Good Knight? Good Luck!
In this exclusive excerpt from their unauthorized biography of Bob Knight, Steve Delsohn and Mark Heisler argue that the volatile basketball guru who landed in Lubbock nearly five years ago hasn’t lost his brilliant coaching ability. Or, for that matter, his incomparable temper.
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After Knight’s firing from Indiana, plenty of detractors had questioned his ability to coach. A Time magazine essay titled “How College Basketball Left Bobby Knight Behind” had gone so far as to assert: “Truth is, Knight was never a great coach. He was a good coach of often overrated players.” The truth was, as his first season at Tech had demonstrated, Knight was still capable of things that awed his peers. “I can’t say this enough,” said retired University of Texas—El Paso coach Don Haskins of that first season in Lubbock. “His team didn’t overachieve. It over overachieved.” Ironically, that was the spring IU came back too, as the unheralded Mike Davis led the unheralded Hoosiers to the NCAA finals. After a 6-5 start, with Davis looking overmatched in his second season, the Hoosiers warmed up in conference play and caught fire as a number five seed in the tournament, stunning Mike Krzyzewski’s number-one-seeded Duke Blue Devils in the South regional, then beating Kent State to advance to the Final Four, in Atlanta.
It was the season that Indiana needed in order to move beyond Knight. For Knight, however, there was no moving beyond Indiana. His bitterness was like a black hole, sucking everyone around him into it. He’d had no contact with Davis since the night he’d offered to pay his former assistant’s $95,000 salary out of his own pocket if he’d leave with him. Instead, Davis had taken Knight’s job when it was offered to him, and the relationship deteriorated from there. When Davis was deposed for a former player’s lawsuit against Knight in 2002, he was asked if his old boss was a bully and replied, “Yes.” Asked if Knight’s coaching style was always appropriate, Davis answered, “No … I mean, if we were sitting here now, and you said something he didn’t like, he would go off and scream and yell and curse at you.”
In the Final Four, the Hoosiers faced highly favored Oklahoma. Before the game, Pat Knight called Davis “a backstabber” and said he would root for Oklahoma. It turned into a firestorm in Indiana. Todd Leary, Pat’s former Indiana teammate and close friend (Pat had been in his wedding) and now the color commentator on IU broadcasts, told the Indianapolis Star’s Terry Hutchens, “If Bob Knight would just send a telegram to Indiana University and congratulate all those kids for what they’ve accomplished, he would be loved by ninety-nine percent of the people in the state of Indiana. But we all know that will never happen. I don’t know why I keep thinking Coach Knight will take the high road, because he never does.”
Knight had never been litigious or motivated by money at IU, giving his six-figure Adidas stipend to the university every year, calling it “pimp money.” After being fired, however, he spent years pursuing redress against IU in the Indiana courts. Despite a deferred compensation package of more than $400,000 a year for ten years, he contended that he was owed more for the income he had lost. When a Monroe County judge ruled in favor of IU, Knight appealed, though he eventually dropped it. Then he filed a second suit against the university, seeking to have IU pay his legal fees in another dispute.
IF KNIGHT’S OLD LIFE WAS GONE, his latest one had its own challenges. Texas Tech went to a new level, winning at least twenty games in each of his first three seasons. That was wonderful for the Red Raiders but only standard for Knight, who was used to competing for conference titles as a warm-up before competing for national titles. In Knight’s second season, the Red Raiders went 22-13 but didn’t get an NCAA bid and had to settle for a third-place finish in the NIT. It was so disappointing that Knight announced that he would give back his $250,000 salary.
Life in Lubbock had some of the old turbulence too. Before the February 17 game at Texas, in 2003, one of the most important of the season for Red Raiders fans, Knight benched Andre Emmett, the team’s star, and reserve Nick Valdez for oversleeping and missing a walk-through. It was reminiscent of Indiana’s 1985 game at Illinois, where Knight benched four starters against the favored Illini. The Red Raiders were 4-7 in the Big 12, and the Longhorns were number three in the nation. Texas Tech lost, 77—65, but Knight praised his players at the post-game press conference. “We didn’t have somebody we had to make up for on defense every time down the floor,” he said. “From my standpoint, it was a team I enjoyed watching.” Knight said his players had voted unanimously to bench Emmett and Valdez. Asked to elaborate, Knight exploded. “I said all that’s going to be said about it,” he yelled. “It’s none of your f—ing business beyond what I’ve said, period.”
Shortly afterward, Knight circulated a two-page document outlining Valdez’s confidential disciplinary history in a meeting with twenty local business leaders. Knight said they were “people who needed to know.” Some of the information had nothing to do with Valdez’s basketball career and, as the Avalanche-Journal reported, constituted a possible violation of a federal privacy law, although no charges were ever filed.
Valdez quit, but Emmett accepted his punishment—five hundred sprints the length of the court and back—and returned to the team. When Emmett complained in the course of completing his work-parole program, Knight doubled his sentence and then tripled it. “I felt like I was running for nothing,” said Emmett. “It was supposed to be five hundred. So I ran the five, and it was five hundred more. So that made a thousand. So he said, ‘Five hundred more.’ I was like, ‘Hold on.’
“Took me three and a half days, and on the fourth or the fifth day we had a game, so I was in the ice tub for a couple days … After my first five hundred, I felt like I was on my way out. I was trying to go home, but my family and my supporting cast, they told me, ‘Stick in there. Don’t let nothing stop you from doing what you do.’ After that, I kept my mouth closed, and I ran the next thousand without saying a word.”
In December of the 2003—2004 season, Knight’s third at Texas Tech, the Red Raiders were to play Iowa in Knight’s first meeting since 2000 with coach Steve Alford, his former Indiana star and now-estranged protégé. It was nationally televised and good exposure, but it meant an obligatory review of their rift. Knight wasn’t having any of it. The day of the game, Knight, sitting with Alford for a joint interview, went off on ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla, the former St. John’s and New Mexico coach, who merely asked if they wanted to put the issue to rest.
“Let me answer that,” said Knight. “You know, this is an absolute crock of bullshit. You know, you f—ing people in the news media, all of you f—ers, dwell on some negative piece of bullshit like that. And I don’t know how Steve feels about it, but it f—ing pisses me off, and you don’t have to bleep one single f—ing word of this. … So all of you media people can go f— yourselves when it comes to something like that. Now, I don’t know if Steve has anything to add to that or not.” Steve did not. The Red Good Knight? Good Luck!
Raiders, who were in the midst of a 16-2 start, won the game 65—59.
Close losses to Texas and Oklahoma State dropped them to 16-4, but they were still ranked nineteenth in the nation on February 2, when Knight and Gerald Myers went to lunch at a fashionable downtown grocery store called Market Street. Knight was at the salad bar when Texas Tech chancellor David Smith came up to him. After that, in a familiar pattern, the stories diverge wildly.
Knight said Smith congratulated him on the way he’d handled himself in the Texas game when he’d ordered Tech students to stop their rude chants at the Longhorns. Knight said he answered, “David, as long as I’ve been here, for the most part … I think I’ve done pretty well.”
“I go around to fix my salad,” Knight told the Avalanche-Journal. “He came at me pretty hard, saying, ‘You’ve got issues. What are they?’ Right then is where I think I was at fault. I should have just shook my head, walked away, and did a lot of other things, and I didn’t. I went on to tell him what one of those issues was, and it went back and forth a little bit. But the one thing there was—I absolutely did not instigate anything.”
Smith said he had been talking to Myers, saying how much he’d appreciated Knight’s approach, when Myers suggested he tell Knight. In an internal university report, Smith wrote that he told Knight, “‘Most of us only hear the negatives, it is important that sometimes someone remembers to express the positives.’ I expressed the same sentiment that I did with Gerald Myers that despite some tough losses, I especially wanted to commend him on how he had handled the last few weeks and in particular the student section at the University of Texas game.
“His demeanor and habitus changed drastically. With a red face, his response was curt and angry as he responded, ‘I always handle things well and have always handled things well. …’ He walked about two or three steps to my left with a very angry look, tried to place more salad in his takeout tray, obviously upset and shaking when I asked, ‘What seems to be the problem? I only wanted to commend you and provide some positive feedback. … ’ He became even more agitated, stating that I was always misinterpreting.”
Smith said he eventually realized that Knight was angry about an incident from the previous season. After the suspension of Andre Emmett and Nick Valdez, with no other university officials available for comment, Smith had announced, “We will look into this event.” Smith said an angry Knight had then abruptly walked away from him in the locker room before a game the following week and that he had discussed Knight’s behavior with Myers. At the salad bar, Smith said Knight alluded to the months-old incident, insisting he had only been preoccupied.
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