When Rick Pitino was a young assistant coach at Hawaii and Syracuse, if he heard of colleagues at other schools getting to work at 6 in the morning, he’d set the alarm for 4:30, get in a quick workout and be at his desk at 5:45.
“Everything is a competition,” he told me once, years ago. “Life is a competition. Sometimes that means working a little harder than you think you’re capable of.”
But even Rick Pitino — “Relentless Rick” was one of the nicknames the Boston Globe gave him when he coached at Boston University — never had a day quite like the one Clair Bee had on Thanksgiving Day 1939. Bee coached both football and basketball at Long Island University and it usually worked out fine: Football would end just in time for hoops.
But in August of that year, President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving from the fourth Thursday of November to the third to help the Christmas season economy. LIU, which always ended its season on Thanksgiving Day, dutifully switched its season finale against Catholic University.
