A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  After taping the commercial, Knight was back in the lobby. The chair wielder was across the lobby, having no interest in another meeting with Knight. But Knight was not about to let the incident die. He walked across the lobby. “Listen,” he began, “I want to tell you a few things.”

  He never got started, though, because his adversary looked up and said, “Look, I’m sorry I did it, okay? But I don’t have to listen to you,” and walked off.

  Now Knight was furious. “Who runs this station?” he demanded. A woman in the lobby identified herself as the wife of station owner Roland Johnson. The two of them went outside to talk. Knight told Mrs. Johnson that he was insulted by what had happened. Mrs. Johnson agreed with Knight and apologized. “If I were running the station, that kid would be fired,” Knight said. “Have your husband call me at my office when he gets back.”

  Knight was relating the story to his assistants an hour later when Roland Johnson called. Knight went through the story again. Mr. Johnson apologized again. Not good enough. “I think that kid should come out here and apologize to me in person,” Knight said. Mr. Johnson didn’t think that was a good idea. Why stir up potential trouble? The young man had been spoken to and had been told he was wrong and had agreed he had been wrong.

  Not good enough. “If you can’t get one of your employees to come out here and render a simple apology,” Knight said, “then I don’t see any reason to do any further business with your radio station.”

  End of conversation. Knight was not blackmailing or threatening. He was angry, and he meant exactly what he said. When he walked on the floor to start practice a few moments later, he was still upset by what had happened. The assistants knew that what came next was almost inevitable.

  If the team had been sharp and crisp that day, Knight might have forgotten the radio station for at least a couple of hours. But they weren’t. They were, in fact, a little sluggish. They were scheduled to fly to Fort Wayne the next night to play an intrasquad game in the Fort Wayne Coliseum. Maybe they were looking ahead to that; maybe it was just the way the stars and the moon were aligned. In any case, practice lasted less than an hour.

  It ended when Kreigh Smith, who had the misfortune of flashing enough potential at times that he had become a favorite target, threw a silly pass. “That’s it,” Knight roared. “I’ve seen all I want to see of this crap. If you people are only going to demand enough of yourself that you end up playing on a horseshit team then the hell with you. Go take a shower. I’ve seen as much of this crap as I can take for one day.”

  He stalked off. The players and the assistants went to the locker room. Everyone talked a little. It was the same stuff: we have to work harder, concentrate better. Knight burst into the room. “There was no effort to get better out there at all. You guys don’t listen and you don’t think. It’s the same bullshit as last year. Boys, you are just not good enough to play like this and be any good in the Big Ten.”

  He left. They sat and looked at each other for a while. Finally, the assistants softly suggested that everyone go back on the floor for some individual work. In his locker room Knight had stripped and was heading for the steam room to try to cool off.

  “I can’t go through another year like last year,” he said. “And right now, we just aren’t very good.” There were no mind games today. The frustration, starting at lunchtime and extending into the evening, was quite genuine.

  The next day the entire Indiana entourage flew to Fort Wayne. Sixteen players, five coaches, Ralph Floyd, Ed Williams, team cardiologist Larry Rink, Tim Garl, Bob Hammel, and John Flynn made the trip. Flynn was a newspaperman Knight had known since his days as a junior varsity coach at Cuyahoga Falls High School. That had been Knight’s first job after graduation from Ohio State, and he and Flynn had remained friends long after Knight had gone on to Army and then Indiana. Flynn was living in Bloomington while waiting to receive word on a job application in Memphis, and he came to practice almost every day.

  He was a bright, sharp-tongued man who had known Knight long enough that he was not intimidated by him. Flynn enjoyed Knight and Knight enjoyed Flynn. Knight found Flynn’s intellect challenging. And Flynn, while recognizing Knight’s flaws, was devoted to him. “Bob Knight is an asshole,” Flynn said one night, “but he knows it and tries like hell to make up for it.”

  Both Indiana University Foundation planes were used for this trip: the big plane, which had twenty seats, and the brand-new little plane, which had eight. Indiana always travels by charter. The team will usually fly to a game site the evening before a game; the rest of the entourage, which for regular season games usually includes team doctor Brad Bomba, Floyd, sports information director Kit Klinglehoffer, radio play-by-play men Don Fischer and Max Skirvin, and TV play-by-play men John Laskowski and Chuck Marlowe, will arrive on the afternoon of the game. The big plane group always includes Knight, Garl, Hammel, anywhere from one to four assistant coaches (the recruiters usually meet the team the next day), and the players.

  This trip was a chance to give Indiana’s fans in the northern part of the state a chance to see the team live. The Fort Wayne Coliseum was completely sold out, a crowd of 9,200 packed into the place to see a preseason scrimmage. Outside the building, tickets were being scalped for up to $25. This was a measure of how deep-seated the feeling about Indiana basketball is throughout the state. Neither Purdue nor Notre Dame could guarantee anything approaching a sellout for an off-campus game, much less for an intrasquad scrimmage. In Fort Wayne, tickets for the scrimmage were sold out within hours of going on sale.

  Knight revels in the popularity of the team and the school. This was the kind of night he enjoyed. These fans were less jaded than the ones in Bloomington. To them, the mere presence of the Hoosiers was an honor, so they weren’t about to do any second-guessing. At the airport, a police escort met the team bus and Knight was assigned a personal bodyguard from the local sheriff’s department for the evening to protect him from the crush of adoring fans in the hallways of the Coliseum.

  Despite the lively crowd, the team did not play very well. The most notable exception was Alford, who made three straight steals at one point in the second half, prompting Knight to call him over. “Have you been reading books on how to play defense?” he asked. Alford giggled. From Knight, this was a compliment.

  Few other compliments were passed around. Knight was particularly unhappy with Thomas and Harris for their inside play and told them so in the locker room when the scrimmage was over. It was not until the next day, after looking at the tape of the scrimmage, that Knight became genuinely upset. The tape showed sloppy play, missed passes, bad rebounding position. Knight had planned to give the team Friday off except for a brief meeting and to practice only briefly on Saturday afternoon. After he saw the tape, he changed his plans. He wanted to practice Friday afternoon.

  The players, expecting the day off after arriving home from Fort Wayne after midnight, were sluggish. Knight knew this, and he knew they were tired, but he believed they had reached a point where they had to learn to play tired. During the season, they were going to have to deal with that at times, and now was as good a time as any to emphasize it. So, halfway through the Friday practice, he threw them all out and told them, “We’ll see you all in here at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Six in the morning?

  Early morning practices were the oldest form of punishment in the book for most coaches. But not for Knight. He had never gone in for the standard forms of punishment—early practices, running wind sprints, four- or five-hour practices. Only on a couple of occasions during twenty-one years as a head coach had he resorted to such methods. But he was resorting to it now.

  The players understood. They weren’t happy about it, but they also didn’t find it unfair. This was a crucial time, and they hadn’t been sharp for a week, not since the Czech game. Sharpness was a lot to ask four weeks into practice with two weeks left until the first game, but these players were used to being asked for a lo
t.

  They dragged themselves out of bed and made it to practice at six the next morning. The first hour was a nightmare. Knight was so angry he even ordered several wind sprints. He was going to make them work when they were tired even if it killed all of them. Finally, play picked up. The offense began moving the ball. By the time they left the floor at 8 A.M. Knight felt better. But not satisfied. “Be back at noon,” he ordered.

  They went for another ninety minutes at noon. Play was brisk, mistakes were few. No one wanted to even think about the consequences of a poor practice. There was still a lot of time left in the weekend. No one relished the thought of spending Saturday night in Assembly Hall. Knight had made his point: if you want to rest, you have to earn it, even when you’re tired. When he let them go that afternoon, he told them to be back to scrimmage at 4:30 the next day—all except Alford and Robinson, who were told to be at the airport at 9:15 the next morning to fly to Chicago for the annual Big Ten media day.

  Knight would boycott the meeting for the second year in a row. The year before he had skipped it to protest the Big Ten’s failure to do anything about conference teams (read: Illinois) that were cheating (in his view) in recruiting. For that act, Knight had been censured by the league. For that censure, Knight was boycotting again. But he told no one of this plan. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he told Alford and Robinson.

  They were there the next morning. Knight was not. Alford tried to study on the plane. “I am definitely going to flunk ACore,” he groaned between yawns. Alford and Robinson made it back to Bloomington just in time for the Sunday scrimmage. It had been a long week. The next two weeks would be worse.

  The team didn’t make it through practice on Monday or Tuesday. On Monday, Knight sent them home early, telling them again to return at 6 A.M. But that one didn’t stick; after talking to the coaches, he changed his mind. Having them come in at that hour on a weekend was one thing, but having them come in that early when they had to be in class was another. Practice would be at the regular time on Tuesday.

  On Tuesday, mistakes by Thomas, Morgan, and Calloway led to the team’s third mass kickout in less than a week. “You know something, Daryl, if I were you I wouldn’t come to practice,” Knight said. “I’d just not even bother because why show up and be a shitty player? There’s no point.”

  A moment later, when Harris tried to save a ball from going out of bounds, Thomas and Morgan, the two players closest to him, neglected to yell directions at him. That was it. “How much patience do you expect me to have? I won’t tax myself any more. Everybody out.”

  Into the locker room they went. A few minutes later, Knight followed. Everyone expected an explosion. There was none. More often than not, Knight is a very good reader of his team’s mood. He had been on them almost without letup since the Monday after the Czech game. He knew this was going to be a delicate team. It was not that experienced, not that deep, and not big or strong physically. There were going to be times, if they were to succeed in any way, that Knight would have to suppress the side of him that wanted to rage at incompetence; there were going to be times, later in the year, when he couldn’t suppress that side, but now, with the record 0-0, he could.

  “You know, every single one of you is a good kid,” Knight began. “I know, we all know, that you try to do everything we ask you to do. I know it isn’t easy all the time. In fact, sometimes it’s just about f—— impossible. But you have got to try. You have got to play through being tired.

  “You new people, ask the other players how hard it is to play in the Big Ten. Ask them how tough every game is. We don’t have any gimme games on our schedule. Not one. There is not one game we play that you people can win just by showing up. Some are harder than others, but bad play, stupid play, nonthinking play will get you beat on any night. I guarantee it.”

  Knight paused to look around the room. He looked into the faces of the players. His voice was soft. “You know, there is no way I would have [Michigan State guard] Scott Skiles on this team. We don’t want kids like him here. [Skiles had been arrested three times.] We want kids like you. But Scott Skiles is tougher than every single one of you. Toughness, boys, wins basketball games. Intelligence wins basketball games. Thinking wins basketball games. Just running around in circles and not thinking loses them.

  “We work too hard, you work too hard to go through another season like last year. Every one of us suffered last year. I know I did and I know you did, too. I know you don’t want to lose. But I also know that you can’t win playing like this. You just can’t. You’re not good enough. We’ve had some teams here that were talented enough to win most nights even when they didn’t play their best. You people simply are not that good. You are not great athletes, except for Harris. You are not great shooters, except for Alford. You are small. To win, you have to be smarter and tougher every single day than the other guys. And you aren’t going to be smarter and tougher by some magic formula when the games start. You have to come to practice every day and work on it.

  “Now, do you think you are ready to go out there again and work the way we have to work? If you aren’t, tell me and we’ll call it a day. Don’t come back out on that floor unless you are really ready to play.”

  He walked out the door. No one said a word. For a moment, everyone just looked at each other. Then Alford got up and followed Knight back to the floor. Fifteen players followed.

  For the rest of that night and the three days after that, they practiced better than they had all year, perhaps better than they had in two years. One sentiment seemed to run through the entire team: Just when you think the man has lost control he turns around and proves he’s a genius all over again.

  On the morning of November 23, Knight gathered all seven coaches and Garl in the coaches’ locker room to talk about a starting lineup. Everyone agreed on four names: Alford, Thomas, Harris, and Morgan. The fifth spot was a tossup among Calloway, Robinson, and Jadlow. Knight never voted. He just left the names on the board and went to watch the Indiana-Purdue football game. The season was seven days away.

  That evening, Knight had as much fun as he had had in years. Jim Crews was to begin his college coaching career at Evansville that night, and Knight had been planning for several weeks to surprise him by showing up at the game with a group of Crews’s former teammates, friends, and coaches.

  This was, for all intents and purposes, a reunion. Steve Green, John Laskowski, Steve Ahlfeld, Steve Downing, and Tom Abernethy had played with Crews. Kohn Smith, Royce Waltman, and Julio Salazar had coached with him. Tim (Doak) Walker had been a manager all four years Crews had played at Indiana. Dan Dakich had been recruited by him.

  The group that flew to Evansville that night was a mix of the generations that had grown up during the Knight era at Indiana. Sitting in his customary seat at the front of the plane, facing toward the rear, Knight was in a buoyant mood as everyone swapped old stories. The players from the ’75-76 era, who had not been on an Indiana team plane in years, were shocked when they boarded.

  “You mean,” Green said in a stunned voice, “there’s no partition between him [Knight] and the players?” On the old plane, Knight and the assistants had sat in a partitioned-off front area of the plane. Even though Knight often came stomping back to tell the players what he thought after a loss, there was at least some small separation. On this plane, there not only was no separation, but Knight sat facing the players.

  Plane stories are a large part of Knight lore. One of the more popular ones came after a loss at Michigan in 1980. Indiana had lost by a point on a forty-foot shot at the buzzer. One person who did not play in that game was Steve Risley, one of the seniors on the 1981 championship team. Risley was in the doghouse. When the initial shock of the loss had worn off, Risley sat in the locker room thinking, “What a terrible loss. But at least he can’t yell at me on the plane going home since I didn’t play.”

  The team rode in silence to the airport. As they boarded the plane, Risley saw several bags
of McDonald’s food sitting up front. “Perfect,” he thought, “I’ll just curl up in back, eat my McDonald’s, and stay out of the way.”

  It never happened that way. First, Knight grabbed the McDonald’s bags and threw them onto the tarmac. No Big Macs for Risley. Then, as soon as the plane was airborne, Knight charged out of his seat and headed straight for Risley. “Risley, if we could afford to play you in games like this we wouldn’t be losing. The reason we lost this game was you. It was your fault.” Knight never yelled at anyone else the whole trip. For two days he didn’t let Risley practice. The next night, he started him. Of course, Risley then played the best game of his career.

  There would be no yelling on this trip. Just story-telling. As the plane landed in Evansville, Knight yelled, “Doak, the bus better be here.” Walker was thirty-one years old and a successful businessman, but to Knight he would always be a manager. Managers were in charge of making sure a bus met the team plane on the road. The bus was there. At the game, Knight sent Walker (who else?) to the locker room to tell Crews his old friends would be watching.

  When Walker relayed this news to Crews and he looked up to where Knight and company were sitting, Crews shook his head. “Jesus,” he said, “we’ve got a horseshit team.” But Crews was slightly choked up when the public address announcer told the fans that Knight and Crews’s old teammates were in the building. Evansville was bad, but Kentucky State was worse, and Evansville won the game, 50–48. After the game, when the hugs and the congratulations were over, Knight took Crews aside. He had been taking notes during the game, and he wanted to tell Crews what he needed to work on with his team.

  When the plane landed back in Bloomington, Knight said to everyone, “That was a really nice thing you all did going down tonight. I know it meant a lot to Jimmy.” It also meant a lot to Knight.