The American Spectator

p> THE DARKEST OF KNIGHTS br> Re: Michael Brendan Dougherty’s Anger Management : /p> p>I live in Iowa and being a Hawkeye fan, I had little or no respect for Bob Knight when he coached in the Big 10. He “cheated” by intimidating officials for many years as they became scared to call games evenly in Bloomington, Indiana. If you dismiss this, so be it, but it was a tactic he employed very successfully. He threw a vase at a secretary along with many other immature outbursts along the trail he blazed for many years. To Indiana University’s discredit, they tolerated him as long as he won many Big 10 championships and 3 national titles. Once he stopped winning the Big 10 title, he became expendible as the behavior they overlooked for so long became his downfall. He used terrible profanity and showed little respect for people in his own administration. The book “Season on the Brink” details his use of foul and abusive language directed at the president of the university and others in a practice session. Sorry, there are more civil ways to tell someone to leave practice. He was a bully that was a very successfull basketball coach and yes he graduated most of his players. His out of control behavior will be remembered more in regards to his legacy and rightly so. br> — Dwight Walker /p>

Michael Brendan Dougherty seems to believe that thuglike behavior by coaches who win a lot and have high graduation rates can therefore be justified. It cannot and he is very much mistaken.

p>He also neglects to mention Bobby Knight’s truly shameful behavior years ago at the Pan-Am games in Puerto Rico, an incident for which Knight was convicted, to the best of my memory, in absentia for assault or some such charge. Vince Lombardi never assaulted anyone under any such circumstances, nor did Bear Bryant, to cite two famed disciplinarians. Both could, to the end of their days, spend their leisure time relaxing on Puerto Rico’s beaches if they so chose. Bobby Knight, in the specific moral framework of that Pan-Am games incident, is about as “brave” and praiseworthy as Roman Polanski has proved in his own nasty little life. br> — Richard Szathmary br> Clifton, New Jersey