A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  When a manager politely asked Williams if he would please leave, the I.U. vice president shook his head. “You heard what he said,” Williams told the manager indignantly. “For his sake, I hope he wasn’t referring to me.” When the manager told Knight what Williams had said, Knight broke up.

  But even Thomas would admit that Knight’s number one target during the first days of practice was Alford. The little kid, as Bob Hammel affectionately called him, could do little right. He was shooting superbly and consistently, but Knight wanted more. He wanted defense. He wanted better vision on offense. He wanted better passes. He wanted him to take a charge. And take charge.

  Twice, during the first ten days, Knight threw Alford out of practice. Throwing a player out of practice, especially in preseason, is not uncommon. Sometimes Knight will throw the whole team out of practice. But there was a lot of tension between Knight and Alford. The second kickout came early in practice when Knight didn’t think Alford had fought through a screen properly. Alford thought he had, but before he could say a word he was banished.

  When an Indiana player is thrown out of practice he is supposed to go to the locker room and wait. He may be called back, or Knight may come in to add some comments to what he has already said, or he may just sit there until the rest of the team arrives. This time, though, Alford didn’t wait. He was frustrated. He got dressed and went home. Shortly after he left, Knight sent a manager in to get him. The manager reported back that there was no sign of Alford, only his practice clothes piled in a heap in front of his locker.

  “Call him and get him back here,” Knight ordered. Alford was called and came back. More angry words. Alford listened and didn’t answer, but he was furious. Finally, Knight told him, “You can just get out and don’t bother coming back until I call you. I don’t want to see you.”

  This is another Knight test. The proper response is to show up at practice the next day as if nothing has happened. In this case, though, Knight was taking a risk. Alford had spent ten days in white. He had been thrown out twice and then called back to receive more abuse. Maybe, just maybe, he would call Knight’s bluff and not come back.

  “It may run through your mind,” Alford said later. “But, hey, my dad still leads Coach 7-5 in kicking me out. I understand what they’re both doing when they do it. I don’t always like it, I don’t always think it’s fair. But I understand. I have to be an example.”

  And so the next day Alford came back. He was sitting on a training table having his ankles taped before practice when Knight walked in. “Did I have a dream that I called you and told you to come back?” Knight said. Alford didn’t answer. Knight walked out. Practice started. About fifteen minutes into the workout, Knight said quietly, “Steve, put on a red shirt.”

  Alford was a starter again. He had passed his first test of the season.

  There was, during those early days of practice, an unspoken tension that was felt by everyone. Every player, every coach knew that another season like ’85 would be unbearable. Yet this was a team full of question marks. On some days, even at only 6-7, Thomas looked unstoppable playing the low post; on others, he looked helpless. Some days, Harris was a wonder to watch; on others, he was a disaster. Both would have to play well against bigger players for Indiana to be successful. Calloway was also up and down. The two seniors who would be doing a lot of playing, Morgan and Robinson, were working as hard as could be asked, but both had their bad days, too.

  The only real thread of consistency was Alford, who just showed up every day regardless of shirt color and knocked in jump shots from all over the floor. With each passing day, Knight had less and less to say to Alford. He even began complimenting him in his speeches to the public.

  Preseason often seemed to Knight like one long speech. He spoke to alumni groups, charity groups, and whenever friends asked him to. He spoke all over the state, more often than not for nothing. Every night it seemed there was another speech. Vincennes one night, Petersburg the next. Indianapolis at lunch, the rotary club in Bloomington at dinner. Chicago to talk to five hundred alumni on Wednesday, a local restaurant to talk to forty business associates of a friend on Thursday.

  Knight is an exceptional speaker. More often than not, he talks without notes. He talks about the Olympics and about Indiana basketball. He even developed a routine to explain why he threw the chair.

  “A lot of people have asked me about throwing that chair,” he would begin, “and I’ve had to explain myself because my mother asked me about it. Well, if you want the truth, here’s what happened. See, I had been up a lot during our last game against Illinois two nights before trying like I always do to give the officials whatever help I could. [Laughter.] Well, now we’re playing Purdue, and I’m up, and I keep hearing this voice. Usually in Assembly Hall I don’t really listen to all the people trying to give me advice, but this one voice kept piercing right through the crowd noise: ‘Bob, Bob.’ So, finally I looked over there and I see this little old woman, in fact, she reminded me a little bit of my mother.

  “She said, ’Bob, Bob.’ So I looked at her and I said, ’Ma’am, can I help you?’ And she said, ’Now Bob, if you aren’t going to sit on your chair the way you didn’t sit on it the other night, these bleachers over here are very hard and I’d really like to use that chair.’ Now, how can anyone get on me just because I threw that chair over there so she could sit on it? [Gales of laughter.] In fact, when I told my mother the story, she apologized for getting on me in the first place.” (Applause; Knight owns the audience.)

  Most places, Knight owns his audience. To start with, his very presence at most functions in Indiana is like a visit from above. Driving into a small town to give a speech, Knight is apt to encounter a dozen signs on the local main street reading, “Welcome Coach Knight.” He enjoys himself during these speeches, even on nights when he is exhausted. One night he drove three hours through a driving rain to give a speech because he had promised an older friend he would be there. No one would have complained if he had canceled because of the weather.

  Knight’s speeches are funny, but also rousing. He usually finishes with some patriotic theme. “America, America, God shed his grace on thee,” he said one night. “I can’t think of eight words that mean more to me than those. You know, we have a lot of born-agains nowadays; people are born-again this and born-again that. Some of them mean it and a lot of them are phonies. But one thing I hope we’ll never have is a born-again American. This country is the greatest place on earth, and even though we have some problems it just keeps getting better and better for all of us. Let’s remember that.” Usually, that brings the house down.

  But Knight can also rip people in his speeches. The first time he ever addressed an Indiana alumni group he told the audience, “You know, I wish all alumni would be canonized. That way we coaches would only have to kiss your rings.”

  Last fall, during his annual speech to alumni in Chicago, someone asked Knight about Big Ten commissioner Wayne Duke, a longtime antagonist. “You know, if any of you someday are on the street and you see that Wayne Duke is about to get run over by a car, I would encourage you, I think, to try to save him. But not if it’s in any way inconvenient for you to do so.” Knight was delighted with himself for that shot. Duke was furious.

  Mostly, though, Knight delights during his speeches. He is charming, signs every autograph, and has a kind word for almost everyone. He is especially good with kids. “Coach Knight,” a little boy asked one night, “can I play for you at Indiana some day?”

  “How old are you, son?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best to last that long, but I can’t make any promises.”

  Knight also gives an annual speech to the Indiana student body in October. Always, the auditorium is packed, with kids hanging on the rafters. Knight will talk for as long as the students want him to, opening the floor for questions when he is finished with his talk.

  Student: “Coach, do you think it’s fair to ma
ke athletes submit to drug testing?”

  Knight: “If I were in charge, I’d drug test all you sons-of-bitches, not just the athletes.”

  Female student: “Coach, what do I have to do to become a basketball team manager?”

  Knight: “Change your gender.”

  Knight’s comments invariably draw some hoots and boos and offend some people. But for the most part, the students enjoy him. Much of that is because there is absolutely no bullshit in Knight’s approach. He doesn’t patronize them, speak down to them, or try to win them to his side. He just shows up and answers their questions. If some of them don’t like the answers, that’s life.

  Knight went a step further with the students in the fall of ’85, opening practice to them twice. A big crowd showed up each time, and when practice was over the first time, one student stood up as the players were leaving the floor and said, “Thanks, coach.” “You’re welcome,” Knight answered, surprised at how much he had enjoyed the spectators. “Maybe we’ll do it again.” Sure enough, they did.

  The first few weeks of practice were extremely hectic for Knight. He thought the six weeks before the opening game on November 30 against Kent State were crucial for this team because of the new players and the new roles many of the old players were being asked to fill. Each practice was crucial, and bad execution was agonizing for him.

  But there was more. There was the speechmaking. And especially, there was the new emphasis on recruiting.

  More than any other area, Knight had been forced to reevaluate his recruiting following 1985. The conclusion he reached was simple: he had done a poor job. Perhaps the assistants were to blame somewhat for not being more critical in their evaluations, but ultimately, recruiting is the head coach’s job. He must decide who he wants and then decide what must be done to get them. If he chooses the wrong players or can’t get the players he chooses, then something is wrong.

  For Indiana, it was primarily a matter of choosing the wrong players. Because Indiana was Indiana and because Knight was Knight, the school was going to have an excellent chance of recruiting most of the players it went after, especially in the Midwest. A few players wouldn’t want to play for Knight, and Knight wouldn’t want some good players playing for him. But there would be a bevy of good players that Indiana could get.

  Knight’s recruiting approach, in six years as coach at West Point and fifteen at Indiana, has varied little. If he wants a player he tells him why; he tells him what his role can be if he comes to Indiana, and that if he does come to Indiana, it will be “the hardest place in the country to play.” Very straightforward. You will go to class or you will not play. You will get yelled at. You will graduate. And you will become a better basketball player. It is, like the man himself, a black-and-white approach. If you like it, you’ll sign right away. If you don’t, you run right away.

  Knight’s lapse in recruiting in recent years had hurt the program. But now he was starting over. Crews, the number one recruiter for several years, was gone. In his place was Joby Wright. The new number two recruiter was Kohn Smith. Wright and Smith are about as different as two people can be. Wright, who was thirty-six, is black and from Mississippi, a huge man whose laugh could fill an entire room. He had been intensely recruited out of high school and had chosen Indiana from among the many bidders for his playing services. And that is what they had been: bidders. In Wright’s senior year, Knight became the Indiana coach. Everything changed. Suddenly, he was being ordered to go to class. Knight counseled him to work toward the degree he had virtually ignored for three years. After Wright had played pro ball for several years, he returned to Indiana at Knight’s behest and earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees. In 1981, he became a graduate assistant coach, and in 1982, a full-time coach. He was now the senior assistant coach on the staff.

  The players liked Wright because he spoke their language. He made them feel comfortable; it was his way of saying, “We’re all the same.” The players loved to tell the story about the night before a game in 1983 when Wright had decided to impart a few final words of wisdom. “Now don’t be out chasin’ no bitches tonight,” Wright had said. “I guarantee you Coach ain’t out chasin’ no bitches. So why should you?” From that day forth, Indiana players constantly cautioned one another not to be out chasin’ no bitches the night before a game. Once when Knight was trying to tell the players that they had better get to bed at a decent hour (Knight has never had a specific curfew), he told them, “If you boys think there’s a trick you can try that I didn’t pull, you’re wrong. And if there is one, I guarantee you, Joby’s tried it.”

  Kohn Smith could no more talk to the players in street language than he could talk to them in Swahili. He had arrived at Indiana the summer after the second national championship in 1981. He was thirty-three, a Mormon, married, with three children and a fourth one due. He had been raised in Utah and had become a successful high school coach in Idaho. He met Knight at a coaching clinic, and the two became summertime hunting and fishing partners. One reason Knight enjoyed Smith’s company was that Smith was better than he was at both hunting and fishing. Knight always enjoyed competing with people who were tough to beat, regardless of the sport or setting. Smith was delighted when Knight offered him not just a college coaching job but a job at Indiana, the defending national champion. Smith’s role with the players was that of a soother; when Knight blistered the paint off the locker room walls with his harsh words, he would often send Smith back to check the damage.

  Most mornings when the coaches gathered to talk about the day’s practice plan, Knight would begin by saying, “Joby, did we recruit anybody today?” And Wright would shake his head and answer, “Well, Coach, we’re hangin’ in there.”

  These meetings took place in the coaches’ locker room. The players’ locker room sits on one side of Assembly Hall and that of the coaches on the other. This gives both players and coaches an oft-needed feeling of separation. The coaches’ locker room was known to one and all as “the cave,” partly because it was on the basement floor of the building, but more because of the long hours the coaches put in there.

  The room was comfortable, but it often felt like a prison. This was where the coaching staff did most of its work. After games they would sit in the cave for hours going through the tape of the game. Knight would sit in his chair working the remote control while all the coaches sat around him. Everyone had pen and pad out to take notes. After a bad game, it might take hours to get through the tape because Knight would run back the poor plays so many times. Garl would go out and bring back huge quantities of food. No one ever went hungry at Indiana—sleepless, yes; hungry, no. There were times when the secretaries arrived the morning after a loss to find the coaches still in the cave, having not gone home yet. Wright, Smith, and Waltman were veterans of the long postgame sessions and were accustomed to them. Felling had some trouble adjusting; he occasionally nodded off to sleep while sitting on the couch as the tape ran on and on.

  Wright and Smith were encouraged by Knight’s attitude toward their recruiting reports. He was interested, even eager, and when Wright would suggest that Knight go to see a player practice, he was delighted when Knight willingly went. Early in December, Knight even flew up to Elkhart to watch a 6-10 high school sophomore named Sean Kemp practice. A sophomore; this was a breakthrough.

  Knight needed to see players—lots of them, and often. If he didn’t, emotional as he was in his evaluations of the players already at Indiana, he might see a kid once and decide he was better than anyone he had, simply because on that night anyone would seem better than the players he had. Indiana’s recruiting thus far in the 1980s might best be summed up by the sad case of Delray Brooks.

  Anyone who ever met Delray Brooks would put him on the list of the five nicest people they had ever known. He was generous, sweet-tempered, patient, funny, and everything you would want in a friend. He was, almost without question, the best-liked player on the Indiana team. He was as comfortable with the
white players as he was with the other blacks; even on a team like Indiana’s, where racial problems seemed almost nonexistent, this was unusual.

  If Brooks had been just another guard trying to make it in college when he came to Indiana, he might have had a happy four years there. But Brooks was one of those high school kids built into a phenomenon by the time he was sixteen years old. He was almost 6-4 with long arms. He was mature beyond his years, and his size allowed him to dominate high school guards while playing at Rogers High School in Michigan City, Indiana.

  By his junior year, everyone in the country was recruiting Brooks. When he visited Notre Dame to see the Irish play Indiana that year, Knight grabbed him before the game and told him, “Delray, we need you at Indiana. I expect to see you there.” Brooks was thrilled. Bob Knight needed him.

  That summer, Brooks was the big name at the Five-Star Basketball Camp—the basketball camp at the time—winning most of the awards. Knight had seen him play only once, during his junior year, a game in which Brooks played little because of foul trouble. And so, when the early signing date for high school seniors rolled around that November, Brooks chose Indiana. Knight was thrilled at the thought of Brooks and Alford in the same backcourt. It looked like a dream backcourt. Because of Brooks, he didn’t even try to recruit Gary Grant, who went on to Michigan, or Troy Lewis, who landed at Purdue. Both would have been very interested in Indiana. Both turned out to be better players than Brooks.

  Throughout the 1983-84 season, whenever Alford screwed up in practice Knight would tell him, “When Delray Brooks gets here next year, you’ll never play. Your ass will be so far down the bench, no one will ever hear from you again.”

  These pronouncements hardly shook Alford. Knight’s telling players that they would never play again was hardly unusual. His most famous pronouncement along those lines came in 1981 after a loss at Purdue. On the bus trip home, Knight walked back to where Isiah Thomas was sitting. “Isiah,” Knight roared, “Next year we’re bringing in Dan Dakich. He can do so many things on a basketball court that you can’t do, it isn’t even funny.”