Rick Pitino sure has the life. He is still winning big 13 years after his induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and, better yet, he is still living beside the third green at Winged Foot Golf Club.
He called his backyard view of the iconic course a suburban New York treasure. “I never want to give that up,” Pitino said.
Another thing he never wants to part with: his job. At 73 years old and a grandfather to 16, Pitino is not running away from the NIL, play-for-pay realities of college basketball. He dearly loves the game (“I eat, sleep, and drink it.”) and wants to keep going and going, maybe until his 80th birthday, God willing, of course.
Three years into a six-year contract, St. John’s wants Pitino to accept a lucrative new deal to keep him next door to Winged Foot. “They have offered me one, but I haven’t signed it yet,” Pitino said. “I think it’s on the table right now and in the works but … I’m just focused on winning this tournament.”
The Big East Tournament. St. John’s won it last year, Pitino’s second season at the school, for the first time in a quarter century. The Red Storm finished 2025 ranked fifth in the nation — before falling to Arkansas in their second NCAA Tournament game — and started this season at No. 5 again, the best preseason ranking in program history.
Early struggles tempered expectations before St. John’s won 16 of its final 17 games and repeated as regular-season champs for the first time in four decades. Everything revolves around big man Zuby Ejiofor, the school’s first star to win the conference’s Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. The Red Storm start the Big East Tournament on Thursday against Providence. It’s a team with a legitimate chance to reach the Final Four for the first time since Lou Carnesecca and Chris Mullin got there in 1985.
If St. John’s does advance to Indianapolis in April, Pitino would be leading his fourth school to a Final Four (Providence, Kentucky and Louisville) and coaching in the national semis in a fifth different decade (starting with Providence in 1987). He doesn’t think this 2026 team is as talented as the 2025 team that was upset in the tournament, but then again, these Red Storm are not lacking in poise and heart.
“Can we win the national championship?” Pitino said. “I’m not sure our backcourt is strong enough for that. But the way (point guard) Dylan Darling is playing, everything is possible.”
It would be a hell of a thing if the basketball lifer who grew up in Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island, who signed his UMass scholarship papers on the floor of Madison Square Garden, and who once coached the New York Knicks into the playoffs finished his career by winning St. John’s’ first NCAA title. In a city of championship droughts — the Jets haven’t won since the 1968 season, the Knicks since 1973, the Mets since 1986, etc. — St. John’s last reached an NCAA final in 1952, six months before Pitino was born.
A ticker-tape parade in his hometown at some point before he finally retires? Pitino said that he hasn’t given it much thought, that his philosophy on basketball as he’s gotten older aligns with the late Jim Valvano’s approach to March.
Survive and advance … from one day to the next.
But if the only coach to win national titles at multiple schools were to win The Big One at a third in St. John’s?
“I really don’t think in terms of winning a national championship,” Pitino said. “I think in terms of building up a team to have a shot to win the national championship.
“But it’s the place I grew up in, the place I love, so it would mean everything as a New Yorker. It would be one of the great endings for any person, never mind me. … It would be an amazing feat.”
Yankees manager Aaron Boone, left, and Rick Pitino swap jerseys during the Yankees’ playoff run. (Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
So would 1,000 career Division I victories, depending on how you keep score. Pitino owns 910 on-court victories, even though the NCAA puts his official total at 787. Infractions committed on his watch at Louisville compelled the NCAA to vacate his 2013 national crown and, ultimately, cost Pitino his job. Those unforced errors are there for people to judge how they see fit.
Pitino said the different mistakes made with Louisville, and years earlier with the Boston Celtics, changed him over the long term. “I’m a much better coach and person because of failure,” he said. After Louisville, he found a sanctuary with the Panathinaikos club in Greece, where, Pitino said, “I didn’t know one person and I was coaching in countries I’d never seen before. That made me stronger and better, too.”
He landed back in the States at mid-major Iona and then at St. John’s, a barely-relevant program that Pitino described as “a mess” upon his arrival. Nobody who has watched Pitino coach is surprised that three years later, St. John’s is the opposite of that.
Pitino can’t see himself coaching at yet another school, though he said his time in Greece and the EuroLeague was so special that a return there “would be a possibility if I’m being totally honest.”
And as soon as he said those words, Pitino stopped himself cold and pondered those Winged Foot views. “I don’t feel like moving again,” he said through a laugh.
At St. John’s, he gets to challenge himself in different ways by competing against his son Richard at Xavier and against Dan Hurley at UConn, winner of two of the last three national titles. Nothing is easy in college basketball at a time when Pitino believes the sport is as competitive on the floor as he’s ever seen it.
Now comes the hard part, inside March Madness, a place where you need guards to make plays and everyone to make foul shots to have a shot at the ring.
“It can definitely be done at St. John’s,” Pitino said.
“You just have to be a little lucky along the way.”
