Now he was angry. “You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You aren’t ready to write a book. You aren’t even thirty yet. Stop being in such a rush.”
I would have been angry at that remark, except I knew he was making it only to try to get me to back down. So I ignored it. He tried several other angles, including flattery. “You’re my best reporter. I can’t afford to lose you for an entire basketball season.”
“I appreciate that George. But isn’t one season better than forever?”
When he finally figured out I wasn’t changing my mind, he shook his head. “I’ll talk to [Ben] Bradlee. I’ll see what I can do.”
There really wasn’t much for him to do. I knew perfectly well Bradlee would say to him, “Hey, it’s your call. He works for you.”
I went back to New York to cover the Open. Never once in two weeks did George bring up the book or whether he had talked to Bradlee. I let it go, deciding I would deal with it when I got back to Washington. On the morning of the Open final between Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe, I was sitting in the press box killing time when I heard Bud Collins say, “John, you have a visitor.”
No, it wasn’t Abbie Hoffman. It was Katharine Graham, the former publisher and chairman of the board of the Post. Like just about anyone who had worked at the Post for any period of time, I’d met Mrs. Graham on a number of occasions. As a rookie night police reporter, I had been invited to one of her “new people” lunches in her private dining room. I still remember her asking us over dessert to tell her how we thought the paper could be better.
Not surprisingly, there was complete silence. None of us really wanted to tell Katharine Graham how to make her newspaper better, especially since it was pretty damn good anyway.
“Oh, come on, all of you,” she said. “I really want to know. That’s why I asked. Don’t be intimidated.”
“Well,” I said, “we don’t do a very good job in sports with getting things into the paper at night. The deadlines should be more flexible to get game stories into the paper, and we need to get more box scores into the home delivery edition.”
Mrs. Graham looked me right in the eye and said, “John, you need to be a little more intimidated.”
Gulp. Believe me, I was a lot more afraid of Katharine Graham than of John Thompson.
Now she was standing in the back of the press box talking to Bud when I walked up.
“John,” she said. “I just had to come up and see you. I have loved your tennis coverage this summer. It’s been wonderful.”
I knew Mrs. Graham played tennis and was a big fan. It was one of the reasons the paper covered so much tennis. “Thank you, Mrs. Graham, that’s so nice of you…”
“The kid’s good, Katharine,” Bud, always my agent, put in.
“Oh, I know,” she said. “And you know what I like best? The way you write about McEnroe. I’ve always liked him. I know he has that temper, but he’s so passionate. You’ve been able to explain him in a different way.”
“Well, when he’s not losing his mind out there he’s actually a good guy,” I said.
“Yes!” she said. “He is a good guy. I couldn’t agree more.”
A few minutes later she was gone, off to a corporate box to get something to eat before the match began. A few minutes before the 4 p.m. start, Pete Alfano and I went downstairs to our seats in the stands to watch the match. The view from the press box was, generally speaking, terrible, but Ed Fabricius, then the USTA’s PR guy, always managed to dig up about a dozen seats near courtside for some of the major media outlets. Pete, being from the New York Times, had one of the seats. I had the Post’s seat. Bud wasn’t with us—he sat with Alan King, who had the best seats.
The players walked out to start the match. McEnroe was serving. The ball boy tossed him two balls, and he shoved one into the pocket of his shorts as he always did. But as he turned to serve, there was one person who hadn’t quite made it to her seat in about the fourth row.
Katharine Graham.
I gasped in terror. McEnroe was staring at Mrs. Graham, bouncing the ball he was going to serve on the strings of his racquet. She had no idea what was going on because she wasn’t looking at him.
I grabbed Alfano’s arm. “This is it,” I said. “I’m done at the Post if he yells at her. I just told her what a good guy he is.”
Maybe it was because the match hadn’t started yet, but McEnroe—whom I’d once heard yell at a woman in Madison Square Garden, “Hey, lady, if you’d lose some weight you might get to your seat on time!”—never said a word. Mrs. Graham took her seat and you could almost feel twenty thousand people (starting with me) breathe a sigh of relief.
Lendl won the match in straight sets, a huge win for him because he had lost three straight Open finals—two to Jimmy Connors and one to McEnroe. Twenty-five years later, Lendl remembered the match almost point-for-point. “That was as big as any match I ever played,” he said. “John had me down 5–2 in the first, and I broke him back and won the set. After that, I was in control.”
None of us knew it at the time, but McEnroe, who was twenty-six, had just played his last major final.
I flew back to Washington the next morning and went straight to the office. George’s greeting was terse. “Go see Bradlee,” he said.
When I was waved in, Bradlee was seated behind his desk in his famous pose: chair back, feet up on his desk. He asked if I wanted coffee—the first and only time he ever offered me coffee in his office. I said no thanks.
“George says you want to do a book on Bobby Knight,” he said.
“I do,” I said. “He’s said he’ll give me total access and—”
Bradlee waved me off in mid-sentence and sat up in his chair. “John, let me be honest with you. I don’t think anyone gives a shit about Bobby Knight anymore. He’s yesterday’s news.”
I knew Bradlee was a sports fan, although more a Redskins fan than anything else. He might very well have been right; maybe the Olympics would prove to be Knight’s Last Hurrah.
“Ben, you might be right,” I said. “But I think he’s still interesting to a lot of people, and if he gives me the kind of access he’s promised—”
“What if he changes his mind the first time they lose a tough game?” he said. “What then?”
That thought had occurred to me on a daily basis since July, when Knight had told me to come on out to Bloomington. As mercurial as he was, I knew I would be at risk virtually all season: a bad loss, a disagreement—almost anything could leave me on the outside looking in.
“Good question,” I said. “I might be back here before Christmas begging you to take me back.”
He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged. “If you want to do it, I won’t try to stop you,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll sell five books outside the state of Indiana, but you’ll probably sell a few there. Look, if you really want to do it, go with God.”
I didn’t know whether to thank him or tell him, “Never mind, I think I’ll stay here where I’m safe.” I thanked him. I was going to Bloomington, and it was time to find an apartment near Assembly Hall.
5
The Honeymoon
THE PLACE I FOUND was less than a half mile away from the parking lot at Assembly Hall in the Dunhill Apartment complex. I got two bedrooms with about six pieces of furniture—a bed, a desk and a chair in the second bedroom, a table and chairs in the kitchen, and a couch in the family room. The cost was $225 a month. That was fine with me.
I arrived in Bloomington in the middle of a driving rainstorm. I also left several months later in a driving rainstorm and endured many others in between. It really didn’t snow all that much, but it seemed to rain almost every day.
Knight had told me to make sure I arrived in time to go with him to a speech he was giving that night in Lawrenceville, Illinois. I wasn’t sure why it was so important that I be there, but I wanted to get off to a good start so I left my house at three o’clock in the morning to make sure I arrived in time to unpac
k my car and get to the Cave by five o’clock that afternoon.
I made it with a few minutes to spare. Knight was in the shower, and the only person in the Cave was the one assistant coach I hadn’t met: Ron Felling. Jim Crews had left Indiana the previous spring to become the head coach at Evansville. Felling had been a hugely successful high school coach—he’d won four state titles in Illinois—and had coached, among others, Marty Simmons, who had been at Indiana for two years before transferring to Evansville.
“I’m the reason we’re going to Lawrenceville tonight,” Felling told me. “That’s where I used to coach. Coach is doing this as a favor to me.”
One thing I would learn quickly was that no one—I mean no one—who worked inside Assembly Hall ever called Knight “Bob.” His first name was Coach. This wasn’t uncommon in coaching, but it seemed especially true with Knight.
I liked Felling instantly. He had an easy smile and a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor. Perhaps because he was new, he seemed less intimidated by Knight than the other assistants. One of Knight’s favorite words on his long list of profanities was cocksucker. When he got really angry, everyone became a cocksucker. Whenever he would call Felling a cocksucker—which was often—Felling would laugh, shake his head, and say, “You know, Coach, I’m trying to quit.” Knight would try not to laugh or even smile at the response, but more often than not he did.
While Knight was getting dressed (he greeted me by saying, “Good thing you weren’t late, we’d have left without you,” causing me to resist the urge to say, “Oh God, if only I’d been late”), Felling told me how Knight had courted him to join his staff.
“We’ve known each other for years,” Felling said. “Recruiting, clinics, things like that. He called me about two in the morning, woke me up, and said, ‘So are you going to come and coach for me or not?’ I said I would so I could go back to sleep.”
It turned out we were flying to Lawrenceville on a four-seat plane. I wasn’t nearly as bad a flier back then as I am now, but climbing into that little plane with the rain still pelting down, I was not filled with confidence. In fact, I found myself thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? Am I nuts? I should be back at the Post getting ready to go out for a drink with my friends right now.”
The trip was bumpy, to say the least. If Knight was at all nervous, he certainly didn’t show it. “You know, John, if it’s your time, it’s your time,” he said.
“Bob, it might be your time,” I said. “But it is not my time.”
During the flight he talked about the ground rules for the book. Actually, the ground rule for the book. There was only one.
“Nancy and I are separated,” he said, talking about his wife. “I bought a house on the other side of town that I’m going to move into. Right now I’m still at home with [younger son] Patrick because she’s down at Duke on the rice diet.”
What he didn’t mention, which I would learn during the course of the season, was that he had started seeing Karen Edgar, a high school basketball coach from Oklahoma who would eventually become his second wife.
“I don’t want the book to be about my personal life. I don’t need Patrick and [older son] Tim reading details about their parents getting divorced.”
“Do they know?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said.
Actually, Patrick didn’t know at that point. He and I would become close during the season—Patrick was a high school freshman, Tim was a sophomore at Stanford—and Patrick told me after his mother came back to town that he thought his parents were going to work things out.
I told Knight I had no problem at all with that ground rule, that I thought it was a more than reasonable request, and that the book I wanted to write was about his relationship with the players and his coaches anyway. I asked if there was anything else.
He shook his head. “No. I want you to see how the program really works, and the way to do that is for you to have access to everything,” he said. “I think you’re going to really like these kids. They may not be the best basketball players in the world, but they’re terrific kids.”
We finally landed—somehow—in Lawrenceville. Knight wowed his audience, which was eating the kind of chicken that’s usually served at potluck political dinners. He even introduced me toward the end of his talk.
“John Feinstein is a friend of mine,” he said. “He works for the Washington Post but he’s going to spend this season with our team to write a book that I hope will show people just what goes into trying to have a successful basketball team.” He paused. “John, stand up so these people can see what a liberal Jew from the East Coast looks like.”
I stood up. I had no problem with that introduction. For one thing, it was accurate even though not all liberal Jews from the East Coast look like me. For another, that’s the nature of jock put-down humor. If I had introduced Knight to someone as a right wing Midwestern WASP, he would have laughed it off or said something like “Damn right I am.”
Even though it was my first day with Knight, I felt comfortable, except on the airplane.
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS were, for the most part, enjoyable. Knight waited several days before he introduced me to the team. Maybe he was waiting to be sure he was going to let me stay. I would walk into the locker room with Knight and the four full-time coaches—Felling, Kohn Smith, Joby Wright, and Royce Waltman—and stand in a corner near the door while Knight talked to the team. Most of the time the three graduate assistants—Dan Dakich, Julio Salazar, and Murry Bartow—would stand in the same general area. I had met all the coaches and the other key member of the staff, head trainer Tim Garl, right away.
The players didn’t quite know what to make of me, but really weren’t that concerned one way or the other about my presence. Knight was constantly bringing strangers into the locker room—hunting buddies; pals from Orrville, Ohio, where he’d grown up; coaches he’d known through the years. Sometimes he introduced people to the players, sometimes he didn’t.
“It was sort of routine for us,” Steve Alford told me later. “We just figured you were another one of Coach’s buddies.”
After about four days of practice, Knight announced to me as we were making the afternoon trek across the gym floor from the Cave to the locker room that today was the day I was going to be introduced to the players.
Knight explained who I was and why I was there and told the players that, unlike with other media members, I didn’t need to go through the sports information office to talk to them. The players were a little bit stunned when Knight told them I’d have complete access for the whole season.
“The only guy who ever had that kind of access on a regular basis was [Bob] Hammel,” Alford said. “And we didn’t even really see him as a reporter. He was Coach’s pal and we knew he wouldn’t write anything Coach didn’t want him to write.”
In fact, the players had two nicknames for Hammel, who was the sports editor and columnist for the local paper in Bloomington (then known as the Herald-Telephone). One was “the shadow,” because he seemed to go everywhere with Knight. Frequently, while on the road, Knight would decide to walk back from practice or occasionally from a game when he was angry. He would jump up from his bus seat and say, “Come on, Hamso,” and Hammel would jump up and follow him off the bus.
The other nickname for Hammel was “Pravda,” because the players considered him the official Bob Knight news service. Hammel knew almost everything about the team but rarely reported much of it. He was a very solid, professional newspaperman, but he had figured out early on that being in a position to report some of what went on in the Indiana basketball program by keeping Knight happy was better than being able to report none of what went on by making Knight angry.
Plus, he genuinely liked Knight. Even after Knight had thrown the chair, Hammel had defended him. Looking back on that column, he was genuinely chagrinned. “I realized that it read like a legal brief,” he said. “I acted as if Bob was my client rather than my subject.”
My nickname among the players as the season went on was “the invisible man.” That came from Alford, who was the player I became closest to. That made sense: Alford was the team’s best player and the captain. He was also the subject of more Knight tirades than anyone, in part because Knight knew he needed Alford to be a great player for the team to be good, but also because Knight knew Alford could take it.
After graduating, Alford actually cowrote a book called Playing for Knight. The chapter on his junior year was called “The Invisible Man.” I considered that high praise. He often referred to me as being in a room doing my “invisible act.”
That was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be there without being there, and as the days passed, it became easier. The assistant coaches were thrilled by my presence for one reason: it meant they had a chance to go home for dinner. Knight has never been good at being alone, even for short periods of time, which is one reason why he always had people hanging out with him before and after games. He needed an audience.
I was a brand new audience. Knight liked to go out to dinner somewhere just about every night. Usually that meant one or more of the assistant coaches had to go with him. Felling was the prime candidate because he was divorced. Once I arrived though, I stepped into that role. It made sense for me because Knight was expansive and talkative at dinner. Plus, I certainly didn’t have anything better to do back at the Dunhill Apartments.
I was also occasionally helpful to him during that period in his role as a single dad. Patrick was a freshman at Bloomington North High School and often needed to be picked up shortly after class or—once his high school basketball season began—shortly after practice. One day I volunteered to do the pickup. After that, I did it often. I didn’t mind at all. For one thing, I liked Patrick, who was bright, outgoing, and funny. For another, after I’d been there awhile, a thirty minute break from hearing yet again about the shortcomings of Alford, Daryl Thomas, and the two junior college transfers, Andre Harris and Todd Jadlow, was not a bad thing.
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