Rick Pitino….Well as all of you have heard Rick Pitno screwed up! Yeah, he screwed up pretty bad. So to bring you all up to speed this is how it went down. Rick Pitino, the head coach at Louisville, who has lead the Cardinals to be the overall number one team last year, one Final Four appearance, a couple Elite Eight appearances, a Big East Championship, and a couple of Conference USA Championships, slept with a lady in the back of a restaurant 6 years ago, who got pregnant. He then paid her 3000 dollars for medical purposes (a lot will focus that it was for an abortion but we will go with medical purposes). Now, six years later he has come forward with the whole story seeing that the lady, Karne Sypher, has tried to extort 10 million dollars from him for the whole incident.
Okay now that we are caught up let me tell you what makes me mad about this whole thing. I have been listening to sports radio and listening to all these dads call in and say, “ I would never let my son play for Rick Pitino, not after this.” Or “ I wouldn’t even let that man into my house if he was trying to recruit my son!” and my personal favorite, “ this man needs to be fired! This is so immoral and he needs to be fired for his off court actions!”
This is what gets me! All these dad’s call in as if their son is a blue chip, top 50 player in the nation and would actually be recruited by Louisville, but in reality, they either don’t have a son, their son wouldn’t be old enough to play under Pitino within the next 10 years, or their son today isn’t even a top 500 player n their state! To be completely honest, if I was the President of Louisville, and I heard Pitino was recruiting your son, I would fire him. If he was recruiting your crappy son to play for my University I would be more concerned about that than his off court actions. I hired the man to win games, and he wouldn’t be doing that with your horrific son on the court. And kids that are getting recruited by Louisville aren’t worried about what their coach did off the court, they are worried about what he can do with them on the court and if their coach can take them to the next level, which Pitino has and can do.
Now by no means am I saying what Rick Pitino did was okay. It was completely immoral and out of line. But let’s face the facts, our society accepts these things all the time, and in Pitino’s defense this was an off the court action. On the other hand, a man named Manny Ramirez cheated on the field! He was caught with steroids. We didn’t seem to have a problem with that, seeing that when he came to the minors and played for Albuquerque we sold the place out! What? The man cheated in his sport, meaning he was completely dishonest in his sport, on the field! He still is playing, and still getting support.
Maybe we should stick with someone in the same sport with a similar crime, if you will. How about a man named Kobe Bryant? What is the first thing you think when you hear his name? NBA championship maybe? How about 81 points in a game? Oh, but how did we forget that he was accused of raping a girl (cheated on his wife in the process) and went to court for it? Oh wait how did we forget that? He didn’t get fired! He didn’t lose any support! Ask any L.A. Laker fan about it and they will probably say, it’s in the past. They don’t care! He still sells tickets and wins games therefore he won’t be going anywhere anytime soon!
This says more about our society than about these people. See we let them get away with it and we look past it. We talk tough about how this should be a career ending thing, but we don’t sit out of games, we don’t remove our support, we don’t make it career ending, we just say shame on you. Wait a few months, this will all past and come March when Pitino is winning and Louisville is on the brink of making the Final Four, we will praise him for being the great coach he is. As Jim Rome says, this is a basic playbook move. Acknowledge it, own it, apologize for it, don’t make excuses or rationalize it, be sincere, move on and keep working. That is what Pitino is doing and because our society isn’t as tough as we talk, he’s not going anywhere.
