Stay in your chair.
I had papers to grade. So many papers. Stacks. Work. I taught writing courses as an adjunct at the University of New Mexico. A few miles away, practice had just started for the 2005 NCAA West Regionals, the Sweet 16.
He doesn’t matter.
I crammed the essays into my bag and darted out of the coffee shop. Fuck. Jumping on my mountain bike, I sped down the cracked sidewalk of Central Avenue, crossed south across Stanford, and turned right down Lead — the essays jamming into both kidneys.
Shit, shit, shit.
Blowing through a stop sign, I turned onto Yale, past Family Dollar, past the prostitutes in sweatpants, and onto Caesar Chavez. White-knuckling the handlebars, I rode into a headwind that spun into a crosswind, scattering 7-Eleven plastic bags and tumbleweed.
Success, Coach Knight said, is performing to the limit of your potential.
Down a hill. Up another, I peddled through the vast University Arena parking lot, past the CBS broadcast trucks, and to the glass door main entrance of The Pit.
A suspicion snaked through my gut. It was over. He was gone. I’d missed him.
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Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Robert Montgomery Knight: a giant planet, varying hot and cold, with a vanishing number of moons. Bobby Knight: long past Act Three, King Lear in a polyester V-neck sweater. Coach Knight — a dormant volcano on the West Mesa.
The Pit — haunted home of Jim Valvano since the ’83 Final Four — hummed with a giddy energy as Washington Husky fans chatted with Cardinals from Louisville and grinning Texas Tech Red Raiders posed for photos (Guns Up!) with West Virginia bros in performance polos and coonskin caps. Maybe it was the spirit of Jimmy V, a friendly ghost running through all our sports, looking for a hug, reminding us that life is short and sports are games and games are fun.
For me, this wasn’t fun. This was filial duty, a task I no longer wanted or understood.
The Washington Huskies still had the floor. I was early. Along the sideline, in two rows, I spotted my tribe — a dozen or so silver-haired AARP’ers, wearing mismatched, faded crimson-and-bright-red Indiana Hoosier gear. Though I didn’t know a soul, I knew they’d be here. In the new hoops century, they were known on message boards as the Lost Tribe of Hoosiers, Bobby’s Bitches, or simply The Orphans. And I was one of them. Some of us wanted to bask in “The General’s” glow. Others wanted proof that somewhere in America young men still set screens, moved without the ball, found the open man, and played balls-out, man-to-man defense. Others still, just wanted to remember.
I asked an old-timer wearing a U.S Navy cap and an IU Starter jacket if anyone was sitting next to him. Looking up, he winked, like Popeye’s granddad and said, “You are, partner.”
We made our introductions and the whiff of Aqua Net and Old Spice hugged me like home. The Hoosiers had missed the NCAA tournament, but we weren’t here to root for Indiana. Like other sports subcultures — the Baltimore Colts Band, the Navin Field grounds crew at old Tigers Stadium — we were struggling with the Big Game’s most basic rule: nothing lasts, nothing endures.
I’d committed to Indiana and Coach Knight in the summer of ’87, as a rising fifth grader, giving my grandmother, Mae Collins (“Mae-Mae”), the news as she sat stringing and snapping green beans and counting my free throws. Six of seven. Seven of eight. Bend your knees! Eight of ten. I was born in ’76, the season of 32-0, and while I couldn’t recall that championship, I remembered ’81. The day Reagan was shot, after the bullet that grazed the president’s rib had lodged into his left lung, I prayed the title game against Carolina wouldn’t be postponed.
Now, Mae-Mae was dying of cancer in New Albany, Indiana, a river town across the Ohio River from Louisville and more than 1,200 miles east from The Pit. Growing up in Atlanta, we spent holidays in Indiana and I trekked north each summer to the Bob Knight Basketball School. After her diagnosis, I tried to call more. Once she said she was having a rough go teaching my granddad how to do laundry. He struggled. Ratios of powder to water. “He’ll be alone soon,” she said, “so he better start paying attention.”
When I called, Mae-Mae and I talked IU, Coach Knight and Hoosier Hills Basketball — the Bulldogs of New Albany, and their rivals at Jeff High and Floyd Central. Before they were Hoosiers, I knew Damon Bailey as a Star, Pat Graham as a Highlander, and Sherron Wilkerson as a Red Devil. There was no website to join or 1-900 recruiting hotline to call, just my grandma’s voice: Wait till you see this boy Bobby’s watching.
I was lucky — if Knight’s voice was lodged in my head, so too was Mae-Mae’s.
As The Pit’s sound system blared the muffled bass of the Black Eyed Peas, I learned some of my fellow Orphans had been here before — the ’92 NCAA West Regional, when Indiana buzz-sawed through UCLA. Oh, what a team. Should’ve been Bobby’s fourth.
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Photo: Getty Images
No boy had any business loving anything as much as I loved Indiana basketball
The Huskies layup line, led by the diminutive, dynamite Nate Robinson, blew up into a dunkfest. The orphans rattled off who in their ranks had passed since then of heart failure, prostate cancer, lupus The Lord took him in his sleep. As the Huskies tossed and threw down their alley-oops, the orphans reminisced on ’92. I’d watched the game in Atlanta on TV with my dad. Years earlier, he’d taken me to the ’84 NCAA East Regional in Atlanta where a Hoosier cast of nobodies upset a Tar Heel squad of Jordan and Perkins. When the buzzer sounded, my dad shot his fist into the air. Steering us through the Omni’s concourses — grown-ups in red chanting, Fight IU, Fight, Fight, Fight! — he locked his hand on my shoulder.
By the summer of ’87, the boundaries of Indiana’s basketball empire stretched from New Orleans, where Keith Smart’s baseline jumper had just secured another NCAA title that spring, to Hollywood’s silver screen and “Hoosiers,” nominated for two Academy Awards that same spring, to New England, where three-time NBA MVP Larry Joe Bird stood as the greatest basketball player in the world. Southern Indiana was the capital of this hoops kingdom and in its heart of hearts stood one man — Be tough! Move! Think! Communicate goddamn it! — pounding, pushing, prodding, more, More, MORE!
No boy had any business loving anything as much as I loved Indiana basketball.
But that incarnation of Indiana basketball was long gone and as the 2005 Red Raiders of Texas Tech hit the floor they were led by no one. Eventually, assistant coach Patrick Knight sauntered onto the court, clapping hard, chewing gum, barking out commands, in full-son-of-Knight mode, even in a glorified shootaround. Ten minutes later, Bob Knight emerged in gray corduroys and a green sweater with a yellow collar.
“Late again, Bobby,” the man in the Navy cap noted flatly.
Knight in Indiana: His not so greatest “hits”
1974
Larry Bird transfers from Indiana after only 24 days on campus. Homesick, overwhelmed at the size of theschool, Bird also confides to family and friends that he was hurt when Knight refused to acknowledge him on campus when Bird said hello. Knight later refers to Bird’s brief IU tenure as “one of my greatest mistakes.”1976
Knight, in the midst of a perfect season, violently seizes the jersey of Indiana sophomore Jim Wisman in an overtime win against Michigan. The moment is captured by Indianapolis Star photographer Jerry Clark and runs in AP wire stories. The image first casts Knight, at age 36, as college basketball’s raging boy genius.1977
Sophomore forward Mike Miday transfers from Indiana and tells the Daily Student he “couldn’t stand the way [Knight] treated me as a human being.”1979
Knight assaults 33-year-old Puerto Rican policeman Jose de Silva, before practice at the Pan American Games in Puerto Rico. Following the medal ceremony, Knight jeers, “Fuck ’em! Fuck ’em all! …The only thing they know how to do is grow bananas!” Knight is later charged and convicted in absentia. His legal representation consists of Bloomington lawyer and former IU-player Clarence Donninger, Knight’s future boss and Indiana AD.1980
Knight fires a blank from a pistol at longtime target Louisville-Courier Journal reporter Russ Brown in Assembly Hall. “You missed,” Brown called out. “Wait till you shake your head,” Knight yelled back. Brown is encouraged by the paper to pursue legal action and refuses.1981
Knight, in the wake of a Final Four victory over LSU, grabs Buddy Bonnecaze, an LSU fan and accountant, by the throat and pushes him over a barroom trashcan at the Cherry Hill Inn in New Jersey. “If that’s wrong, so be it. If it happens again tomorrow,” Knight said, “I’ll be wrong tomorrow.” Indiana University takes no action.1985
Knight, in tears after being ejected for hurling a chair across the Assembly Hall floor in a game against Purdue, apologizes to IU President John Ryan and promises to accept any punishment. Shortly later, Knight changes his mind and threatens to resign if punished by Indiana. IU relents. Knight is suspended one game and fined by the Big Ten Conference.1986
Angry after Steve Alford misses a free throw before the half against Illinois, Knight rages at the Indiana cheerleaders for chanting during Alford’s foul line ritual and kicks a megaphone. The megaphone clips an Indiana cheerleader in the leg.1987
Knight is fined $10,000 by the NCAA after banging his fist on the scorer's table after receiving a technical foul during a tournament game against LSU.1993
Knight is booed in Assembly Hall after fans witness him cursing and kicking his own son, Pat, in a game against Notre Dame. For the first time in 20 years, Indiana takes action and he is suspended one game by Athletic Director Clarence Donninger.1994
Knight head-butts Indiana guard Sherron Wilkerson on the bench against Michigan State.1997
Junior guard Neil Reed transfers from Indiana. While refusing to go into specifics, Reed tells Sports Illustrated, “I think the school should hold up to its end of the end of the deal because there is a problem there. And they should look into it … It is clear that Coach Knight answers to no one.”1998
Knight rages at 64-year-old Jeanette Hartgraves, the secretary to Clarence Donniger, calling her a “fucking bitch.” Donninger steps in between Knight and Hartgraves until Knight leaves. Donninger reports the incident to Indiana President Myles Brand. Indiana University takes no action.1999
Knight allegedly chokes Bloomington resident Christopher Foster in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant after Foster voiced his alarm at several perceived racist remarks Knight made at dinner. No charges are brought against Knight.1999
Knight physically confronts and fires longtime assistant Ron Felling after hearing Felling criticize him to former Indiana player and assistant Dan Dakich. Felling sues Indiana and Knight for wrongful termination. The case is settled out of court.2000
After Knight continues to speak negatively about him and his father, former Indiana player Neil Reed says Knight choked him at a practice in 1997. Videotape sent anonymously to CNN, later sourced as Felling, confirms the incident. Knight is suspended by Indiana University President Myles Brand for three games and ordered to pay a $30,000 fine. Knight agrees to operate under a policy of “zero-tolerance” toward improper behavior.2000
Knight grabs and squeezes the arm of Kent Harvey, an Indiana Freshman student, after he says "Hey, Knight, what's up?". Knight is fired for violating University President Myles Brand’s "zero-tolerance" policy and for what he calls a "pattern of unacceptable behavior."2001
In an interview during a car ride with Playboy’s Lawrence Grobel, Knight grabs the reporter’s wrists in an attempt to seize the tapes from their interview. Grobel declines. The interview continues.On his time at Indiana and his departure from the school, Knight says: “My fucking heart was ripped out by this goddamn bullshit!”
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Knight strode into The Pit, head down. He’d aged, but he was always already old. In ’81, Frank Deford’s prophetic Sports Illustrated profile “The Rabbit Hunter” warned that Knight was headed straight toward some anachronistic violent ending, like Ohio State’s Woody Hayes. Over the decades, the stock comparison became cliché. In 2005, exiled from the Hoosier kingdom, on the fringes of a distant desert, Knight was 65, the same age as Hayes when he slugged Clemson’s Charlie Bauman in the throat.
Knight leaned back on the scorer’s table, arms crossed, a program in his back pocket.
Unlike Hayes, Knight never struck an opposing player. Instead, over five different decades, he targeted his own. A brief and incomplete history of Bob Knight’s cruelty would include shoving Wayne Radford (’74-78) in the back and slapping Daryl Thomas (’83-87) across the face; gut-punching the 6-foot, 160-pound Steve Alford (’83-87); kicking his own son Patrick (’90-95); breaking the nose and separating the shoulder of his other son Tim; head-butting Sherron Wilkerson (’93-96) and later dismissing Wilkerson from the team for domestic violence. Early in his Indiana tenure, Knight cold-cocked Sports Information Director Kit Klingelhoffer and before the end of it he brutalized Athletic Director Clarence Donninger. A forearm shiver to the chest of assistant Ron Felling led to the proof that Knight had choked Neil Reed (’94-97). On Sept. 7, 2000, Knight grabbed the arm of IU freshman student Kent Harvey — Hey Knight! What’s up? he said — to teach him, in Knight’s words, “manners and civility.”
And for that last hard lesson he was fired from Indiana. Until his death, Ohio State kept an office for Hayes. There’ll be no office emeritus at West Point, IU, or Texas Tech for Knight.
Sitting in The Pit, surrounded by Orphans, Knight’s history of abusing college kids banged around my head as ungraded student essays sat in my bag. But I couldn’t look away.
“I think Bobby looks nice in green,” a geriatric in a crimson turtleneck said.
Patrick screamed help-side!
“The yellow collar is a nice touch,” I added.
A man in a gray Stetson hat and black cowboy boots approached Knight. Putting his arm around the man, Knight leaned in, and whispered. They reared back and roared, laughing.
Half-watching Knight and the shootaround, our talk traveled with news from the tiny Hoosier hamlets of Goshen, Greenwood and New Albany. With each word, we moved past Bible studies, bake sales, and closer inside the immaculate, cluttered Indiana homes with 10,000 chiming clocks, endless knick-knacks, runaway Readers Digests, and somewhere on a pantry wall, closet door, or down by the deep freeze, a poster of Coach Knight.
Tacked above stacks of Yellow Pages and Methodist Hymnals, next to her piano, Mae-Mae kept a poster schedule of the 2000 Indiana squad. Knight’s last. The schedule hung for years, as if time had stopped, which it would for my grandmother on Sept. 9, 2005, as I sat 30,000 feet over Nothing, Nowhere, Missouri, hurtling home to Indiana.
Patrick yelled. Knight laughed with the man in the gray hat. Patrick yelled louder.
Near the end, as Tech shot free throws, the orphans — tired, road weary, wondered about dinner. I volunteered El Pinto, Los Cuates, or El Patio, the holy sites of New Mexican dining, detailing the rich, gringo-palate-shattering glories of red and green chiles, stuffed sopapillas, and homemade tamales.
They stared at me as if I was speaking a different language.
“There’s also an Olive Garden,” I said, “right off I-25.”
Sighs, relief. A robust Orphan with a leather fanny pack patted my arm.
I also provided coordinates for Texas Roadhouse, Cracker Barrel and Golden Corral. My man, my partner, in the Navy cap jotted notes in a mini-flip steno pad.
They thanked me, shook my hand. Someone slid me a Werther’s. They asked if I was eating enough. How could I possibly be eating enough? Could I join them?
And I pictured us all at a long table, with the head seat empty. Breaking buttery rolls and shoveling mashed potatoes, we’d drink the Kool-Aid. Passing deviled eggs, Jell-O, and Mae-Mae’s very own green bean casserole, we’d say the names — Buckner, Whitman, Alford, Cheaney — and help ourselves to seconds, thirds. Between bites of peach cobbler, ice-cream, and pound cake, we’d recite the years — ’76, ’81, ’87, ’92 — and we’d say Amen, and say it again, and it would be good.
Bob Knight Dead. Car accident. Wyoming. That was it. There it was. I read the news while buying birthday balloons with my daughter Rose, standing in line at Walgreens. The tiny letters scrolled across the ESPN ScoreCenter app on my phone.
Rose, turning three, tugged my leg. “Hurry daddy! Let’s go!”
Hadn’t Hemingway, too, died in a car crash in Wyoming?
As it turns out, Bob Knight wasn’t actually dead … but I didn’t realize that yet
Balloons secure, receipt in bag, Rose and I began our daily exercise in crisis negotiation. Weeks earlier, I’d let her “drive” in my lap around a vacant lot. And now? Now, always, questions, demands: I want to drive. Why can’t I drive? Can you unbuckle me? Frozen! Play Frozen! Our first encounters behind the wheel, coupled with Queen Elsa’s struggle to control her powerful emotions, had unleashed Rose’s inner tyrant.
“Try again, buddy,” I said.
“Hey Daddy. How are you? Good? Can I drive please? Will you play Frozen?”
We’re working on volume control and complete sentences. Results vary.
As it turns out, Bob Knight wasn’t actually dead. His Ford Expedition had struck a cow on the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway outside Cody. The cow was dead. The Expedition totaled. Knight, was fine. But I didn’t realize that yet. And so, after buckling up and cuing Frozen, I spent the next eleven minutes in the driver’s seat trying to process what I’d just misread.
The snow glows white on the mountain tonight,
not a footprint to be seen …
In my head, I started the obit. Born October 25, 1940 in Orville, Ohio … each obit would chronicle Knight’s wins, NCAA titles, and his near total abuse of players, co-workers, fans, foreign officers of the law, random passers-by. For Knight, life was a constant contact sport where collisions weren’t only inevitable, but invited.
A kingdom of isolation. And it looks like I’m the queen.
“Sing, daddy, sing!” Rose yells.
I can’t carry a tune, but when Rose insists, I sing.
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside.
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I tried!
Notorious for his sideline antics and heated encounters with officials, Knight’s persona loomed larger than life. I’d known Knight first as a literary character from John Feinstein’s “Season on the Brink,” a book whose profanity I sneaked past seventh and eighth grade censors for book reports and oral presentations. A book, and main character, that dominated my imagination and limited literary landscape until high school, until Hemingway.
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Photo: Focus on Sport
Don’t let them in, don’t let them see.
Knight’s obituary wouldn’t require a Hemingway, but it’d need a serious bullshit detector.
Be the good girl you always have to be.
Rose closed her eyes and sang as we turned onto the Diagonal Highway in Boulder County, Colorado. I merged with the high-speed traffic and thought a good lede could touch on Knight’s idol, General Patton, who’d also died after a car wreck. (Heidelberg — fender bender.) And then in succession I thought of Dave Shepherd (’71), Landon Turner (’81), and Luke Recker (’99). Now, there was real juice in this crash ending, poetry almost. Would the scribes catch it?
Let it go, let it go.
Can’t hold it back anymore
“Louder!” Rose shouted.
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door!
Bob Knight’s three-act car wreck at Indiana begins with Dave Shepherd, moves through Landon Turner, and culminates with Luke Recker. Three wrecks, three totaled cars, three crumpled bodies. Each wreck revealed who Knight was at that moment in his life: a young coach on the make, a genius of the heart, a cruel, bloated emperor.
Shepherd, a holdover from Coach Lou Watson, was a 1970 Mr. Indiana who averaged 26 points per game as a freshman. During the summer of ’71, as Knight was in Louisiana, recruiting Robert Parish, Shepherd wrecked his Camaro outside of Bloomington. The Camaro was rumored to be from Bill and Jim Howard, Bloomington doctors, and “friends of the program.” Shepherd suffered broken ribs, a broken jaw, broken ankle, and needed hundreds of stitches in his head. His mouth was wired shut. When Shepherd woke up in the hospital, by his bedside sat Knight.
When Shepherd came back to practice, at 130 pounds, he found the intensity turned up. Bleeding at the mouth, not competing to Knight’s satisfaction, Knight kicked him out of practice. Shepherd left. Knight sent assistant Dave Bliss to chase. Shepherd came back. And so too did the mind games, the berating, the bleeding at the mouth. At the end of the season, Shepherd had reached his end. He was transferring to Ole Miss. When he gave Knight the news, Knight responded by staring at him in silence.
Here I stand
And here I’ll stay
Let the storm rage on
Luke Recker fit into the archetype of Dave Shepherd, a role Steve Alford and Damon Bailey had also played. Recker, like Shepherd, left Indiana after two years in the summer of 1999. Before classes were set to begin at Arizona, Recker and his girlfriend Kelly Craig, an IU cheerleader, were passengers in a 1990 Ford Taurus sideswiped by a drunk driver outside of Durango, Colorado. Kelly was left paralyzed. Her brother, Jason, was in a coma. The driver, their friend, John Holdberg, was killed. Recker suffered a severed temporal artery and only survived because a friend maintained pressure on the wound. Recker temporarily lost an ear, and broke his thumb. His injuries required over 200 stitches.
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Photo: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
“Luke gave [Knight] his heart and soul for two years and he never even got as much as a card”
“He wasn’t hurt very badly,” Knight said of Recker. “What really got to me was the girl and her brother.”
Keith Smart and Indiana officials reached out to Recker and his family. Knight? Nothing.
“Luke gave him his heart and soul for two years and he never even got as much as a card. Don’t tell me how he’s there for everybody,” Recker’s mother said, “because he’s not.”
Dave Shepherd now owns one of the largest insurance companies in the Midwest. Today, Luke Recker, resident of Iowa City, sells medical equipment to hospitals.
It’s funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all!
Rose and I made a right over the railroad tracks, onto Jay Road. I watched the cyclists on my right, and made note of the hot air balloon on the horizon.
“Turn it up, louder!” Rose yelled.
“Loud as it can go, buddy.”
Knight was fishing in Montana in the summer of 1981 when he got the news that the center of his national championship team, the 6′10″ Landon Turner, had totaled his car on State Road 46, some 30 miles from Bloomington. Turner was on his way to King’s Island Amusement Park near Cincinnati. Months earlier, Knight had mercilessly ridden the reluctant Indianapolis junior, calling him “a pussy” and putting tampons in his locker. But Turner rallied and led Indiana down the stretch to a National Championship.
When Knight got the news, he rushed back to Bloomington and decided he’d do whatever it took to ensure Turner’s recovery. “I’ve got to take care of this kid. If I’m not back there, they’ll just let this go,” he said. “If I’m back there, I can take care of this kid, I can raise money for him. I can take care of his family.” Knight raised over half-a-million dollars for the Landon Turner Trust Fund.
Here I stand In the light of day
Let the storm rage on
he cold never bothered me anyway!
“Again, again, please, again, play it again,” Rose said.
Though Knight refused to return to Bloomington, on the evening of Turner’s induction to the Indiana University Hall of Fame in 2012, he was handed a letter from Knight. In the letter, his former coach tells Turner that his most meaningful moment on a basketball court was when Turner came back for senior day, in his wheelchair.
… you were in your wheelchair on the court behind me when on the spur of the moment I asked all the former IU players in the stands that day to stand. Then I thought of you, looked back, and needled you as always: “Landon, aren’t you going to stand up?”
You gave me that great big smile and said, “Coach, I am standing, in my heart.”
That, I’ll never forget.
Pulling into the drive, I put the car in park, let the song play out, and tried to recall Bob Knight, Coach Knight, protector and provider for Landon. I’m a coach. I think that is a coach’s responsibility. The same man, who at the height of Reagan’s America, put an arm around AIDS patient Ryan White at Market Square Arena. I heard Ryan was an Indiana fan. Defender of the written word. A ball is a fleeting moment. A book lasts a lifetime. The teacher who quoted Kipling and Lincoln, line for line, to pimply faced teenaged basketball campers. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and Treat those two Imposters as the Same. And who at the end of camp would rest his hand on the shoulder of yours truly and field some obvious, rehearsed question while patiently answering, nodding, accepting my thank you sirs. More teacher than general, more man than myth — that was my Coach Knight.
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Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
God help me, I loved him.
“What’s wrong daddy?” Rose asked.
Goddamn me, I did.
“Nothing buddy,” I said. “Just thinking.”
Checking my phone, I read closer: the cow, the truth. So the end wasn’t in Wyoming. This would not be how, not with a whimper, bang, or cow. I’ll outlive the sons of bitches. Neil Reed was dead. Myles Brand — dead. Knight rages on, even as his only coaching peers, Dean Smith and Pat Summit, slide into the darkened shadows of the mind.
“Can we please go inside and play happy birthday?” Rose asked.
After the party, after reading Rose to sleep, I thought of Hemingway and Knight: big-little boys whose worst instincts grew bolder as they aged. They shared the DNA strand of American Genius that required violence. Skylights collapsed on Hemingway’s forehead, he tripped face first into campfires, successive plane crashes cracked his skull. How did Knight experience the collision, the moment when the sensors inside the Expedition sparked the solution of sodium azide and potassium nitrate, producing a pulse ofhot nitrogen gas launching the airbag with the force equal to a solid rocket boost into his face? Right on that beak of a nose. Blasted. Money shot.
In the whiplashed confusion inside the crushed vehicle of floating white dust — talcum powder, cornstarch — maybe Knight’s scrambled synapses and neurons triggered a question. Who? Who finally fought back? Was it Russ Brown of the Louisville-Courier Journal whom he aimed and fired a starter pistol at? Maybe one of the many strays from Cuyahoga Falls to Lubbock. Isiah? Thomas once said if he’d had a gun there were times he’d have shot Bob Knight. Maybe it was the revenge of Tommy Minkunda, a hunting buddy, whom Knight shot in the neck with a 20-gauge shotgun. Members of the ’93 IU squad? After losing to Butler, Knight greeted them at practice brandishing a shotgun. As the white dust settled, maybe Knight wondered if he was dead. Was this the afterlife?
No, just Karma, Wyoming. Moo.
Later, I looked it up. In 1930, after hunting in Wyoming with John Dos Passos, Hemingway (drunk) dropped Dos Passos off at a Billings train station and returning home, slid off an embankment of ice. Broken arm. In the hospital, Hemingway grew a beard. The next year he wrote“Death in the Afternoon.” Thirty years later, up in Idaho, he took a long-barreled, straight-stocked shotgun and blew out his brains.
The first glass door to Assembly Hall that Jason tried opened with a gentle push. We were thirteen years old and inside college basketball’s limestone Mecca. We’d arrived hours early to the Bob Knight Basketball School, a weeklong summer camp on the campus of Indiana University. After unpacking, we made the pilgrimage across campus.
The concourse featured a long trophy case, detailing Hoosier greats. While Jason dreamed in Georgia Tech gold and white, with a pantheon of Mark Price, Dennis Scott, Kenny Anderson, and his own dad, he too was a serial reader of “Season on the Brink.” He read Feinstein not for Knight’s 2 Live Crew freestyle profanity kicks, but because college basketball felt so very real.
Lingering at the modest NCAA trophies, I gave Jason statistics and stories he didn’t solicit or stop. We soaked in as much basketball as we could. That summer we’d been fixtures at his older brother’s AAU games. Keith’s team, the Atlanta Celtics, featured the future ’93 ACC-Rookie of the Year and the starting frontline of the ’96 Georgia Bulldog Sweet Sixteen team. Keith ran point, and later spent his senior year at the prep factory Oak Hill Academy, before briefly backing up Travis Best at Georgia Tech. During the games, Jason sat in the stands watching his brother as I kept an eye on the coaches.
They arrived early and late with constant Diet Cokes and cadres of assistants in tracksuits. Cremins. Tubbs. Crum. Huggins. They weren’t bad guys. Joey Meyer. Dale Brown. They were nice guys. Wade Houston. Hugh Durham. But they were just that — guys. Scaled to life, approachable, they huddled in the stands, faces blank, speaking in staccato that could break at a second’s notice into big broad Well Hellos! with huge smiles, hugs, and handshakes all around for moms, assistant principals, second cousins, and friends from around the way. Left alone, their posture snapped back. Straight-faced. Severe. I didn’t know what selling was then; I just knew Bob Knight wasn’t.
Bob Knight wasn’t some guy, but a force, an earthquake, a thunderclap. And as Jason and I slowly made our way down the dimly lit steps toward the darkened floor, we braced for the blast of that voice: What the hell are you two doing? Who let you in here?
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Joe Robbins/Getty Images
We stood on the baseline with the red banners above us, bigger in person than television, blown by the air conditioning, swaying softly. Jason never faced a basketball court where he didn’t feel he belonged and while I stood hypnotized, he headed straight to half-court and the center circle. Standing on the painted state of Indiana, he raised his arms to the invisible roaring crowd and the imaginary millions watching at home.
That first summer Jason played beautifully in Bloomington, even earning an audience with Coach Knight. The next summer, a few days before we were set to head back, Jason got into a drunken fistfight with a concrete wall. The wall won. Right hand, cast.
Back in Bloomington, I returned to Assembly Hall through the same unlocked door, and back down to the floor. That year I brought “Season on the Brink” as contraband company. In the dorm, I read, and in the strange summer camp silences, I felt two things. I suspected I wasn’t destined for greatness or even playing time, but I wanted to coach and teach. Knight had decided to become a coach in high school and sitting on the bench at Ohio State had sharpened his powers of observation and insight into the art of basketball.
One of Knight’s nicknames from his staff in Feinstein’s book is “The Mentor” which also played off Knight’s constant affection for older coaches like Henry Iba, Pete Newell, Joe Lapchick. In the book, Feinstein also shows how vital a role student managers played at Indiana and how many went on to coach. There was my path. Manage. Teach. Coach.
The primary teachers at the Bob Knight Basketball School were Indiana assistant coaches Ron Felling, Dan Dakich, and grad assistant Craig Hartman. They ran the camp. Felling’s niece was a classmate of mine back in Atlanta and each year I made sure to tell him she said hello. Felling would smile and slap me on the back as if I was some old, lost friend. Dakich’s constant deadpan, sardonic humor, turned lightly on the campers and heavy on himself. In the summer of ’92, as we collectively watched Jordan and the Bulls beat the Blazers, Dakich was asked more than once if he’d really shut down Air Jordan in ’84? “Why would you ever doubt me?” he’d say straight-faced to campers. Campers would look at each other and then back to Dakich: “Okay, but did you really stop him?”
On those summer mornings, we did spot the basketball genius Calbert Cheaney, an All-American, the Big Ten’s All-Time leading scorer, riding his bike up 10th Street to class, like clockwork. One night, walking back from our “Film Session,” Chris Reynolds and Greg Graham, the starting backcourt, walked past us by the arboretum carrying a load of brick-thick textbooks. While present day hoop nostalgia waxes poetic on the two seasons of Michigan’s Fab Five, that Indiana team of Cheaney, Graham, and Reynolds, owned the Wolverines (3-1) and the Big Ten (31-5).
The summer of ’92 stands out from all those I spent at Indiana. Knight was everywhere: getting out of his white Lincoln Town Car outside of the HPER Gym telling us to hustle, taking off a kid’s backward baseball cap inside the cafeteria, challenging campers to free-throw contests, which he always won. One night, in the McNutt dormitory, I was certain I was dreaming of his voice, which wasn’t uncommon for me in high school. Awake, I kept listening, and then I opened the door. At the end of the hall, Knight held a broom and dustpan and instructed two campers on the finer arts of sweeping. They’d been caught wandering into a cheerleading camp. Their punishment: run the sad stairs of Memorial Stadium in the morning and sweep the floors in the evening. Coach Knight wasn’t pleased with their sweeping standards.
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Photo: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
In ’92 when Knight spoke, the silence between his syllables shook, not with rage or brimstone, but care
Even the air around Knight’s customary talks in the morning and at night cracked with electricity. Back in April, Indiana had lost a heartbreaking Final Four game to Duke and Knight’s pupil Coach K. That same month, Patrick Knight had been kicked off the team after being arrested for public intoxication and yelling at a police officer.
Throughout his talks Knight sprinkled “Drinking, Drugs, Len Bias,” but saved the big one for the end of the week. I’d heard the same speech the previous year, but in ’92 when Knight spoke, the silence between his syllables shook. Not with rage or brimstone, but care. On the last night, he marched up and down the rows of children asking: “Why would you risk everything? Why would you not want to be the very best you?” Tears took shape in the corners of his eyes. “I’m proud of you. For the sacrifices you’ve made. For being here. For working hard. You came to Indiana to get better, compete, and get tougher.” Knight stood next to me, his voice shaking. “So boys. Make good decisions. Be smart. And remember, success is performing to the limit of your potential.” A charge shot through me and tears filled my eyes.
Knight was really talking about Patrick and I was thinking about Jason.
While I can’t speak for everyone attending the Bob Knight Basketball School in the summer of 1992, I think we all felt like Damon Bailey after he won state for Bedford North Lawrence. When reporters asked if Bailey was ready for Coach Knight, he said, “I’m his boy!” We were all his boys. At least, for that night.
The rest of my story at Indiana as a summer camper angling for a student manger position held very little drama. Each year, I returned to Bloomington. Each year, Jason declined. Each year, Ron Felling asked about his niece, my grades, and my plans. Each summer, I thanked Knight for the opportunity and told him how much it meant to me. Knight looked me in the eye and thanked me. We had our moment. I didn’t bring up the student manager job with him, but I did my last summer with Felling. I’d been accepted, somehow, to IU. I’d major in English. I wanted to coach. Could I be a student manager? Felling said to come by once I got settled. There was a process, he said, but “we’ll take care of you.” He smiled and we shook hands.
I never wanted to leave. I also never arrived. I ended up at Young Harris College in the mountains of north Georgia on a partial scholarship for Forensics and Debate. I wrote Knight a two-page letter and asked about the transfer policy for student managers. Knight wrote a prompt, polite reply, wishing me well and stating that all student managers start out as freshmen.
What did I miss by not being a student manager at Indiana?
I missed Dakich leaving for Bowling Green. I missed Felling telling Dakich on a phone call that all Knight seemed to do was “rant and rave” to which Knight, eavesdropping on the other line fired Felling on the spot, and moments later thrashed Felling to the ground. Of all his assistants, Felling served Knight the longest. Felling made sure Indiana signed Calbert Cheaney of Evansville and warned Knight of hyping Damon Bailey too much. I missed out on Patrick Knight joining the staff. Patrick, who testified in a legal deposition that his dad hadn’t gone far enough with Felling, said, “I would have beat the shit out of Ron.” I missed the transfers, the paranoia, faculty protests, zero-tolerance, student riots, and double-digit NCAA losses to Colorado, Connecticut, St. Johns, and Pepperdine.
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Ron Coddington/MCT
Instead, I hooped with Jason each night at the Young Harris gym. “Good,” Jason said. “You aren’t a basketball manager. You’re a basketball player.”
During the very first week of class, I had English 101 with Dr. Steven Harvey. An essayist and author, I only knew him as the intense and demanding man in cardigan who had the reputation as the hardest professor on campus. In one of his first lectures, Harvey explained how the Greeks had two concepts for time: chronos and kairos. With chronos every moment was equal. This was our waking day tick-tock, but kairos represented weighted time, the full moment. Harvey said, “Think of “Hoosiers” when Jimmy Chitwood rises for that final shot and the ball spins and rotates and arches toward the goal with so much depending on that one single shot.”
I quickly learned that Harvey was an ACC fan. I forgave him that as he forgave me hounding his office hours and lingering before and after class with questions large and small. His reputation for toughness was earned, but Harvey smiled a lot. His lectures and the shape of his voice suggested we lived in a world where there was plenty of light.
During that first quarter, we talked basketball. After finals, I gave him Joan Mellen’s biography on Knight. Harvey reviewed books for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. I wanted his impression, but longed for insight on how great teachers thought. Like Knight, Harvey had charisma and toughness, but the volume, pitch, and tone were all different. Reading the book over the holiday, Harvey wrote me a single page, single-spaced review.
In time, Dr. Harvey taught me the value of presence and showed me this most during my second year at Young Harris. On March 21st, 1996, I was in a single car, drunk driving accident in which Jason was killed. When I came back to school, Harvey invited me to office hours. When he asked how I was doing, he smiled ever so slightly and waited. And in that silence, I knew I had to shoot straight.
On Bob Knight, Dr. Harvey wrote:
I’ve never been a soldier or athlete so I might be missing something when it comes to Knight’s manner of teaching, but his constant brutality and berating of college students puts them in a perpetual place of fear. My work with students is to discover what is beautiful and true. Fear of anything, much less of me, is irrelevant on this quest.
Those words meant a lot to me in January 1996. Now, years later, they mean even more. In the days after the accident, I watched March Madness in a hospital bed with the TV muted. Indiana lost in the first round to Boston College, preventing a potential matchup with Tech that Jason and I desperately wanted to see. With that possibility gone, I was all in for Tech, but Cincinnati wiped them off the glass. On my last day in the hospital, Dr. Harvey called from Young Harris. He told me he was sorry. He wished me well. He said he hoped to see me on campus again soon. That was most of what he said, but not the sum. In his voice, I heard the simple refusal to submit to disaster as well an invitation to something larger.
Bob Knight was holding court in southern Indiana and it wasn’t clear when it was going to end. So Auerbach calls and says Bob, listen … We weren’t a rapt audience, but we paid cash to sit and listen. And I don’t know of eight greater words than, “America, America, God shed his grace on thee.” Rapture is rarely the point in children’s stories where simplicity reigns, good guys win, and the ending is always happy.
Knight was ostensibly speaking on behalf of New Albany High School Athletic Department. My wife Alice and I lived in New Albany where I taught writing courses as an adjunct for Indiana University Southeast and she taught art across the river in Louisville. Rose was two months old and unemployed. We were already semi-regulars at New Albany High School for Friday and Saturday night basketball games.
On the way to hear Coach Knight, Alice asked how long the speech would last. What if Rose got hungry? How would Knight respond to a red-faced, screaming infant? Like most of married life, I had few answers so I hedged my bets with pastries.
We parked in front of Honey Crème Donut Shop on Vincennes Street. Alice raised an eyebrow and we made our choices between homemade donuts, curlers, and éclairs. Walking down Vincennes Street with our donuts, coffee, and Rose in a Boba Carrier across Alice’s chest, Alice said, “So, over an hour, huh?”
Alice grew up outside of Athens, Georgia; she knew collective sports hysteria. Living in Hoosierland, I shared with her the small gems of seeing Sherron Wilkerson, Mr. Indiana ’93 on campus at IUS, finishing up his degree. Once, I pointed out Pat Graham, Mr. Indiana ’91, outside of Tumbleweed Restaurant in Floyd Knobs. I resisted the half-urge to ask both the question strangers had been hounding them with their entire adult life: What was he really like? Coach? Coach Knight?
What I couldn’t answer was Alice’s questions. As New Albany High School came into sight, along with a throng of folks in red and crimson, I told her if Knight came out fired up and particularly patriotic, it could take awhile.
“Why?” she asked, as Rose squirmed.
I told her the only things I knew from spending a lifetime of reading about Bob Knight was that his potential for tangential bromides depended on mood, climate, and diet.
We walked into the New Albany gymnasium lobby, which elicited a nostalgia that wasn’t exactly mine. New Albany had been my dad’s high school, my uncle’s, and cousins’. But I felt a similar pang when I listened to WHAS 88.1 and the play-by-play of Charlie Jenkins whose smoky-smooth, veteran baritone hit some Basketball-Pavlovian sweet spot resulting in sweaty palms and fingernail gnawing.
Earlier that spring at the Class 4A sectionals at Seymour High School, New Albany lost at the buzzer to archrival Jeffersonville. When the horn sounded, a scuffle broke out in front of us. I tried to remove an older, almost elderly man, all elbows, from the back of a rotund man in overalls and a John Deere seed cap. Three consecutive gentle blows to my back thwarted my peacekeeping mission. Turning around, I found a grandmother with a closed fist, screaming in tongues, a native hoops language I understood.
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The cult of Coach Knight remains in session
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Joe Robbins/Getty Images
Classification and school consolidation, be damned! Zone defense and dribble-drive offense, be damned! Damn the Wildcat blue and Cardinal red in the stands! Indiana basketball was very much alive in the Hoosier Hills Conference.
We walked through the gym lobby, past the New Albany trophy case, saying hello to friends from the YMCA and Farmer’s Market, and found my cousins. We visited across from the portrait of the ’73 Bulldog State Champs, a team of Afros, short-shorts, muttonchops, and Coach Kirby Overman. Overman infamously benched Larry Bird in the 1974 Indiana-Kentucky All-Star Game in the Hinkle Field House. The slight left Bird in tears and a scar he never forgot. Looking at the portrait amongst a lobby of time-warped Hoosiers, I reminded myself that the game is always, in the end, about players.
The cult of Coach Knight, of which, I was technically still paying dues was in session. Thirty-bucks, bleachers. Seventy-five for the floor. Adjacent from the trophy case was a long folding table with various Bob Knight and Indiana memorabilia such as Knight’s biography, “Knight: My Story” (co-written with Bob Hammel) and the coffee table book “Silver Knight” (written by Bob Hammel). The table featured Indiana practice shorts and shirts. The empire had foreclosed and the emperor was selling clothes.
I approached the table, and pointed to the Indiana practice gear. “You’re selling this?”
The man behind the cash box nodded.
“Do the proceeds go to a cause?”
The man sipped his Diet Mountain Dew.
“Does the money you make at this table stay at this school?”
He shrugged.
Alice tugged my arm and we headed with the crowd inside the gym. I wanted to kick something. Hoosier relics being pawned. They didn’t belong to him. During his time at Indiana, Knight took pride in never having a corporate logo anywhere in Assembly Hall. I heard him say this, each summer. In Knight’s Dunn Meadow farewell address, his final state of the Indiana basketball union, he warned of an Assembly Hall full of Pepsi Cola and Dog Biscuits advertisements.
But it was Knight himself whose Texas Tech sweater was soon tagged, NASCAR-style, with an auto parts store emblem. Knight starred in commercials in everything from fruit juice, German automobiles, and music-rhythm video games. In 2012, Knight held another passive-aggressive rummage sale when he auctioned off his Indiana championship rings. He cited the education of his grandchildren, who like so many, face an uncertain future of escalating college tuition. Unlike so many, they’ll be able to lean on their grandfather’s estimated net worth of between 15 and 25 million dollars.
Taking our seats in the stands, I scanned the quarter-capacity crowd. The empty seats coupled with the garage sale brought to mind “The Rabbit Hunter.” Early on Deford quotes former Indiana literature professor Edwin Caddy, who says of Knight, “He’s in a race now between overcoming immaturity and disaster.”
That was 1981. Thirty years later, with the race long over, what exactly did disaster look like?
Bob Knight marched, with measured steps, into the New Albany High School gym, to our polite applause. Clad in a yellow sweater and gray pants, he instructed us to stand and join him in the pledge of allegiance. Pivoting hard, he established position, jutting out his chin, and placing his hand over his heart. We turned, in obedience, and the DJ inside my head cued the singsong of Elmer Fudd, “Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit.”
Children’s stories provide routine, ritual, and assurance that all is well with the world, and sometimes those stories are for the teller as much as the child.
Children’s stories provide routine, ritual, and assurance that all is well with the world. Everything is functioning properly. Nothing to fear. Nothing is under the bed or in the darkness. Nothing will ever change. Sometimes those stories are for the teller as much as the child. For over ninety minutes, Bobby Knight rocked us to sleep with the same stories he’d been telling every summer up the street at Huber’s Restaurant in Starlight, Indiana at IU Varsity Club meetings. The only things new were the younger high school students in the stands, who had only vague notions of Michael Jordan and no clue who Henry Iba, Bill Russell, or Johnny Bench were. The stories kept going, asking for connective tissue, context, and compression.
Parcells came to our practice once after he’d won a Super Bowl and said, Look, Bob …
As Knight droned on, down south in Baton Rouge, Tiger Stadium was shaking and rocking as LSU battled Alabama under the bright lights. Geaux Tigers! Roll Tide! That sounded fun. The Honey Badger! The Process! I resisted the urge to check my phone. Bob Knight was holding forth in Indiana, telling us all a bedtime story.
It went on. And on. Ted Williams was obsessed with being both the greatest hitter on earth and the greatest fly-fisherman. Knight’s refusal to tell a sustained story involving the Indiana Hoosiers and his stalwart stance of refusing to return to Assembly Hall since being fired was rooted, somewhere, in Ted Williams’ refusal to tip his cap in ’60. He wanted to be like his hero. Yet, it wasn’t that simple. If Knight refused to come back to Assembly Hall, he still barnstormed Hoosier towns like Kokomo, South Bend, Fort Wayne, at bookstores, gyms, and schools soaking in the adulation. Knight wasn’t exiting into the catacomb dugout silence, God-like; Knight was trolling, like a retired, bizzaro Babe Ruth, in the lowliest Carolina league, taking very slow homerun trots.
One of the most important lessons I took with me from West Point remains that if you …
Alice rocked with Rose on the bleacher seat and I studied the spots on the gym floor I like to shoot from the most: top of the key, left corner, right wing. I thought of Assembly Hall. I thought of Jason standing at half-court, arms in the air. In his Dunn Meadow farewell, Knight hit on perhaps his truest statement when he said of Assembly Hall, “It is sort of a sacred place.”
Sports, at its best, provide pockets of the sacred. When I was a kid my dad built a backyard basketball court in front of our tool shed. Tall woods and the South Fork Peachtree Creek bordered the yard. Measuring the dimensions, he tilled the earth until the dirt was soft, level, compact. From a black walnut tabletop, he cut the backboard and fastened an iron rim. He carefully looped and securely laced a heavy, cotton net. Year after year, I shot basket after basket, in shade and silence. Under a canopy of magnolia, oak, and pine, I shot. I shot hoops in the dark and cold; I shot in the rain and mud. I shot for hours in the summer with the image of Jason guarding me. In the spring, before school, when the air was thick with honeysuckle, if I could do it just right and swish the very first shot of the day, a brief halo of pollen exploded from the net.
Like millions of other kids shooting hoops on playgrounds and backyards and blacktops, basketball became my home. But home is only as good as the people and relationships in it. Those people become family. When Knight was fired from Indiana, Mike Krzyzewski called it “tragic.” And it was. Not because Knight was a victim, but because his time at Indiana should’ve added up to something more.
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M. David Leeds/Getty Images
“Bob Knight was too old to change and too young quit”
What were the obstacles standing in Knight’s way of creating an enduring legacy? It wasn’t complicated. Zero-tolerance? Try common sense. All Knight had to do, in the words of former Indiana Trustee Ray Richardson, was “stop being a jerk. Try being a decent guy.” Or in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, a Hoosier who had seen war: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
In the end, I’m not sure what Knight saw when he looked out into the faithful crowd of fans and followers. Maybe in the blurry smokescreen of self-regard he didn’t see us at all. Not once did he mention the power of reading or wish the high school students in the stands well. Barely once in the onslaught of self-sentiment could he even speak the name of our shared motherland: Indiana, In-dee-anna, Indiana.
Instead, he put his hand up in an oddly formal gesture of farewell and held it there. Just like at Dunn Meadow back in 2000 after he asked everyone to bow their heads and observe a moment of silence in honor of himself and his family.
Never good at goodbye, I shouldn’t have expected more. In ’71, with a record of 11-13 and a longer record of manhandling cadets, Army refused to renew the contract of Private First Class Knight. On the end of his tenure at Indiana, Pat Graham quipped, “Bob Knight was too old to change and too young quit.” Old enough, he quit on Texas Tech in February ’08, midseason, skipping out of Lubbock. Before long he’ll simply wander off an ESPN set and into the night.
But on that Saturday night in southern Indiana, as he stepped away from the podium and began toward the exit, our scattered applause was uneven, unsure. Was it over? Finally?
Shoulders scrunched, head down, and hands in pockets, Bobby Knight sulked across the gym floor of New Albany High School, trailed by two ambling and armed officers of the law — the security detail he didn’t need — still, to the very end, the general he never was.
Pamz coaches Carver Mobb from the sidelines.
Chucky, Carver Mobb's quarterback.
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Quarterback Brandon Wimbush
Cornerback/running back Minkah Fitzpatrick
Coach Hansen, far right, with Brandon and his parents.
Coach Hansen, Minkah Fitzpatrick, and Brandon Wimbush
Minkah with Alabama coach Nick Saban. (Courtesy Minkah Fitzpatrick)
Brandon leads Prep against Bergen Catholic on national television.
Brandon with Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly and Coach Hansen.
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