One on One

by John Feinstein

  All these years later, Felling still calls Knight “Coach.” Old habits are hard to break. He doesn’t talk to many of the old gang anymore. When he ran into Royce Waltman a few years ago, Waltman told him he thought what he had done to Knight was wrong.

  “I told Royce that was fine if he wanted to think that,” Felling said. “But he wasn’t there, was he?”

  The hurt is still there in his voice as he talks.

  “There was nothing I loved more than being out on that floor coaching,” he said. “That was where I was most at home. I looked forward to practice every day because I felt like that was my time to shine. I was good at it.

  “There was a time when I thought I’d get a chance to have my own team, but, honestly, I don’t think Coach wanted me to leave. I’d hear that someone had been interested in me and he had told them I wasn’t interested. In a way it was flattering because I knew he felt like he wanted me around, but I would have liked to have taken a shot. If there was one thing I was good at, it was coaching basketball.”

  He still has friends in Bloomington and was welcomed when he showed up one day at football practice in the summer of 2010 to see some of his old IU friends. “Tom Crean [currently the Indiana basketball coach] came down and walked me through all the new practice facilities, gave me a complete tour,” Felling said. “We spent some time talking about what they’re trying to do over there now. He couldn’t have been any nicer.”

  The condo where Ron and Camie live is a couple of miles from the beach. Often they take their boat with friends and go into Naples to have lunch and then come back close to dinnertime. It is, for the most part, the sort of idyllic life one would hope for at the end of a successful career.

  “I’ve got just about everything I want,” Felling said. “My sons [who both still live in Indiana] are doing great. We spend Christmas up there so I can be with the [four] grandchildren. For the most part though, I stay wherever the weather is warm and I can be on a boat. Not a bad way to live at all.”

  No doubt. But as Felling sat in a seaside restaurant with a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico on a sparking early March day, there wasn’t much doubt that, given a choice, he’d probably still rather be in a gym on a cold winter night doing what he loved to do.

  “Remember,” he says as we walked back to the car, “the night we all went to see Damon? How much fun was that?”

  I remember. And it was fun.

  AH DAMON. AS PAUL Simon might have sung, “Where have you gone, Damon Bailey? An entire state once turned its lonely eyes to you.”

  Actually, Damon has gone home. And he’s very happy there.

  Damon Bailey was the surprise star of Season on the Brink. He showed up on Knight’s radar—and thus mine—sometime in January of 1986, an eighth grader who had already become a legendary figure playing middle school ball somewhere down along the back roads of southern Indiana. One night when I was in Indianapolis trying unsuccessfully to get Isiah Thomas to talk to me about Knight (“My mother always said if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” was his line), Knight and Bob Hammel drove down to Bedford to see the young legend play. The next morning Knight was like a teenager in love for the first time, describing everything Bailey did. He was insistent that Bailey—an eighth grader—was better than any guard Indiana had right now; not potentially better, better now. To say there was skepticism about this among the coaches is putting it mildly.

  “We play Saturday so we can’t go see him on the weekend,” Knight said. “But next Tuesday, we’re all going to see him.”

  A crusade was planned. Two cars would make the trip. Knight and three of his professor pals would go in one car; Royce, Felling, and I would go in the other car. “I don’t think I want to ride back with you, Felling,” Knight said. “I know you’re going to find something bad to say about the kid.”

  Knight led the way with Royce driving the chase car. Felling was in the back literally waxing poetic as we headed down the darkened roads of southern Indiana. “A boy, a hoop, a dream, a dark winter night…”

  I still remember walking into the tiny gym at Shawswick Junior High School, which seated about fifteen hundred. As I wrote in the book, if God had parachuted in through the roof, it would not have caused a bigger sensation than Knight walking in and standing by the door.

  It was easy to pick Damon out once we sat down because he was bigger—at about 6'1" back then—than anyone on the opposing team, Oolitic Middle School, and because he had the ball most of the time when Shawswick was on offense. It wasn’t long after we arrived when Royce asked Felling the question that brought about the answer that would be most repeated in future years by those of us who had spent any time with Knight.

  “So, Ron, what do you think?”

  “I think the mentor has slipped a cog.”

  Bobby Dwyer had first called Knight “the mentor” when he arrived at Duke with Mike Krzyzewski in 1980. Keith Drum and I had picked up on it, and whenever we referred to Knight in Krzyzewski’s presence, we called him “the mentor.” Never “the general,” that was someone else’s cliché. For years after that night at Shawswick, whenever Knight began doing Knight things and I would be asked what the hell he was doing, I would just say, “To quote Ron Felling, the mentor has slipped a cog… again.”

  When we walked out of the gym that night with Knight rattling on about the wonders of Damon, it was Felling who wouldn’t back down and declare Damon the next Jerry West. Knight asked both assistants what they thought. Royce, always the diplomat, said, “He’s pretty good, Coach, very good.” Felling just said, “I thought Jay Shidler was better in eighth grade.”

  Shidler had been a reasonably good player at Kentucky—nothing more—a few years earlier.

  I wrote about Bailey in Season on the Brink as much to show how carried away Knight could get with a young player, literally years before he would go to college, as anything else. Alford, who was assigned to take Bailey out to eat one night after a game, asked me what I thought about him since I’d seen him play.

  “It was hard to tell because there was virtually no opposition,” I said. “He’s very mature for a kid that age. I think he can be good, maybe even as good as you.”

  Alford laughed. “Come on, he’s got to be way better than me. I can’t guard anyone, remember?”

  “That’ll be true until Damon gets here,” I said. “By then you’ll be the toughest sumbitch Knight ever coached and poor Damon will be the worst player who ever lived.”

  Bailey’s presence in the book helped add to his rapidly growing legend. High school basketball in Indiana is a huge deal under any circumstances. Being a white high school star makes you an even bigger deal. Having been anointed by Bob Knight—in a book that was a number one bestseller—helped create four years of Damon-mania.

  “There were times I praised you for writing about me and times I cursed you,” a thirty-eight-year-old Damon Bailey said, sitting in his comfortable office inside the Hawkins-Bailey Warehouse in Bedford. It was the morning of the 2010 NCAA title game, which would be played ninety minutes away in Indianapolis. I had driven down from Indy early that morning to spend some time with Bailey. “On the one hand, being treated as a star was a lot of fun. On the other hand, I couldn’t just go to the mall with my girlfriend because people would recognize me and ask for autographs. I was a teenager. I didn’t think it was right to big-time anyone.”

  He had dealt with the hype caused by Knight’s comments about him the way almost everyone who ever crosses Knight’s path deals with anything Knight says. “When I read it, my first thought was that it was Coach Knight being Coach Knight,” he said. “I thought I was pretty good, but I knew I wasn’t that good.”

  Bailey was never the type to big-time anyone. I first met him when he was a high school sophomore, when I went to one of his games as part of my research for A Season Inside. I had been asked, “How’s Damon Bailey doing?” so often I thought I should go and try to answer the question.
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  The answer was quite well. Bailey was a great high school player, a four-time first team All-State player at Bedford–North Lawrence High School. As a senior, just like Alford, he was Mr. Basketball in Indiana, and he ended his high school career in absolute storybook fashion by scoring the last eleven points in the state championship game to bring BNL from six points down in the last two minutes to win in front of more than 41,000 people in the Indiana Hoosier Dome. The state championships had been moved to the Dome in large part because of Bailey’s overwhelming popularity.

  When I first introduced myself to him after that game in 1988, I told him I hoped the book hadn’t caused him too many problems. “Nah, it’s been fine,” he said. Then he smiled. “Sometimes people do expect a lot of me though, after what Coach Knight said.”

  Bailey handled it all remarkably well. “What people sometimes didn’t understand is that I had Coach Knight in my life before Coach Knight was in my life—that was my dad,” he said. “He coached me until high school and he was always very tough on me. I never minded having demands put on me because I loved to play and I thought I always gave everything I had. So my dad getting on me didn’t bother me most of the time, and Coach Knight getting on me didn’t bother me most of the time.

  “Both my parents were strong people in different ways. They both made sure I never got a big head. My dad was Coach Knight—always demanding more, getting on me. My mom was more like Dan Dakich [who was a full-time assistant during Bailey’s years at Indiana], the one who talked quietly and told me not to get too upset about what my dad had said.”

  Wendell Bailey was the transportation director for the North Lawrence school district. Beverly Bailey was a bank teller. “I grew up dreaming of going to Indiana,” Damon said. “To me Coach Knight was Indiana. If he had left before I got there, would I still have gone there?” He paused and nodded his head. “Probably.”

  He committed to Indiana as a junior, although he did give some thought to going to Louisville, which was about the same distance from home and wouldn’t have involved carrying the hopes and expectations of an entire state—not to mention Knight—with him to college. But Indiana was his destiny, and to a large degree, he lived up to all the hype in college.

  In his four seasons at Indiana, the worst the Hoosiers did was a trip to the Sweet Sixteen. From 1991 to 1994, Indiana went to the Sweet Sixteen, the Final Four, the Elite Eight, and the Sweet Sixteen again. The Final Four game in 1992 was the loss to Duke on the day that started the almost ten-year Knight-Krzyzewski freeze. Coincidence or not, in Knight’s last six seasons at IU—after Bailey’s graduation—Indiana never reached the Sweet Sixteen again.

  It was during Damon’s freshman year that his younger sister, Courtney, was diagnosed with leukemia. Damon had been forced to leave a game at Michigan with a thigh bruise. On Monday, after getting treatment, Damon walked back into the locker room to get ready to join the rest of the team on the floor for practice and found his father and Knight waiting for him.

  “Honestly, my first thought was that my dad was upset with me because I’d had to come out of the game,” he said.

  He wishes now that had been it. Instead, his father and Knight quietly explained to him that Courtney had leukemia. “This happens to other people,” was Damon’s first thought. His second thought was, “This is my little sister. She’s a high school freshman. This isn’t right.”

  When he went to see her, he felt better. “She wasn’t the least bit down,” he said. “She said she was going to fight it and beat it—and she did.”

  A little more than three years later, Damon Bailey played his last home game at Indiana. He was going to graduate as the school’s sixth all-time leading scorer, with 1,741 points. He had been a four-year starter on very good teams. In his office is the Sports Illustrated cover he was on in December of 1993 with the headline “Hoosier Hero.”

  He had been all of that for eight years.

  Knight always insisted on holding Senior Day ceremonies after the last home game was over rather than before it began. He didn’t want players getting too emotional before they played. This created some pressure because a loss could put a damper on those ceremonies. In 1985, after Indiana had lost to Michigan, Knight refused to take part in the ceremony for Dakich and Uwe Blab. “You’re on your own,” he told them.

  Before the game, Damon told Knight that he wanted to recognize Courtney when it was his turn to speak. Knight said that was fine. Indiana won the game and Bailey spoke emotionally about his definition of courage. “I get cheered, I get all the hoopla because I can dribble a basketball and shoot a basketball,” he said. “Courtney is the one who should be cheered. She’s been through a lot more than I have.”

  It was warm and sweet—and a few minutes later it was largely shattered because Knight decided to read a poem when it was time for him to speak about the seniors. Actually it was a lyric from a rap song. Knight had been under a lot of pressure—again—that season for his behavior. He had head-butted one player and had appeared to kick his son Patrick, who, like Bailey, was a senior on that team.

  And so, in response to all the (of course, unfair) criticism, Knight concluded his senior day speech by saying, “When my time on earth has gone, and my activities here are past, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass.”

  Naturally, most of the crowd hooted and cheered when Knight was finished. Naturally, that was the clip shown a million times over the next week. Did it bother Bailey that Knight couldn’t allow Senior Day to just be Senior Day and not step on his sister’s moment?

  “Like I said, it was Coach Knight being Coach Knight,” he said. “That’s a bittersweet day under any circumstances. I gave him everything I had for four years, I do believe that. I had played hurt that year, I had a torn muscle in my abdomen. What got me through it was reminding myself that my sister was dealing with a lot more pain than I was and that she wasn’t complaining. I wanted to make that point.”

  He smiled. “I got to make my point.”

  Bailey’s career ended with a round-of-sixteen loss to Boston College. I remember that game, played in Miami, because Patrick Knight was on the floor for the final couple of minutes. When the buzzer sounded, he made a point of walking over to press row to shake hands with me. It’s a shame Texas Tech didn’t work out for Patrick, but he’ll do fine coaching at Lamar. I’d say he’s a good kid, but he’s forty years old now. I’m proud to have been his babysitter.

  Not long after that game, Bailey saw a quote from his coach that really hurt him.

  “Coach said, ‘If there was ever a player I felt I failed with, it was Bailey,’ ” he said, able to recite it almost word for word sixteen years later. “He said he got less out of me than anyone he’d ever coached. All I knew about my career at Indiana was that I gave Coach Knight everything I had to give—whatever that was. That’s what I said when I was asked about it because that was how I felt.”

  Of course, in Knightworld, the bad guy in that exchange was Bailey.

  It was soon after he graduated that I crossed paths with Damon again. He had been drafted in the second round by the Indiana Pacers and was on injured reserve for the ’94–95 season after he had torn a patella and ended up having to have surgery on both his knees. That was the fall of my aborted book involving Larry Brown, so I ended up sitting behind the Pacers bench with Damon on several occasions.

  It was funny because I sensed a strange bond—not a closeness or even a friendship—but a bond because Damon knew that I understood what he’d been through. I had watched Steve Alford go through the almost identical experience: the difference being that Alford had ended his career on a national championship team, so Knight—after hammering him for most of four years—ended up talking about him as if he had invented basketball.

  I reminded Damon, not even being aware at the time of what Knight had said about him, of something I had written in Season on the Brink. “It is a crisp October day in 1990. Damon Bailey, Indiana freshman,
fails to help on defense. Knight stops practice. ‘You know, Bailey, when we had Alford here he was so much tougher than you it wasn’t even funny. Why, I never had to talk to him about playing defense even once in four years!’ ”

  I didn’t remember exactly what I wrote, but when I brought up the passage to Damon he laughed. “You had that one right,” he said.

  Bailey never played in the NBA. He sat out that first season, didn’t make the Pacers the next year, and landed in Fort Wayne in the CBA. The good news was he was such a big star in Indiana that he single-handedly sold a lot of tickets for the team. He was paid far more than the typical CBA player because he sold a lot more tickets than the typical CBA player.

  “There was no salary cap,” he said. “So they could pay me as much as they thought I was worth.”

  He was in a couple of NBA camps and played briefly in Europe, but Fort Wayne was the best place for him. Then Isiah Thomas bought the league and put in a salary cap: $40,000, a fraction of what Bailey had been making. He was still fighting various injuries. One day in the fall of 1999 he went to Keith Smart—another former Indiana star—who was coaching the team and said simply, “It’s time. I’m done.”

  He went home to Bedford and began working full-time at Hawkins-Bailey, a business he and a friend had launched soon after he graduated from college. “We sell preventive maintenance products to coal mines and limestone companies, and lubricants like Castrol for heavy machinery,” he said. “My partner did most of the work while I was still playing. Now we’ve built the company to twenty-one people and—last year—eighteen million dollars in sales.”

  The economy hurt business, but not that much. “People still need to run furnaces,” he said.

  He has also had summer camps around the state for years, running as many as eighteen at one time. In Indiana, the name Damon Bailey is still magical. “What’s changed is when we first started the camps, kids came because they knew my name,” he said. “Now kids come because their parents know my name.”