St. John's Rick Pitino wears white suit to Red Storm's White-Out game against Villanova
St. John's head coach Rick Pitino wears a white suit during a Big East men’s basketball game against the Villanova Wildcats at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Rick Pitino does good in white.
Pitino brought the sellout crowd at the Garden to its feet before Saturday night’s game against Villanova by donning his signature white suit for the program’s annual “White Out” game. Pitino had actually been considering leaving it in the closet this season because the No. 15 Red Storm were coming off a humiliating loss Wednesday night to No. 6 Connecticut in Hartford.
Pitino wondered if donning a white suit that he had custom made in the fall for the occasion might not seem serious enough for a game he called the “most important” in his three seasons as St. John’s coach.
“I went out to a special tailor for the first time in my life and had a white suit made up,” Pitino said Friday. “I said, ‘you know, this could be one of my last white suits if I finished coaching this year — which is not true — but I said, ‘there's no freaking way I'm wearing a white suit after that loss.’ So I just wasted a lot of money.”
Asked if he though leaving it home might send the wrong message — that Wednesday’s loss was impacting how he treated Saturday’s — he replied, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
He was also reminded that he is 2-0 wearing white at the annual “White Out” game.
But he also had coffee with a group of friends Friday morning and they told him they’d all bought white suits for the occasion.
Pitino came out to raucous applause and then had the group of friends from the coffee clatch pose with him at midcourt, all of them in white suits.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
