The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL SOKOLOVE

  Drama High

  Warrior Girls

  The Ticket Out

  Hustle

  Players First (with John Calipari)

  Success Is the Only Option (with John Calipari)

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Sokolove

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Photo credits

  1: © 2018, Scott McIntyre for The Washington Post, Reprinted with Permission; 2: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images; 3: AP Photo/Gregory Payan; 4: Reuters/Lucas Jackson; 5: Reuters/David Ake; 6: Reuters/Paul Connors; 7, 8: Reuters/Jeff Haynes; 9: AP Photo/Ed Reinke; 10: Scott Utterback/Courier Journal; 11: Reuters/Matt Sullivan; 12: Robert Hanashiro USATS; 13: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill; 14: John Reed USATS; 15, 16: AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley

  ISBN 9780399563270 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780399563287 (ebook)

  Version_1

  For Ann

  CONTENTS

  Also by Michael Sokolove

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE FAMILY

  CHAPTER TWO FOOTPRINTS

  CHAPTER THREE WAITING FOR BRIAN BOWEN

  CHAPTER FOUR THE ’VILLE

  CHAPTER FIVE ABSOLUTIONS

  CHAPTER SIX FISHING IN POLLUTED WATERS

  CHAPTER SEVEN THE SAGINAW CONNECTION

  CHAPTER EIGHT THE PLAYBOOK

  CHAPTER NINE WHEN WE SIN AGAINST OUR NATURE

  CHAPTER TEN “I FEEL IT WAS AN ASSASSINATION”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN THE CHARDONNAY CROWD

  CHAPTER TWELVE THE SPOILS OF UNCOMPENSATED LABOR

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Imagine, for a moment, if the characters who fixed the 1919 World Series were somehow still on the scene, operating in the shadows. Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who masterminded the whole thing, was immortal—or he had finally passed on, but his sons and grandsons and various minions and flunkies still rubbed elbows with players in “chance” meetings in hotel lobbies, drank in the same bars, and befriended their friends. They insinuated themselves, latched on, and never left. There was no Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner who restored faith in the honesty of the competition, but instead what remained was a lingering stain and an ongoing whiff of suspicion. The sport continued to be a source of entertainment for millions, but it went through spasms of scandal every decade or two, and there was always the feeling that another one was coming around. If you followed baseball, you did so with a degree of skepticism.

  This is the history and current reality of college basketball. The sport has never been clean. It is an intimate game played on a small space with just five players a side, and it breeds relationships of all kinds, including unsavory ones. It was a magnet, right from the start, for gamblers, hustlers, and cons. City folks mostly, on the fringes of a city game.

  Basketball’s original sin is the practice of point shaving—the manipulation of scoring margins by players working at the direction of gamblers who have bet the point spread. The way it works is that competitors on a team favored to win, say, by 11 points, ease up enough to make sure they prevail by just eight. (They don’t want to cut it too close.) They can still win the game, while the sharpies collect on their bets. It is a scheme so well suited to basketball that it grew up right along with the sport itself.

  Point shaving is said to date at least as far back as the pre-NBA Boston Celtics in the 1920s, just three decades after James Naismith nailed peach baskets to the walls of the gym at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA, and episodes of it have toppled major college programs and ended or curtailed the careers of some of the game’s greatest players. The most famous of them was Connie Hawkins, an electric, high-flying player who was considered the Julius Erving or Michael Jordan of his day—but who lost his college career in the early 1960s and was banned by the NBA until he was twenty-seven years old.

  There have been periodic outbreaks in the decades since, with prosecutions of gamblers and players connected to betting schemes at Boston College (1978), Tulane (1985), and Arizona State (1994). There is no reason to believe that point shaving does not still endure somewhere within the college basketball system.

  On September 26, 2017, just days before practices for a new season were to begin, college basketball experienced its biggest jolt since a coast-to-coast wave of point shaving nearly brought the whole sport down more than half a century ago. Standing at a lectern in a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, law enforcement officials revealed that the FBI had been investigating “the criminal influence of money on coaches and student-athletes who participate in intercollegiate basketball” for more than two years. The FBI had used its customary methods—wiretaps, hidden cameras, and criminal suspects flipped and turned into informants—to explore the sport’s murky depths, down into layers that insiders would not want anyone to see. “We’re talking in the realm of hundreds of calls . . . consensually recorded meetings, some videotaped meetings, probably a couple of dozen of those,” a prosecutor explained. Ten people were arrested, including assistant coaches at four major programs.

  The sprawling federal case involved recruiting, but the root cause was the same as what has plagued college basketball from the beginning: the big money coursing through it, now billions of dollars, that bypasses the unpaid workforce. Amateurism has long been a luxury of the upper classes. Many college basketball players come from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and some from outright poverty. They are easily tempted, easily compromised, and easily persuaded to break rules that some (though perhaps a dwindling few) hold sacred.

  “We have your playbook,” an FBI official said, indicating that the bureau would continue to fan out in the recruiting world. But what was revealed even on that first day was seismic. It put names and faces to long-rumored dirty dealing on the grassroots basketball circuit, also known as AAU basketball—the web of youth teams, sponsored by major shoe and sports apparel companies, that attract the top players and the most avid recruiting. (AAU stands for Amateur Athletic Union—though what occurs under its aegis mocks traditional definitions of amateurism.)

  “Grassroots” is a catchall term that encompasses the AAU teams, their tournaments and all-star events, as well as the summer camps sponsored by the major shoe companies. An NCAA blue-ribbon panel referred to it as “ungoverned space”—as if describing a Third World conflict zone under the loose control of rival warlords. Grassroots basketball has replaced high school ball as the primary recruiting ground of college coaches. It is where players are scouted, ranked, flattered, and offered a range of benefits.

  In conversations secretly taped by the FBI, college assistant coaches talk like gangsters as they accept bribes in return for setting their players up with shady agents and money managers, whose goal is to cement business relationships for when the players reach the NBA. “The mother
fucker that’s scoring 22 points a game” is how one coach describes a player, before promising to “bury” any rival advisor who tries to get close to the kid. One of the hustlers talks of the value of buying off coaches, explaining that they provide “complete access to a kid because if the coach says nobody can come around—can’t nobody fucking come around.”

  Two of the defendants charged by prosecutors were connected to Adidas, one of the three major companies that contend for the loyalty of teenage players (the others are Nike and Under Armour). Prosecutors alleged that an Adidas employee and consultant created “sham invoices” to generate money for bribes and provided tens of thousands of dollars in cash that were exchanged with players’ parents in hotel-room handoffs. The money was intended to induce their sons to commit to Adidas-sponsored college teams.

  Basketball recruiting, or at least the periphery of it, has long been known as an unscrupulous business, a subculture populated by men dedicated to getting their hooks into young athletic flesh and working it for profit. Many people knew that the shoe companies exert an unhealthy influence. The government’s focus on the rivalry between Adidas, Nike, and Under Armour makes them seem like competing crime families, and it highlights a less familiar element of the recruiting landscape—the corporatization of street-level sleaze.

  * * *

  —

  Brian Bowen Jr. was a known commodity on the grassroots circuit from the time he was in his early teens—a kid who was sure to be an object of intense recruiting, sure to play at the major college level, and maybe become a pro if he kept improving. He was from Saginaw, Michigan, an economically depressed Rust Belt city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation, but a basketball hotbed. Draymond Green, an all-star with the Golden State Warriors, is one of several NBA players who hail from Saginaw, where players take pride in their scrappy, physical style of play, not unlike Tom Izzo’s Michigan State teams, who play just an hour to the south.

  Bowen did not come away hardened by his environment, either by Saginaw or its tough-edged basketball tradition. Just the opposite. There was a sweetness about him, a shy smile and an engaging manner. He was given a nickname at birth, “Tugs,” because he pulled on his mother’s hair with his tiny fingers, and that was what his family, friends, teammates, and coaches called him ever since.

  He played Little League baseball when he was younger, and ran track and played soccer up until eighth grade. He was an only child, and his mother chauffeured him around, fed him, and made his schedule. Even after he reached high school age, she could sometimes be seen kneeling or sitting on the bottom row of a set of bleachers as she laced up his sneakers before a game—like a figure-skating mom tightening the laces of her child’s skates. In his spare time, he liked building elaborate structures with Legos. The worst that people said about Tugs was that he could seem a little sheltered.

  By the time Bowen reached twelfth grade, he was six foot seven. He had played at a couple of different high schools and for several AAU teams. Like many of his peers, he was a free agent at a young age, always open to better opportunities.

  As some of the nation’s most famous college basketball coaches called him, texted him, sent him letters, and attended his games, Tugs let his father, Brian Bowen Sr., respond to his suitors and help him winnow them to a list of contenders. The family also brought an advisor into their circle: Christian Dawkins, a Saginaw native whose own father had been Draymond Green’s high school coach.

  Dawkins was young, still in his early twenties, but he knew dozens of college coaches, and even NBA scouts and general managers. Tugs trusted him. He figured Dawkins could guide him—let him know how to sort out the good guys from the bad guys.

  There is a long buildup to a vaunted high school prospect finally choosing a college. It’s an event. A culmination. A basketball bar mitzvah. Some prospects make the announcement in their high school gyms, in front of the whole school with ESPN broadcasting live. When Romeo Langford, a coveted prospect in the 2018 class from New Albany, Indiana, announced his decision, Indiana, his fans began lining up outside the gym at 2:30 p.m. for the big reveal—four hours before the doors opened.

  Tugs let his recruitment drag on for a very long time, way past when other top recruits had committed, and then finally revealed his choice in a more low-key way, on Twitter. “Happy to announce my commitment to The Ville,” he tweeted under his handle, @20Tugs, signaling that he was signing with the University of Louisville. His father followed up with a tweet of his own. “Congrats, Tugs,” he wrote. “God has blessed you.”

  * * *

  —

  Eight college basketball programs feature prominently in the government’s case: Arizona, Miami, Oklahoma State, the University of Southern California, Auburn, North Carolina State, Kansas, and Louisville. More than a dozen others have been mentioned in news reports because either their coaches or players they were recruiting came into contact with the defendants.

  The consequences for most of them—the coaches, their teams and universities—are not yet fully known. But one school, the University of Louisville, is where the impact of the scandal, and its broader significance for college athletics and the future of the NCAA, can be felt and observed now.

  Louisville figured out how to monetize basketball better than any other university in America. It sold hard liquor in its NBA-quality arena and marketed high-dollar premium seats and luxury boxes to affluent Louisvillians. The U. of L., as it is known locally, not only made more money on its basketball team than any other school in the NCAA, it wasn’t even close: Louisville was out in front by $7 million.

  A visionary athletic director, Tom Jurich, leveraged the success of the basketball team and its charismatic Hall of Fame coach, Rick Pitino, to elevate the rest of the athletic program. He raised money with ease and built stadiums, arenas, ballparks, and practice facilities, all situated on the campus’s eastern edge and faced in handsome red brick. The football stadium was renovated and expanded once, then a second time, then a third. A coach who played a winning, exciting style of football helped fill the seats. Against all odds, Louisville used a series of middling conferences as stepping-stones to climb all the way up into the powerhouse Atlantic Coast Conference, alongside bluebloods Duke, North Carolina, and Virginia.

  For most of its history, Louisville was an ugly duckling of a commuter school. The athletic facilities that Jurich built became known as the university’s “front porch”—what it showed to the world. Sports itself was the leading edge of the U. of L. The university had successful teams across the whole program and high-achieving individual athletes. A U. of L. swimmer won an Olympic gold medal in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, just two decades past a time when her university could barely afford to put chlorine in the pool.

  The rest of the university followed along. It was beautified, and students moved into newly built dormitories. There was life after dark: a bar and a restaurant scene, some music venues. Other markers began to point up: The test scores of incoming freshmen. Fund-raising for academics. Tuition.

  Louisville was an example of how to build an institution of higher learning out of an athletic program. Right up until the moment when it became the prototype of how the whole thing blows apart.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FAMILY

  On a late August evening in 2017, Tom Jurich, the University of Louisville’s athletic director, welcomed several hundred benefactors to the annual 50 Yard Line Dinner. It was a sit-down affair held on a terrace overlooking the south end zone at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, densely staffed, with waiters circling to quickly fill up empty wineglasses. Jurich’s guests were his program’s most generous donors, a cross section of the city’s elite: thoroughbred breeders, coal executives, lawyers, doctors, bourbon distillers, lobbyists who worked in Frankfort, the state capital.

  At sixty-one years old, Jurich had a sort of Chamber of Commerce look—short gray-flecke
d hair, bushy eyebrows, a barrel chest. He himself was one of Louisville’s barons. The state-funded university listed his annual salary as $514,000, but if you counted the various bonuses, escalator clauses, life insurance policies, and fringes like car allowances and country club memberships, he had actually made more than $5 million the previous year. The university even threw in $30,000 for a financial planner to help him handle his money. For good measure, they calculated his tax liability and provided extra money to pay what he owed—which was referred to as “grossing up” his salary.

  Jurich had taken over as athletic director in 1997, when Louisville was still largely a commuter school occupying an unprepossessing stretch of 345 acres just south of the city’s downtown. The institution, one of the first colleges west of the Allegheny Mountains, dates back to 1798, but its new buildings were concrete, Brutalist structures. The campus was poorly lit, signage was just about nonexistent, and grass and weeds sprouted up through cracked walkways. The local line was that athletes on recruiting visits were brought on to campus at night and then quickly whisked back home in the morning before they could take in the full measure of the dreary surroundings. Most of the academic departments struggled to rise to mediocrity. Affluent Louisville families sent their children to Kentucky’s flagship university, eighty miles east in Lexington—or out of state. To the extent that the University of Louisville was known nationally, it was for basketball and the two national championships won in the 1980s under coach Denny Crum, but even that program was in decline.

  Jurich had worked as athletic director at his alma mater, Northern Arizona University, and then at Colorado State. He was a former college football player and low-round NFL draft choice married to a former Miss Wyoming. Nothing in his background suggested the breadth of his vision or the magnitude of the success he would achieve. He sensed a potential at Louisville, a hunger among the city’s moneyed class for a big-time sports program and a willingness on their part to pay for it. He was a genius at forging relationships and understanding what his partners wanted. ESPN, for example, needed midweek programming. In Jurich, they found someone who would have let his student-athletes compete at 3 a.m., any day of the week, if they could be on national TV in their Cardinal red. He considered himself a “coach whisperer” and had a knack for identifying young assistants from elsewhere who could step into top jobs and elevate Louisville teams to prominence.