Rick Pitino began his Hall of Fame coaching career in 1974 as a graduate assistant at the University of Hawaii. Following his nondescript career as a point guard at the University of Massachusetts, Pitino had to fly across the continent and a massive ocean just to get a job. Once he landed in Honolulu, however, he made his mark. He proved to be a dogged recruiter, a meticulous planner, and a workaholic — a rising talent with limitless ambition.

And yet … during Pitino’s brief tenure there, Hawaii’s basketball program committed dozens of NCAA violations that eventually landed it on two years probation. Pitino was named in eight of the 64 infractions the NCAA listed in its final report. That included providing round-trip airfare for players, arranging for players to receive used cars in exchange for game tickets, and providing false information to the NCAA. When the scandal first hit, Hawaii fired head coach Bruce O’Neill and allowed Pitino to finish the 1975-76 season as interim head coach. But once the season ended, Pitino was out of a job as well.

For many young coaches, an episode like that would end their careers before they began. And yet … Pitino’s obvious ability, combined with the network of contacts he developed while coming up through the New York City hoops scene, earned him a job interview with Jim Boeheim, the newly-hired head coach at Syracuse. The interview took place in a hotel lobby on Pitino’s wedding night. While his new bride cooled her heels in their room upstairs, Pitino convinced Boeheim to hire him, and then he called off his honeymoon so he could head to Cincinnati to recruit a guard named Louis Orr. (Orr, of course, eventually signed with Syracuse, sending Boeheim onto his own Hall of Fame career.)

This is how it has always been for Pitino. He is unquestionably one of the most brilliant coaching minds ever to prowl the sidelines. He is also one of the most ethically compromised. For more than four decades, the shine of his talent has been greater than the shadows of his controversies – until today, that is, when the University of Louisville put him on unpaid administrative leave in the wake of revelations about an FBI investigation into college basketball.

It is a sad ending to a storied career, but in many ways, it was a predictable one. Rick Pitino has long been one of the game’s brightest stars. It was only a matter of time before his habit of flying too close to the sun would send him down in flames.

There has always been this twin narrative when it came to Pitino. His triumphs were always accompanied by disasters. There was, for example, the time he took Providence to the 1987 Final Four, arguably his most impressive professional accomplishment. That was the season the three-point line was introduced to men’s college basketball. While most older, established coaches resisted the change, Pitino embraced it. He did the math, ran his players ragged, and told them to let it fly. When it worked, a star was born.

Just three weeks before, Pitino and his wife, Joanne, were riding the team bus from the Big East tournament in New York City when they got word that their six-month-old son, Daniel, had died of heart failure. Daniel had been battling heart issues since birth, but his death still came as a shock.

Pitino likes to say that his happiest days were the ones he spent in Providence, but his ambition got the best of him, as it always would. He accepted the head-coaching job with his favorite childhood team, the New York Knicks, only to leave after two seasons to take over a Kentucky program that had been wiped out by scandal. Beginning in 1989, Pitino imposed his will and resurrected the program, taking the Wildcats to the Elite Eight in 1992, the Final Four in 1993, an NCAA championship in 1996, and a loss in the NCAA final in 1997. Pitino was a hero in the Bluegrass. He was set for life.

And yet … he could not resist the lure of the Boston Celtics, not to mention the $50 million they offered to have him coach the team and run the franchise. It was a huge mistake. Pitino could stomp and preen all he wanted in front of his college players, but his all-about-me act quickly wore thin with older professionals. He resigned 34 games into his fourth season, leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table.

Pitino made it immediately known that he wanted to return to college. At the time there were two prime openings, Michigan and Louisville. He preferred Louisville but was concerned about working for Kentucky’s rival. He told the Michigan athletic director during a morning phone call that he would accept the job, but he changed his mind later that day at his wife’s behest. Louisville represented a badly needed fresh start. He was going to do what he loved at a program where he could win and in a state where he loved to live.

That fall, his best friend and brother-in-law, Billy Minardi, was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Those closest to Pitino have long maintained that that tragedy, combined with his humiliation with the Celtics, changed him. From the outside, it certainly appeared that way. The Pitino who alighted in Louisville carried himself far differently than the one who imperiously lorded over Lexington. He was nicer, quieter, more human. Moreover, he seemed aware of this change within. I’ve talked with him about this many times, including during an interview we did in 2014. “I think a lot of what you’re saying is very much true,” he said. “At Kentucky, you’re still young, everything is going great, you’re at the Roman empire of college basketball so to speak. And a degree of arrogance comes with that type of winning. Without question, I lacked humility.”

That did not mean, of course, that he had lost his competitive edge. If anything, the knowledge gained from all those ups and downs sharpened his skills. Predictably, his teams at Louisville won fast and won big. A Final Four in his fourth season. Back to back Elite Eights. Another Final Four in 2012, followed by a national championship in 2013. That made Pitino the only coach in history to win NCAA titles at two different schools. That same week, Pitino found out he had been inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame, and his son, Richard, was hired to be the head coach at Minnesota. It was a triumphant week if ever there was one.

And yet … the shadow of scandal continued to hover. First came the embarrassing admission in 2009 of an extramarital tryst in a Louisville restaurant, which Pitino was forced to reveal after the woman, Karen Sypher, who became pregnant and said Pitino helped pay for her abortion, tried to extort money from him. (Sypher was later convicted and sentenced to serve seven years in prison.) Then, two years ago, Pitino’s program was rocked again, this time by the publication of book in which the primary author, Katina Powell, alleged that she had arranged on-campus sex parties for Louisville recruits, which she said were set up with the help of a member of Pitino’s staff.

Pitino said he knew nothing about those parties, but that was irrelevant. Under NCAA rules, a head coach is responsible for any violations committed by his staff. In hopes of escaping major penalties, Louisville self-imposed a postseason ban on its 2016 team, but the NCAA hammered the program anyway, suspending Pitino for the first five ACC games of the upcoming season. The only thing left to be determined is whether the 2013 NCAA championship game will be vacated, which appears to be inevitable.

And yet … Pitino kept his job, and his team was ranked in the top ten of many preseason polls. One of the reasons for optimism was the arrival of Brian Bowen, a 6-foot-7 freshman who committed to Louisville in June. Now, thanks to the complaints revealed this week by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, we know the reason Bowen signed with Louisville is allegedly because Adidas, at the request of two unnamed Cardinals coaches, paid $100,000 to Bowen’s family. Once again, Pitino is claiming no knowledge of those transactions, and as of now we have no direct evidence that is not true. But in the public’s eye, he long ago lost the benefit of the doubt.

Neither Pitino nor anyone on his staff was among the ten men who were arrested Tuesday morning. None of the head coaches at the four schools where assistants have been charged were fired. But given the fact that Louisville is already on NCAA probation, and given Pitino’s own sordid past, the school had no choice but to cut him loose.

In announcing that Pitino has been put on unpaid leave – Pitino’s dismissal is a formality, to be executed by the Board of Trustees after ten days in accordance with his contract — Louisville’s interim president, Greg Postel, said his hope was to find an interim head coach within the next 48 hours. Finding a successor to Pitino won’t be easy, but that is the least of the school’s problems. Coming on the heels of the just-imposed NCAA sanctions, Louisville faces the very real possibility of getting hit with the so-called death penalty, which hasn’t been levied against a major program since SMU football in 1986. Whatever the NCAA ends up doing, it will only serve to further sully Pitino’s legacy.

Rick Pitino is 65 years old, and though he is still as good as he has ever been at running practice and working the sidelines, it is hard to imagine him coaching again, especially in college. He is finally out of chances. There are no more And yets. It is a sad way for a storied career to end, but he has no one to blame but himself. The poet Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the need for a man to “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” In a basketball game, however, there can only be one victor, and when it comes to Rick Pitino’s coaching career, the scoreboard is painfully clear.

It was a disaster.

(Top photo: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)