Pitino plods along without his former mojo

There was a time in my life that I was in awe of Rick Pitino. When the coach from New York came to my home state to coach the University of Kentucky in 1989, he was someone who easily impressed. With his slick hair, fancy suits and smooth talk, he quickly won over the hearts of the Bluegrass and over the course of his nine-year run, returned Kentucky to the top of the college basketball world once again. As a teenager, I remember thinking that Rick Pitino had it all and would not be stopped.

Rick Pitino helps Louisville improve to 18-9 this season by beating DePaul. (AP)

Fast forward to this afternoon as I sat in a half-empty Allstate Center in Chicago and watched Louisville struggle to beat an awful DePaul team and it was hard not to notice how far the mighty King had fallen. Even if you have lived under a rock for the past year, you still know all about Pitino, Karen Sypher, Porcinis and a restaurant rendezvous that still baffles the imagination. As the world focuses on Tiger Woods and his infidelities with a Perkins waitress, don't forget that the originator of scandal within a restaurant was none other than Pitino himself.

However it's not just the transgressions in his personal life that have changed my image of Rick Pitino from a decade ago. There have been plenty of athletes, entertainers and even presidents, who have had personal scandal and then rebounded to still have productive careers. But with Rick it is different. The Pitino that coaches a mediocre, inconsistent Louisville team that is living life on the NCAA bubble is simply a pale reflection, both literally and figuratively, of the one that ruled college basketball in the 1990s.

That Rick Pitino was famously on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a "Man Possessed" and seemed to want nothing more than to dominate his profession in ways that no other coach had ever done. And in some ways he succeeded. During his career he has coached the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Kentucky and Louisville, two of the three greatest NBA franchises and two of the 10 greatest college basketball programs. No nomad coach has ever had a better set of four jobs. He is the only coach to have taken three different programs to the Final Four and he is an almost certain Hall of Famer in the near future.

But that is not the Rick Pitino we see today. The Pitino we see today is one that is presiding over a team with lackluster talent and performance that can see it lose by 20 to dismal St John's one night, win at Syracuse the next and struggle with DePaul the week after that. Rick still paces the sidelines, but the urgency seems lacking, and the performance is not where it should be. This will be Rick's ninth Louisville team and his career taking over one of the elite programs in America has seen one Final Four, only three trips to the Sweet 16 and two NIT berths. Not a terrible record by any means, but not what one would have expected from the King of College Basketball in the 90s.

And oh yeah, Rick has some distractions at home. The favorite subject of chants in gymnasiums across the Big East, Karen Sypher, goes to trial soon and their story makes his existence in his home city a continuous punchline. And then there is the little issue of the Rick's former program down the road, which has leapfrogged past the Cards with a Pitino-like coach who still shows the fire that Rick once did, only with results that have the Commonwealth dreaming of a national title.

The parallel career to Rick Pitino is that of Steve Spurrier in college football. Both men ruled their sports in the 1990s, went to chase understandable dreams of professional success and then returned to the college ranks at slightly less ideal situations than the ones they left before. Both assumed that the past glory would find them again and their respective fan bases at Louisville and South Carolina had national title dreams dancing in their heads. But now both seem as mere fragments of their former selves, creating momentary flashes of brilliance, but ultimately falling short of their past glory.

The Rick Pitino I knew in the early 90s would see that situation, pull up his bootstraps one last time and show the world that he still had the goods to rise to the top of the coaching profession once again. The Pitino I saw today in Chicago has allegedly tried to depart Louisville for the NBA twice in the last two years and is looking at a future that will hopefully just not include the initials "NIT" within it.

I never saw Willie Mays drop fly balls in centerfield for the Mets or Muhammad Ali take body blows from no-name tomato cans at the end of his career. But having seen Rick Pitino coach without the passion and brilliance that once permeated his every move, I think I know what it must have looked like.