A coach’s hard edges can’t be forgotten, or tolerated
By some accounts, there are at minimum 170,000 words in the English language. But in my business, two are favored above all others when describing a subject who’s spent much of his time in the public eye acting like a horse’s patoot — and worse, loving every minute. Complicated. Complex.
Those babies are convenient cover for us; word holograms that allow readers to mine from them what they will.
If you want to believe there was more good than bad in the life of college basketball legend Bob Knight, “complex” will work.
If you saw him as an inexplicable bully, braggart and human time bomb waiting to wound opponents and innocents alike, well, you can view him as “complicated” and move on with your life.
Me? I always saw Knight as more than a coach. I’m still not sure whether he deserved to be called an icon — the overused four-letter word (Knight knew a lot of them) used by obit writers in the wake of his death Wednesday at the age of 83.
As much as anything, Knight was a backroom symbol of how a certain segment of America wants to see authority, particularly if those wielding it wear a whistle around their neck. Tough. Flinty. Demanding. Resourceful. And above all else, self-righteous.
From the aesthetic standpoint, I get the attraction to Knight. In terms of pure basketball, there may never have been a better coach than the man whose omnipresent sweater was as red as his face.
Thirty-one years ago, I covered his 1991-92 Indiana team during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. I’ve never watched a more elegant form of the sport. Up close, Knight’s motion offense moved like the innards of a bank safe — tumblers and flywheels clicking together with a synchronized beauty that truly was breathtaking.
“No wonder this guy throws chairs,” I thought to myself. “If Indiana’s not getting a wide-open 15-foot jump shot every time down the floor, somebody screwed up.”
Such precision doesn’t happen by accident. Often, it doesn’t even happen with endless repetition or occasional genius. If it did, Knight’s imitators, and there are thousands on courts and fields, even today, would all be NCAA champions.
No, Knight was truly, supremely gifted.
The problem was, he knew it. And couldn’t marshal it.
In ’92, I followed the Hoosiers on their march through the tournament — from Boise, Idaho, where they’d dispatched Eastern Illinois and LSU, a team with a freakishly talented kid named Shaquille O’Neal, and then to Albuquerque, where Indiana would need two wins to make the Final Four.
At every turn in Boise and Albuquerque, Knight tap-danced and goose
stepped between entertaining and surly. He clearly understood his power; he knew his words and thoughts and actions resonated beyond the basketball gym and into the civic arena. He’d created an ugly international incident in Puerto Rico in the 1970s. In the ’80s, he spawned a discussion about appropriate behavior when he tossed a chair across the floor in a game against archrival Purdue.
By the early ’90s, his was a show that could play on many channels, not just ESPN. A man who wasn’t fireproofed by his employer wouldn’t have dared mime striking a Black Hoosier, Calbert Cheaney, with a bullwhip as cameras clicked away. Even in jest.
Even on a throwaway subject, Knight headed south. When asked at a news conference by Albuquerque radio personality Henry Tafoya about his team’s “game face,” Knight mockingly threw on about a dozen of his own, contorting his mug like a Hollywood special effects master cueing up highlights from Halloween 3. ESPN used the clip for decades.
Mostly, what Knight told us was that he, Bobby Knight; he, coach; he, smarter than thou, was up here.
And you, player; you, journalist; you, college president; you, anyone he didn’t deem as worthy, were all down there.
Eventually, my two weeks of watching Knight ended: He and the Hoosiers dismantled excellent Florida State and UCLA squads and were headed to the Final Four. It would be his last appearance in the big show.
It took years to see it in full, but Knight’s career had commenced on its trip downhill. He left the Hoosiers in 2000 after he was accused of grabbing a student whose innocuous-for-the-time greeting — “Hey, Knight, what’s up?” — enraged the coach.
There’s no way to really gauge this, I suppose, but I believe Knight got angrier as time went on, not because the motion offense didn’t work as well, but because the world around him was changing. No longer could the title Coach Knight cause time to stop and knees to bend. In a country where honorifics were being diminished by a lawsuit, an internet post, a simple question, men like him no longer stood unchallenged atop the mountaintop.
I think he saw it sooner than most.
And it ticked him off. After Indiana, he found employment at Texas Tech, located in a corner of the country given to overlook his tirades, and in some way, celebrate them. Of course, he won there, and for a time, he had more all-time victories than any coach in history. Then, as time does to all coaches, he faded away.
What’s left now are the stories of a brilliant and sometimes brutal man who ruled a sport — and maybe, a way of thinking — for longer than most. That’s not complicated or complex at all.
It also won’t be replicated. And thank God for that.