Even after all these years, nearly 20 in the commonwealth of Kentucky, the resident authority on college basketball’s fiercest rivalry is easily identifiable as an outsider. His voice and mannerisms give him away as the worst sort of impostor, a northeastern Yankee interloper. And so because he is not of the rivalry born, some refuse to give him his due, insisting he is little more than a carpetbagging expert.
Yet no one has attempted to do the impossible like Rick Pitino has in his career, straddling the barbed-wire divide between the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville by serving as each school’s demigod in residence, their head basketball coach.