Knight’s father died a decade later, when Bobby was 29. In those 29 years, Pat Knight owned only three automobiles. Most places, he walked. He rarely tipped; “Nobody tips me,” he would say. The only thing he ever bought on time was the house on North Vine Street. And he hated to do that. He took out a 20-year mortgage and paid it off in 4-1/2 years. He gave up golf and many other pleasures until he could square accounts. Now, you see, now we are talking about discipline. “My father was the most disciplined man I ever saw,” Bobby Knight says. “Most people, they hear the word discipline, and right away they think about a whip and a chair. I’ve worked up my own definition. And this took a long time. Discipline: doing what you have to do, and doing it as well as you possibly can, and doing it that way all the time.”
Pat Knight was very hard-of-hearing, which limited his communications with his son. He would turn off his hearing aid every night and read the evening paper, front to back. “And he believed every word he read,” Knight says emphatically, explaining why he becomes so distraught when the press fails to meet his expectations. Pat also introduced his son to hunting and fishing, and to this day that’s Bobby’s escape. There are no outsiders to louse it up; it’s as pure, God willing, as basketball should be.
“People are always surprised when they hear about my fishing,” he says. “Everybody thinks I’m going to get so wound up I’m going to have to leave in five minutes. But I don’t carry over that stuff you see on the court. There’s nothing I enjoy more than winding down some river, floating along, watching for deer, counting the squirrels.” A warm smile, a pause, and then: “And nobody knows what you’ve done that day except you and the guys involved.”
IV: WOMEN
This particular day, he had been away, hunting down in southern Indiana with some of the guys. Nancy had a meeting to attend in the evening, but she passed it up, because Bobby was late getting back. She cooked a huge, scrumptious dinner, but apparently that’s standard fare at the Knights’.
Whatever other ambiguities Knight has to deal with in these cloudy times, Nancy isn’t one of them. “She’s just a great coach’s wife,” he says. She knows her man, too, knows not to intrude on the game. When Indiana won the NCAA in Philadelphia in 1976, Knight and some old friends from basketball and Orrville went out to dinner afterward—the victory celebration, the culmination of his career. Neither Nancy nor any other woman was included.
Says Steve Green, one of Knight’s better players, who graduated in 1975, “He feels women are just an obstacle that must be overcome. Players’ girl friends didn’t really exist for him. Just didn’t exist. If he heard me talking to someone about my wedding, he’d be yelling, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it!’”
It is instructive that Knight’s language seldom goes beyond the anal stage. In the course of a day, he describes an incredible number of things being done to the derriere: it’s burned, chewed out, kicked, frosted, blistered, chipped at, etc. Plus, almost every time he loses his temper, there is invariably a literal bottom line, involving the suggestion that the posterior be used as a depot—for money, a whistle, the Time and Life Building, what have you. But, when addressing the fairer sex, Knight has a reputation for purposely expanding his anatomical vocabulary to include graphic references to the male genitalia. This curious proclivity has offended people of both sexes and, perhaps more than anything, has tarnished his personal reputation.
One of Knight’s heroes is Harry S. Truman, which is why Give-’em-hell Harry is conspicuously honored by bric-a-brac in Knight’s office. But this graphic assessment of another president, Lyndon Johnson, by columnist William S. White, is eerily applicable to Knight: “His shortcomings were not the polite, pleasant little shortcomings, but the big ones—high temper, of course, too driving a personality, both of others and himself, too much of a perfectionist by far . . . Curiously enough I think one of the reasons he didn’t go down better . . . was that his faults were highly masculine and that our society is becoming increasingly less masculine; that there’s a certain femininity about our society that he didn’t fit into.”
On the subject of Bobby and women, Nancy Knight demurs: “I certainly couldn’t have been married more than 17 years to a man who hates women. But I can understand how Bobby feels about some of them. I believe a woman should try and stay in the home. I’ve never been anything but very happy and satisfied to spend my life raising a family.”
Nancy is, really, the only woman who ever came from the outside into Knight’s life. She isn’t pretentious, and their sprawling house, hidden in the woods just outside of Bloomington, is warm and comfortable. But those who would deal glibly in harsh housewife stereotypes must be careful. Everyone who knows the Knights well has the same one secret: Nancy influences Bobby more than you ever would guess.
Like many coaches, she often speaks for her husband in the first person plural—“We got the job at West Point”—but in neither a proprietary nor insecure way. He has the court, she has the home. It’s defined.
Nancy acknowledges that Bobby’s disputes with the press may well be exacerbated by her overreaction to criticism of him. “I read about this ogre,” she says, “and he’s the gentlest, kindest person to his family. He does so much good everywhere, I just can’t stand to see the man I love being torn apart.”
It would also seem that Bobby is equally protective of Nancy. His seemingly exaggerated responses in two major controversies may be traced in part to the fact that Nancy was involved peripherally in each. His protracted altercation with this magazine [Sports Illustrated] centers on disputes he has had with Senior Writer Curry Kirkpatrick, who did a piece on the Hoosiers in 1975. But Nancy was also personally wounded by a throwaway line of Kirkpatrick’s, just as she had been by a passing reference another SI writer, Barry McDermott, made in an earlier article. In trying to humorously mock Knight’s martinetism, McDermott suggested that the Hoosier players had gone over to the coach’s house for a holiday meal of bread and water. Nancy, who prides herself on being a gracious hostess and accomplished cook, took the crack literally. “I cried and cried,” she says.
Then there were the 1979 Pan Am Games. Puerto Rico was, in many respects, an accident waiting to happen. Those who know Knight best say the episode traumatized him, and while he’s a chatterbox, he talks compulsively on this subject. And he still won’t give an inch. “There is no way I was going down there and turn the other cheek,” he says. “If there was trouble, I was ready to give it right back to them. The first day we were down there, they burned some American flags. There was tremendous resentment toward the United States, tremendous hostility. Listen, America means a lot to me. If the guy . . .”
What guy?
“The Guy. If The Guy says tomorrow, hey, this country is in trouble and it needs you in this position or that one, then I give up coaching tomorrow and go.”
So, even before the officious San Juan policeman threatened him—cursing him, poking at him—Knight was simmering. Then he became concerned for the safety of Nancy and his two sons. “It was terrifying,” she says. “We had to change apartments. I couldn’t sit in my seat at the games. I had to stay at the press table. I feared for my life and my children’s.”
However Knight behaved in Puerto Rico—“You have no respect for anybody. You treat us like dirt. You are an embarrassment to America, our country. You are an Ugly American,” a Puerto Rican sports official snapped at him after the Pan Am basketball final—it must be understood that Knight perceived, correctly or not, that the three things he values most in his life were being menaced—his family, his country and his team.
V: PLAYERS
Late in his senior year at Ohio State, Knight considered a job at a high school in Celina, Ohio, as the coach of basketball and an assistant in football. He liked the place, but walking back across the school’s gridiron, he kicked at the turf and shook his head. “I thought, if I’m going to be a basketball coach, I can’t be diverted,” he says. “I wanted vertical concentration. That’s still the
essence of my coaching.” So he took a lesser job as a basketball assistant, without any football responsibility, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. In his first game as head coach of the 10th-graders, he broke a clipboard.
Intensity?
A year later, with Taylor’s help, the Brat from Orrville got the assistant’s post at West Point under Tates Locke, enlisting in the Army to qualify for the job. When Locke left in 1965, the brass stunned everybody by giving Pfc. Knight the job. “I’ve never had any apologies for being a head coach at 24,” he says. “I was making $99 a month then. I have no sympathy for people who don’t make progress because they won’t accept the pay somewhere.”
Money has never motivated Knight. He has turned down raises, preferring that the money go to his assistants, and he professes not even to know what his salary is—except that, relative to what other teachers at Indiana make, it’s too much. This is not to say, of course, that Knight wears a hair shirt. He has a television show, a summer basketball camp, the free use of a car, and, he volunteers, Checkers-like, “I did take a fishing rod once.” Also, it’s an absolute point of pride with him that he must be paid as much as the Hoosier football coach, Lee Corso. But just as pointedly he has advised alumni and the commercial camp-followers who grubstake coaches on the side to take a wide berth. Recently, however, Knight decided he was a fool to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he solicited bids from shoe companies that were willing to pay him in the hope that his players would wear their sneakers. Adidas won, but instead of sticking this “pimp money,” as he calls it, in his own pocket, Knight is turning it over to the university.
This isn’t going to endear Knight to the coach who’s looking to put a new Florida room on the house, just as a lot of Knight’s colleagues weren’t thrilled two years ago when he kicked three players off his team for abuses of training rules (drugs, obviously), and then trumpeted that he was the only coach extant with the “guts” to live up to his principles. But his honor even exceeds his smugness. “He just doesn’t cheat,” says Newell. “Never. Bobby doesn’t even rationalize. Instead, what he does do is the single most important thing in coaching: he turns out educated kids who are ready for society.”
Now Knight is on an even broader crusade, trying to impose on others, by legislation, his devotion to academics. He would like the NCAA to pass a regulation that would deny a college some of its allotment of athletic scholarships if its players don’t graduate within a year after their eligibility ends. That is, if a coach has five so-called student-athletes finishing up on the team in 1981 and only two graduate by 1982, then the coach can only replace the five with two new recruits. “With this, you’re making the faculty a police department for the NCAA,” Knight says. “Even if you can get a few professors to pimp for a coach, you can’t buy a whole damn faculty.” He laughs, devilishly. “And how can a coach vote against this plan? How can anyone vote publicly against education?”
Nothing pleases Knight as much as the success his players have had off the court. Indeed, he uses their accomplishments to justify the controversial “way we operate,” saying, “Look, if all our players were losing jobs, I’d have to reassess my way. And if I heard some of my old players blistering my ass for the way I run things, I’d have to reassess. But, you see, despite all the crap you read, the only ones who’ve ever complained are the kids who didn’t play, got frustrated and quit.”
But, tit for tat, it may also be true that Knight’s players have a high success rate because only success-oriented types would select Indiana basketball in the first place. In other words, the twigs only grow as they were bent a long time ago.
Knight’s honesty extends to his recruiting. When a recruit is brought to Bloomington, he’s introduced to the whole squad, and not merely sequestered with a happy star, a Mr. Personality and a pretty cheerleader. Parents of recruits are encouraged to talk with parents of present squad members. Knight doesn’t have a missionary instinct. He isn’t, he says, “an animal trainer. Recruit jackasses, they play like jackasses.” Instead: “We’ve drawn up a personality profile, and you might even say it’s a narrow-minded thing.”
So, black or white, rich or poor, the neatly groomed Indiana players tend to be well-intentioned young things, upwardly mobile, serious about education and so well adjusted that they can endure Coach Knight’s wrath in fair exchange for the bounty of his professional genius. Calculated coach, calculated players.
The hand-picked Hoosiers are expected to speak to the press, even in defeat, the better to mature and cope. They dress in coats and ties on game days, and during the season must wear trim haircuts, without beards or mustaches.
Significantly, things have gone awry only since the national championship season, soon after which a number of players quit, some castigating Knight, and two seasons after that when the coach bounced the three players for disciplinary reasons. “All of a sudden I won, and I thought I could be a social worker, too,” he says. “I thought I could take a guy off death row at Sing Sing and turn him into a basketball player.” Never again. The prime result of that convulsion has been an even more careful weeding-out process. A single blackball from a team member can eliminate a prospect from consideration, and as a consequence, a sort of natural selection of the species has occurred. The system has become so inbred that, as contradictory as this sounds, rough-tough Knight’s team now includes a bunch of nice Nellys. The Hoosier basketball coaches all worried about this even before this rather disappointing season—Indiana was 10–6 at the end of last week—confirmed their fears. Knight himself, like a grizzled old soldier, waxes nostalgic about the single-minded roughnecks who chopped their way to victory for him at the Point.
Had Knight never won a game at Indiana, he would have secured a lasting reputation for his work at Army, where he succeeded with little talent and no height. At Indiana, as well, the mark of Knight as coach goes far beyond his mere W–L totals. When he arrived in Bloomington, the entire Big Ten played run-and-gun, in the image of Indiana, the conference’s traditional lodestar: racehorse ball, the Hurryin’ Hoosiers. It wasn’t just a catchy sports nickname. It was a real statement. The Hurryin’ Hoosiers. The Bronx Bombers. The Monsters of the Midway. There aren’t many of them. But no matter how much the old alumni whined at the loss of tradition and hittin’ a hundred, Knight went his own way. From Knight’s arrival through last week, Indiana has gone 215–65, but, more significantly, the average Big Ten score has declined from 74.0 to 67.5 in that span.
His strategic axioms are firm—no zones, disciplined offense—but he exercises latitude year by year, permitting himself to be dictated to by his material and the state of the art. He has such consummate confidence in his ability as a coach that he suffers no insecurity about crediting the sources of his handiwork. It all came from other coaches, didn’t it? His defense is based on the old Ohio State pressure game, which Taylor had borrowed from Newell. His offense is an amalgam of the freelancing style used at Princeton in the early ’60s, by Butch van Breda Kolff (“The best college coach I ever saw”), intertwined with the passing game that the venerable Hank Iba employed at Oklahoma State.
This season Knight was willing to modify some of his most cherished tenets to permit Isiah Thomas more artistic freedom. But, ultimately, those who would survive at Indiana, much less succeed, must subjugate themselves to the one man and his one way. Incredibly, 10 of Knight’s former assistants are head coaches at major colleges, but those who coach under him are strictly that: underlings. Among other things, they aren’t allowed to utter so much as a word of profanity before the players. Only Bobby.
He prowls the practice court, slouched, belly out, usually with a sour, disbelieving expression upon his visage. He is dressed in Indiana red and white, but of a different mix-and-match from his assistants’. Except for a few instructions barked out by these subordinates, the place is as silent as a tomb. Only the most privileged visitors are permitted to watch this class.
The chosen few watch on two levels of consciousness: wha
t they see before them, and what they anticipate Coach Knight might do next. If he really contrives to make a point, he will perhaps merely rage, or pick up a chair and slam it against the wall, or dismiss a hopeless athlete. It’s like technical fouls—you don’t ever get them, you take them. And, like every good coach, Knight knows how to deal with the unexpected. One day a few years ago Knight kicked a ball in anger. He caught it perfectly on his instep and the ball soared toward the very heavens, straight up. More miraculously, when it plummeted back to earth, it fell into a wastebasket, lodging there. It was a million-to-one shot, something from a Road Runner cartoon. But nobody dared change his expression. Finally, Knight began to grin, then to laugh, and only at that point did everyone else break up.
“I’ve always said, all along, that if I ever get to a point where I can’t control myself, I’ll quit,” Knight says stoutly, though unmindful, perhaps, that he can drive things out of control even as he skirts the edge himself.
VI: MORE RABBITS
John Havlicek once said, “Bobby was quite a split personality. There were times when we were good friends and, then, like that, times when he wouldn’t even talk to me.” Knight says, “My manners set me apart in a little cocoon, and that’s something that’s very beneficial to me.” Maybe, but too many people humor Knight instead of responding to him, and that may be the single real deprivation of his life.
The one group of people who can still treat him honestly are the older coaches, Dutch uncles, who have earned his respect. A few years ago he took on as an assistant Harold Andreas, the man who had first hired him as an assistant at Cuyahoga Falls. What a wonderful gesture! Andreas retired from coaching in 1977. And so, in Andreas’ place as the father/grandmother figure, Knight hired Roy Bates, who used to coach one of Orrville High’s rivals. Bates, who recently took a leave of absence because of poor health, is a no-nonsense fellow with a crippled left arm, whose teams were 441–82 in basketball and 476–52 in baseball. Bates adored Knight, and though Knight had three younger assistants, it was the older man he was closest to, literally and otherwise. Bates always sat next to him on the bench.
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