It started with Coach Pitino himself, who said that in the aftermath of charges that his University of Louisville assistant basketball coach hired prostitutes over a number of years for some of his players (festivities took place in the athletes’ dorm), he felt
… heart broken… My heart is just taken out of my body and broken.
It continues with this remarkable essay, which argues that Pitino himself a few years ago had sex on a restaurant table (some reports say it happened on the restaurant floor, or in its bathroom) because of 9/11 (RICK PITINO AND THE SHADOWS THAT NEVER LEAVE):
[Pitino’s] descent into a dark place [so maybe it was the bathroom] happened no more than two years after 9-11. The idea that tragedy and loss [a close relative of Pitino’s died] did not have anything to do with a flawed man’s attempt to fill those voids with something adventurous (and highly inappropriate) seems unconvincing.
Plus even the Pope, man…
In keeping with the Golden Rule Pope Francis invoked when he spoke to Congress, none of us would ever want the past — something 12 years ago — to be held against us.
The whole essay’s really weird because few people so far have anything to say at all about whether Pitino knew his lads were double teaming (or so the exposé claims) in the dorm … It’s as if the writer – given Pitino’s own sex scandal background – assumes we’re going to go there and we’re going to assume Pitino must have known all about the McNasty…
I mean, he might have. Who knows? We’ll find out. But that’s not what most people are thinking about right now. Right now we’re thinking about whether the claims are true, what exactly happened… It’s early days. Yet here you’ve got this guy anticipating a general belief that the slimy Pitino (as the essay goes on to note, he’s paid an outrageous fortune, is a really unpleasant human being, is a hypocrite – all those motivational books about how you can be as great as he is – and is an inveterate breaker of rules, athletic and otherwise) must have known about the sex. So right there I’m not sure the writer is accomplishing his Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if at this late date you need a definition) goals by going out of his way to remind us that Pitino’s a shit.
After a long detailed recounting of Pitino’s grubby past, the essay ends in this way:
[We need to] recognize the fragility of life behind (and beyond) the public persona of someone who has won multiple championships and earned a boatload of money.
You know, there’s one thing Scathing Online Schoolmarm will say for Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t say I’m a shitty person because of 9/11. He doesn’t say under all my greed and cruelty I’m fragile and you have to be nice to me. Nor does he have admirers who say these things for him.