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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“I responded,” Smith wrote in his account, “that Gerald Myers (still to my right) was also in the locker room and that he had a similar impression and was so upset by Knight’s action towards me that he immediately followed me to my suite to apologize in front of several witnesses. Knight’s response (in a very loud voice) was in essence, ‘He did not!’ He stated almost in a scream, I always misinterpret comments and that I called him a ‘liar,’ apparently because I had contradicted his version of the locker room encounter. He repeated yelling, ‘I am not a liar!’ I chose to walk away out of the store. Just steps past the checkout counter, I turned around to see Bob Knight charging up behind me furious with fists clenched and confronted me before I could leave the store.”
Smith said Knight and Myers drove away, with Knight at the wheel of his tan Lincoln, but that Myers then got out of the car “and appeared to be yelling at Coach Knight.” According to Smith, Knight then got out and ran after Myers, abandoning the car, with the driver’s side door open, before getting back in and driving off in pursuit of Myers, trying to persuade him to get back in the car.
The next day, Texas Tech officials went into high-level talks to decide Knight’s fate. Later, before that night’s game, the coach got a standing ovation from a crowd of 9,835. At the press conference held after the Red Raiders won, he gave his version of events. Myers didn’t say a word in Knight’s defense, and the available evidence supported Smith’s version. Unnamed witnesses told the Avalanche-Journal that Knight and Smith had been talking quietly before Knight began yelling, “Are you calling me a liar?” and said that Knight followed Smith after he walked away. They also corroborated Smith’s description of Myers’s jumping out of Knight’s car and Knight’s jumping out to pursue him, leaving his car in the street.
After the Avalanche-Journal filed an open-records request, the university released a copy of a letter Myers wrote to Knight, officially reprimanding him. “Bob, from this day forward you must avoid these kind of incidents. Any further behavior of this type either public or private is unacceptable and will result in severe actions.” However, no apology was offered or demanded. As the IU administration had once done, Texas Tech officials negotiated Knight’s sentence with him. Having decided on a reprimand rather than a suspension, which would have incurred Knight’s displeasure and perhaps even his resignation, university officials tried to put the incident behind them as fast as possible. Smith declined to discuss it; his written account surfaced only after the Avalanche-Journal’s open-records request. Myers said the whole thing had been a “misunderstanding.” Once again, there was a question of who was bigger, Knight or the school. Only the school had changed.
By the close of Knight’s third season, which ended in a 70—65 loss to top-ranked St. Joseph’s in the NCAA tournament, an uncertain future loomed before Knight’s Red Raiders. Knight was still the darling of the business community, which lavished its support on him, and he had a well-heeled personal following in town, but the excitement around his program had died down. Knight, who had predicted that the IU administration would deck Assembly Hall in advertisements after he left (incorrectly, it turned out), was now a walking advertisement himself. With Adidas logos on his shirt lapels and two more from O’Reilly Auto Parts and Texas Tech on his sweater, he looked like a NASCAR driver.
However, attendance had dropped back below 10,000 a game, 2,000 below that of the Lady Raiders’. Before the 2004—2005 season, the indefatigable Pat Knight spoke at fraternities and dorms all over campus, encouraging students to turn out, something no IU assistant would ever have imagined doing. Knight had been negotiating a contract extension with Texas Tech, but he signed it only after his alma mater, Ohio State, where influential alumni had started a movement to get him hired, called him to say it would go in another direction to fill its coaching vacancy. Expectations were minimal going into the season. The preseason consensus had the Red Raiders in the bottom half of the conference, so it was another of Knight’s surprises when he went to a three-guard lineup, finished the regular season ranked number sixteen in the nation at 18-9, and reached the finals of the Big 12 tournament. Senior guard Ronald Ross, a one-time walk-on, led them in scoring, but they were a model of balance, with four players in double figures.
Seeded number six in the NCAA tournament, they put away UCLA, moving into a second-round matchup with the number three seed, perennial power Gonzaga. The Zags went up by 13 points in the second half, but the Red Raiders came back to win 71—69, going ahead to stay on Ross’s three-pointer with 1:06 left.
Knight, who had barely celebrated any of his three NCAA titles, was visibly moved by this win. When the game ended, he told Pat to go up into the stands and bring Karen down. She was already crying when she reached the floor and continued to weep as she hugged her husband while he did a TV interview. In the most tender gesture he had ever made on national television, Knight cradled Karen’s head on his shoulder.
The good feelings lasted for several hours, until Knight did an interview with Sporting News Radio’s Chet Coppock, who asked the wrong question. With the Hoosiers coming off a bad season amid speculation that Mike Davis would be fired, Coppock asked about it, and Knight vented his bitterness yet again. “They created that for themselves,” said Knight. “The guy that’s coaching there is a guy that I told Pat we were going to replace at the end of the season.” Knight went on to blast the IU administration again and say that the athletic director “didn’t know his ass from third base.” The next day, as if answering Knight, IU announced that Davis would remain.
Knight and his players were on a cloud for the next five days, before their third-round game against West Virginia, in Albuquerque. It was only 320 miles from Lubbock, and the Pit, on the New Mexico campus, was filled with Red Raiders fans. The Mountaineers didn’t look unbeatable. In a bracket with no great teams, Knight even seemed to have a chance to return to the Final Four for the first time since 1992, when he had also come through Albuquerque.
The run-up to the game was another Bob Knight festival. At a press conference, he told Ross to call him “a latter-day Santa Claus,” and when it was Knight’s turn at the mike, he asked, “Do you want to hear my ho, ho, ho?” After the NCAA forbade him to drink out of his O’Reilly Auto Parts cup at press conferences, Knight, the one-time scourge of NCAA commercialism, brought it anyway, announcing, “First of all, I’m really happy to be here with my O’Reilly Auto Parts cup.” Stories went out, saying Knight had really mellowed this time.
The dream died against West Virginia. The Red Raiders fell behind by ten points, then came back to go ahead in the second half, only to lose in the closing seconds. “I told our players after the game that they’ll look back on this game and they’ll feel like they made mistakes,” said Knight, which was his way of saying it had been their game to win. “But I think if they can look at the total picture and see what all happened from beginning to end, they should feel very proud of themselves for what they were able to accomplish this year.” It was his way of saying he was as surprised and as pleased as anyone else.
In fall 2005 Bob Knight, now a 65-year-old enfant terrible, began practice with his team, as he had every autumn but one since he’d graduated from Ohio State, in 1962. Three starters returned from the Red Raiders’ Sweet 16 team, with Dean Smith’s 879 career victories dead ahead, 25 more than Knight’s 854, within reach in one season if it was great enough.
His life was quieter, if not quiet. Pat, now his associate head coach, was an ideal buffer between Knight and his players, the referees, and the press. There were no reported incidents of head-butts, kicks, or chokes, however inadvertent or instructional. His best players weren’t leaving one after another, as they had at the end at IU. However, Knight was still Knight. When Andre Emmett, by then a member of the Memphis Grizzlies, heard a replay of Knight’s bloodcurdling 1992 diatribe at Indiana, the one that had lasted one minute and fourteen seconds, with fifteen “f—s” and sixteen first-person references, he said it was the same Bob Knight who had coached him.
“I think it’s one of those things you have to live through, to see for yourself,” said Emmett. “I’ve never really met anybody to this date who broke down the game of basketball as well as he did. He’s beyond coaching. He’s a teacher of the game. He was tremendous. And then, how his style works—it was very different for me but it made me a tougher person. …
“From the outside, it may have looked like that [he was mellowing], but from the inside, I mean, he was always intense. He was always the same old Coach Knight. My three years with him, he was pretty much the same. Actually, he picked it up each year.”
Nevertheless, there was no doubt Knight had found a comfort zone. Many of his old retainers, like his IU secretary, Mary Ann Davis, were with him in the Tech athletic department. The Knights’ sons and their wives were near, as was his grandson. Coaching legend Pete Newell, Knight’s mentor of mentors, was in his nineties and living outside San Diego, but he talked to Knight by phone weekly and visited Lubbock when he could. Newell says that when he, Bob, and Karen get to talking about the Red Raiders, it’s often he and Karen on one side, trying to tell Bob that some player he expects more from is really okay.
“He’s more relaxed,” said Newell. “He’s more accessible too. … I do think he’s at peace now much more. He’ll never be totally at peace, and that’s him.” For a man who seemed doomed to drive himself into a bitter retirement, this would be a happy ending. Of course, whether it’s more glory that awaits, another fall, or both, his story isn’t over.
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