Losing ugly

Rick Pitino leaves the Boston Celtics in critical condition -- and he isn't looking so good himself, either

by Jason Gay

EVERY TIME I saw Rick Pitino on television this year, I was amazed at how terrible he looked. His brown eyes, once so fiery and bright, appeared dull and glazed over, a pair of lifeless globes plunged deep in their sockets. His black hair -- just a few years ago a tall, thick Frankie Valli mane -- was thinning and flat. His forehead was wrinkled and wan, his cheeks sallow, his neck thin and veiny. He didn't look like a professional basketball coach anymore. He looked like a prisoner on death row.

Pitino, who officially quit as coach and president of the Boston Celtics on January 9, is far from the first sports coach to be prematurely aged by his profession. Jeff Van Gundy of the New York Knicks, himself a scant 39 years old, already resembles a hollow-eyed creature from an Edward Gorey illustration. Bill Parcells, the curmudgeonly former coach of the New England Patriots and the New York Jets, went gray in his relative youth, and also suffered from chronic weight and heart problems. In fact, if one were to randomly assemble a cast of sports coaches and put them in a room together, they would look less like a group of well-paid motivators and strategists and more like a group of extras from Night of the Living Dead.

Even in this company, Pitino looked especially morbid. Were it not for his declining appearance, however, it might have been impossible to feel any sympathy for the coach, who came to Boston in the spring of 1997. Rick Pitino is many things, but he is not a sympathetic figure. He is smart, tough, arrogant, stubborn, disingenuous, and sometimes distrustful. Though he has had more than his share of team successes, almost his entire career has been spent in the service of one man: Rick Pitino. Time and again, he has abandoned old friends and benefactors -- in Providence, in New York, in Kentucky -- in search of new fields to conquer. And he has become very rich in the process.

For this reason, then, Pitino's Waterloo as Celtics coach has given the public a hearty surge of schadenfreude. Like a complacent old politician's loss to a pesky newcomer or a fundamentalist evangelical's disgrace when caught with his pants down, Pitino's failure is seen as an almost poetic comeuppance. Criticism of the coach has teetered on gleeful. Ha-ha to the cocky $50 million man who couldn't earn his paycheck. Ha-ha to the man who won everywhere else but couldn't win here. Ha-ha, ha-ha. You laugh at Rick Pitino so hard it hurts.

BECAUSE IT is we fans who are the real losers. The disintegration of the NBA is an old story by now, but to attend a Celtics home game at the FleetCenter during the Pitino era was to witness a particularly embarrassing grotesquerie. If you could manage to get over the absurd cost of tickets -- high enough to price all but the most fortunate families out of the building -- and the stadium's shameless catering to corporate seat owners, there was the horrible sideshow of neo-entertainment designed to keep the increasingly brainless fandom "entertained." This Epcot-like carnival included applause-o-meters, cheesy shooting games during time-outs, hyperactive twentysomethings firing T- shirts into the cheap seats, child dancing contests, a relentless, ear-throbbing frat-rock soundtrack, and, of course, the hideous JumboTron TV, which telecast the whole depressing spectacle high above center court.

And if you could somehow manage to stomach this off-court assault, another one awaited on the parquet floor. Let us state for the record that the Celtics were not, at any time during the Rick Pitino era, the worst team in professional basketball. Yet they came awfully close. They were certainly one of the most erratic teams around -- on one night, the Celtics could shoot out the lights but appear utterly incapable of stopping a geriatric from crossing the street; on the very next night, they might defend effectively, but look as if they could not drop a basketball in Boston Harbor. To opponents, they could be mildly irritating, largely because Pitino, a former college coach, insisted on making his troops play an aggressive, full-court trapping defense straight out of Hoosiers. But they were never feared. During Pitino's tenure, they never once made the playoffs.

More than anything else, the Celtics were a revolving-door workplace, the NBA's equivalent of a Wal-Mart during the Christmas season. Dozens of players came and went during the Pitino era, some within months, or even days. Pitino's constant wheeling and dealing as the Celtics' coach earned him much ridicule. Just as a gambling addict tries to "solve" his gambling habit by gambling more, Pitino appeared to be trying to harness his player-dealing by dealing more players.

Most of the players Pitino obtained were either horrible underachievers or honorable overachievers. He appears to have a gift for getting great performances from the allegedly not-so-great (Bruce Bowen, Adrian Griffin). At the same time, however, he got unimpressive performances from the allegedly impressive (Kenny Anderson, Chauncey Billups, Antoine Walker, Vitaly Potapenko -- ugh, it goes on and on). The one true star of the Pitino era, Paul Pierce, was never quite capable of making up for the shortcomings of those around him. Walker, the holdover star from the previous regime, worked himself out of favor with the fans with his occasionally uninspired play, his ball-hogging, and his odd habit of enthusiastically wiggling his upper torso after even the most routine of dunks.

THE PITINO-LED Celtics had their moments. It's easy to forget, but the Pitino era kicked off with a home win over Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. There were other memorable times: a strong start to the strike-shortened 1999 season, a stunning defeat of the Los Angeles Lakers on the West Coast, and recently, a marvelous buzzer-beating victory over the New Jersey Nets. But those moments were interspersed with long stretches of moribund play. The Celtics would lose, badly, to just about anyone -- a tepid Golden State, a brain-dead Washington, a listless post-Michael Jordan Chicago. The team's inconsistency was maddening.

The strange thing about this mess is that just about all of it falls squarely on the shoulders of the coach. When teams break down, the blame can often be dispersed among a number of individuals -- the general manager, the head coach, the assistants, and, of course, the players. But Pitino was a head coach with rare power in the NBA. Aside from his $50 million, seven-year contract, he had full control over decisions about personnel, from point guards and centers to the secretaries who roamed the corridors of the team's headquarters. It was the kind of autonomy Pitino demanded before he came aboard, but it had a downside. By taking the keys of the franchise into his hands alone, he ensured that every dent would ultimately be his doing.

Still, Pitino made a lot of excuses. He blamed the NBA salary cap for restricting his ability to make deals. He blamed the team's lack of a suitable practice facility for his failure to attract free agents, and when he got that (and didn't get free agents) he blamed the salary cap again. He blamed the strike that cut the 1998-'99 season almost in half. He blamed the players' money-hungry agents. He blamed the media.

But the most infamous of all Pitino's excuses was the "unlucky" bounce of ping-pong balls at the 1997 NBA draft lottery, which cost the team the chance to draft a seven-foot-tall collegian named Tim Duncan, who went on to lead the San Antonio Spurs to the league championship two years later. In fact, Pitino went so far as to say that had he known he would not be able to get the top draft pick and Duncan (or at least the second pick and a chance to get another budding star, Keith Van Horn), he would never have vacated his coach's chair at the University of Kentucky.

But how "unlucky" was Pitino, actually? The NBA draft lottery is weighted to give preference to the worst teams; as the losingest team in the league in the 1996-'97 season, the Celtics were given the most ping-pong balls in the popper. But the team's chances of securing the first pick (and getting Duncan) were essentially one in three, so not getting that pick can hardly be categorized as "unlucky." A far more accurate term would be "probable." But in Pitino's spin cycle, we wuz robbed.

The Celtics wound up getting picks three and six in that draft, with which they selected Billups, a point guard from the University of Colorado, and Ron Mercer, a forward who had played for Pitino at Kentucky. Neither player is with the team anymore. In fact, if you can follow the bizarre tangle of trades engineered by Pitino during his three and a half years, Mercer's old slot essentially belongs to Eric Williams (a player Pitino had dumped early on, only to change his mind and get him back in a trade); Billups, if I'm not mistaken, is essentially Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift and a Dodge Caravan. The coach announced each of his new deals with impressively mesmerizing gusto -- eyes fixed on the cameras, he would actually make you feel temporarily happy about landing Tony Battie, or Kenny Anderson, or Vitaly Potapenko, or that Dodge Caravan.

Pitino's shrill excuse-making and spinning managed, at least for a while, to disguise not only his weaknesses in judging NBA talent, but also the fact that his team had been surpassed by a number of competitors that were in inconsiderably worse straits than the Celtics when Pitino arrived from Kentucky. You can go right down the list: the Toronto Raptors, the Orlando Magic, the Dallas Mavericks, the Golden State Warriors, even the Los Angeles Clippers.

When people began to wise up to this, Pitino made his biggest mistake, which was to lash out against the fans. "All this negativity that's in this town sucks," he moaned after a loss last March. Forget that the coach's anger was misdirected -- Pitino should have made clear that what ticked him off was the media and the constant ranting about his team on sports radio, since actual civilian Celtics fans, as a general rule, are pussycats compared to Red Sox or even Patriots fans. By lashing out against the fans -- the very people who had bronzed him and lured him to the city in the first place -- Pitino burned the final bridge that attached him to this city. (It's worth noting that Pitino's arrival coincided with the New England departure of Parcells; it's obvious we were looking for a replacement idol for the Cult of the Coach.)

Now we say goodbye to Rick Pitino. He will undoubtedly surface somewhere else soon, probably at a major Division I college. He will probably win, too, and help refurbish his now-damaged reputation. He probably won't return to the NBA (although never say never). The grand experiment is over. And like the victims of a two-car collision, neither Rick Pitino nor his former team is a picture of health.