NEW YORK – Rick Pitino bought a powerboat in the summer of 2017. A 32-footer. Open cabin with wraparound seating. A real beauty. In the mornings, he’d take it into the Atlantic and “just look around and listen to music by myself.” At dusk, he’d set out across the Miami River, “go to a restaurant, tie it up.” This is what men with his means and in his station of life do, he thought. This was how he would spend these years. Under the sun. Wind in his hair. Louisville behind him.
Within a year, he sold the boat.
Then came two years wandering the Euroleague as coach of Panathinaikos, a Greek professional team. Then, three years coaching Iona College, a small Catholic school in New Rochelle, N.Y., riding the bus to league games at Quinnipiac and Mount Saint Mary’s.
And now Pitino, who turned 71 in September, is sitting in the passenger seat of a rented Volkswagen Jetta, wearing a sweatsuit in the morning chill of a New York autumn, stuck in a.m. gridlock. We’re crawling to the Upper East Side, where he and his wife, Joanne, have kept an apartment on 65th Street since the late ’80s, back when he coached the Knicks. That was roughly a lifetime or two ago, but who’s counting anymore? Of all the things he could be doing this morning, Pitino is instead here, in this…
