Rick Pitino’s white suit is ready to go if needed for Saturday night’s ‘White Out’ in the St. John’s basketball game against Villanova, but the head coach isn’t sure if he wants to wear it.
The sting of Wednesday’s 32-point loss against UConn might be too fresh.
Pitino went to a tailor prior to the start of the season to have a brand-new custom suit made for the game. It was going to be the final white suit he had made in his coaching career and he’s still debating if he will walk out of the tunnel at Madison Square Garden wearing it.
“There’s no freaking way I’m wearing a white suit after that loss,” he recalled on Friday afternoon after the defeat the Red Storm took at the hands of the Huskies. “So, I just wasted a lot of money.”
Yet the Hall of Famer left the door open for potentially wearing it.
He joked that he could change his mind if he had a “couple of wines” and also explained that he has a group of friends that he has coffee with on weekends and they all purchased white suits for the game and are planning on wearing them.
“I’m down in the dumps,” he continued. “When you wear a white suit, it’s about being confident, it’s a celebratory thing, and right now I’m not in a celebratory mood.”
St. John’s is 2-0 under Pitino in games when it publicized a ‘White Out’ to its fans, including last season in which the Johnnies won the outright regular season Big East title against Seton Hall.
“It looks clean on him,” Oziyah Sellers said but added that it doesn’t matter to the players what Rick Pitino wears.
Dillon Mitchell was pretty clear once he was told that the Red Storm are undefeated when its head coach wears his signature suit, “Then he got to put the white suit on.”
St. John’s will look to take another step in getting at least a share of the Big East regular season title with a win over the Wildcats (8:00 p.m. ET, FOX).