He’s the Mr. Fix-It of basketball — badly in need of his own magic touch.
Former Knicks coach Rick Pitino — who made his career resurrecting tanking college programs — has seen his public image tarnished by a sordid sex scandal that could cost him his job.
The staunch Catholic family man’s contract with the University of Louisville has a morality clause that may have been violated when he admitted having sex with a woman on a barroom table in a one-night stand six years ago — and then plunking down $3,000 for an abortion.
His contract, which expires in 2013, states the school can ax him for “acts of moral depravity.”
The 56-year-old coach’s romp became an ugly public-relations black eye when Karen Cunagin Sypher was charged with trying to blackmail him — and then accused him of rape after her extortion arrest.
Police have dismissed her rape allegations because of holes in her story. But during the investigation, Pitino was forced to admit to the 2003 encounter.
Pitino said yesterday he hopes to continue coaching at Louisville “as long as they will have me.
“The past seven months have been very difficult on the people I love,” he said. “I let them down with my indiscretion six years ago and I’m sorry for that and I tell them that every day.”
Sypher angrily slammed Pitino’s mea culpa in an interview with The Post.
“What about my family?” she asked. “I’m waiting for that apology. He made me murder my child. It should sicken the public and it devastated my children.”
School officials seem to be standing behind Pitino.
Louisville President James Ramsey expressed disappointment in Pitino’s “errors in judgment” but pledged to move forward.
“As we try to teach our students, when you make a mistake you admit it and right it as best you can,” he said.
Athletic Director Tom Jurich added that he expects Pitino to be head coach “for a long time.”
Pitino, a married father of five who travels with a priest to road games, first encountered Sypher at the 2003 party at the Porcini restaurant in Louisville.
He told cops that when the restaurant closed, the 49-year-old blonde came on to him and they had sex while his assistant, Vinnie Tatum, was in the room.
Sypher then drove Pitino home. Two weeks later, she told him she was pregnant. Pitino suggested meeting at the home of the team’s equipment manager, Tim Sypher — whom she married in 2004.
There, she told Pitino she planned to have an abortion but didn’t have insurance, so he agreed to give her the money.
But Sypher claimed she didn’t want the abortion.
“I wanted to have the baby but Rick said if I did, my children would all be in concrete,” she alleged. She also claimed that she now believes “my husband was paid off to marry me.
“The only way they could shut me up was to have him marry me,” she claimed. “It was a setup from the beginning.”
Early this year, she and her husband filed for divorce. And with the split, her finances went south.
In February, she and an accomplice were charged with making phone calls threatening to go to the media unless Pitino paid her millions.
Instead, he went to the FBI.
After that, she told cops Pitino had raped her not only at the restaurant in 2003, but again when they met at Tim Sypher’s house to discuss the abortion. Investigators said her story was too flimsy to press charges against Pitino.
“The coach has not done anything illegal,” said Pitino’s lawyer, Steve Pence.
But the fact that Pitino admitted to their sexual encounter is a victory for Sypher, her lawyer said.
“It shows that she wasn’t making it up,” said the attorney, James Earhart. “The cops just chose to believe who they want to believe.”