AFTER SAYING A Sunday morning mass on Long Island, the Rev. Brian J. Shanley drove to Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, to meet with Rick Pitino. It was March, and Shanley, president of St. John’s University, needed to find a men’s basketball coach. He could almost predict the reactions he’d get if word of the meeting got out.
Yes, the days of pearl-clutching over college basketball ethics largely were over, but Pitino’s history transcended the reality of the new world of NIL money. Shanley had asked his staff at St. John’s to compile a list of candidates for the job, and Pitino, a Hall of Famer who was coaching nearly 20 miles away at Iona, initially wasn’t on it.
Curiosity put Shanley on the road that day to Pitino’s house. That, and Mike Tranghese.
Tranghese is a former Big East commissioner with whom St. John’s consulted in its search. Tranghese had helped Shanley before, when the priest was president at Providence and the school hired a relative unknown in Ed Cooley in 2011. One of the best things about being a consultant rather than an employee, Tranghese says, is that you can say whatever you want.
He was blunt when he talked to Shanley.
“I said, ‘Father, I have no doubt if you hire the right one from this group that this person can have some success,'” Tranghese recalled. “‘But your fan base has been waiting 32 years to win. They’re beaten down, they’ve been operating in despair for so long.
“‘The only person to dig you out of that and give you a great basketball coach and win is Rick. We need to just talk about Rick and forget about everybody else.'”
Tranghese told the priest that he believed Pitino was a good man.
Banished from basketball in 2017, Pitino was fired by Louisville amid an FBI investigation into allegations of bribery in college basketball. The Independent Accountability Resolution Process, an outside enforcement arm of the NCAA, eventually exonerated Pitino in late 2022, but he came with other baggage. Louisville had to vacate its 2013 national title after the NCAA found one of Pitino’s former staffers had arranged for stripteases and sex acts for players and prospects.
Pitino was in his mid-60s at the time of his dismissal, but retirement was never really an option. Basketball was his identity, and nothing — not a yacht nor a house on a golf course — could replicate the feeling of being on the sideline, or more important, in an empty gym during one of his player development sessions.
Greece and the EuroLeague eventually got him back in the game, and Iona got him back home to New York. St. John’s, and the Big East, put him back in the big time. Back in his element.
Shanley went to Winged Foot in March because he felt as if he needed to speak with him as a person, not a coach. The resume — two national championships, 834 college wins — was never in question. Shanley wanted to take a measure of who Pitino was now, and what he’d learned from what Shanley calls coaching purgatory.
After lunch and three hours of conversation, he had his new coach.
“I believe in second chances, and letting people evolve,” Shanley says. “And I think Rick right now is at a point in his life where he’s not the same person that he was 10, 15, 20 years ago. The guy I talked to … there’s no red flags here for me.
“I think some people were a little surprised, if not even a little shocked — why would a Catholic school hire somebody that had been through stuff? But from where I sit, judge not, lest ye be judged.”
PURGATORY, IN CATHOLICISM, is a way station of punishment where the dead go to be cleansed of their sins. The next stop after purgatory, it is believed, is heaven. Shanley obviously didn’t mean Pitino had been through purgatory in a literal sense, otherwise a long list of Catholics would sign up for the lot of a millionaire ex-basketball coach set adrift.
But to Pitino, that time did not lack its share of challenges. The man who became the only coach to lead three different schools to the Final Four (including Providence in 1987) was suddenly toxic in college basketball circles. It was awkward in NBA circles, too. In 2018, he told ESPN that he’d hired agent Drew Rosenhaus in the hopes of landing an NBA job — he previously coached the Boston Celtics and had a successful run with the New York Knicks. But Pitino remained unemployed.
The man who’d spent six or seven hours on a basketball court daily for more than four decades had an empty calendar, and didn’t know what to do with it.
“I tried to get a commentating job on ESPN, and they said, ‘No, we’re all booked,’ and they just didn’t want me on the air,” Pitino says. “I worked for them before; I did the NBA draft. I did ESPN games when Kentucky was on probation.”
(An ESPN spokesman said the company continues to have an amicable relationship with Pitino.)
“So your friends and your family obviously never cancel [you], but the public, from a media standpoint and trying to get work, cancels,” Pitino says. “And then the biggest thing about it is you never get your day in court because the NCAA drags it out so long. I mean, they dragged it out for five years before we got an opportunity to hear the case.”
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