The Exile of Rick Pitino

“He put a bounty on him.”

What do you mean? A bounty?

“A bounty. 10,000 euros.”

This was the first story Rick Pitino told me in Athens. It was a good one, and it foreshadowed the madness yet to come. Pitino has lots of stories and, these days, lots of time to tell them.

Before he came to Greece, Pitino was out of coaching for more than a year—and thought he might be out of coaching forever. After a federal investigation into bribery and fraud in college basketball—Adidas was accused of funneling money to high-profile high school players to steer them to teams sponsored by the shoe company, including Pitino’s Cardinals—Louisville fired the Hall of Fame coach in October 2017 after 16 seasons. Pitino was never charged in the scandal and remains defiant about his innocence, as does his lawyer. He wrote a book about the saga and insists he’s never given so much as $5 to a player. But after Louisville fired him, he feared no one in the college game would offer another gig no matter how much he pleaded his case. He was right. No one came to his rescue. At least not a college, anyway.

In December 2018, a friend of a friend called. There might be a job opening. In Greece. Coaching Panathinaikos, one of the two main teams in Athens. An official offer came on Christmas Eve. He took it and flew out on Christmas Day.

It was hard not to notice that Pitino, in his Panathinaikos kelly-green scarf, clearly enjoyed the warm reception. Panathinaikos fans are passionate about their team and, now, their famous new coach. So is the owner. Dimitris Giannakopoulos has a bit of a reputation in Athens. Giannakopoulos took control of the team from his father, Pavlos, who ran it for decades and died about a year ago. There’s a banner with Pavlos’s visage that hangs in the rafters of Olympic Indoor Hall. Dimitri’s family owns Vianex, the largest pharmaceutical company in the country, and his media outlet, DPG Digital Media, partnered with CNN to bring CNN.gr to Greece.

That’s the buttoned-up businessman side of Giannakopoulos, but it’s the 44-year-old’s off-hours reputation that’s made him a folk hero—or a villain, depending on whom you ask and their allegiances—in a country that has a healthy respect for rebellious behavior. He’s sort of a Greek Al Davis, if Davis had been richer and younger and given far fewer fucks. Giannakopoulos has been fined and banned from EuroLeague games numerous times for numerous infractions—including and especially for threatening the lives of multiple referees and also their families, as well as opposing fans. He also has a fondness for posting bizarre but super-entertaining videos and pictures on Instagram, some of which have led to the aforementioned fines and bans. He’s openly accused rival owners of bribing officials. And after firing the coach who preceded Pitino, Xavi Pascual—a former EuroLeague Coach of the Year who had delivered Panathinaikos the 2017 Greek Cup—Giannakopoulos told the remaining players that the staffing change “does not dismiss your blame” after the team started 6-7 in the EuroLeague this season. The owner warned that they were “now obligated to have your minds here at all times, seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” otherwise he would “start cutting contracts and you all won’t even play in the EuroCup.” (In addition to playing in the Greek Basket League, Panathinaikos also plays in the EuroLeague against teams from other leagues across Europe.)

More recently, Giannakopoulos tore his rotator cuff and had surgery on his shoulder—then celebrated with a post-op cigarette. In bed. At the hospital. Which he naturally posted to Instagram.

“Yeah,” Pitino chuckled, “the hospital gave him shit for that.”

When Pitino took the job working for that team and that owner, halfway around the world and even further removed from the status he previously enjoyed, I reached out. We talked on the phone a couple of times. He usually picked up right away or called me back promptly. I got the sense that he had time to fill and wouldn’t mind talking—about anything and everything. Before long, we hatched a plan for me to go see him.

That’s how I found myself in Athens, having lunch with Pitino at a restaurant called Agora in the Ampelokipoi neighborhood. I brought my buddy Dave the Greek (DTG) along for the trip as a translator and fixer. He’s Greek American, fluent in the language, and his family lives pretty close to Pitino in Athens. DTG is also a big Greek basket fan. (That’s what they call basketball. They drop the back end of the word.) Dave is how I came to find out about Panathinaikos and its deep-rooted hatred for Olympiacos (traditionally the most popular team in Athens and its most heated rival), how I learned about Giannakopoulos’s outsize personality, how I connected with people in and around the team and fans all over the city.

It was the third time I’ve been to various parts of Greece with Dave. He has the country wired—waiters, bartenders, fans and friends, pistachio peddlers, hoteliers and cab drivers (cab drivers in Greece are basically intelligence officers; nobody has more information). Dave talks to everyone, and everyone loves Dave. Mere moments after landing in Greece, we were zooming down the highway toward Athens when DTG struck up a conversation with Andreas, a friend of his who drives a taxi and picks him up whenever he’s in town. One mention of Giannakopoulos prompted Andreas to call the owner “Greek Scarface.” I thought he was being hyperbolic until Andreas—weaving through traffic at an incredible speed while wearing no seatbelt—twisted halfway around in his seat to show us a picture Giannakopoulos posted of Al Pacino in Scarface wearing an arm sling just like his.

Dave mentioned the “Greek Scarface” exchange to Pitino, who immediately launched into the bounty story. This was right after the handshakes, just as we sat down to lunch, before we had water or bread or a menu in our hands.

We were at a back table at Agora, Pitino in a dark navy cardigan, pants of the same color, and a gray-and-red-striped shirt. He has an apartment not far from there in tony Psychiko. The team put him onto the place and also gave him a car. The apartment is big and has parking. It also has a pool inside about as large as the section of the café we were sitting in. Pitino hasn’t taken a dip yet. “It’s not as impressive as it sounds,” he said. I looked around at the size of our room and quietly disagreed. He explained that an Olympiacos fan had disrespected Giannakopoulos after the man’s favorite team beat Panathinaikos pretty easily in early January. Perhaps spit on him. Which led to the bounty. Giannakopoulos’s men supposedly found the guy, too. I asked Pitino what happened to the poor bastard, which is exactly what Pitino said he asked his boss. The guy evidently apologized, so Giannakopoulos said it was “all good.”

“That guy,” Pitino laughed, “is going to show up in six months with two broken arms.”

Pitino was kidding. He’s in on the joke. (Multiple attempts to reach Giannakopoulos to speak about, among other things, the bounty were rejected.) He knows how this must look from the outside, because he’s on the inside. The fans are rabid. The owner sounds like a Bond villain. And the team Pitino took over is having an atypically difficult season. Panathinaikos lost to Luka Doncic and Real Madrid in the EuroLeague playoffs last season. They’re playing a lot better of late, but the chances of making the postseason this year are, in his words, “not very good—slim.” (The big issue is they can’t shoot.) And yet Pitino is leaning into the experience with enthusiasm. He gushed about Greece, the people, and, as you might expect, the man who writes his checks. Pitino might be the only person I spoke to in Greece who thinks the owner is “playing a part.” He mentioned several times that Dimitri was educated in London and comes across “totally different in person.” “He’s really a sweetheart,” Pitino said. Meanwhile, Pitino—ostracized in his home country—is beloved in Athens. I’ve never seen Marbury in China or Hasselhoff in Germany, but I have seen Pitino in Greece. It’s a spectacle.

Over the better part of a week, I spent time with Pitino before and after his team played Olympiacos in the Greek Cup (the biggest game of the year; their long-standing sporting distaste for each other is sometimes delightfully referred to as “the derby of the eternal enemies”). We talked late at night, over the phone and via text. We met up in the afternoon at the arena prior to practice to tour the facility and his tiny, windowless office. And together we FaceTimed my wife, who was home in Los Angeles, during a wine-fueled expat Valentine’s Day dinner. Through it all, Pitino had a lot to say—about bounties and betrayal, games won and careers lost, “corrupt” prosecutors, rivalries, and, he hopes, redemption. Or maybe he doesn’t hope for that last part. Right now, just coaching again is enough, though it would be nice if people noticed.

Exile does not mean anonymity. Not for Pitino. Not at all.

“The funniest thing,” Pitino said, doing his best Greek fan impression, “is ‘photo, photo.’ Everywhere. ‘Coach, photo, photo.’”

He was at Golden Hall one day to get his pants tailored. It’s a giant mall not far from where he lives and where the team plays. He was on his way up the escalator when a guy spilled out of a Starbucks yelling, “Coach, photo, photo.”

“I’m going up the escalator,” Pitino said. “He goes flying up the escalator with me. So I thought we’d wait until we get to the top. He’s going like this”—he mimes a selfie motion—“I’m getting ready to jump off. ‘Photo. Photo.’”

As he told that story over lunch at Agora, the waiter came by and asked whether he wanted fresh black pepper with his pesto gnocchi, explaining helpfully in English, “Coach, only Panathinaikos. Only Panathinaikos”—perhaps to assuage any fears that he might be an Olympiacos fan and have reason to poison the pepper. A few weeks earlier, Pitino was out to lunch with longtime Panathinaikos president-GM Manos Papadopoulos when his companion said maybe they had picked the wrong spot and shouldn’t come back. Pitino asked why. Papadopoulos told him “the owner, he’s Olympiacos.” Pitino shook his head.

“I said, ‘Manos, we’re just getting some gnocchis and some veal.’”

He laughed again at the absurdity of it all. Pitino—no stranger to intense local rivalries—described the Athenians as “Kentucky fans on steroids.” He is almost always mobbed at the airport, where he stops to answer media questions before flying to the next game. Panathinaikos supporters recently surrounded the team bus on a dirt road in Lemnos, an island near Turkey, forcing it to idle until they finished chanting and singing the club anthem. And after we had lunch, he was standing outside Agora when a two-door Skoda slammed on the brakes in the middle of traffic, then rolled down the driver’s window. From across the street, the driver had somehow identified Pitino, who was wearing sunglasses. I was standing right next to him, and I’m not sure I would have known it was Pitino if I hadn’t already known it was him. The driver shouted, “Coach,” then made a fist with his right hand and patted it twice on the left side of his chest near his heart. “I am with the Red.” An Olympiacos fan. Then he peeled off.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Pitino said, smiling.

And yet despite all the attention, Pitino is mostly flying solo. He has more free time now than ever before. At Louisville, his day was booked. In the office by 6:45 a.m. A series of what he called four “player development sessions” until noon. Exercise at lunch. Practice in the early afternoon, followed by recruiting calls. Home by 7 p.m. That was his 12-hour day, almost every day.

Greece is different. There are fewer demands on his time and less structure. Panathinaikos practices in the early evening for 90 minutes. Pitino usually goes for dinner around 9:30 p.m., “the early seating in Greece,” as he calls it. He just got American TV in his apartment and stays up late watching games, sometimes until 4 or 6 a.m. depending on who’s playing and whether or not he can sleep. (His son Richard coaches the Minnesota Golden Gophers, and he tries to never miss a game.) The time zone change is still messing with him, and there are often late nights when he finds himself alone in the apartment, drawing up plays on a whiteboard, a glass of Jameson in one hand and a marker in the other.

“It’s an adjustment,” Pitino said. “I’m by myself.”

He has toured the Acropolis Museum and strolled through Plaka, and tries to stay busy. Some old pals from Kentucky came over for a visit. So did his middle son, Chris. His four other children and wife are all due over soon. He went to a club for a friend’s birthday a few weeks back. Giannakopoulos was there. Pitino stayed until 3 a.m. He ballparked the chances of that happening in the States at “slim and none.” When I asked why he consented to the interview since we had no prior relationship, he said he thought I was after a good story and not looking to burn any bridges—then immediately added that it was just nice to have conversations with people who speak English. He made a friend in the American Embassy; Pitino spent New Year’s Eve with him and his wife at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, one of Athens’s finest. They had dinner with about 30 people he’d never met and watched fireworks explode high above the city’s historic ruins.

“I have a lot of these nights where I don’t know the people,” Pitino said, “but I say yes just to experience it.”

He called the guy who dropped him off on New Year’s Eve—one of the many people from that evening he had never met before—“hysterical.” They talked basketball all night, then he got out of the car to embrace Pitino and give him two kisses, one on each cheek. “I said, ‘Well, I’m a Greek now,’” Pitino recalled.

It all comes off like a basketball version of Lost in Translation. I told Pitino it seemed like he’s searching for something, that his new job is really a form a therapy.

“Very much so.”

Truth is, Pitino was bored. And bitter. His words. Before he took the Panathinaikos job, he was rattling around his house in Miami, staying up late at night obsessing over why he was watching college basketball instead of coaching it.

“I did miss it,” Pitino said. “I’ve always been a very positive person, and I hated the fact that I was very bitter. I hated that. I wanted to get away from that. That’s one of the reasons I took the job. You’re sitting at home, watching basketball, and you’re very bitter. That type of bitterness is not healthy at all.”

In September 2017, the Department of Justice charged 10 people—including a top executive from Adidas and four college basketball assistant coaches—with wire fraud, bribery, travel act, and conspiracy offenses. Pitino was not among those charged, though he points out he was the only head coach to lose his job as a result of the investigation. Authorities said that a Louisville assistant plotted to redirect $100,000 from Adidas to Brian Bowen II, a top Cardinals recruit. Pitino maintains he knew nothing about it, and says he feels “bad for the kid and his mom,” whom he thinks were also in the dark. Bowen never played a game in college. He’s suing Adidas and now plays in Australia for the Sydney Kings.

When the story broke, Pitino was already serving a suspension for Louisville’s first five ACC games as punishment for a different scandal. In 2015, the NCAA investigated Louisville and then–assistant coach Andre McGee for allegedly hiring strippers and prostitutes to entertain recruits on official visits.

“The Andre McGee thing, there are six players who are suing the NCAA—the six guys on the team who lived in the dormitory. Small dormitory. Just six players and 20 students,” Pitino said. “Not one of them knew anything. No managers. [McGee] snuck them through a back door. Security, people who worked the front door, knew nothing. So when people say, ‘You should have known,’ I always question all the college coaches I meet and say, ‘Do you go in your players’ dormitories?’ And they all say, ‘Absolutely not.’ So how could I—if none of the assistant coaches knew, six of the players didn’t know, the managers didn’t know—how the hell am I gonna know? When you tell people that, they say, ‘Yeah, that’s good’—but they don’t want to think that way.”

McGee was eventually fired, the Cardinals were forced to vacate their 2013 national championship, and Louisville enacted a self-imposed 2016 NCAA tournament ban. After “the McGee thing,” Pitino said he “threatened my staff almost every day about following the letter of the law. Every day.” They obviously didn’t listen. Not surprisingly, the ensuing coverage was hypercritical of Pitino. Headlines blared that his legacy was “glory tainted by disgrace” and declared him “a product nobody should want.” In terms of interrogating his own culpability, the furthest Pitino was willing to go was copping to a lapse in judgment.

“I hired the wrong assistants,” Pitino said. “But I had 30 of them that went on to become head coaches. I ran out of names and started taking other people’s suggestions. And I hired two or three bad assistants. That’s my fault.”

Before the Adidas scandal—the company has paid him more than $38 million; his lawsuit against it is pending arbitration—and the McGee scandal, there was the restaurant scandal. In 2010, Pitino testified in a federal extortion trial against a woman he admitted to having sex with in a closed Louisville restaurant in 2003. The woman, Karen Sypher, went to prison for attempting to shake down the still-married Pitino for money and gifts in exchange for his silence. As Pitino put it, “we all have weaknesses and faults.”

“I don’t blame them,” Pitino said about Louisville firing him. “It’s the way they did it.”

Pitino said the school’s Board of Trustees gave him 20 minutes to talk to his team, then he was escorted off campus without being able to grab his personal possessions. They changed the locks on his office, he said. He took a plane out with his wife later that afternoon. They sold their Louisville-area house in one day. Except for a funeral, he hasn’t been back since.

He said some coaches he once considered real friends have since ghosted him. He dropped a few big names that have turned their backs, but didn’t want to rip them on the record. By contrast, he said Bill Belichick, just an acquaintance, reached out several times to check on how he’s holding up. So did John Calipari, a former foe turned friend. Calipari recently said Pitino should come back to Kentucky to be honored, but Pitino doesn’t think he’ll do it. He said the current students there wouldn’t remember him as the old Kentucky coach, just as the guy who got kicked to the curb by the rival Cardinals.

That has a lot to do with why Pitino took the Panathinaikos job. He was still stewing about Louisville, and his friends knew it. Which is why he was intrigued and thankful when Memphis Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace called in December.

Wallace was Pitino’s GM back when he was coaching the Boston Celtics. Years ago, Wallace spoke at a EuroLeague conference in Barcelona. That’s where he met Dimitris Giannakopoulos and his cousin Aggelos Kotaridis, a wealthy man about town in Athens who owns a gorgeous apartment with a killer view of the Acropolis. That’s the friend-of-a-friend connection that led to the offer. But before Pitino bought in to a new life, in a new country, Wallace had to do some selling. He explained to Pitino that it would be “an experience like none he’s ever had before” and said “Panathinaikos and Olympiacos” makes even the most intense domestic American rivalries look like “church league volleyball on a Sunday night.”

“We don’t have anything like this in U.S. sports,” Wallace told me. He called late one night Greece time, and we talked while DTG guided us through Athens’ graffiti-lined streets on our way to dinner. “Yankees and Red Sox. Kentucky and Louisville. Alabama and Auburn. There’s nothing like it.”

Wallace sensed that Pitino wasn’t “ready to put the whistle away.” He trumpeted Pitino’s various achievements to me: 32 years in the game, seven NCAA Final Fours, two national titles, and 770 career college victories, which puts him 13th on the all-time list, ahead of legends like Jerry Tarkanian, Hank Iba, John Calipari, Bill Self, Tom Izzo, and even John Wooden. There were also two tours of duty in the NBA as head coach of two iconic franchises, the Knicks and Celtics. (He won 52 games in his final season with the Knicks before resigning to take the Kentucky job; the Celtics gig did not go as well.) Wallace also pointed out Pitino’s impressive coaching tree, which includes Billy Donovan, Jeff Van Gundy, Tubby Smith, and Brett Brown, among others. And he lauded Pitino as an innovator: As early as his days coaching Providence in the mid-1980s, Wallace said, Pitino was one of the first coaches to “to embrace the back-of-the-envelope math” by becoming one of the first adopters of the 3-point shot while “the NBA still looked at it like a gimmick and not a weapon.”

Wallace hopes Pitino gets another opportunity stateside but allowed that Pitino’s “accomplishments have been overshadowed by the last few years.” During one of many conversations, I told Pitino I have no idea whether this really is just “a bad break,” as he called it, or if he did the things he’s been accused of doing. He could be complicit or negligent or some combination of both. Either way, the end result is the same. The verdict has been rendered. Whatever Pitino’s sins, real or perceived, this one thing is certain: His banishment has become a weird, wild ride. Pitino didn’t push back on that last point. He listened and nodded and drank his wine.

Perhaps no one understands what Pitino has gotten himself into better than Manos Papadopoulos. He’s been in the Panathinaikos’s front office for the better part of 30 years. A couple of days before they played Olympiacos, we sat on the couch in his windowless office—which sits across the hall from Pitino’s windowless office—and he tried to put Greek basket and the rivalry with Olympiacos in perspective. Papadopoulos is maybe 5-foot-5 with a shock of gray hair, but he has a huge presence. He is a massive figure in the Greek Basket League who has seen it all, but he said even after “so many results” he still finds himself “wondering why I have so big stress.” The game is so important to him that sometimes he ends up—and here he got an assist from Dave to translate the right word—“shaking.”

“It’s something extra,” Papadopoulos said about the GBL. “I believe only Greek people can understand this. What is funny is that people that come from other countries, they don’t believe before. But when they come, they are part of this, how to say, theater, crazy theater. And immediately they understand.”

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” That’s what Pitino’s wife, Joanne, asked him before he got on the plane. She had Googled Giannakopoulos, which is perhaps not the best idea for the concerned spouse of a man who was about to go to work for Giannakopoulos. Pitino told her not to worry. Before taking the job, he talked to Wallace and to Nick Calathes, who played for the Grizzlies for two years and is now Panathinaikos’s best and highest-paid player. Calathes told me he was surprised Pitino took the job “because Coach’s name came out of nowhere.”

“Obviously he didn’t know anything about European basketball,” Calathes said before practice at Olympic Indoor Hall one afternoon. “He’s been in the States his whole life. I guess he wanted to see the experience and do something different.”

If nothing else, working for his new boss definitely qualifies as “something different.” In January 2018, the EuroLeague opened an investigation after Giannakopoulos trash-talked Fenerbahce fans and former head coach Zeljko Obradovic in a since-deleted Instagram post following a game in Istanbul. Giannakopoulos was banned for 12 months for his behavior, though the punishment was later knocked down on appeal to five months and €60,000. The Panathinaikos owner took it in stride. First he threatened to pull the team out of the EuroLeague entirely—then he repeatedly violated the ban. Last year, he got fined another €60,000 for attending a late regular-season game, and an additional €300,000 total for attending two different playoff games against Real Madrid.

Last November, he was fined another €30,000, this time for accusing Olympiacos of bribing the officials in a game against Panathinaikos. The referees’ report from that evening is colorful:

When the 2Q finished, the owner of home team (Mr. Giannakopoulos) was waiting inside and told us: “We know everything—several times—we know you betting twenty thousand, twenty thousand the Polish, twenty thousand the Italian, -several times-, Only the Spanish is fair. We’ll send to Bertomeu and Stokes everything.

Bertomeu is EuroLeague CEO Jordi Bertomeu. Olympiacos subsequently sued because of what it called the “slanderous official statement of Dimitris Giannakopoulos and Panathinaikos BC” and for the “reparation of the damage the club suffered due to the illegal behavior of the above sycophants.” I asked a few Greek journalists how it’s possible for Giannakopoulos to keep flipping the bird at the EuroLeague. A Greek reporter named Antonis Stroggylakis explained that Giannakopoulos was both the owner and president for a while, but had recently abdicated the president title to Papadopoulos so he could circumvent EuroLeague oversight. I was still confused. Isn’t the owner subject to EuroLeague rules? Yes and no. “It’s complicated,” Stroggylakis replied.

Giannakopoulos has a history of bursting into referees’ locker rooms, and simply accusing them of taking bribes is actually one of his more genteel methods. According to the referees’ report from a 2013 game against Olympiacos, Giannakopoulos, flanked by three men, cursed at one ref in the locker room and said, “You will not leave this place.” In 2015, after a playoff game against CSKA Moscow in Athens, he allegedly took it even further, telling the refs, “I’ll kill you. You will not leave Greece tonight alive! I promise you this from my eyes.” He also reportedly told the officials, “I’ll fuck your mother, your wife, your children in front of you.” Incredibly, Panathinaikos won both of those games.

“I don’t think he likes the refs very much,” Pitino deadpanned when I asked him about the whole “I’ll kill you and/or fuck your family” stuff. According to a report, after the CSKA Moscow game the refs stayed at the arena until 1 a.m., then got a police escort back to their hotel and, ultimately, to the airport. This is the kind of behavior that leads the average Greek basket fan to think the Panathinaikos owner is mixed up in more than just pharmaceuticals and media outlets. DTG translated countless conversations with people who wondered aloud about potential ties to organized crime.

“I don’t think so,” Pitino said. “The Russian mob and that stuff? I think he’s created an image because [of] Scarface. But in real life Dimitri is a businessman. You’ll meet him.”

I tried my best. Before I flew over, Apostolos Liogkas, who handles PR for Panathinaikos, said it shouldn’t be a problem. Then I arrived, and it was a problem. After several emails and texts, and endless in-person pleading, Liogkas sent a message on the morning before the Greek Cup semifinal against Olympiacos: “Unfortunately his schedule is full these days. Probably he will not be at the arena tomorrow.”

Apostolos is a super-nice guy and was just doing his job, but there were several problems with his story. It was hard to believe that Giannakopoulos, who went to the arena even when he was banned and loves being the highly visible owner of a EuroLeague franchise, would consider skipping the biggest game of the year against a team he’d accused of bribing the referees. There was also the fact that, not even 24 hours before the oh man Dimitris is just sooo swamped right now email, Giannakopoulos was busy posting endless photos and videos of a schedule that even the best PR expert would be hard-pressed to describe as “full these days.” I particularly liked the part where he was drinking and smoking with his feet up on the desk in his all-black office.

Finally, a few hours after I was told that oh man Dimitri is just sooo swamped right now, I received this video from Pitino. He had shot it during practice, which was great. Pay attention to the conspicuous white courtside throne at the very end. That’s for the overworked owner who supposedly wouldn’t be attending the game.

Giannakopoulos went to the game. And just as Pitino predicted in a text to me in the run-up, the clash with Olympiacos turned out to be what it always is: “A fucking war.”

Two hours before the biggest game of the season, Olympic Indoor Hall looked like the set of a postapocalyptic thriller. It was cold and dark and so windy outside the rain was almost horizontal—a fitting backdrop for an Olympic Village that’s fallen into disrepair since hosting the Summer Games in 2004. Architect Santiago Calatrava’s grand vision has been left to slowly decompose. Rust and rot are everywhere. There are green spaces with no grass, reflecting pools with no water. And yet it wasn’t hard to see the beauty, to imagine what was and what could still be, if only there were money for repairs. Greece is still slowly digging out of the brutal and protracted financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures that cratered the country’s economy and nearly led to Grexit in 2015. Gas costs around €1.49 per liter, which works out to roughly $6.50 a gallon. The average monthly income is around €1,060. The personal income tax rate is a staggering 45 percent, while the corporate tax rate is 29 percent.

Even for someone as ostensibly wealthy as Giannakopoulos—approximations of his net worth are hard to come by, but as of 2015 Forbes reportedly had his dad’s/family’s money pegged at just under $1 billion—that makes team-building difficult. There’s no salary cap in the EuroLeague, but if Panathinaikos wants to pay a player, say, €1 million, they’d owe another €290,000 or so to the Greek government. Pitino estimated that Giannakopoulos loses €10 million to €15 million per season. That puts him “behind the eight ball,” Pitino said, compared with bigger, better-financed clubs like CSKA Moscow, FC Barcelona, and Real Madrid.

“He does it because he loves Panathinaikos,” Pitino said. “He has great passion for it. He loses a fortune each year. He wants to win desperately.”

In that way, the Greek Cup semifinal could not have gone better. I’d heard so many tales in advance of the game, but the proceedings exceeded expectations. In the early 1900s, basketball players were called “cagers” for the metal fence that often surrounded the court. In Greece, that term still applies. There was a protective wall behind the benches of both teams, and a net was raised to the rafters to prevent people from throwing things on the court.

There was good reason to take the precautions. The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked Liogkas what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”

At halftime, Panathinaikos had a 15-point lead and seemed certain to cruise to a comfortable win. Then something weird happened. I was talking to a Greek journalist—about 150 credentials had been issued, roughly the number for an NBA playoff game—when word began spreading that Olympiacos was refusing to play the second half. Impossible, I said. Not impossible, the reporter replied before flicking his cigarette butt in the direction of what appeared to be an air filtration unit. Sure enough, Olympiacos forfeited at halftime. A friend of DTG’s quipped that they probably quit “due to smoke inhalation.” As it turned out, it was Olympiacos’s turn to complain about the refs. But instead of making accusations about bribery, they simply left their ball behind and went home because of perceived bad calls.

“[Fans] throw fireworks, players go to the hospital with flare burns, rubber bullets have been used. The games still went on,” Stroggylakis said, outlining the history for me. “This is unprecedented. To my knowledge, this has never happened.”

Former Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt is in charge of Olympiacos now. I wanted to ask him about the decision, but the postgame press conference was canceled. After I left Greece, he told reporters that he supported “the owners and the management, but I don’t necessarily agree with the decision.” Meanwhile, Panathinaikos mocked its rival on Twitter. The translation: “Disappearance, can you help?”

In the coaches’ film room after the game, Pitino said Panathinaikos had played its best defense yet on his watch, attacked the Olympiacos switches, capitalized on mismatches, and generally “dominated” after the first three possessions. He could not fathom how Olympiacos could possibly blame the refs. But that was less important than the attendant spectacle. Pitino pulled out his phone and pulled up his messages. “Did you see what Dimitri did?” he asked.

That’s when Pitino showed me a photo of Giannakopoulos—who had spent much of the game leaping out of his white leather courtside throne to clap with both hands, one of which was attached to an arm in a sling—placing a pair of red women’s underwear on the empty Olympiacos bench. Because of course he had red women’s underwear at the ready for just such an occasion.

The next day, Olympiacos announced that Giannakopoulos would not be allowed in the Reds arena in the future and swore never to play a Greek League game against Panathinaikos again unless non-Greek referees were used. (No one is more distrustful of the Greeks than the Greeks.) After the statement came out, Pitino told me that Giannakopoulos felt bad about his behavior, even “ashamed.” I wasn’t so certain. Giannakopoulos issued his own statement after the stunt and said he wanted to “apologize to the basketball world, except for Olympiacos.”

I went searching for him after the game, but was cautioned against it by a reporter whose name I won’t use for obvious reasons. We had been laughing about where and how Giannakopoulos got the red underwear when the journo suddenly lowered his voice and said, “But keep it down, what you say about him. Seriously. We are in his domain. We are surrounded by his men.” I looked around. The only people in our vicinity were riot police with shields and heavy weapons. I took the advice.

This is where Rick Pitino works now, who he works for and with. More than once during the trip, and several times that evening, he told me, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I lost track of how many times he said it. He wasn’t the only one to express the same sentiment. Sean Kilpatrick, the former University of Cincinnati standout who Pitino convinced to join the team in January after he washed out of the NBA, was on the same page. After the game, we marveled at the madness, from the fans and the flares, to the game that was canceled, to the infamous red underwear. “Bro, bro,” Kilpatrick said, “I ain’t ever seen that shit before.”

Earlier that evening, I said as much to a security guard, who was smoking next to a no-smoking sign (which made him just like everyone in Athens). Dave had made friends with him when we entered the arena, because Dave makes friends with everyone in Greece, and not for the first time on our trip, it led to doors literally opening for us. After a little encouragement from DTG, the guard unlocked a door that we weren’t supposed to go through, to access a staircase we weren’t supposed to use, so we could go downstairs to meet Pitino in his office. The whole scene was just crazy.

“This isn’t crazy,” the guard replied as he waved us through, “this is Greece.”

On the night before we flew back to the States, we had dinner with Pitino at Papillon Bistrot in Psychiko, the same restaurant that Papadopoulos wanted to bolt from because “the owner is Olympiacos.” Somehow we survived. They even kept the restaurant open late for Pitino. A cameraman and a producer from Showtime joined us. They’re filming a documentary about Pitino that will likely air in advance of next college basketball season. The first footage they shot was the forfeited Olympiacos game.

It’s a minor miracle it happened at all, even for a half. Weeks earlier, a game against AEK was delayed when the power went out in Olympic Indoor Hall. That’s a semiregular occurrence. Practice was temporarily postponed one afternoon for the same reason, and I interviewed Nick Calathes in a pitch-black hallway while Apostolos Liogkas illuminated the two of us using the flashlight function on his phone. For the first week or so after Pitino took the job, the building had no heat. He coached wearing a scarf, and the players bundled themselves in sweats. His tiny changing room initially had no curtain on the shower, and there was mold everywhere. The facilities are as far from what he’s accustomed to as the basketball. Which is yet another reason to wonder how long he’ll stick around.

In late January, Pitino said he was “only here for a short sabbatical.” That did not go over well. There are also some quirky commitments that come with his current job. While we were in Athens, he flew to Thessaloniki in northern Greece to coach the All-Star Game. “I tried to get out of it,” Pitino said, “but they said I’d get suspended for the next two games.” The dunk contest was at halftime. Pitino was one of the judges. He zoned out at one point and had to elbow Blatt—who was coaching the opposing team and was also roped into being a judge—and ask what score to give one of the dunkers. “He was as disturbed as I was,” Pitino said.

His contract is up at the end of the season, which is rapidly approaching if Panathinaikos misses the EuroLeague playoffs. (They’re 10-13 in EuroLeague play.) When I asked whether he’s gotten any interest back home, he said major boosters at UCLA were “pushing hard” for him after Steve Alford got fired but the university president “nixed it.” “And if I was in his shoes,” Pitino said, “I would nix it too. He’s not going to research the Southern District of New York. ‘I don’t need that aggravation. Let me hire someone who is totally clean.’” (A UCLA spokesperson said the school will have no comment on the coaching search until the process has concluded.) Pitino also knocked down a recent report that UNLV is after him. In a text, he told me there was “0 truth” and said he and his agent have had “0 contact” with the Rebels. The current UNLV head coach, Marvin Menzies, is one of Pitino’s former assistants and, he said, “a good friend.”

It’s possible that Pitino was using me to float the UCLA rumor and get his name recirculated. Maybe that’s what this is all about, but as one of the Showtime guys said over dinner, we’d all entered into a consensual, transactional relationship. Showtime gets a documentary; The Ringer gets a story; Pitino gets to be Pitino again, at least for a little while.

Pitino seemed skeptical that he’d get another college job. He doesn’t “want to keep proving my case” and thinks it might be “best to just let it go.” Initially, he seemed equally skeptical that he’d return to Greece or take a bigger EuroLeague offer if one came along. But after Panathinaikos upended Olympiacos, it sounded like he might have second thoughts about sticking around. When Panathinaikos went on to beat PAOK BC in the Greek Cup final—the organization’s second Greek Cup championship in three years—Pitino texted me two pictures of him beaming with the team during the ensuing celebration.

What he wanted out of all this, he kept saying, was an adventure. “This is actually a fun place to be in my mind,” Pitino said, “because I have no clue what’s going to happen to me in a month. I know I’m going to be here, but I have no idea what’s next.”

He used to tell his players not to sweat the small stuff in life, not to stress, because one day they’d look back and regret not enjoying the good times. Now he’s in Athens, reflecting on that very same advice and how quickly shit changes. There’s a push-and-pull between his desire to keep coaching, to keep the whistle, and missing his family. He has 11 grandkids he used to see all the time. Now he never does. He’s in a country that, while warm and welcoming, is not his own. The home-life-versus-work-life struggle is real and universal, and no one is impervious to it, least of all Pitino. Right now, he’s feeling all the feelings.

It was after 2 a.m. when we left the restaurant after that final five-hour dinner. We said our goodbyes. By the end, Pitino was calling Dave “DTG” and “Dave the fixer.” He wished me luck with the story. Then he went off into the Athens night to continue the adventure, to find out for himself what will come next.