rick pitino admits accepting UM job then reneging
i know probably everyone knows this story by now but for those that don't here it is again. article over on thewolverine.com about pitino accepting then backing out of michigan head coaching position
SO GLAD HE TURNED IT DOWN.
He is the annoying love child of Dustin Hoffman, Steve Buschemi, and some sort of toady gangster.
Belein is way better.
Pitino and his boys (Calipari, etc.) don't make sense for schools that do more than pretend to be serious about academics. They're better off at 3rd/4th/worse-tier places where they can be "more basketball."
Not really sure why you'd associate Pitino with Calipari. They've never worked together, it's pretty well known that they don't like each other:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577309832101308606.html
http://www.sbnation.com/ncaa-basketball/2011/10/6/2473170/rick-pitino-fires-back-at-john-calipari
Pitino should have kept his snausage in his pants and he has some other not so attractive characteristics. but he doesn't have anywhere near the rep of Calipari as far as being a douchebag, breaking amateurism rules and leaving his schools as the NCAA probation/forfeiture hammer is about to drop.
Apparently, this guy thinks all Italians act the same.
The spiky haired orange bastard above me speaks the truth.
You're right -- I just looked that up. (Aside: Pitino first worked as a head coach in 1976 -- on an interim basis -- at Hawaii. He would have been about 24 at the time. He got hired at Boston University as the head coach just two years later.)
Oh, and it's definitely not an Italian thing. That's 50% of my ancestry, so I'd never go there.
"So Pitino called Martin back at noon during Martin's scheduled paddleball game to let him know, getting his voicemail.
"[That's when] he can never be disturbed unless it's a matter of life and death, and his assistant said, 'Is it a matter of life and death?'" Pitino recalled. "I said, 'No, it's really, really important.' It's a matter of life and death, because I changed my mind. "
This exactly what I expected.
I wonder if Bill Martin enjoys paddleball as much as parasailing
But they both take a distant second to "fucking up coaching searches". He is a scratch handicap at that game.
PS: I liked RR and Love Beilein... just sad it took us an extra decade to rebuild the hoops program when Pitino would have done it much sooner... in all likelihood. Still wouldn't trade Beilein for anyone else in coaching... that includes Coach K.
story. he gave a reasonably decent set of quotes, but i have to say, nice trash-mouth wife. mabye that explains why he ended up with a fling in a restaurant with a psycho.
Go figure he made a decision that was best for his family and not just himself. I admire him for that. That can be tough to do especially in his profession.
... you wrote this with a sense of irony given the individual.
Well I dont know the individual only what i hear about him. But from what I hear it is a bit ironic
Some Morrisette level irony here*.
*Morissette bastardized irony
but considering that we ended up with Beilein, it all worked out for the best. I think he's a better fit than Pitino ever would have been.
I'm glad he's not our coach. I much prefer Beilein.
That being said, Bill Martin really does not know his way around telephonic communication.
Considering that he's a very successful businessman in addition to being an elite-class competitive sailor, it's really odd that his communication skills are so lacking.
I ran into him in an Ann Arbor hardware store a year or so ago and said hello to him. He seemed like a nice guy considering that I'm a complete stranger, but I didn't get the sense he's a real people person.
I've met him too, and I got the same impression. Though I remember hearing (from John U. Bacon, I believe) that while Martin was a very successful businessman (he's a multimillionaire), his company/companies are actually quite small. So I guess it stands to reason that, to an extent, he only ever interacted with a few people face-to-face on a daily basis.
The private company he founded was very small in terms of staff size. He never had to be an extroverted, polished communicator. To take over something as large as UM athletics (not to mention it being a big part of the public's eye) had to be a jolt to his way of operation. As good as he was at funding facilities without going into the red, he never really found his footing in any other part of the job.
I too have heard he is a very good guy. Just terribly miscast, which was the school's fault.
doing on his property... as he owns half on Ann Arbor. The land is probably his.
I've actually met Bill Martin once or twice through my work at Detroit Edison because we've worked with First Martin Corporation through the years all over Ann Arbor. He actually showed up at a couple meetings for the Fifth Avenue Underground Garage because several of the properties for which we needed to relocate equipment were First Martin properties. He seemed amiable enough in the meetings, but he sat in the corner and let other First Martin people do the talking, only saying "Hello" and "Have a good day" essentially.
As for the story itself, it's interesting really that we came so close to being a Pitino-coached team, but then I think back on that, especially now considering where we are and how much Beilein has done with this program, and sort of give the prospect the same look Beilein seems to be giving Pitino here:
Beilein looks like he ain't buying whatever Pitino's selling, either.
Googly eyes notwithstanding, can we get us some old-school style adidas wear (in much better colors, of course) like the one Pitino has on? The old adidas logo is so much cooler than the new one, and that is a sweet track suit. Again, in the wrong colors, but still.
I'm glad they listened to me...well before i thought to say anything. perhaps I need to click that Moe's banner a bit more often.
This was a story probably a year ago. I'm glad we got Beilein, but playing squash and sailing during coaching searches for your school's two biggest sports...give me a fucking break Martin.
I don't fault him for playing squash or going sailing. The guy's entitled to have a life outside of his job. He just shouldn't have been out of reach when he did those things.
I didn't say he couldn't do those things. I said he shouldn't have been doing those things during a major coaching search.
Can't believe we went from almost having Rick Pitino as our coach to....Tommy Amaker. Quite the change of plans there.
Many schools got hoodwinked around that time into thinking if you hired a Duke assistant, you would get the Duke mystique. Like other programs, we found out the hard way that is not even close to true.
Mike Bray is by far the most successful member of the Coach K tree and his resume is kinda meh (only one Sweet 16 in 13 years at ND).
I forget who made this quote, but it rings true: "You can play for Coach K. You can coach for Coach K. But that does not make you Coach K."
..."if the world ever ends, I'm going to Northwestern. Everything happens there twelve years later."
I also heard somewhere that after Pitino got cold feet, the finalists were Amaker and John Calipari. Talk about dodging a cannonball.
I don't remember Calipari being a candidate. I think his old UMass program had gotten investigated by the NCAA by this time, so we weren't going to touch him.
It was mainly Pitino and Amaker that we went after. Maybe a MAC guy or two.
This is all Dave Brandon's fault!
Not fair bro.
I don't really know of any thing negative about Pitino other than that whole cheating/abortion/extortion incident. I don't think he's ever landed in sanctions/NCAA trouble.
This story has been around unofficially since it happened although I think it was only in the past few years that Pitino added the part with his wife preferring Kentucky to the public narrative. Although it was widely suggested that she was why they went back to Kentucky even though people said that he could not take the Louisville job at the time given that he had been the coach at Kentucky. Previously, the story was just that he was going to go to Michigan but called to talk to Martin and Martin was MIA playing squash or something. Maybe he would have gone to Louisville no matter what but you have to wonder how Martin could let him bail without at least upping the offer and trying to talk him into going to Michigan. I mean, I like Beilein a lot more as a person but Pitino's at his 7th Final Four...
I forget, why did he leave KY in the first place? It's one of the top jobs in CBB.
He was offered the Celtics job and a really big pile of money. Think it was like $75 million for a decade or something. At that point he'd just been to two straight national championship games with Kentucky and had little to prove as a college coach but still obviously had dreams of being successful (and rich) in the league. He wasn't.