One reel of film will be played thousands of times on ESPN this
week to mark the surprise midseason retirement of Texas Tech
basketball coach Bobby Knight. In his white and black striped polo
shirt, Knight stalks across the Hoosiers’ bench in 1985. Purdue’s
Steve Reid prepares to take a technical free throw. As the referee
hands him the ball Knight grabs a red plastic chair, plants his
left foot onto the court, and heaves it in the general direction of
Reid. The crowd, ever-faithful, cheers him.
After the sportscasters treat you to that incident, they may
choose any of the scores of clips where Knight rains down a shower
of obscenities and insults on a beat reporter. The message that you
are supposed to learn is that the Knight was too short tempered,
too thin-skinned, too prone to rage.
But elements of showmanship were ever-present in Knight’s antics
and rarely lost on his victims. Two years ago Purdue’s Reid said of
the famous chair-tossing, “I wish it would have hit me…My agent
and I have not made one red cent off of it.” Years after the
incident, Knight told a packed arena, “When my time on Earth is
gone, and my activities here are past, I hope they bury me upside
down and my critics can kiss my [bleep].”
Knight played himself in Adam Sandler’s film Anger
Management and he sometimes let news cameras capture him
wielding a bullwhip at practice. He was called “the General” but he
was also the Ringmaster in the circus that swirled around him.
Sports columnists, afraid that their subject is not important
enough for their immense talents, have invested great moral
significance in Knight’s decision on Monday to leave his job as the
Red Raiders coach mid-season. Jay Marrioti took a few moments in
between “Around the Horn” shoots to fly into high dudgeon: “He
didn’t resign. He didn’t retire. Let it be known forever that Bob
Knight quit on his Texas Tech players…How typical — how
sad — that this would be the exit strategy for the old ogre.”
Oh, shutup. The truth is that Knight gave the reins of the Texas
Tech team over to the ready hands of his son, Pat Knight. And this
“ogre” is the most accomplished coach in the history of his sport.
He won his 900th game last month and captured three NCAA
championships in his tenure at Indiana. He also grabbed an NIT
title, and coached the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal in
1984.
Along the way, he never broke an NCAA rule of recruiting and he
graduated the vast majority of his players. This is the man in
college basketball to be singled out for abuse?
His sudden departure from Indiana University after 29 successful
seasons was the result of his mid-century Midwestern sensibility
clashing with the informality of pajama-bottom wearing students of
today. In 2000, a freshman, Kent Harvey, called out “Hey, Knight,
what’s up?” Predictably, Knight grabbed Harvey by the arm and told
him a few things about “respect.”
WHAT ELSE SHOULD we expect? Knight grew up in the steelworker’s
town of Massillon, Ohio, in the '40s and '50s. Where he was from,
Knight’s response to Harvey’s behavior would have been
unremarkable. At the tern of the millennium, it constituted a major
scandal. Knight was asked to leave. He urged IU students not to
riot at his departure and to leave the campus and Harvey
unmolested.
Knight took the next year off before accepting the job at Texas
Tech. In his six full seasons as coach, the Red Raiders reached the
NCAA tournament four times, making it to the Sweet Sixteen in 2005.
He leaves them “on the bubble” for this year’s March Madness,
ranked 60th in the nation. His son will have to carry them the rest
of the way.
Bobby Knight’s legacy not only includes the immense amount of
hardware stacked in Indiana and Texas Tech, but also the careers of
those he worked with, including Lawrence Frank, current manager of
the New Jersey Nets, and Mike Krzyzewski, coach of Duke. He
championed the “motion offense” and team play in an age where the
collegiate game was declining. Strategy now consists of recruiting
the most talented players, then isolating them on the court for
one-on-one drives to the basket.
Basketball Hall-of-Famer John Wooden said, “I don’t think
there’s ever been a better teacher of the game of basketball than
Bob.” This intense instructor would run his pupils on endless
suicide drills. Once or twice, he gave them a tap on the chin to
get their attention, sending corpulent opinionators like Marrioti
into apoplexy, and causing ESPN anchors to examine game-tape as if
it were the Zapruder film.
Our age no longer tolerates coaches like Knight. Too bad. The
game benefited from him. So did the players — even if they
occasionally had to wipe flecks of spit off of their faces.
