Commentary : Pitino Again Comes in on a White Horse

He came to the New York Knickerbockers as a knight on a white horse. He goes to Kentucky as a knight on a bigger white horse. The image suits Rick Pitino just fine.

Of course, it will take some time -- just as it does in Central Park -- to clean up after the horse is gone, but that’s all right.

For the Knicks, after two years of rising from the bottom, it is a setback. “I think so,” Al Bianchi, the general manager, conceded Tuesday when the days and hours of waiting for Pitino’s decision were done. Any time a coach leaves of his volition and not the team’s, the progress of the team is jeopardized.

It’s not exactly like being left at the altar, but Pitino guided the Knicks to the second round of the playoffs. The team was selected to play his kind of pressing, running game, and this time the choice has to be a coach whose style suits these players. You can’t change all of the players.

The new coach will have to learn them and they’ll have to learn him. And, as Bianchi reminds us from time to time, they’ll have to come out of it with a half-court offense and defense better adapted to the playoffs than this year’s were. It may take a while.

But then they are a whole lot better off than they were before Pitino left Providence College to be a head coach of professionals. “This is a great job to have,” Pitino said. “You couldn’t have said that three years ago. That’s the legacy I’ve left behind.”

And of course he’s right. False modesty is not one of his faults. The players and the general manager and the fans would not dispute his point. “The team had 12 different lockers and they went in 12 different directions out of the locker room,” he said.

“We had to turn a dismal attitude and bad chemistry. Lack of hustle. The system turned around their thinking and the fans turned out in droves. Next year it will be hard to buy a ticket.”

In two seasons he took a team that had won 24 games and bored its fans to tears, and won 38 games and then 52 games. They put on a show.

But if you think Hercules had a hard job cleaning out the stables, just look at the job waiting at the University of Kentucky. Tradition is waiting for Rick Pitino to ride in and give it a new shine.

“It’s unlike any job I’ve ever had,” Pitino said, shaking his head to indicate the vast demands.

Tuesday he went to Madison Square Garden to work out the details of his Knicks contract, which has three years remaining. He’d told Bianchi on Monday that he was going.

And Tuesday Pitino was selling. It is probably his greatest gift. He could sell his young professionals on playing his demanding style of game. He could sell Kentucky the notion that he was the right man to lead it out of its shame. Surely he can sell the best talent in the land that Kentucky is still the place to go.

He can see himself cleansing Kentucky’s program and establishing Rick Pitino as another Dean Smith or Bobby Knight or Albert Schweitzer. “Nobody has more integrity than Rick Pitino,” the man himself said just the other day.

“I’m taking a program that’s traditionally been the most prominent in the country and we find it in the midst of scandal and an absence of talent,” he said. He thinks he can turn it around, or he wouldn’t be going even for the slice of Fort Knox. He says he can do it without cheating, which is not in the context of Kentucky’s history.

“No question,” he said. “I know I’m going to do it ethically, the right way. We did it at Providence.” He cited the recent NCAA award to the Kentucky football program for the highest graduation rate in the NCAA. “I believe in the NCAA rules,” Pitino said. “We want a team the institution can be proud of off the court as well as on.”

Pitino has a gift for saying the right thing. He will be a golden-tongued recruiter. He will charm high school players and their parents.

His charm is best when refreshed and used on a new crop of players every four years. His system works best on impressionable young men before they become grizzled Hessians.

“You have to know who you are,” Pitino offered in explanation. “It was an emotional decison to leave Providence. I made it because I grew up in New York and I wanted to be part of the turnaround. I am a college coach. My job is to turn around the University of Kentucky.”

Larry Brown is a college coach until he gets there and then a professional coach until he gets there. Pitino is still two jump-switches from Brown’s category.

Pitino felt he was at a point in his career where he had to either strike out for the ideal college situation or commit himself to the Knicks. It couldn’t go on indefinitely that he would long for college life in public and then be considered for every job that opened.

Kentucky is Kentucky. “I enjoy the daily activities of college basketball,” he said. “When players leave practice, they hang around your office and you become part of their life and they become part of yours.”

Dean Smith has it that way. Bobby Knight sort of has it that way. Pitino felt he had it at Providence. First they won. “It’s going to take quite a few years,” he said.

The team Pitino leaves behind will have to prove itself again. Perhaps John MacLeod, at the moment the only man on Bianchi’s list, can take it farther. “I don’t know how it will affect the players,” the general manager said. “I think they are talented enough. Rick’s game was so demanding, if they could adapt to that, they ought to be able to play for a new coach.”

Pitino’s record with the Knicks will get the attention of the commonwealth to begin with. For three years, while he is laboring under the NCAA sanctions, he will have a honeymoon. Then he will find out the demands are somewhat greater than at Providence.

“You know the Sinatra song?” Pitino said. “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.”

He can say the right thing.