The tears do not flow on this afternoon. But they are right there, barely contained behind Rick Pitino’s blank eyes.
He is the new basketball coach at the University of Louisville, and on this Sunday he is at an airport hotel as part of a media day sponsored by Conference USA. But neither his sport nor his team is the subject as he sits here at a crowded table. He is talking instead of Billy Minardi.
They met back when both were high school students in Long Island, N.Y., and eventually their friendship blossomed and Pitino married Minardi’s sister Joanne. The coach and his brother-in-law would go on to golf together and do all those things best buddies do together, but suddenly, tragically, their good times ended on the morning of Sept. 11.
That day, as he regularly did, Minardi reported to his job at the brokerage firm of Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and there he died, his life among the many stolen by a terrorist attack.
“Now everything seems harder,” Pitino says, “just because I think there is so much pain around me.
“When you think of the situation you’re feeling, you realize there are probably 30-some other thousand people that are feeling the same pain. So it’s very difficult. And I guess, with the war still going on and everything around us, for our country it’s something that’s not been known to this generation.
“It’s funny about perspective. I gave the eulogy at the funeral, and the whole eulogy was on perspective and how little things tend to bother us. From losing games to finances and things that really are irrelevant in life. We really don’t know it at the time, and I said the greatest lesson we can learn is not only perspective, but to not in three months go right back to our ways.
“I will never lose my tremendous passion for the game or for winning. But I will accept losing much better than I have before.”
Does it change the way you coach?
“It’s funny,” he says. “I’m the type of coach who could get on a player, but I’d always make sure before he left that I’d pick him back up. Now I think I may hug him before he leaves. Before you were sometimes in such a rush, so busy, you may not notice it. Now I’m very cognizant of anybody’s feelings.”
Pitino was in Louisville on that awful day that changed so many lives, but he soon made his way to Minardi’s home in Bedford, some 40 miles outside Manhattan.
When he was coach of the Knicks, he had talked Minardi into buying the home, which was near the team’s training site in Purchase, and when he left the next year to take over at Kentucky, Minardi had lain on a bed in it and moaned: “How can you do this to me? You made me buy this house.”
Briefly, even after the attack, there was hope that Minardi would be returning to it when Pitino spotted his name on a survivors Web site. But it was a false hope. His name, like so many others, had been listed there in error, and very quickly Pitino realized he would have to carry on without one of his very best friends.
The one thing you don’t want, you don’t want people to feel your pain,” says Pitino. So it’s up to you. Certainly, I’m happy today that I’m in Louisville, Ky., because I have so much compassion for my family with this happening. We had so many common friends in Kentucky. There were 30 people who were just as close to Billy as they are to me.
“So I’m very lucky to be there because the pain is shared.”
