Big Knight-mare
Ex-Hoosier: Former coach ‘would be in jail’ for past abusive tactics
The peek behind the curtain — a peephole through a hurled chair — paints a grisly picture of life at Indiana under Bob Knight.
The combustible, legendary former coach of the Hoosiers “would be in jail” if he used his tactics on today’s athletes, a former player alleges in a jolting autobiography.
Todd Jadlow, a big man who played under Knight from 1985-89 — including the 1985-86 season chronicled in John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink” — says the controversial coach grabbed players by the testicles, punched him in the back of the head and cracked a clipboard over his head, among other claims in “Jadlow: On The Rebound,” released Oct. 15.
Jadlow, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, told NBC’s WTHR in Indianapolis that the most difficult part of playing for Knight was “the mental aspect.” He said he had to remind himself he was simply playing a game, “that this man can’t kill me.” Knight allegedly made the physical aspect trying, too.
The book states, according to the report, a litany of offenses and demeaning verbal jabs that the three-time NCAA champion coach would employ during temper tantrums.
He would grab players, not just Jadlow, by the testicles and squeeze, Jadlow writes. During a walkthrough for an NCAA Tournament game against Seton Hall in 1989, the book charges, Knight punched him in the back of the head with a closed fist. During a 1989 game against Louisville, the coach who boasts 902 Division I victories, slammed and cracked a clipboard over Jadlow’s head, he claims.
Jadlow said he was ridiculed by Knight for his facial tic.
“If you don’t stop the [bleeping] twitching, I’m going to throw your ass out of here,” Knight told him, Jadlow says.
Daryl Thomas, a forward and co-captain on the 1987 title team, was a frequent target of the coach’s masculinity obsession, the book says. Knight would call Thomas a “(bleeping) p---y,” and once made team managers decorate his locker with pictures of female genitalia, Jadlow claims.
The allegations stand in contrast with Jadlow’s defense of the embattled Knight. After the polarizing and infamously combative coach was fired in 2000, following a player’s assertion that Knight had grabbed him roughly by the arm and screamed at him, Jadlow spoke passionately about Knight.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with all my Indiana stuff,” he said in the aftermath, according to Topeka’s Capital-Journal. “I’m sure not going to be wearing anything Indiana. I’m ashamed to say that I’m a graduate of Indiana. [Knight] is a guy who should have a monument of him erected.”
Even today, Jadlow insists he’s “a Knight guy,” he told WTHR. “I’m proud to have played for him and love him like a father.”
Jadlow, who played professionally in Argentina and Europe, ostensibly wrote the book to chronicle his own hell-and-back tale. He reportedly was cited for one DUI and arrested for another on the same day, and served a year in jail, he told CBS Sports in April.
He told WTHR that he has been sober for three years and decided to write the book as a self-help remedy.
“It’s very therapeutic for me to tell my story,” he said.