February 2006
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.
IN MARCH 2001, just before the start of the NCAA basketball tournament, Bob Knight received a call from an old friend, Texas Tech University athletic director Gerald Myers. It was hard to know who was more excited: the recently fired Knight, who had just endured his first winter in 38 years without a basketball team to coach, or Myers, who had just fired his coach and was giddy at the thought of having a chance to hire such a giant.
A few days later, Myers met Knight in Florida (where Knight was watching spring training), bringing Texas Tech president David Schmidly with him. Schmidly and Knight, both avid fishermen, hit it right off. Knight and his wife, Karen, soon arrived in Lubbock for a three-day visit, amid fanfare worthy of a movie star. The Knights were as thrilled with Lubbock as Lubbock was with them. Knight later said that he had been sitting down with officials from another school when Karen, who was standing behind them, began shaking her head no. He said his wife, a native Oklahoman, told him, “No place in America will better understand you than West Texas.”
It was as if it were meant to be. The arena was on Indiana Avenue. The school colors were scarlet and black, so Knight could still wear his trademark red sweaters. Knight, who had been a Red Rider at Orrville High, in Ohio, would now be a Red Raider. An editorial cartoon in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal showed the heavens parting and angels ushering him into the spotlight. Knight assured Schmidly that his time away from coaching had given him a new perspective. Schmidly didn’t ask for any behavior clauses in Knight’s contract and airily dismissed press concerns, insisting he knew of nothing Knight had done at Indiana University that would have gotten him fired at Texas Tech. He claimed to have interviewed a hundred people who knew Knight but was only vaguely familiar with the tape showing Knight grabbing the throat of former Indiana player Neil Reed, and saw no need to watch it. When sixty members of the faculty signed a petition protesting the hiring, Schmidly placated them in a meeting, promising he would be personally responsible for Knight’s behavior.
On March 23 Myers announced Knight’s hiring at a rally in Tech’s United Spirit Arena, attended by a raucous crowd of 7,500. Knight delighted them, making the Texas Tech “guns up” salute with both hands. When Myers presented him with a red sweater-vest, Knight said, “This is without a doubt the most comfortable red sweater I’ve had in six years.” A press conference followed, but with reporters in from around the nation, Knight invited the crowd to stay, encouraging his new fans to let the press know what they thought of its questions. When a reporter tried to ask a follow-up question, Knight declined to answer. When the reporter persisted, Knight asked the crowd, “How many of you want to hear a follow-up from this guy?” The crowd booed.
Be it ever so humble, or unfamiliar, there was no place like home.
“IT’s KIND OF, WELL, not Mayberry, but the people are kind of like that,” said Knight’s son Pat, after arriving in Lubbock to work alongside his father as an assistant coach. “No one bothers you. They’ll come up and talk to you about the game, but they don’t want to know why you didn’t go into the post or why this and why that. … We’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We only have one newspaper. You don’t hear much about Dad. He kind of likes that.”
Nevertheless, Lubbock wasn’t the windblown truck stop the press would make it out to be as it dramatized Knight’s fall from grace. With a population of 200,000, it was more than three times the size of Bloomington, the home of IU. Nor was Knight bringing the cowpokes a game they had never heard of. Texas Tech had a new 15,000-seat arena and had been in the NCAA’s Sweet 16 in 1996, more recently than Knight had. That season, the Raiders went 30-2, and teammates Darvin Ham and Tony Battie would go on to play in the NBA.
Unfortunately, with big-time athletes came trouble. An NCAA investigation subsequently unearthed an array of athletic department violations, including “free bail bonding and legal services” provided to student athletes. Texas Tech forfeited its 1996 tournament wins, had its scholarships limited, and had recently endured four losing seasons in a row, spiraling down to 2000’s 9-19 record. By that year, attendance at Red Raiders games in the two-year-old United Spirit Arena was running below that of the Lady Raiders’, who were still the local stars after winning the 1993 NCAA title with Sheryl Swoopes. In celebration, the Avalanche-Journal had put out its first extra edition since Pearl Harbor. As a local bumper sticker put it, “Texas Tech—Where Men Are Men and Women Are Champions.”
As far as men’s basketball was concerned, Texas Tech was the runt of the Big 12, and Myers could offer Knight a salary of only $250,000, below the conference average, although he was promised another $500,000 from various sources. Knight wouldn’t have his pick of in-state kids, as he had had at Indiana. The University of Texas at Austin dominated the state in all things, and the Longhorns, along with Kansas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State, dominated Big 12 basketball. In his darkest days at IU, Knight could still attract top prospects from around the nation when he felt like trying. At Texas Tech, he was limited, no matter how hard he tried. Pat said that when they called out-of-state recruits, they often had to tell them where they were located and what conference they were in.
Nothing showed how far down the food chain Knight had dropped than his attempt to recruit his first blue-chip prospect: six-foot-eight, 250-pound Sean May, of Bloomington North High School, the son of former Indiana and NBA star Scott May, who remained one of Knight’s archloyalists. Scott got his son to take a look at Texas Tech, but it was only a courtesy visit late in the process. Sean had been considered a lock for IU, with his former high school teammate Jared Jeffries there. Sean also played in high school alongside Mike Davis Jr., the son of the new Hoosiers coach, and was over at his house all the time. However, after leaving Lubbock, Sean made the surprise announcement that he’d go to North Carolina, prompting speculation back home in Indiana as to just what Knight had told him.
“Scott said he took Sean down to Lubbock because he owed Coach Knight a chance,” said the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Rick Bozich. “Scott said, ‘Hey, I’ll get him down here. You’ve got to convince him to stay here or come here. That’s on you, Coach. I’ll get him here, and you go from there. I’m going to give everybody the same opportunity.’
“But, in the end, supposedly it was a compromise choice, in that he wasn’t going to go to Texas Tech because that would be probably not the best thing for his basketball career. And he wasn’t going to stay at Indiana because I’m sure that would piss the Knight loyalists off. So, he went to Carolina.” Scott May denies Knight had anything to do with his son’s decision. In any case, Indiana lost out on a can’t-miss recruit, and three seasons later, with Sean May leading the way, Carolina won the national championship.
KNIGHT’S FIRST MEETING with his new players that spring was at seven on a Saturday morning. He immediately laid out the new dress and hair codes. Freshman Andre Emmett, who had braids with beads in them, said his introduction to Knight was “short, straight, and matter-of-fact. I drove home to Dallas, went to a barbershop, and cut it all off.”
Eight days after Knight took the job, a short press release announced that three returning players, including starting point guard Jamal Brown, had been kicked off the team. According to one of the players, they had been late several times, but no more details were forthcoming. “We’re not going to say anything beyond what’s been said,” said Tech athletic director Myers. “They’re not going to be on the team next year.” That left only four scholarship players from the previous season’s 9-19 team, who would be joined by one scholarship freshman, two junior-college players, two freshman walk-ons, and two seniors who were given scholarships. That fall, when practice began with Midnight Madness, Knight said only, “We have a chance to be competitive.”
Knight was never better than when he had something to prove, and he had never had more to prove in his life. As he said before his Texas Tech debut, a victory at home over William and Mary, “I feel like the Earps, going to Tombstone.” Tombstone shaped right up. The Red Raiders won sixteen of their first twenty games, beating conference powers Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. Attendance jumped to 13,500 a game. Students billing themselves “the General’s troops” wore World War II helmets. Fund-raising zoomed as Knight appeared at rallies throughout Texas—and even at some with loyalists in Indiana.
The Raiders finished the regular season 21-7, tied for third in the Big 12, but fell in the first round of the NCAA tournament to Southern Illinois. Their opponent was coached by Bruce Weber, a former assistant to Purdue coach—and longtime Big Ten rival—Gene Keady. “Don’t let that SOB beat you,” Weber said his old boss had told him.
