Rick Pitino AP “Villains!” I shrieked. “Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!” — Edgar Allan Poe, 1843, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
I don’t even know if such jobs come with torments, anymore, but if they do, Iona’s new basketball coach, the itinerant Rick Pitino — now perhaps facing his second NCAA suspension — may be among the hunted and haunted.
According to the NCAA, his arrival at Iona, an “Adidas school,” may not mean the end of his payments for past transgressions. That telltale heart, the one attached to his Adidas keychain, may still be thumping beneath the hardwood.
As Pitino has already filled Iona’s roster with recruits from far-flung global outposts, the NCAA, on Monday, issued more Notices of Allegations against perennial basketball mill Louisville and, by extension, Pitino, for the FBI-revealed Adidas-payola scandal on Pitino’s watch. Pitino has denied wrongdoing, but told WFAN in March that he was “the leader and I deserved to be fired.”
Pitino’s Adidas “allegiances” were so extensive that the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2017 reported that 98 percent of the cash provided by Adidas to Louisville the year before went directly to Pitino for “personal services.” The school received $25,000 from Adidas to Pitino’s $1.5 million.
The newspaper reported that the year before while Louisville received a mere $10,000 from Adidas, Pitino’s cut again was $1.5 million. And that doesn’t include the $5.5 million paid him by the college in salary and perks before he was let go “with cause” following the sneaker payola scandal.
Why such sneaker cartel affection for Pitino and other brand-name college coaches? Why so many tens of millions of dollars in Red Chinese factory-made Tell-Tale Hearts in the employ of our institutions of higher learning?
Apparently, the NCAA feels that Pitino left some unpaid bills, including those from an “escort” scandal that forced Louisville to vacate a national championship. Pitino denied any knowledge that those women who, in addition to helping Louisville recruit, were strippers and prostitutes.
In an infamous, cherished understatement, one of the recruited explained, “I knew they weren’t college girls.”