Wife helped Louisville coach Rick Pitino pass on retirement

Wife helped Louisville coach Rick Pitino pass on retirement

By C.L. Brown, (Louisville) Courier-Journal

Louisville coach Rick Pitino should have a strong team for the 2011-12 season.

With the regular season winding down, Joanne Pitino delivered perhaps the most thorough scouting report Louisville coach Rick Pitino heard all season. Only this wasn't about an opponent. It was about his future.

Pitino completed his 10th season at with the Cardinals — his longest tenure in one spot in his career — and said he contemplated stepping down at the end of the season.

"I said this team has given me more pleasure than just about any team that I've coached," he said. "I think they've overachieved about as much as any team I've coached. I said this may be the time to exit."

Then he opened up the discussion with his wife.

"She said, 'Absolutely not,' " Pitino said. " 'The time to exit is when you win a championship or go to a Final Four, and you've got too much to give to this game.'

"She went on a dissertation like you wouldn't believe."

Pitino, 58, said he believes he still has up to five more years left.

Louisville is adding a strong recruiting class to the cast of four returning starters from a team that finished 25-10 and tied for third in the Big East.

Still, that didn't stop his son Richard from asking if retirement was on the table when approached about replacing assistant Steve Masiello, who left to become the head coach at Manhattan.

"When everything broke with Steve and I talked about bringing Richard back, that was the first thing he said," Pitino said. "'I don't want to hear anything about a retirement. We have to achieve our goals.' I said you won't hear it from me."

In a radio interview Wednesday with Terry Meiners on WHAS-AM, Pitino elaborated a bit more on his eventual replacement. He denied talk that Richard would be named head-coach-in-waiting. He said his 28-year-old son, who has never been a head coach, would not be one of the names he would recommend to athletic director Tom Jurich.

"I'm going to go until I (can't) go with this type of energy," Pitino said. "I don't know who the successor would be. … Certainly the first guy on the list I would recommend 3-5 years from now would be the coach at Butler (Brad Stevens). He would be the type of person who I would recommend."

My first thought was "who's wife".