Big Mike: Morality In Louisville

August 15th, 2009

Flash from Louiville: The King has no clothes. Here in the River City, the King is one Rick Pitino, coach of the University of Louisville men’s basketball team, the highest-paid employee of that redoubtable institution, a man whose face graces a healthy percentage of the Louisville Courier-Journal‘s front pages. His is the face of the city and, boy, is it red. The cardinal Cardinal is in the hottest water of his life.

Usually, when I’m trying to be cute, I’ll call this place Luigiville but I hesitate to do so today for fear that readers will think I wish to slur Italian-Americans. Believe me, I have no such intention. I only wish to slur major college sports coaches and the knuckleheads who slobber all over them. The sane among the species Homo Sapiens sapiens realize Pitino’s inner thoughts are meaningful only to the obsessive-compulsives who worry about point spreads and the couch slugs whose idea of a day well-spent is to watch teenagers play games on TV. That would be a plurality of Louisvillians.

Good old Rick Pitino. He made the rounds of the bookstores last fall and winter, signing copies of his book, “Rebound Rules: The Art of Success 2.0.” Big stores like Barnes & Noble as well as well-respected little local operations like Carmichael’s Books were jammed with fawners trying to touch the hem of his garment. His book lays out his very straightforward roadmap for life. Here’s a quick sample of his sagacity:

So as my friend Bill Parcells says, you are your record – and my record in Boston was 102-146. We never made the playoffs. I had never taken losing well, and now it was my identity: With the Celtics, at least, I was a loser. I was stumbling through the darkness of doubt.

So, if you follow Pitino’s train of “thought” and wish to employ it to run your life, you define your life in terms of National Basketball Association wins and losses. And then, when things look darkest, you quit (which is what he did.)

I had no stomach to read much farther. I bet he goes on to say that life is more than a box score, yadda yadda yadda. Gee thanks, Plato.

Anyway, this great titan of epistemology, ontology and ethics has been under siege in recent months. Many in the town of Louisville have leapt to his defense against the broadsides of a woman named Karen Sypher, variously described by locals as a bitch, a whore, a golddigger, a scam-artist and a psychotic. Oh, and not a few randy young L-villians have made special mention of the fact that she has breasts the size of spaghetti squashes.

Sypher became a household name here because she’d tried to extort our Plato in exchange for her continued silence about a purported tawdry affair back in 2003. My heavens! You’d have thought she was trying to take away his gun.

The panel of experts down at Dick’s Pizza shook it’s collective head and concluded she was lying, greedy and clearly insane. Poor old Rick Pitino, they warbled.

Oops. The Plato of the Hardcourt was forced to hold a press conference Wednsday night, admitting his affair with the woman. During her current divorce hearing, the court has heard accusations that Pitino essentially raped her, that he paid for her abortion, that he bribed the man she’s divorcing to marry her in the first place, and that Pitino and the husband paid former federal agents to spy on her.

I wonder what Bill Parcells would have to say about all that. Sounds like a poor won-lost record to me.

The Louisville Cardinals men’s basketball team has been rated by some Las Vegas oddsmakers as a probable Final Four team next March. The odds were set before this latest round of Sypher-mania. The hullabaloo may adversely affect the team’s chances. She must be insane.