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Kevin Blackistone

Louisville Boss Looks the Other Way After Pitino's Cardinal Sin

Posted Aug 13, 2009 12:13PM By Kevin Blackistone (RSS feed)

Filed Under: NCAA Basketball

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Rick Pitino, James RamseyWho knows who was the first college chancellor or president to abdicate his or her responsibility as chief executive officer of their college campus? Who knows when that superior first exhibited so much spinelessness?

All we know for certain is who the newest university boss is, in what is a lengthening line, to wobble on weak knees. He is Dr. James Ramsey.

Ramsey (far right) is the president of the University of Louisville. He is the man seated in an office that touts a message to fellow Kentuckians about accountability. It announces: "More than ever, [the] University of Louisville is showing accountability in all that it does. But what exactly do we mean by accountability?"

Apparently, this: If you earn millions of dollars for our university, you can do whatever you want and the university will just look the other way.

How else can anyone view the lack of reaction of the university's CEO to the tawdry tale that was unveiled Tuesday and Wednesday on his campus like some peepshow behind a dingy curtain in a dark and dank back room of a seedy alley parlor? His millionaire basketball coach, and married father of five, Rick Pitino admitted not just to having an alcohol-infused affair, but to providing money for his paramour to obtain an abortion, according to a police report, or at least paying for her health insurance, as stated by Pitino's lawyer, when she said she was going to have an abortion. This from a coach who is such a devout follower of the Catholic church, which continues to condemn abortion as an evil, that he once proudly displayed a photo of his meeting with Pope John Paul II and keeps his personal priest, Father Edward Bradley of Henderson, Ky., on the bench with him.

Then Ramsey broke out a bow and tied it all up.

"We hope this closes this chapter; we're all ready to move on," he said. "Our university is recovering from a flood that shut down a large portion of our campus, preparing for the start of classes on August 24th, and getting ready to welcome the most academically talented freshman class in our history. We need to get back to our job of educating the next generation of Kentucky's leaders."

A good start would have been circling the basketball coach's behavior as unacceptable by requesting that he tender his resignation. But winning the conference, making the NCAA Tournament and keeping the checks coming off the backs of young men who aren't getting paid for their labor is more important. (Pardon the digression, but I'm obligated at the mention of so-called student athletes in revenue-generating sports like men's basketball to point out that they are getting a free education in return for practicing and playing their sport 20 hours a week for the entertainment of the rest of us.)

The Pitino event is yet another reminder of a number of falsehoods about sports in general and college athletics in particular. Like the recent Steve McNair tragedy or the Isiah Thomas meltdown in New York, the Pitino story shows that we are only kidding ourselves if we say that we know the men and women we champion as sports heroes. We haven't a clue about what goes on when they leave the field of play, the post-game podium and walk out of the locker room door and into their private lives.

And when we let the phrase "college athletics" roll off our tongues we are doing so merely out of rote rather than from truth, because college and athletics have less and less to do with each other. They are just about separate entities and, the way things are going, they probably should be.

A recent study by The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Boston Globe showed just how disparate the college campus and its intercollegiate sports have become. At least 39 private universities and plenty of state colleges invest much more in basketball coaches like Pitino and football coaches than the folks who run the campus and, of course, do the teaching and research, which ostensibly is what colleges and universities exist to do. Further, more and more athletic departments are basically becoming independent of their campuses, becoming self-sustaining money-making entities that buy leeway with the schools by cutting them checks during these lean times. Louisville's athletic department, largely because of Pitino's on-court success, did just that recently. The school was thankful. Now Ramsey apparently has provided his part of that quid pro quo relationship.

As Sheldon Steinbach, who served 37 years as attorney for the American Council on Education, told the Indianapolis Star last year: "Ultimately, the buck stops with the president, but ... the president relies on the athletic director. The athletic director is dependent on coaches to promote ethical, lawful processes."

It doesn't matter anymore that coaches like Pitino ply their trade on a college campus and, one would expect, are therefore part of the overall mission to mold the minds of young men and women. It doesn't matter that they sign contracts, the most-lucrative on campus, that include morals clauses that could result in dismissal for doing something considered depraved. It doesn't matter that they become the faces of the schools if not the cities and states in which they work. It doesn't matter that in 2007 Pitino held a player, Derrick Caracter, to the terms of his contract and suspended him indefinitely from the team for violating it. Caracter's offense? Breaking curfew. No word if he was out as late as Pitino when Pitino committed his "indiscretion," as he termed it.

That's how disingenuous Pitino and Louisville are in this matter. All that matters is that they recruit the best players and win the most games and get to the most-lucrative tournaments and bowl games and bring home the most championships.

"He's been diligent in his work as our men's basketball coach, despite a number of false rumors, reported inaccuracies and the difficulties this personal matter that happened six years ago has placed on him and his family," Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich said on Wednesday of Pitino. "I'm a million percent behind him."

As a result, so is Jurich and Pitino's boss, school president Ramsey, who sounded as if he may as well be working for them rather than the other way around.

This is the charade that is college athletics. The people whose titles suggest they should be in charge are all but emasculated. The university ideal has been desecrated.

Tags: rick+pitino, RickPitino

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Kevin Blackistone

Kevin BlackistoneKevin B. Blackistone is a national columnist and commentator for FanHouse.com. He is a regular panelist on ESPN's sports-debate show, "Around The Horn,'' seen Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. ET. Blackistone currently serves as the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.