By ADAM ZAGORIA
After taking over as the head coach at St. John’s a year ago, Rick Pitino said his team was in discussions to face Duke at Arthur Ashe Stadium — the largest tennis stadium in the world and the site of the U.S. Open’s biggest matches.
The idea was for that game to have taken place this season when it would have featured Duke freshman star Cooper Flagg, the projected No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft.
The game never materialized, but St. John’s is still looking into playing a high-profile game at Ashe, possibly against Kentucky in the return game of a home-and-home with Mark Pope’s team.
Pitino discussed the matter in an interview Saturday with Matt Jones of KSR, and added via text: “It would be cool if we could do that but I think Mark wants to play at MSG.”
“Nothing is definite,” Pitino added by text from Kentucky, where he attended “Big Blue Madness” Friday night and will attend the Vanderbilt-Kentucky football game Saturday night.
Pitino said in May he planned to play a home-and-home with Kentucky at Rupp during the 2025-26 season, and at Madison Square Garden the following year.
I talked with Rick about this earlier.
The return game between @StJohnsBBall and @KentuckyMBB
could be at MSG or possibly Arthur Ashe Stadium but he said ‘Nothing is definite’ https://t.co/3cXEP9OpKH— Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) October 12, 2024
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Ashe is is the biggest tennis stadium in the world and has only once before hosted a basketball game of any kind. That came in 2008 when the WNBA’s Indiana Fever beat the New York Liberty in a game played in late July, about a month before the U.S. Open where Roger Federer won his fifth straight — and final — title in New York City.
To play a college basketball game under the roof in Ashe in the winter, Pitino said a year ago, “Well, first they’ve got to make sure they have heat in the building. I know it’s enclosed but you gotta have heat.”
“Don’t worry, Coach Pitino, there will be plenty of heat,” Patrick McEnroe, an ESPN tennis analyst and former Davis Cup captain, told me by text. “This would be awesome.”
Still, a highly placed St. John’s source said the situation was still fluid, and that such a game would need a sponsor and logistics would have to be worked out.
“That’s the holdup,” the source said of securing a sponsor. “Everybody wants to play, everybody wants to do a home-and-home. Everybody wants to finalize it.”
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