Sports

Pitino’s coaching path was clear as teen in Long Island

Sometimes, you walk into a gymnasium, wander onto a playground, and the talent on display can make you gasp. It probably didn’t take an advanced degree in basketball for anyone to look at Lew Alcindor as a kid, or Connie Hawkins, or probably Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, and understand that what they were seeing was beyond special.

It’s the player you stumble upon that can make a coach smile more than 40 years later. It’s a coach like Pat McGunnigle, freshly appointed as the boys’ varsity coach at St. Dominic’s High School in Oyster Bay that summer of 1967, wandering to the old beachside courts in Bayville, seeing a scrawny kid working by himself in between pick-up games.

And the coach thinking to himself, “This kid lives for this.”

“If you think Ricky is driven now,” Pat McGunnigle was saying yesterday, “then you should have seen him when he was 13, 14, 15 years old.”

Ricky goes by Rick now and, yes, it amuses McGunnigle that Rick Pitino will turn 60 in September and the coach still calls his old player by a name best applied to a 16-year-old. But there’s a reason for that: In many ways, when he watches Pitino work a sideline, work an official, bark at one of his players, he still sees little Ricky doing the same thing at the old bandbox gym where the Doms played home games back in the day.

“You hear guys talk about a kid who’s a coach on the floor all the time, I know,” McGunnigle says. “But I’m telling you, when you saw that kid he was so serious, so driven, so focused, you knew he was going to be a coach. Because he already was.”

Those were glorious times for the Long Island Catholic League, a ferocious band of brothers at places like St. Agnes in Rockville Centre and St. Anthony’s in Smithtown and St. Mary’s in Manhasset. The league was a Division I factory in the ’60s and ’70s, churning out players and coaches in droves: Ralph Willard (St. Dom’s) and Bob McKillop (Chaminade) and Brian Mahoney (St. Agnes) among many others.

They would compete in these overheated, undersized gyms all winter, then join forces in the summer at places like East Meadow’s Prospect Park or Rockville Centre’s Hickey Field, often taking the show to the parks of Queens and Brooklyn so Pitino, who had spent his preteen years in Cambria Heights, could help shake some of the suburban softness out of them.

“His friends were the other guys on the team, and they were all successful,” the 71-year-old McGunnigle says. “Bobby Panzenback, from Syosset, who got a full ride at William & Mary. Bobby O’Keefe, also from Syosset, who’s a doctor now. Mike Kelly, from Hicksville, who works at the U.N. And Ricky.”

And Ricky, who would make his girlfriend, Joanne Minardi, rebound free throws for him, promising he would take her to the beach if he ever made 100 foul shots in a row with Carvel as the consolation prize; they wound up eating a lot of ice cream together. Ricky, who as a senior averaged 28 points and 10 assists for the Doms, who signed the scholarship papers for Massachusetts right on the floor at Madison Square Garden after watching Marquette beat UMass in the NIT.

Ricky, whose college career took an interesting U-turn when the Minutemen’s coach, Jack Leaman, turned out to be an old-school taskmaster who believed his point guards should pass first, shoot never and always, always, always walk the ball up the court.

“He played a different style in college than when he played for me,” McGunnigle says, before adding with a chuckle: “Judging by the way he coaches now, he preferred the way we did it.”

The old coach has marveled at the work Pitino’s done with this Louisville team, which will face Kentucky Saturday in the NCAA Tournament’s first national semifinal.

“And I got news for you,” McGunnigle says. “Ricky’s gonna beat Kentucky. And then he’s gonna win Monday. And it’ll be one of the greatest achievements you’ve ever seen.”

Maybe that’s a proud teacher talking. Or maybe he’s thinking about the days — every day, as he recalls — when Ricky Pitino would show up early for 3 o’clock practice and not leave until the custodians shooed him from the gym at 9. That guy you see working the sidelines? McGunnigle saw it all back in the day, starting on the lonely courts of Bayville, hard by a beach that might as well have been on the other side of the moon.