Rick Pitino is in the glare of headlines again amid shocking allegations and stern denials surrounding a college basketball scandal.

Seems just like old times with Slick Rick, doesn’t it?

Real old. Circa the 1970s in Manoa to be exact.

No sooner has the University of Hawaii men’s basketball team just returned from one appearance before the NCAA Committee on Infractions and Pitino is front and center in an episode that reminds of another dark chapter that went before the panel for events that unfolded nearly 40 years ago. A milestone referenced in the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations earlier this year.

This time Pitino is under fire in the wake of allegations that his current program, the University of Louisville, paid for hookers and strippers for players, recruits and some of their guardians from 2010 to 2014, with many taking place at the players’ dormitory.

The initial assertions are backed by a subsequent ESPN "Outside The Lines" report, though Pitino claims ignorance of the alleged incidents and maintains he will not resign his job.

Much as he maintained that he did not provide free airline tickets to UH stars Reggie Carter, George Lett and Henry Hollingsworth or help secure cars for Carter (a Mustang) and Lett (Oldsmobile) in the mid-1970s.

Pitino’s only transgression, he claimed at the time, was providing coupons for free meals at McDonald’s.

The Committee on Infractions choose to believe otherwise in "Case No. 560 University of Hawaii," in which it slapped the men’s basketball team with a two-year probation that impacted the program for a decade.

It ordered UH to dissociate itself from him and found Pitino among those guilty of acting "Contrary to the principles of ethical conduct." Moreover, it concluded that "involvement in various violations in this case demonstrates a knowing and willful effort of their part to operate the University’s intercollegiate athletic program contract to NCAA legislation."

Of course, the stakes have changed mightily in the intervening decades. In 1975 Pitino was an ambitious 23-year-old assistant coach making, maybe, $20,000 with the avowed target of landing a head coaching job by age 25. Then-head coach Bruce O’Neil’s still-warm chair, as it turned out.

Now, the 63-year-old Pitino is a Hall of Famer trying to protect a legacy, not to mention a 10-year, $50.93 million extension announced in June.

You may choose to believe that Pitino was ignorant of what was said to be going on in a program that he has ruled with a tight grip. Perhaps it is even possible that a low-level staff member somehow rounded up the cash necessary to run the scheme and perpetuated it on campus without so much as a peep reaching the ears of Pitino or his top assistants.

But that seems as unlikely as Pitino failing to call a strategic timeout or forgetting to update his courtesy car.

And, these days, the NCAA penalizes head coaches not only for what they have done but what they should have known.

Which brings up the question of which would be more damning: Slick Rick revealed as the cheater or unmasked as hopelessly clueless?

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.