CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Former egomaniac Rick Pitino appears before us as a changed man, older and wiser but still charismatic.
He changed college basketball two decades ago with his pressing and his three-point shooting, and for the next few years he figured he'd outcoach everybody. Turns out nobody outcoaches everybody for very long.
"I've come to realize why you win and why you lose," Pitino said Friday, the day before his latest team will face North Carolina in the East Regional final, "and it has nothing to do with me or with Roy [Williams, Carolina's coach] -- players win or lose. It's less and less about what you know and more about what your guys do."
A pause to reflect: In 1995 a Pitino-coached team played North Carolina in another regional final, and the day before that game Pitino compared his program to Dean Smith's and said, "Both have great coaching." Carolina beat favored Kentucky rather easily, and the self-described "great coach" used the bitter defeat as a life lesson.
"That loss was the pilot that helped us win a national championship [in 1996]," Pitino said. "We were disappointed in our shot selection."
From that day forward, every Pitino team has sought to blend three-point shooting with inside scoring, and the results were obvious yet again as Louisville trashed Tennessee 79-60 in Thursday's regional semifinal. The Vols were what a Pitino team used to be; the Cardinals are what a Pitino team is.
And what is Pitino himself? One of four coaches to take four programs (Boston University, Providence, Kentucky and Louisville) to the NCAA tournament. The only coach to guide three schools to the Final Four. He's no longer the prodigy who sparked the epic Providence run of 1987, but he's still among the two or three most successful in the business.
"Coach P, he knows what he's doing," Louisville forward Juan Palacios said. "He's been coaching 32 or 33 years -- whenever you ask him how long, he always gives you a different answer."
