Bobby Knight, 83; coach known for wins and temper
Bobby Knight, one of college basketball’s signature coaches and a singular personality renowned for his tempestuousness and hubris, qualities that helped bring him to the pinnacle of his sport and also tainted his success, died Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 83.
His death was announced in a statement on his website. It did not give a cause.
Mercurial and volatile, Mr. Knight was among the most polarizing characters in American sports. He was a brilliant coach who sought out intelligent players, deployed a ferocious manto-man defense, extolled the virtues of precision passing, and preached the necessities of boxing out, rebounding, and neverending hustle. Known as a principled perfectionist and a master teacher, he was also a driven competitor for whom losing was agony and a relentless motivator whose chief tool, it often seemed, was the anger-fueled rant.
He began his coaching career at the US Military Academy and finished it at Texas Tech University. He coached the US men’s basketball team to an Olympic gold medal in 1984.
But he found fame, glory, and notoriety at Indiana University, where he was head coach for 29 years. An animated courtside stalker in a Hoosier-red sweater who became a statewide celebrity in a basketball-mad state, he raised the Indiana program to the national top tier while upholding academic standards — most of his players graduated — and avoiding the pay-for-play recruitment scandals that bedeviled many other schools.
Over two consecutive seasons, 1974-75 and 1975-76, his teams won 63 of 64 games. In March 1976, when Indiana won the NCAA tournament, finishing the season at 32-0, it became the seventh — and last — national champion with a perfect record. From 1971-72, his first season at Indiana, through 1999-2000, Mr. Knight’s Hoosier teams averaged almost 23 wins a season, winning 11 Big Ten titles and, in 1981 and 1987, two more national championships, before he was fired by a university administration exasperated by his displays of incorrigibility.
Sports writer Frank Deford wrote that Mr. Knight was “a prodigy in search of proportion.” Broadcaster Bob Costas once referred to him as “college basketball’s raging bull,” and, indeed, the Indiana coach made a trademark of iconoclasm and defiance of decorum, deriding officials at top volume and hounding his players to the brink of abuse.
He cooperated with many an interviewer but clashed frequently with members of the news media, scorning especially those beat reporters whose basketball knowledge he found wanting. Although he was a voracious reader, especially of military history, and often encouraged students to focus on “the book” rather than “the ball,” he was not above disparaging the whole print enterprise: “All of us learn to write in the second grade,” he once said. “Most of us go on to greater things.”
His foul mouth was renowned: “In the course of a day, he describes an incredible number of things being done to the derrière: It’s burned, chewed out, kicked, frosted, blistered, chipped at, etc.,” Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1981.
During the 1985-86 season, perhaps to counteract his reputation as media-unfriendly, Mr. Knight gave sports writer John Feinstein remarkable access for a book, “A Season on the Brink,” that revealed Mr. Knight’s detailoriented preparation for games, the standards he set for his players, and the grueling workouts he put them through. It also revealed his popularity throughout Indiana and his charitable deeds. But it became a bestseller largely because of the profanity and fury in its pages.
Todd Jadlow, a forward on the 1987 championship team, wrote in a 2016 memoir that, among other things, Mr. Knight cracked a clipboard over his head, squeezed his testicles, and made players run laps while barking like dogs. But Jadlow stayed in the Indiana program and, after he wrote the book, told ESPN, “I still have a lot of respect for him and look at him as a father figure.”
Still, over the years, Mr. Knight’s demands and personality drove more than a few players from Indiana. Sports Illustrated reported in 1976 that one former recruit, Mike Miday, quit the team, telling his student newspaper, “I deserved better than to be treated as an object and demeaned in public,” and adding, “I’m terrified of the guy.” In 1997, Jason Collier left Indiana, telling The Springfield News-Sun in Ohio that he couldn’t adapt to Mr. Knight’s style. He explained, “I tried different tactics — blocking out the yelling, like people told me to do — but when people yell at you, you take notice.”
But belligerence and volatility were not Mr. Knight’s only defining characteristics. He was a principled recruiter, and among his many demands on players was that they attend class. Players, friends, and writers noted that he could be gracious, charming, charitable, and playful. He was articulate as well, often in his own defense:
“I don’t think there’s an official in the country who knows as much about basketball as I do,” he said in a Playboy interview in 1984 about his rough treatment of the referees. “Not even close. Or as much as any other coach knows. And when I’ve got a complaint, I want it listened to. I’ve seen an official not watch for traveling. I’ve seen him watch the flight of the ball instead of the shooter’s hand afterward — whether or not he gets hit. I think that basketball officiating is tough, but I don’t think there are very many officials who know how to watch logically from one to two to three to four to five in a given position on the floor. And when I see somebody violate the logical progression of what he should be looking for, then I’m going to let him know about it.”
Many of Mr. Knight’s coaching colleagues considered him not just a genius coach but an exemplary human being. His former players include All-Americans and successful pros such as Kent Benson, Quinn Buckner, Mike Woodson (a former head coach of the New York Knicks), and Hall of Fame guard Isiah Thomas, many of whom have spoken of a love-hate relationship with their coach while they played for him but an enduring admiration afterward.
In a 2022 interview with the “Run It Back” podcast, Thomas recalled his youthful disagreement with Mr. Knight’s authoritative methods but added that, as a Black athlete, he became aware that many schools used “the athlete for his physical body but never try to develop his mind.” That was not the case under Mr. Knight at Indiana, he said, adding, “Coach Knight had the courage — key word ‘courage’ — to coach me and not try to be my friend.”
The incident that led to Mr. Knight’s dismissal at Indiana occurred in a practice in 1997 during which Mr. Knight grabbed a player, Neil Reed, by the throat and seemed to choke him. A video surfaced in 1999, and the university president, Myles Brand, suspended Mr. Knight for three games, fined him $30,000, and put him on a zero-tolerance policy.
Seven months later, a 19year-old student called out to him in passing, “What’s up, Knight?” The student said Mr. Knight grabbed him roughly by the arm and cursed him for not using an honorific, Coach Knight or Mr. Knight. Mr. Knight claimed he had touched the student’s arm lightly, did not curse, and was merely trying to impress upon him respect for his elders, and the need for “manners and civility.” Even so, that was the tipping point. Offered the opportunity to resign, Mr. Knight would not, and Brand fired him.
In the 25th-anniversary edition of “A Season on the Brink,” John Feinstein wrote: “His good qualities are so good. His bad qualities are so bad. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me a story about encountering Knight and finding him gracious and charming and funny, I would never have to work another day in my life. If I also had a dollar for every time I’ve been told a story about Knight being a bully or being rude and obnoxious, I’d be Bill Gates.”
He added, more succinctly, “There just isn’t anyone like Knight — for better and worse.”