Five years ago, Rick Pitino rented a house here for Kentucky Derby week. One sunny morning, he sat on the porch with an old friend, Holy Cross Coach Ralph Willard, and chatted about the possibility of returning to college coaching.
"It would be tough," Willard recalled saying to Pitino. "Once you've coached at Kentucky, where else can you go?"
Suddenly, a bright red cardinal landed on the porch table between them, inches from their coffee cups. Willard and Pitino exchanged broad smiles.
"When the Louisville job opened up the next year, we howled at that story," Willard said recently in a telephone interview. "What are the odds? We knew what it was. We knew it was a prophetic moment."
The prophecy came true less than a year later. Pitino resigned as president and coach of the Boston Celtics in January 2001 and three months later took over a Louisville program long on tradition and short on promise. Since then, Pitino has whisked a downtrodden Cardinal program from irrelevancy to the Final Four.
Pitino, the first college coach to take three different teams (also Providence and Kentucky) to a Final Four, will arrive in St. Louis to face Illinois with a full appreciation of the moment and the achievement.
"This will mean probably as much to me as anytime in my life," said Pitino, who is a partner in a group that owns seven horses.
Pitino will be surrounded by family just as he was after Louisville (33-4) came from behind a 20-point deficit for a 93-85 overtime victory over West Virginia on Saturday in the Albuquerque Regional final. Not only did Pitino's five children pour out of the stands to congratulate him, but so did his six nieces and nephews, who had lost their fathers.
Pitino's brother-in-law and best friend, Billy Minardi, died in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Minardi's two teenage boys, Willie and Robert, ran out of the stands at the Pit to congratulate Pitino.
A few months before 9/11, Pitino lost another brother-in-law, Don Vogt, when he was struck and killed by a cab in New York City. Vogt's three teenage children, Devin, Billy and Patrick, got hugs from their uncle Rick. The emotion of the moment at midcourt overwhelmed Pitino, who wiped away tears from his face.
"To be honest, I have to say, from what I can remember, it was the happiest I've ever seen him," said Pitino's son, Richard, a 22-year-old senior at Providence. "The Boston days were tough and with all we went through with our uncles, you could see now where life's starting to get better again."
"He cried every day for months," Willard said. "He's over the pain, but he's not over the emptiness."
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