Rick Pitino (L) and Tom O'Grady (C) at Pitino's golf tournament in 2022. Rick Pitino (L) and Tom O’Grady (C) at Pitino’s golf tournament in 2022. (@CoachPitino on Twitter/X.)
College BasketballBy Andrew Bucholtz on

Once again, someone in the cast of characters around St. John’s Red Storm men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino is drawing some media attention. Last week, Meadowlark Media’s Pablo Torre Finds Out published a remarkable episode on the attempts by Tim Rohan and Torre to investigate people around Pitino, and the seemingly-threatening letters and bizarre phone calls Rohan got for doing that. On Friday night, someone else in Pitino’s orbit made news. That would be Louisville businessman and long-time Pitino friend Tom O’Grady, who was sitting courtside in a red blazer for St. John’s Big East Tournament semifinal clash with the UConn Huskies and drew complaints to the refs from UConn coach Dan Hurley, which led to a technical for Hurley and then a rant about O’Grady in a post-game press conference. Here’s what led to the technical:

John Fanta of Fox and The Field of 68 tweeted a video of Hurley talking to security at the half, opining that he was asking them to remove O’Grady. (However, Hurley said after the game he actually was telling security not to remove him.)

But Hurley was quite upset about this after the game, and accused O’Grady of using “a lot of expletives” at him:

“It was a lot of expletives. And, again, like all you’ll see with the camera — you’re not seeing what I’m — what’s in front of me. And I’m probably now the boy who cried wolf because of late game. But I promise you if we play Marquette tomorrow night, there will be no incident because those people are incredibly classy fans and we have incredible respect for them.”

Fanta explored the situation further in a post-game piece at FoxSports.com, which included comment from O’Grady (to a media scrumdisputing Hurley’s comments and claiming he said nothing at all to the Connecticut coach. That also included Hurley’s claim he was trying to prevent security from ejecting O’Grady.

“I kept him in,” Hurley said. “They were going to eject him from the game. I went over there to tell the ushers I wanted him to stay, not because I thought he was a good guy. I thought it might be bad luck. (Laughs). Karma.”

…“I did not say a word to Dan (Hurley),” O’Grady said. “I said to the referee that he was out of the box, and the ref gave him a T. If someone was cussing at him, it wasn’t me. Coach (Pitino) is my best friend. Do you think I would ever do that to another coach? There’s no way.”

While everything else here is disputed between those two, the claims of Pitino being O’Grady’s best friend do seem to have some merit. Here’s what Pitino tweeted about him back in 2022, while he was coaching at Iona:

Hurley is certainly known for his own passion, which even has included on-broadcast expletives. So it’s a little unusual that he seems to have been so bothered by comments from a fan. But he wasn’t specific on what he heard, and perhaps it was worthy of some reaction. (Although it’s a he-said, he-said if the comments here came from O’Grady or not).

O’Grady is the co-founder of Louisville-based sparkling water company Phocus, which drew a writeup from the Louisville Business Journal in 2019. His bio on the company website includes “Tom is a recovering soda addict, and he knew all too well the lack of health-conscious caffeine options.” And we now know he’s a man in a blazer (but not one of those ones) with a knack for getting under opposing coaches’ skin.

At any rate, it’s at the least unclear if O’Grady did anything improper in Friday night’s game. (By the way, UConn eventually won that 95-90, not a bad result for St. John’s considering how Pitino said pre-game they’d need ‘six of their players to get COVID‘ to beat the Huskies.) But he did certainly get on Hurley’s nerves, and even got him to be whistled for a technical. And that’s just the latest remarkable thing from the cast of characters around Pitino. Perhaps Torre and Rohan can do a follow-up on O’Grady.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz