02

Dear Phoenix Suns,

OK. You know, that was really, really funny. Seriously.

I mean, I and many others have been mixing laughter with wide-eyed disbelief the last 24 hours.

And it was, like, so totally hilarious how you convinced us that you had traded for Shaq.

That you had given up Shawn Marion and everything you’ve worked so hard for the last few years for Shaq. (And not the young, amazing, inspiring Shaq, mind you. The old, getting older, “I have no knees” Shaq.)

That you, the Phoenix Suns, the same team that had revolutionized play in the NBA and brilliantly reminded everyone that you don’t have to hold the ball until the shot clock hits “02” to hoist up a low-percentage mid-range jumper, had traded for Shaq.

But we know it’s not true. We know it was just a big ha-ha funny and that you still have Marion and that Shaq’s still dragging down the Heat and that everything is still run-and-gun in too-hot Phoenix.

So, please … end the joke. Enough is enough. Turn the lights back on and remind us of how smart and fearless and uncompromising you are. Remind us why we set our DVRs with delight every time your name pops up next to TNT and 10 p.m. on the menu.

Funny is funny. You got us! We’re suckers. But, please, let’s return to an NBA world that makes sense.

Sincerely,

Desperately concerned NBA fan who’s afraid you’ve completely lost it

Posted by Brian T. Smith

There is so much absurdity in sports, especially on the national level, it’s easy to become detatched and unfeeling toward the emotion and human drama that are supposed attract spectators to athletics in the first place.

Sports writers can be remarkably unaffected by things like arrests, injuries - even deaths - that befall athletes, and can be downright flippant about most of these things, even when they happen to our heroes or those we admire and respect.
There was no tragedy that happened to Texas Tech coach Bob Knight on Monday, only a quiet resignation to end a 42-year coaching career during which he was arguably the most controversial figure in American sports - at least when he chose to be.
Still, there were those who asked me - and more probably will - if I, as someone who lived in Indiana for all but the past three years of my life and followed Indiana University basketball since before first grade, were saddened by Knight’s sudden resignation.
Strangely, I felt unaffected.
Though it was a surprise how and when it happened, Monday’s announcement didn’t shock me as much as I would have thought. Later, I realized why. Despite turning traditional Big 12 doormat Texas Tech into an NCAA Tournament team, the real shock had come years before, when Knight left Indiana.
Like anyone who followed IU during Knight’s 29 years at the helm, I’d revered Knight as a genius, a hero, something of a father figure - the Vince Lombardi of basketball.
Knight was the patriarch of hoops in a state that worshipped the game long before he was born in Ohio, one state away. Basketball had existed before Knight came to Indiana in 1971 - it just didn’t seem that way.
Knight helped build his legend by facilitating the Indiana basketball mystique, one that revolved around high school hoops before his arrival and conjured images of farm boys shooting at rickety goals affixed to their barns nestled within golden cornfields.
“Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts,” he once said, “but it was made for Indiana.”
Before Knight, hall of fame Indiana coach Branch McCracken built a program in then 1940s and 50s based on fast breaks and pressure, earning the nickname “Hurryin’ Hoosiers.”
Knight’s Indiana teams, however, played a style that matched its small-town, rural - mostly white - audience. Patience, screens and passing on offense, and strict man-to-man defense focused on teammates helping one another. Gene Hackman’s character Norman Dale in the movie “Hoosiers” is a Knight caricature in full, and Indiana fans ate it up.
Despite every controversy, every ugly episode, the IU die hards always stuck with him.
There’s no way to describe the devotion Knight’s fans had to him in a way those who hated him would understand. That was the thing about Bob Knight - it was either one or the other. He wouldn’t allow you to be indifferent or wishy-washy. You had to love him or hate him (though you could do both), and Knight gave you plenty of reasons for each.
No figure in American sports I can think of, with the possible exception of the great but detestable baseball star Ty Cobb, has ever been as much a lightning rod of both adulation and criticism as Knight. All week people have written about the contradictions that dominated Knight, the public figure.
He has been called a “classic bully” by former Illinois coach Lou Henson, with whom Knight shared a love/hate relationship over the decades. Former LSU coach Dale Brown, with whom Knight shared only hatred, virtually challenged Knight to a fight in John Feinstein’s book “A Season Inside,” a sequel of sorts to Feinstein’s classic “A Season on the Brink.”
“On the Brink” in itself offered a snapshot of the man who Bob Costas called the “most complex” man in sports. He would go out of his way to reach out to and help those who were less fortunate, answered his own fan mail, demanded his players set a good example and represent the University with class and mentored them well after they had left. In the same book, he rode forward Daryl Thomas until he was reduced to tears, hounded two-time all-American Steve Alford without mercy, cursed out officials and reporters and took out his anger numerous times on chairs, chalkboards and other objects.
Still, those who supported him only concentrated on the positive half of the book. It helped that Indiana won the national championship the year after the book was published.
No matter what Knight did, we stood by him. Using rape as the punch line to a joke? Connie Chung took it out of context. Getting ejected from an exhibition game against the Soviet Union and pulling his team off the floor? The officiating was terrible. Saying he used a whip as a motivational tool on black players like Calbert Cheaney? Even Cheaney found that one funny. Grabbing Neil Reed by the neck in practice and Kent Harvey by the arm for having the gall to say “what’s up, Knight?” Both those little punks had it coming.
Standards of behavior we would have considered unacceptable by anyone else were OK for Knight, because he performed every other task his job required to perfection. He won games and championships and produced young men who represented their school and community with dignity and honor, and made sure they graduated. Never did the NCAA find wrongdoing within the Indiana program, in an era when cheating was everywhere (Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kentucky).
As Knight’s many detractors have pointed out, many other coaches have done the same thing. Duke’s Mike Kryzewski, who will likely eclipse Knight’s record of 902 wins, often has been credited as having all Knight’s positives and none of the negatives.
True, others accomplished what Knight did. Others won more, others adapted to today’s game better. After 1993, when Indiana was ranked No. 1 most of the season, Indiana never really competed nationally again and Knight was never able to land the blue-chip recruits he got in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Still, we all expected Knight to stay at Indiana until he either retired or died. Even if Knight would have done what some worried he would do and attacked an opponent as Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes did in 1979, we would have forgiven him in Indiana.
Until Sept. 11, 2000, that is.
Exactly one year before the nation was sent into its current tailspin of paranoia, IU president Myles Brand fired Knight for violating a school-imposed “zero-tolerance” policy handed out after video of Knight grabbing Reed in practice surfaced.
When the zero-tolerance mandate was delivered in May 2000, I was a news reporter at a paper in Logansport, Ind., and was assigned a man-on-the-street article to get the reaction in the community. The majority of the people I asked were angry at Brand, who, after Knight had spent nearly 30 years doing his will with few consequences from the school, decided to hand out what most believed were unrealistic expectations, ones Knight would later say were never spelled out to him and Brand never clarified in public.
Finally, after Knight reprimanded Harvey for not respecting his elders, Brand - who know runs the NCAA - fired him.
The IU campus, and the entire state, were in an uproar. Instead of standing up for Harvey, one of their own, students made his life so miserable he quit school within a week. Thousands attended a tearful gathering at which Knight spoke for the final time at the school, where I’d be stunned if he ever visited again.
I remember having a conversation with a fellow IU fan the previous year in which we both agreed Knight should retire and the modern game filled with pampered prep stars going pro at 18 wasn’t suited for him. Still, his firing, far more than Monday’s resignation, was a shock. The coach I and everyone of my generation believed would rule in Bloomington forever, the one we had dreamed both we and our children would play for, was suddenly gone.
His tenure at Texas Tech was merely an afterword, a nice way to go out on his own terms and coach his way just a little longer. That, it seemed, was all he wanted, to do things his way, and his mid-season resignation was the perfect punctuation to his career.
There was no press conference, no passing of the torch to Patrick Knight, who had been named head coach in waiting years before. Knight just quit and was done, probably gone fishing. Don’t look for him to be interviewed by Andy Katz on ESPN or anywhere else. Since dealing with the media is not a job duty for retired fishermen, don’t be surprised in Knight is scarcely heard from again.
That kind of exit, more than any press conference where Knight could get in a parting shot at Brand, the media or anyone else, was vintage Knight. A day after the Super Bowl, during the season, with no fanfare and especially no media. That is Bob Knight.
With all the words that have and will be written in effort to describe the man, that may be the only way to do it. He is who his is, and nothing more. He may have changed us, but he never changed himself.

Posted by From the Archives

Love him, hate him.
Adore him, deplore him.
But no matter how you view him, there will never be another Bob Knight.
Knight’s sudden departure from the world of college basketball leaves a void that will never be replaced.
Knight was old-school before “old-school.”
He was a master. A coach’s coach. His coaching style oozed devotion, drive and desperation.
He was also a villain.
His well-documented antics have been replayed to the point of nausea.
Knight was hard to love and easy to hate.
The 902 wins are amazing.
The fact that he lasted so long and fought so hard is amazing.
But here’s what really stands out: Knight called it and coached it and talked it like he saw it.
And in the increasingly plastic/scripted/fake/overly rehearsed and overly thought-out world of collegiate sports, Knight was one of the last true and real characters remaining.
Now, he’s gone.
There will never be another Bob Knight.
And college basketball will never be the same.

Posted by Brian T. Smith

For many college football fans, the first Wednesday in February ranks right up there with Christmas and New Year’s on the holiday scale.
That’s because it’s National Signing Day, when thousands of high school stars around the nation make their choices known. Or as the ad for a day-long show on one cable network breathlessly screams, “Watch the top programs stock up on fresh talent!”
All true, but all misleading. Recruiting is an inexact science, mainly because it’s all projection with no guarantees that they’ll actually pan out.
Guess right often enough and your school might win a title.
Guess wrong more than you should – often for reasons you couldn’t control, like injuries or grades – and you might be looking for work a year from now. 
Which is why you shouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in all those recruiting analysts who seem to grade the same schools in the top 10 every year. The only thing that seems to be different is the order.
Sure, it’s nice to get those “five-star” recruits, but it’s also nice if you can have coaches who can draw that talent out of them once they get there.
Just look at Tennessee since its national championship of 1998. The Volunteers usually recruit well, thanks to the tireless work of coach Phillip Fulmer. Recruiting is his calling card and few coaches in the nation do it better.
Yet what have all those four and five-star guys gotten UT since 1998? Three Southeastern Conference championship game appearances, all of which the Vols have lost, and exactly zero Bowl Championship Series wins.
On the other hand, Virginia Tech rarely gets into anyone’s top 10 in recruiting. More often than not, the Hokies finish between 21 and 25 nationally.
But Frank Beamer’s coaching staff gets the most out of their players. While playing in weaker leagues like the Big East and the ACC has helped, Tech has won three conference titles and played for a national title in the last nine years.
What’s more, you can argue the Hokies’ most disappointing season in that span – 2003 – came with their most-hyped recruiting class playing the key roles. That year, Tech started 6-0 and was ranked third before careening to an 8-5 finish.
Obviously, if you give coaches their choice between the five-star players or three-star guys, they’ll go for the five-star guys every time.
But there is a caveat here – just because you haul in four five-star guys and seven four-star guys doesn’t mean you’ll be playing for a national title in three years.
It helps to be able to coach them some, too. 

Posted by The Continuous News Desk
College Sports

Kevin Tiggs scores team-high 18 points to lead ETSU

BY BRIAN T. SMITH
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
Johnson City – East Tennessee State guard Courtney Pigram bolted hard for a loose ball and jumped through press row.
When Pigram leaped back on the court, the disparate crowd inside the Memorial Center stood in unison, shouted and cheered.
The Buccaneers were back.
After being held scoreless for the final 7 minutes, 16 seconds of the first half and watching Kennesaw State head off on a 17-3 run, ETSU had finally regained its form.
“Coming out of that second half, I felt like I had to push my teammates to do better,” said Pigram, who scored 7 of his 10 points in the second period, dished out three assists and picked up a steal.
Pigram’s inspired play also keyed the Bucs’ come-from-behind rally in a raucous and controversial second half, and helped push ETSU to a 72-66 win over the Owls in an Atlantic Sun conference matchup before an announced crowd of 3,287.
“He’s a fighter, he’s a great competitor,” said Bucs coach Murry Bartow, referring to Pigram. “He’s player of the year in the league last year. And even in a win where he gets 10 points, he’ll be one of the happiest guys in the locker room. He’s just a winner.”
The Buccaneers (13-9, 7-2) improved to 9-1 at home this season with the victory. ETSU has now won five straight and is 8-2 in its last 10 contests.
“It’s different playing at home and it’s different when you’re not playing those money games – you lose a lot of those,” Bartow said. “Our chemistry is better and we’re getting a little bit better as a team.”
Kevin Tiggs scored a team-high 18 points, hit 10 of his 12 free-throw attempts and pulled down eight rebounds to lead the Bucs, while Travis Strong added 13 points.
Ronell Wooten scored a game-high 28 points – including seven made 3-pointers – for the Owls (6-17, 3-6).
Defense got ETSU going on Sunday afternoon. And defense saved the Bucs’ day.
ETSU forced 16 turnovers and scored 20 points off Owls giveaways. The Bucs also picked up 11 steals and outrebounded Kennesaw State 38-30.
“Those first 10 minutes of the second half, the key was [our press defense],” Bartow said.
ETSU jumped out to an early 11-2 advantage after Tiggs double-pumped and sent an inside jumper off the glass and into the hoop with 14:38 remaining in the first half. 
The Bucs’ then stretched their lead to 21-8 when Pigram sank a 3-pointer from the left baseline.
Yet the bottom suddenly dropped out for the Bucs.
As Kennesaw State’s half-court pressure defense came to life, the Owls’ milk-the-clock half-court offense slowly lulled the Bucs to sleep.
And while ETSU sputtered, the Owls found their mark.
Kennesaw State hit 53.8 percent (7 of 13) of its 3-point attempts in the first half, and the Owls’ hot hand from the perimeter allowed them to take a 31-29 lead into the break.
But a re-charged, re-energized ETSU emerged in the second half.
“We together now,” Tiggs said. “We’re not making the same mistakes we was making earlier in the season.”
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Posted by Brian T. Smith