Rick Pitino Was College Basketball’s Highest-Paid Coach. Now He Is ‘Enemy No. 1.’

When Rick Pitino was fired from the University of Louisville last fall, he was the highest-paid college basketball coach in the country, earning nearly $7.8 million a year. Over 16 seasons with Pitino at the helm, the Cardinals made the Elite Eight six times and the Final Four three times. In 2013 the team took home the NCAA championship trophy. He also helped turn Louisville into the most profitable program in men’s basketball.

But along the way, the team was dogged by scandal. There was an apparent conspiracy to funnel $100,000 from Adidas to the family of a star recruit. A team assistant allegedly paid women to strip for and have sex with recruits. Pitino has said he had no knowledge of any of that, and no evidence has emerged tying him to those incidents. Still, many wondered how the coach could have been in the dark about the serious violations that resulted in the NCAA’s wiping that 2013 championship from the record books.

His firing was an abrupt and bitter end to a legendary college coaching career. Before arriving at Louisville, he had led the University of Kentucky to a national championship in 1996 and somehow took an underdog Providence College team to the Final Four in 1987. He also coached the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics, though he didn’t replicate his collegiate success in the NBA.

His new book, Pitino: My Story, isn’t a mea culpa so much as a full-court press. Pitino rails against the university, assistant coaches, the media, the FBI, and the NCAA. He steadfastly asserts that he would have stopped any wrongdoing if he had known about it. “Why would someone who has coached in seven Final Fours suddenly have to cheat?” he writes.

The Chronicle spoke with Pitino about the circumstances of his firing, the influence of sneaker companies in men’s basketball, and whether elite college athletes should get paid.

You write in the book that there are people who consider you college basketball’s public enemy No. 1. Considering that corruption in college basketball is certainly not limited to one program, why do you think you were singled out?

Because it was a scandal. The NCAA knew I had done nothing. They investigated over 100 people and they obviously only hit me with a five-game suspension.

If I was guilty of what was reported, I would have been banned from basketball for five to 10 years. They investigated it thoroughly, and from 100 employees to all of the players, they said, “If Coach P ever knew anything like that was going on in that dormitory, all hell would have been paid.”

But they said I did not monitor one of my assistants. I don’t agree with that, because at 2 in the morning, sneaking girls to a side door, there’s no way I would know that. Now, should I have not hired one or two of my 30 some odd assistants? Yes, I take full accountability for that.

The assistant in question was a guy who had been a player on your team. Some say, “How would he not know about this thing going on for four years, in this special basketball dorm, with this guy that he knows so well?”

Well, it’s just like parenting. So four times a year for four years this young man did this. As a parent, I have four boys and a girl. If one of my children went out four times a year and did the wrong thing, would I find out about it? In this age of social media, I can’t get off a plane in a city without somebody knowing where I am, from a camera phone or whatever it may be. So this young man did this for four years. These recruits went home and they experienced these reprehensible things, and they didn’t tell one person, not one person on social media said, “Hey, you can’t believe what went on at Louisville.”

If you just look at it rationally, I would be the last person that would ever know it, and the other people, there’s six players on my basketball team [in that dormitory] that had no idea this was going on.

People wonder if it was a wink and a nod. Maybe they didn’t tell you what you didn’t want to know. Maybe you sent a signal to those guys that …

Here’s a wink and a nod. A wink and a nod is when you have a great basketball player, and you do all your due diligence, make sure he’s speaking to the right people, but you realize from sophomore year on agents are trying to get into his life, and you realize that they’re around the family. You can’t do anything about it, except do your due diligence. That’s a wink and a nod.

You sort of know, but you can’t do anything about it. In this case, someone who’s making the money I’m making, who realizes that bringing strippers in the dorm is only going to a) get him fired, and b) he’s going to lose a lot of money, he’s going to lose his reputation — that would be the last thing you would condone. The absolute last thing.

When you have already been to seven Final Fours and won two national championships, you don’t have to do those things. These kids meet as many ladies as they want on campus. It makes no sense to me when people make that argument at all. What head coach would jeopardize his future, his money, when it doesn’t get one single player?

Right now you’re suing the University of Louisville for $35 million for breach of contract. You’ve said before that you were the captain of the ship. If the ship went down, or whatever analogy you want to use, why should you get paid out on that contract?

Because it wasn’t cause for me to get fired. They fired me because of what the FBI people said. The FBI came in and said, “You’re involved in this.” If they would have just waited, they would have found out that I had no involvement in that. We’ve already been through the other scandal, that’s long gone. I got fired wrongfully, because I was not involved in that FBI stuff. And people went on the witness stand and said that. There’s not one mention of me on any wiretap at all that I was involved in anything, and there’s a lot of coaches on those wiretaps, but I’m not one of them.

You complained at a press conference once about the influence of sneaker companies, specifically at the grassroots level. You also you make no secret of the fact that you’ve earned millions from from Adidas and others. Looking back, do you feel you were complicit in what amounts to a hypocrisy?

Look, a few companies pay me because they think we’re going to win a lot of games, get into the NCAA tournament, and obviously if you get to the Final Four, the Sweet 16, their product gets marketed. They pay me a lot of money to try and get my team to go there. Now they’re paying these schools an all-school deal, to get every athlete wearing their products, all of the alumni, the boosters. So we’re all going to go out there and buy Nike, we’re not going to buy Under Armour or Adidas, we’re going to buy Nike. That’s part of the industry. Should the players get paid from shoe companies to wear their shoes? Why not? Then you have a problem. How do you find the solution?

At one point you reportedly referred to the NCAA as a joke. Do you think of the NCAA as a joke?

No. I never said the word joke. Where did you get this?

Michael Sokolove reported that in his recent book, The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino.

The NCAA is me, it’s every coach. The people who put you on probation are committees of the NCAA. They administer a lot of different things and a lot of pockets get lined, they make rules, they set up certain things, but they’re not a joke. They try and do the best they can. I would say my solution is, it’s like free trade. I’m Rick Pitino, I’m an athlete, I’m at University X, I should be able to, like any other student, go out and do a commercial, go out and sell my likeness, whatever it may be. But I should be able to do that. That’s my opinion. The NCAA doesn’t agree with that.

So Louisville made $356 million in revenue over a 10-year period, more than any college basketball program. Why shouldn’t the players who play the game see any of that money? Not just licensing their likeness, not just free shoes; why shouldn’t they participate in that tremendous windfall?

I agree with it in theory, I don’t know how to do it. I believe that the athletes should revenue-share in some way. Remember now, we made our money because we built a stadium, we went out and sold the tickets, we went out and sold the marketing, we went out and sold the suites. It wasn’t the players that did that. It was the administration that did that.

Now the players out there — certainly if they were not on a top-10 team, those people would not buy the suites, those people would not buy the tickets, and marketing would be at a nil.

We understand the problem, what’s the solution? I say let them do the commercials, and then somebody else says, “Yeah, but then an Alabama football player, they’ll do a car commercial and they’ll get a Mercedes-Benz and then your program would get the Toyota,” and then somebody else will say, “What about baseball?” It’s almost like socialism versus capitalism.

Should we all be the same as you, we all get the same thing, or should the rich get richer?

Stadiums are great and having a name-brand coach is great, but it’s still those five kids who are on the floor, spending 20 hours a week practicing. Most of them aren’t going to go on to become LeBron James, and everyone around them, including the coaches, are getting wealthy off of their ability. The inequity there just seems like a problem, right?

You and I philosophically agree that they should have some type of revenue sharing. I may be of the point of view that each year they’re there that maybe the university puts fifteen, twenty thousand dollars away, they put it in an account, and they don’t get the money until they leave. I’m all for that.

What you’re bringing up has been going on now for 40 years. And people always say philosophically that it’s wrong.

These kids, they don’t get anything. And there are kids that leave, they don’t have a great education, they’re not going on to a business, they have an education when they graduate, but they don’t have a skill-set so to speak outside of the game of basketball that they go into.

People have to have solutions to these philosophical things, and you’re not giving them to me now.

I just wonder whether the people who are profiting really have much incentive to actually find that solution.

It’s not coming out of our pocket, so why wouldn’t we? Nobody seems to have the answers. I’ve heard this for so long now, and I come up and I’ll say, “No, they should be able to do this, they should be able to do that.” And somebody comes back and says. “What about women? They can’t do that. They don’t have the revenue that men’s basketball, men’s football has.” Now you’re discriminating against women. They can’t go out and make that type of money. I sit here, I don’t have an answer to that.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.