St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino is known for his long and successful coaching career, but basketball isn’t his only passion. Pitino has been involved in thoroughbred horse racing for decades and revealed during an appearance on the Pardon My Take podcast that he once sold a horse for $15 million.
“I had a horse that I sold as a two-year-old for $15 million,” Pitino said. “Two-year-old champion called A P Valentine… His birthday was Valentine’s Day. My four partners, there were five of us. Obviously, Lane’s End [Farm] had 10%. They stayed in on the horse. We bought it for $450,000. I think there were five of us.”
According to ESPN, horse trainer Nick Zito had purchased A P Valentine for Pitino’s Celtic Pride Stable for $475,000 at the 1999 Fasig-Tipton select sale at Saratoga. Then, after A P Valentine won the Grade 1 Champagne Stakes in 2000, Coolmore Stud privately purchased the breeding rights to him for $15 million. Talk about a massive profit.
Unfortunately, while Pitino’s partners made good use of all that money, he did not.
“Chris Sullivan from Outback Steakhouse, the founder of Outback Steakhouse, owned 20%,” Pitino continued. “He bought a lot in Pebble Beach. He put up 200,000 and made three million. Another guy bought a Park Avenue apartment for his three million. Another guy bought a beautiful home in Nantucket.
“What I did was, I’m much more savvy business-wise than those guys,” Pitino added. “I said, ‘I’m gonna put it in a limited partnership, and I’m gonna just buy horses for the next 10 to 15 years. I’m gonna either run it up to 10 million or go broke.’ I’m okay, it’s found money, but I have 10 years to spend this three million. Two years later, I was broke.”
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Talk about a blunder! You doubt Pitino actually went broke, though. The Boston Celtics had reportedly given him a 10-year, $50 million deal to become their head coach in 1997. He then got another multi-million dollar deal when he was hired by the University of Louisville in 2001. Finances shouldn’t have been an issue.
Following Pitino’s departure from the Celtics, Celtic Pride was renamed to Ol’ Memorial Stable. Today, he runs RAP Racing while also coaching the Red Storm. They made it to the Sweet 16 in the 2026 NCAA tournament, where they lost 80-75 to Duke.
Nikola Jokic’s Love For Horses
Pitino is far from the only one in the basketball world with a great love for horses. Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic’s affinity for them is well-known at this point. Jokic once explained his love for horses during an interview with The Athletic’s Nick Friedell.
“We have a saying,” Jokic said. “‘If you’re young and you swallow the horse hair, you cannot stop loving them.’ What I like about them is how they run, how they act, how they’re resting, how they’re smelling. I like to watch them, I like to train them, I like to see them running, racing. The only thing I didn’t do, I did want to race back in the day. I miss that feeling when you and the horse are basically one.”
Jokic famously cried tears of joy after his horse won a race in Serbia in 2025. He shared during this interview that he got emotional because the driver had been a close family friend for years.
Jokic also revealed here that his love for horses and racing is part of an escape for him with everything else going on in his life.
“I track horses every day,” Jokic said. “I follow it. I have three, four of my friends that I follow all over the world. It’s a great way to stay off the basketball court, and you’re into nature, you’re into horses, you’re with friends who don’t care who you are. I basically grew up with some of my friends back home, so I hope that love (of horses) is never going to go away.”
It’s unlikely that Jokic’s love for horses is ever going away. This is a man who was desperate to get back home after the Nuggets won the NBA championship in 2023 because he did not want to miss a horse race.
