By From the Archives

Published: February 5, 2008

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.