‘Complex’ doesn’t even begin to describe HOFer

IT WAS all there, in this small room at the Play-ByPlay, the old bar that was a big deal at Madison Square Garden years ago. They were holding a luncheon for the semifinalists of the 2003 Preseason NIT, but it was silly to believe that’s why so many of us with notebooks were there. We were there because Bob Knight was there.

Even 20 years ago, already 10 years past his coaching prime, Knight — who died Wednesday at 83 — was good copy.

And he was … well, he was Knight. A few softball questions irked him. A few harder questions irritated him. Three straight questions in a row were greeted with “Next question!” The PR men kept trying to end the Q&A. Knight told one of them, “You’ll g-ddamn know when I’m done.”

He said, “I guarantee not one of you SOBs even knows who won the first NIT.”

One of the SOBs in the crowd who’d already been next-questioned said, “I bet one of us does.” “Bulls--t,” Knight said. “Temple,” the SOB — who sounded an awful lot like me — said. “In 1938.”

And like that — like that — it was as if a whole different person had slipped into the red-and-black Texas Tech sweater Knight was wearing. Suddenly there was a story about James Usilton, who coached those Owls. Then there were stories about Pete Newell, and Clair Bee, and Joe Lapchick, and Jerry Lucas, and an old friend of his with whom he used to share gallons of coffee and hours of conversation when they worked at West Point together.

“I think Bill Parcells would be a hell of a basketball coach,” Knight said, “because I think I’d be a hell of a football coach.”

Knight was a hell of a basketball coach, arguably the best basketball coach, and that was both why his decades-long hot-and-cold personality was tolerated and why the way it ended seemed written by the classic Greek tragedists. He won 902 games at Army, Indiana and Tech, and for a time that stood as the most in college basketball history. He won three NCAA Championships (and an NIT; he did love the NIT) at Indiana, coached the 1984 U.S. Olympic team to gold.

But that was always sabotaged, to various degrees, by the incidents, so many incidents, too many to list. His Wikipedia entry runs over 2,500 words under the heading “criticism and controversy.” He survived punching a policeman in Puerto Rico, survived fighting an LSU fan in a motel lounge, survived choking his best player on video tape, survived throwing a chair during a game.

When he was young and volatile at Army, the writers dubbed him “Bobby T”; by the end he was routinely labeled a bully.

And it isn’t just the basketball record he tried to impair. So many of the same players he would routinely humiliate stood up for him to the end. They knew the hundreds of acts of small kindnesses he refused to publicize. In 1981, Landon Turner — who’d helped deliver his second national title a few months before — was paralyzed in a car accident, and Knight helped make sure he was cared for the rest of his days.

“There are a lot of stories like that, and even I only know some of them,” Mike Woodson told me a few years back. Woodson, now the coach at Indiana, had played for Knight from 1976-80, had endured his wrath for four years but also absorbed the good, too. “He was adamant about going to class. He was adamant that we lived with class. He used to tell us when we’d play a program that he knew was cheating, ‘They may drive better cars than you do, but you’re better men than they are.’ And we believed every word.”

He was stubborn and cranky and ornery, set in his ways. He hated every word of the classic book John Feinstein wrote about him, “Season on the Brink,” and Feinstein has occasionally posed that as much as Knight disliked seeing the foul language he used on paper in simple black-and-white, he was also uncomfortable that people might read too much into the good parts, too.

To the end, he was complicated. He was still speaking his mind on ESPN as recently as a few years ago. It seemed he would boycott Indiana forever because he remained bitter at his 2000 dismissal there, but finally returned to Assembly Hall for an emotional homecoming in February 2020 and grown men wept for two straight hours.

They loved him in Bloomington. Elsewhere the feelings were more complicated, more complex. He could move you to the brink of fury, but then show the other side. Back in the Play-byPlay, back in 2003, when the PR people finally came to pull him away, he told the writers, “That was fun,” and as he turned away he smiled.

“But, then, you all know I’m full of s--t, too.”