He had always been a classic gym rat, the kind of kid that, as his high school coach once said, “just lives for basketball. When you don’t see a basketball in his hands, you worry that maybe something’s wrong.” 

Jim McGunnigle had wandered to the beachside basketball courts in Bayville, out on Long Island, not long after he was appointed the basketball coach at St. Dominic’s High in Oyster Bay in 1967. There, he saw a scrawny kid playing hours at a time by himself. It so happened he was attending St. Dom’s. 

“Right then,” McGunnigle told me years later, “you knew: This kid lives for this.” 

Three years later, Rick Pitino was a senior, and he was hell-bent on earning a basketball scholarship. He had it all figured out: major in political science, go to law school, maybe coach kids on weekends. But first he needed that full ride. And it was hard, even then, for an undersized guard to get that ride.