Things change across 36 years. The city changes in myriad ways, always does. The rules of engagement change, and so do attention spans and runways of patience. The jobs are obviously different. But in so many ways Rick Pitino is facing the exact same circumstance now, one month past his 71st birthday, as he did at 35, more than half a lifetime ago.
Back then, in 1987, it was the Knicks, and Pitino’s star was attached to a rocket launcher. He was six months removed from the Final Four at Providence, and he was the home office for coaching ambition, building a template that a thousand other hot young coaches on the come would soon know by heart.
You think things at the Garden were messy for most of the last two decades? In ’87 the Knicks weren’t just losers, they were dead. Madison Square Garden was a mausoleum most games, 12,000 on a good night. Every other team in town was in various states of recent or nascent prosperity. You’d go weeks at a time without seeing a Knicks jacket anywhere in the boroughs.
“They were only selling out about 50 percent capacity,” Pitino remembered Tuesday afternoon, sitting behind a podium at Carnesecca Arena, a new season so close that you could almost hear the stirring of a gathering crowd in the heart of the St. John’s campus, you could almost hear a distant rumble of “We are … ST. JOHN’S!”
“Season tickets were down. Everything was down. They’d won 23 games a couple years in a row. We had to build that all back.”
They did that. Pitino did that. The Knicks started slowly that first year, were sitting 14-28 on Feb. 1. But there was already a sense that this was something you needed to see. Pitino dubbed the Garden “MSGU,” and his players bought fully into his 94-foot, more-more-more scripture. They won 19 out of 21 at home at one point, the only losses to the NBA’s royal families — the Lakers and the Celtics.
“And the Knicks,” he said, “still sell out to this day.”
That is what Pitino brings to this program, and this university, the biggest element. You certainly know about the Hall of Fame plaque, about all the winning, about the 711 victories and the two national championships. Surely you know all about the darker elements, the NCAA messiness early in his career at Hawaii and late in his time at Louisville. That’s all part of the tapestry, yes.
But what Pitino has always brought — everywhere he’s ever worked, without fail, Boston U to Iona and every stop in between — is a peerless ability to sell: himself, his players, his teams. And he has often gone to places where that was far more important than whatever basketball acumen he owns — and he has as much as anyone who’s ever worked a sideline.
At BU, he often had to sell himself on spec because there was no track record yet, just his relentless ambition and his uncapped beliefs. At Kentucky, he had to sell the notion that one of the nation’s blue-blood programs hadn’t bled out due to near death-penalty malfeasance, and he repeated that mantra at Louisville.
And at Iona he had to sell something even harder: his own redemption after the series of embarrassments at Louisville, the notion that he could work thousand-seat gyms again, same as a Final Four stadium. The Christian Brothers offered him absolution, helped cleanse his professional soul. Now the Vincentians have done the same.
And now he sells the Red Storm every day, every practice, every minute. For a program that had grown invisible, it is a king-sized shot of adrenaline straight into the veins. For 23 years, Pitino had tried to convince his wife, Joanne, to sell their Manhattan apartment. She resisted. Now, it feels like the whole city is invited over for basketball season.
“I get a chance to walk around the streets of New York and the comments are awesome,” Pitino said. “People driving the trucks yelling, ‘Go, Johnnies!’ It was like the old days with the Knicks. There’s an anticipation, an excitement about us.”
He smiled.
“Now,” he said, “we have to prove it. It’s time.”
Thirty-six years ago, the Knicks did, scrambling to a 38th win that clinched the postseason the final day of the season, then managing to steal one off the Bird/McHale/Parish Celtics in the playoffs. A year later, they won 52, finished in first place for the first time in 18 years, won a playoff series. Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy get most of the plaudits for the ’90s Knicks, but the foundation was left for them by Pitino before he left for Lexington.
These Johnnies have never quite bottomed out the way the mid-’80s Knicks did, but in some ways it was worse. There has been something beyond apathy percolating off Utopia Parkway for the better part of a quarter century. St. John’s was an afterthought, even in its own city, beyond the fiercest diehards.
Before they can win, they need to be interesting. They are interesting again.
“It’s so much fun,” Pitino said of his team, of seeing his players come together.
And it doesn’t take much to see Pitino at 35 saying the same thing, in the same city, on the other side of the 59th Street Bridge. It’s time.
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