Cloud Over Pitino, Program Inescapable

NEW YORK -- Rick Pitino would like you to know one thing: His tawdry sex affair with a woman who faces federal charges of extortion and lying to the FBI is not going to have the slightest impact on his Louisville basketball team.

There are still plenty of legal hurdles to overcome and motions to be made before the case goes to trial and Pitino is summoned to the witness stand, where presumably his testimony against Karen Sypher will reveal even more salacious details about their romp in a Louisville restaurant, and the subsequent fallout that has engulfed the university's athletic department.

Beyond Pitino, the scandal has scarred Tim Sypher, who is now the operations director of the Cardinals' new gym and who was the team's equipment manager. Tim married Karen (they are now divorced) after she either had consensual sex with Pitino or was assaulted by him against her will -- it's a complicated connection that perhaps the trial will help unravel. The scandal has also greatly impacted Pitino's wife of 33 years, his five children, his extended New York family, Louisville's Catholic community where Pitino worships and pretty much anyone who has a rooting interest in the Cardinals.

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But his current crop of players? "All they're interested in is their future, making their lives better for their families someday, becoming the best players they can possibly be," Pitino said several times during Wednesday's Big East media day at Madison Square Garden. "Winning games, that's really what they're tuned into."

Well, this isn't exactly correct. Walk a few feet and there is Edgar Sosa, the senior guard out of Harlem's Rice High, telling reporters how, once the news broke of Pitino's affair and Sypher's alleged attempt to extort the coach for upwards of $10 million, he could barely go about his business doing normal things -- shopping in the mall, answering the phone -- without having to talk about it.

"I didn't have answers for their questions, but yes, everyone wanted to know if I knew anything," Sosa said. "I didn't. None of the players knew anything more than what we'd see on TV or read in the papers. It got to be a pain telling people I had no idea about what's going on with Coach P. My whole summer was like that. People still want to know and I tell them the same thing I'm telling you. I don't know what's going on."

The point here is scandals have a nasty way of trickling down to innocent observers. Pitino can pontificate and preach all he wants about how "there will be no disruptions" when the season starts in a few weeks. It doesn't make it true. He clearly was trying to make nice with the media Wednesday, remarking several times about how he understood "you have a job to do," but signs of agitation and stress stretched like chalk marks across his forehead.

Still, at least Pitino didn't try to chastise reporters for asking such harsh questions on the day Steve Phillips took a leave of absence. That was Pitino's tactic in August, during his last come-to-Jesus meeting before a crowd brandishing cameras and tape recorders. "Everything that's been printed, everything that's been reported, everything that's been breaking in the news on the day Ted Kennedy died is 100 percent a lie, a lie," Pitino said then, at a press conference he called. "All of this has been a lie, a total fabrication of the truth."

Around the time Pitino was wiping the sheen off his sideburns in the cool underbelly of the Garden, Phillips and ESPN, his employer, were crafting a statement to announce the baseball analyst would be taking an indefinite leave of absence. He had been suspended for a week earlier this month for reasons still not clear, and then the New York Post broke the story about how Phillips, a married man and father of four, had an affair with a 22-year-old ESPN production assistant that resulted in a police report in which only a boiled bunny was missing.

If the allegations prove true, Brooke Hundley, the woman in question, stalked and harassed Phillips' family, and while Phillips long ago proved he wasn't the most faithful husband during his messy tenure as general manager of the Mets, being a cad is not an illegal offense. And if women want to ever move beyond the "woe is me, I've been shunned by a man" Victorian victimhood, ESPN should at least subject Hundley to the same punishment Phillips received.

I'm not sure of Pitino's relationship with Kennedy, but Pitino and Phillips sure seem to have a few things in common. Some day they ought to get together and compare notes on how life falls apart when you go a round or two with handfuls of craziness. (To be fair, we don't know whether Sypher and Hundley are officially loony or just playing the part.)

Pitino refuses to even utter Sypher's name. He calls her "this person." "I'm just a witness in the U.S. district attorney versus this person," he said. "This person has nothing to do with our basketball team or this season."

But she does, because from the moment Pitino chose to reveal his own brand of romance during what he admits was "an indiscretion" with Sypher on the leather bench at Porcini, a Louisville restaurant, in 2003, his carefully-crafted image merged with how he does his job. He told police he gave Sypher $3000 to help allay medical insurance costs when she said she was pregnant; she says the money was for an abortion. While none of this has anything to do with the cost of tea in Louisville, Pitino's indiscretion(s) bring into question whether he should be making moral decisions for anyone else.

Here's the trickle down consequence again, in full glory. Earlier this week, two of Pitino's players accepted plea bargains relating to a disturbance outside a party at a southern Indiana restaurant. Charged with resisting arrest, Terrence Jennings and Jerry Smith received probation and community service for their roles in tussling with off-duty police officers at a homecoming party two weekends ago. Pitino chose not to suspend the players for any games, insisting his punishment is much worse.

He would not provide details of his punishment, so we can only assume it is something really disgusting, like cleaning the leather benches at Porcini, the restaurant where Pitino's legend lives on.

"If you knew exactly what happened, I had 50 worse things happen at Providence, 100 things worse happen at Kentucky," Pitino said, citing his other college stops. "I know what happened was an unfortunate situation. The young men learned from it. Thankfully no one got hurt. The young men knew where they made their mistake.

"They were disciplined, like I discipline all my players. I can assure some people, the first question is: are they going to be suspended? These players -- compared to what I put them through -- much rather would be suspended. Much rather [than] the hell that they pay."

The folks at Providence and Kentucky must love Pitino even more when he says such kind things about their schools. Forget about the fallout and gossip still to come when Pitino takes the witness stand in the fed's trial against Sypher -- a "distraction," the coach calls it, as if he'll be going to court to pay a parking ticket. The Cardinals will need to wear body armor under their jerseys when they play at Rupp Arena Jan. 2.

Because of their coach's choices and the ripples they created, Pitino's team is about to face a full-court press of madness, all season long.