Great Moments in Sports Card History: Antoine Walker

The ‘96 Antoine Walker card from the Basketball Rookies draft set is not exactly the T-206 Honus Wagner card in terms of its significance, but it’s special to me. Why? Those gloriously crappy Kentucky uniforms.

Back in the mid-90’s, Rick Pitino had finished off the job of pulling the Kentucky program out of the muck that Eddie Sutton had shoved it into. The records of Pitino’s last six Wildcat teams:

1991–92 29–7 (12–4)  NCAA Elite Eight
1992–93 30–4 (13–3)  NCAA Final Four
1993–94 27–7 (12–4)  NCAA Second Round
1994–95 28–5 (14–2)  NCAA Elite Eight
1995–96 34–2 (16–0)  NCAA Champion
1996–97 35–5 (13–3)  NCAA Finalist

Keep in mind that this body of work would have been even more impressive had it not been for Christian Laettner’s legendary overtime buzzer in the ‘92 East Regional final.  Four years after that, Pitino put together a squad that’s on the short list of the greatest teams of the 64-team era.

In 1995-96, Kentucky’s title winner had an average margin of victory of 24 points. Compare that to an average margin of victory of 15.5 for the more heralded 1991-92 Duke team that killed the dreams of Wildcat fans. Even more impressively, that edition of the Wildcats featured six players who would go on to be first round draft picks: Walker, Derek Anderson, Tony Delk, Walter McCarty, Ron Mercer and Nazr Mohammed.  Three more players off that team - Mark Pope, Jeff Sheppard and Wayne Turner - would also spend time in the NBA.

So I’m not about to question Pitino’s coaching prowess back then. However, I will question the coach’s choice in apparel.  It might have escaped your memory, but Pitino’s teams were doing all that winning while wearing some truly terrible uniforms. Just look at the shorts Walker is wearing. What the hell are those, blue claw marks?

Kentucky just didn’t limit the madness to those shorts, though.  No, the Wildcats also donned this monstrosity at times:

As for Walker, this card captures him at a time when the world was still his oyster. In 1995-96, he led the Wildcats in rebounding (8.4) and minutes per game (27.0). Since then, here’s a quick and dirty recap of how Walker’s life has gone:

- Made three NBA All-Star teams
- Was arrested for drunk driving in 2009
- Arrested two other times for writing bad checks
- Has been robbed twice
- Squandered $108,142,015 in total NBA salary, declaring bankruptcy in 2010

I previously wrote how Walker’s former Kentucky teammate, the aforementioned Mohammed, actually had to pay for part of Walker’s tab with the bankruptcy lawyer.  To help him get out of the hole, I would gladly pay Antoine $2 if he would autograph the card above for me.

Rick Pitino displays more restraint than he showed at Porcini

I’m amazed that college coaches actively engage in call-in radio shows. I realize these shows provide an opportunity for the leader of the program to engage the fan base, especially those shut ins who don’t feel like buying season tickets because too much of their disposable income is committed to bingo or the Shop at Home Network. But the downside is that any lunatic can call in and potentially slip by the screener.

And that’s exactly what happened to Louisville’s Rick Pitino recently. Thanks to the guys at KentuckySportsRadio.com for making this clip available, where Pitino is confronted by the best type of fan, the fan who…

(A) …is kind of pleased that the program is winning, it’s just not winning enough to suit him.
(B) …is old enough to remember national titles won by previous coaches (in this case Denny Crum).
(C) …is perturbed that his school’s biggest rival (that would be Kentucky) is winning more games right now.

While a lot of the angst is tied up into (A) and (B), don’t ever discount the power of (C). Especially when you’re dealing with the dynamics of basketball in the Bluegrass State. So here goes:

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“We are in the top 25.” Oh Rick, just save your breath, it’s no use stating facts in response to a guy like that.

The Rick Pitino extortion case is a glorious train wreck of moral depravity

The Rick Pitino extortion case is as good as it gets in a tabloid crazy nation like ours.  Here’s the background:

In August of 2003, Pitino met a batshit nuts chick named Karen Cunagin at Porcini, an Italian restaurant in Louisville’s Crescent Hill neighborhood.  The owner gave Pitino the building keys near closing time and left the pair alone.  The two then had sex at a table near the bar, which was verified by statements that both Pitino and Cunagin gave to Louisville police later on.

That must have resulted in one hell of an interesting cleanup for Porcini’s busboy.  “Hey boss, there’s something in this booth, but it ain’t marinara sauce.  Did you put Chicken Marsala back on the menu?”

A few weeks later, Cunagin called Pitino and told him she was pregnant and that the father was a noted basketball coach with a national title on his resume, and that she’d had sex with this person in a Italian restaurant.  The conversation that followed may or may not have gone something like this:

Pitino: Please tell me Bobby Knight nailed you at an Olive Garden.

Cunagin: Uh, no Rick, I’ve never sedu…uh, I mean, I’ve never met Bobby Knight.

Pitino: DAMN! What about Coach K, did you recently have a quicky with him at a Pizza Hut?

Cunagin: Pizza Hut?!?  What kind of whore do you think I am?  No, I’ve never met Coack K either.  It’s you, Rick, that night at Porcini.

Pitino: DAMN!

After that, things got even more tabloidy for Pitino, I’ll let the AP provide the quick and dirty recap:

Pitino said Sypher told him she was going to have an abortion but didn’t have health insurance, so he gave her $3,000 to have the procedure done in Cincinnati, according to the report.

Pitino, a prominent Roman Catholic, contended when the case came to light last year that he wanted Sypher to use the money for insurance, not an abortion.

Over the next six years, she married Pitino’s longtime assistant, Tim Sypher, and the two have a daughter. The Syphers separated after the Pitino affair came to light and divorce proceedings are pending. (AP via Boston Herald)

That’s right, Cunagin friggin’ married Pitino’s basketball equipment manager, Tim Sypher (thus the name change).  This chick is a special kind of crazy…but it gets better.

In April of 2009, Pitino reported that he had contacted the FBI regarding an extortion attempt made against him.  The extorter?  Oh yeah, Karen Sypher.  A week after the revelation became public, ESPN’s Pat Forde dug into the story and came up with this:

Multiple people were said to be calling the coach on behalf of Karen Sypher, sources said. She denies having encouraged anyone to harass Pitino, and denies having any knowledge of those calls before being asked about them by the authorities.

Judy Cunigan said she called and talked to Pitino once herself about three weeks ago, “to ask him what has happened to my daughter.” Cunigan said she got Pitino’s number from her daughter. Judy Cunigan said Tim Sypher came by her house the night she placed that call, pounded on the door and, after being let in, told her not to do it again.

“Now they’ve got it going around that I asked for millions of dollars,” Cunigan said. “We haven’t asked for anything but the truth.”

Judy Cunigan said other calls were made by a family friend she only identified as “Lester.” She said that to her knowledge, Lester never threatened Pitino but only encouraged him to do right by Karen.

Karen Sypher said that if Lester called Pitino, she didn’t know how he got the coach’s unlisted number. She said the only way she suspected that he had placed any phone calls to Pitino was when the FBI played an audio recording of a call over and over, and she believed the voice to be Lester’s. (ESPN.com)

As it turns out, the “Lester” placing the calls was Lester Goetzinger, a longtime friend of Sypher’s.  And how did he get Pitino’s number?  Sypher had sex with him, and in return Goetzinger called up Pitino in February of 2009 threatening to tell the public that the coach had raped Sypher.

After sexing up Goetzinger to get what she wanted, Sypher proceeded to sex up attorney Dana Kolter, who then signed a joint letter with her demanding money from Pitino and threatening to file suit over that romp in Porcini’s back in 2003.

While she was busy mounting half the guys in Louisville to help move her plot along, she got her husband Tim to take a written list of her demands to Pitino.  That list included college tuition for her children, a couple of cars, money to pay off her mortgage and $3,000 per month.

With his hand forced, Pitino basically had no choice but to notify the authorities that he nailed a crazy chick in an Italian restaurant six years ago, paid for her abortion and then watched in horror as she married a member of his staff.  After all that, she was now trying to extort money from him.

In retaliation, Sypher filed a report with the Louisville police department in June of 2009 saying Pitino had raped her in 2003.  Apparently she didn’t get the opportunity to sleep with a police captain in exchange for having him go over to Pitino’s house and arrest him in front of his family.

That’s your recap, and the trial itself started yesterday.  I’ll let Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier-Journal fill in some of the particulars about it:

But Assistant U.S. Attorneys John E. Kuhn Jr. and Marisa Ford have amassed more than 5,000 pages of evidence with which they’ll try to prove that Sypher — then married to Tim Sypher, Pitino’s equipment manager — made “threatening communications with intent to extort,” lied about it to the government and retaliated against Pitino for reporting the alleged extortion.

The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 26 years, although under federal sentencing guidelines, Karen Sypher would, if convicted, more likely face seven to eight years behind bars.

The government’s witnesses in the two-week trial will include Pitino, who may testify as soon as Tuesday.  Spokesmen for U of L President James Ramsey and Athletic Director Tom Jurich, who have stood by Pitino, despite a clause in his contract that allows him to be fired for acts of “moral depravity,” declined to comment on the trial. (Louisville Courier-Journal)

I’m fascinated by this whole affair partly because there’s not a sympathetic figure to be found in this train wreck.  Everyone involved is coming off like a slimeball, including the administration at Louisville.  What more does a coach have to do to break a moral depravity clause in a contract?   Get caught running a dog fighting ring?

By retaining Pitino, you give opposing coaches like John Calipari (who’s no saint himself) all the ammo they need to recruit against your institution.  “Hi (insert name of blue chip recruit), this is Coach Calipari calling from Kentucky.  I heard you’re considering Louisville.  By the way, you been keeping track of this Karen Sypher case?  No?  Well then, let me fill you in…”

We’ll see what happens when Pitino takes the stand today or tomorrow.  Sypher’s lawyer James Earhart (hey, an attorney, they’re the biggest slimeballs of all!) will ask undoubtedly Pitino about the following:

Earhart said Sypher didn’t call the police after leaving Porcini because she didn’t think anyone would believe her. After telling Pitino she was pregnant, the coach made a veiled death threat, Earhart said.

“He makes a suggestion of something having to do with concrete shoes and a river if this matter can’t be resolved,” Earhart said. (AP via SI.com)

With Sypher’s track record, I highly doubt that this allegation is true, but it would have been sorta cool if it was.  And it would have gotten that much better if Sypher had pulled an Oksana Griogorieva and taped it.  In such a scenario, would Rick Pitino then be considered morally depraved by the powers that be at Louisville?  Who knows.

All things considered, has Rick Pitino been a failure at Louisville?

All things considered, has Rick Pitino been a failure at Louisville?

Compared to the expectations the fan base has and what has actually transpired, could Rick Pitino’s tenure at Louisville be considered to be somewhat of a failure?  Granted, the guy has produced a Final Four appearance (in 2005) as well as two other Elite Eight appearances.  That’s not exactly chopped liver right there.

But a national title hasn’t been forthcoming, and at a basketball school that hasn’t climbed to the top of the mountain since 1986, that’s an awfully long time to wait.  Think of every traditional basketball superpower out there - Duke, UCLA, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky - and you’ll find they’ve all won titles since Louisville last turned the trick, with some of those schools having done it multiple times.

You see, here’s the slippery slope in judging a coaching job, you just can’t take into account the number of wins.  If Pitino had put up the same numbers he’s put up at Louisville at a school like Georgia Tech or Stanford, he’d be a legend in those towns.  But in college hoops, where you’re winning is almost as important as how many you’re winning when it comes to judging performance.

While I don’t doubt that Louisville fans love the guy (despite the slip ups in his personal life), I don’t get the sense that too many of them are putting Pitino ahead of Denny Crum in their hearts.  After all, in nine seasons at the school (damn, doesn’t seem that long) he’s got one more 13-loss season (3) than he has 30-win seasons (2).

In Pitino’s previous coaching stop, at hated rival Kentucky, he generated one of the fastest reclamation projects the sport has ever seen.  Don’t kid yourself, the 14-14 mark he put up in his first season on the job there in 1989-90 was one of the best coaching jobs of the last quarter century.  That program had been gutted, and in four years, he had it back in the Final Four.  And the 14 losses in 89-90 were the only time he cleared the double digit mark in defeats while in Lexington.

You can’t help but compare his teams at Kentucky to the squads he’s coached at Louisville.  And in doing so, one thing jumps out at me when making the comparison:  star power.  In eight seasons at Kentucky, he had three players who ended up being consensus All-Americans: Jamal Mashburn, Tony Delk and Ron Mercer.

In nine seasons at Louisville, Pitino has yet to coach a player who was a consensus All-American.  Heck, John Calipari had two at Kentucky this past season alone, and they were both true freshmen (DeMarcus Cousins and John Wall).  That lack of star power has also translated into a dearth of Pitino’s Louisville players making a splash in the NBA Draft.

If you look at the first 20 players selected each year going back to the 2002 draft (which is the draft that took place after his first season at Louisville), Pitino’s only generated three draftees who fit that criteria:  Reece Gaines was the 15th pick in the ‘03 draft while Terrence Williams was picked 11th and Earl Clark was picked 13th in last year’s draft.

Compare that to Calipari, who’s had five players go in the first 20 picks over the same time span.  And in next month’s draft, Wall is the likely top pick, marking the second time in three years that a Calipari-coached player is taken first overall (Derrick Rose was the other back in 2008).  Counting Tyreke Evans last year, this is the third straight year that Calipari’s generated a top five pick.

In terms of recruiting, it wasn’t exactly a banner 2010 for Pitino.  While Calipari inked another stellar group of newcomers, Louisville’s recruiting haul wasn’t quite as well received.  Rivals ranked Kentucky’s class number one while Louisville didn’t make the top 25.  Last season, Calipari’s first Kentucky class was also considered the nation’s best by Rivals, while Pitino’s was picked 16th.

Whatever the reason, Pitino’s not bringing in a constellation of stars, and with his team moving into a new 22,000 seat arena, expectations have actually managed to increase, as if that was possible. I’m just throwing this out there, but it doesn’t appear that a national title is in the program’s near future. Maybe Pitino feels the same way, because it just so happens his house is on the market.