SN Archive: Remembering Rick Pitino's first Final Four at Providence (April 13, 1987, issue) originally appeared on The Sporting News.
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This article, 'Waking up echoes at Providence' by Bill Reynolds, originally appeared in the April 13, 1987 issue of The Sporting News.
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—He arrived here two years ago making more promises than a door-to-door salesman. He came armed with a reputation as a gung-ho recruiter who once had postponed his honeymoon to go on a recruiting mission.
And, from the beginning, he promised to wake up the echoes of Providence College's great basketball tradition.
“When you go to sleep tonight, I don't want you to think about your Visa or Mastercard,” he told the school's booster club the first time he addressed it. “I don't want you to think about your troubles. I want you to go to sleep and dream about cutting down the nets.”
Who was this guy?
At the time it was as if Rick Pitino was just another obsessed coach with a pocketful of mumbles that are promises, some basketball version of Elmer Gantry, an evangelist with a clipboard. Go to sleep and dream about cutting down the nets? With a program that had been 11-65 in the Big East Conference since the league's inception?
Who was he kidding?
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But on March 21 in the NCAA Southeast Regional in Louisville, Ky., Pitino was cutting down the nets. The Friars had just beaten Georgetown to reach the Final Four for the first time since 1973. That such a dream became a reality so quickly is difficult to believe, especially when you consider that the Friars were 38 games below .500 (96-134) in the previous eight seasons.
“People say this is a Cinderella story,” Pitino said. “But it goes beyond that, because Cinderella didn't work this hard.”
The Friars' advance to the Final Four in the second season after the 34-year-old Pitino had taken over a program that had been on life support systems also has made him one of the hottest coaches in the country.
And it has earned him the selection as The Sporting News 1987 College Basketball Coach of the Year.
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“It's just been an unbelievable coaching job,” said Joe Mullaney, whom Pitino replaced. “You look at other coaches, and you see strengths and weaknesses. But I've watched Rick for two years, and I don't see a chink in his armor.”
“Rick is willing to pay the price to be successful,” said Gordie Chiesa, who gave up the job as head coach at Manhattan to become Pitino's assistant at Providence. “A lot of guys talk about being committed, but this guy lives it every day. He's more committed than the people at Bellevue Hospital.”
Pitino's commitment to the game began early. He grew up in Queens, the youngest of three boys. He went to a basketball camp when he was 14 and, as fate would have it, his counselor was Howard Garfinkel, one of the best-known evaluators of high school talent in the country.
He's more organized than crime.
– Providence's John Marinatto
The next year Garfinkel started Five-Star, his showcase summer camp in the Poconos for top prospects, and Pitino was first plugged into a coaching network that “steered my life.” He returned to Five-Star every summer while he was playing for the University of Massachusetts. He would listen to such speakers as Hubie Brown, Bobby Knight and Chuck Daly, ingesting a little of this, a little of that, learning and developing basketball philosophies of his own.
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While still in college, he coached a team at Five-Star, one of the youngest who has done that. “He won more trophies than anyone in the history of the camp,” Garfinkel said. “Even when he was still in college he was as good as most of the high school coaches.”
After college, Pitino was hired as an assistant coach at Hawaii. Two years later he was Jim Boeheim's assistant at Syracuse, where he postponed his honeymoon to go recruit Louis Orr. “I thought it was perfectly normal,” he said. “You can always take a honeymoon. But you can't always recruit a great player.”
Boston University was his next stop. It had no tradition, no talented players and an apathetic student body—a coach's graveyard. Everyone told him hot to take the job.
Pitino went 91-51 in five years at Boston University, his first job as a head coach. Twice he was named New England's Coach of the Year.
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Pitino's reputation for working his players as hard as any coach in the country began at Boston University: He would hold three practice sessions on Thanksgiving Day, make his players carry bricks and make them practice after games if he wasn't happy with the way they played.
He seemed to be the epitome of the obsessed young coach.
Then he went to the National Basketball Association's New York Knicks, his hometown team, as an assistant to Hubie Brown, whom he knew from Five-Star. “I used to get goosebumps every time I heard John Condon announce my name,” he said of Madison Square Garden's longtime public address announcer.
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Two years later he came to Providence. One reason supposedly was the grueling NBA lifestyle. One was that Brown told him that the Knicks' situation was becoming unstable and that the “bottom line in coaching is you have to take care of your family.”
Pitino had played against the great Providence teams of the early '70's, which featured Ay-Americas Ernie DiGregorio, Marvin Barnes and Kevin Stacom. He knew all about the tradition, the sleeping giant.
So he came to Providence with a five-year plan, as if success was something that could be franchised like a fried-chicken recipe.
He said the Friars were going to employ a fast tempo even if his players weren't as talented as those in the upper echelon of the Big East. He said the Friars were going employ a full-court press even if they didn't have much overall team quickness. He said the Friars were going to be the hardest-working team in the country, then instituted a vigorous conditioning program that included early morning running. He told both guard Billy Donovan and center Jacek Duda to lose 20 pounds. He instituted an individual instruction period during which each player comes to the gym for several hours a week in addition to the team's practice sessions.
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He said his goal was not to out-coach his opponents, but to outwork them. “He's more organized than crime,” said Providence sports information director John Marinatto.
He opened his first practice session of his inaugural season with a midnight practice, complete with champagne, a symbolic statement that the Rick Pitino Era had begun at Providence. And, from the beginning, he was confident.
“What if you fail in your five-year plan?” he was asked two years ago.
“I won't fail,” he said.
“And you don't have any doubts about that?” he was asked.
“None whatsoever,” he said.
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Pitino, of course, was right. He has resurrected Providence basketball via one of the quickest reclamation projects in recent college basketball history. He also has cut down the nets.
So what's next? Will Pitino stay at Providence, or is the lure of The NBA a magnet he can't resist? His name keeps surfacing in connection with both the Knicks and the Phoenix Suns.
Should Pitino leave Providence, where he came with a shopping bag full of promises, his legacy will be that he delivered on everyone.