To this day, Patrick Knight jokingly refers to me as his old babysitter. The summer after A Season on the Brink came out, I ran into Patrick, who was playing in a summer league tournament in Princeton, New Jersey.
“My dad still mad at you?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “You know how he is. The important thing is I still like you.”
Actually, that meant a lot to me. I liked Patrick Knight then and I like him now.
His father and I spent a lot of time together prior to the beginning of the season. If we weren’t going out to dinner, we were often in his car driving to a speaking engagement somewhere in Indiana. Once Knight decides he likes a line, he tends to repeat it. And so I was routinely introduced as “my Eastern liberal Jewish friend.”
One of the things I figured out early on about Knight was that he wasn’t nearly as funny as he believed himself to be. I was never able to articulate my feelings about that until my friend Dave Kindred described it perfectly: “The sound of Bob Knight’s life is uncomfortable laughter.”
Yes. Exactly. Knight will often say something he thinks is funny that just isn’t. People know he’s trying to be funny so they try to laugh—and it is uncomfortable. Knight liked to joke with African-Americans about race, with Jews about being Jewish, and with women, the few he allowed into his life, about women. He often joked with his former center Steve Downing, who had become an assistant athletic director, about how lazy black guys were. Downing, who loves Knight and is devoted to Knight, would laugh and wave it off.
I felt the same way about the Jewish cracks. I’m a believer that if you can’t laugh at yourself, you have issues. One of my all-time favorite jokes is one my mother told me years ago: Jewish mother is on the beach with her infant. A giant wave washes the baby out to sea. She looks up at the sky and says, “Oh God, Oh God, if you’ll only spare my child, I’ll be eternally grateful.” Another wave washes in and there’s the baby completely unharmed. She looks back up at the sky and says, “He had a hat!”
Like most people, Knight loved that joke. There was only one time where I thought he stepped over the line with me when it came to that sort of humor. It was after practice one afternoon and Knight had walked to one end of the court with Kohn Smith, Royce Waltman, and Joby Wright. I was at the other end of the court being regaled by Ron Felling with one of his never-ending stories. As Felling was talking, Knight called his name. Felling didn’t hear him. Finally, I said, “Hey, Ron, I think Bob is calling you.”
Felling turned around to see Knight waving him over. I honestly don’t remember what it was he wanted. Chances are good he was going to ask Felling why in the world Alford couldn’t do a better job of fighting through screens. When Felling and I walked up, Knight had decided the reason for the ten- or fifteen-second delay in Felling’s arrival was me, since Felling had been talking to me when Knight had tried to get his attention.
“You know, John,” Knight said. “There are times when I’m not sure that Hitler wasn’t right about you people.”
I froze. This was about three weeks into my Bloomington sojourn, and one thing I had figured out quickly was that Knight did not like anyone arguing with him when other people were around. Earlier that week, Al McGuire had been in town to do a preseason interview with Knight for NBC. As was usually the case when an important friend visited, Knight gathered a group for dinner. Somehow the subject of the 1971 Penn team came up during the conversation.
“One of the most unbelievable games I think I’ve ever seen was when Villanova demolished them in the regional final that year,” Knight said. “They were 28–1 going into that game and Villanova beat them by forty.”
Without thinking I said, “They were 28–0 going into the game, Bob. Villanova was their only loss.”
Knight stared at me for a second as if shocked I had said anything. “John, I was at the goddamn game,” he said. “I was scouting for [Ohio State coach] Fred Taylor. You think I don’t remember their record?”
“If you think they were 28–1 going in, you don’t,” I said.
Knight was now officially pissed off. “I know you have a good memory,” he said. “I know you think you have the greatest f—ing memory in the history of the world. But you’ve got this one wrong.”
“How much?” I asked.
“What?”
“How much do you want to bet?” I said. “A thousand dollars?”
McGuire was trying to change the subject. I wasn’t having any of it. Looking back, I was acting like a jerk. But at that moment I was going to prove I was right.
“I’m not taking that kind of money from you,” Knight said. “I’ll bet you a hundred.”
We agreed. There was no internet in those days, so Knight dispatched Bob Hammel to call his office and have someone look it up. When Hammel returned to the table a few minutes later, he was pale.
“Well?” Knight asked.
“Um, Bob, Penn was 28–0 going into that game.”
Knight turned bright red. Pointing his finger at me he said, “I don’t ever want to hear about your f—ing memory again.”
He wasn’t upset about the hundred dollars—which I never tried to collect and he never offered to pay—he was upset that he’d been proven wrong in front of his friends, and especially in front of Al, who could have cared less one way or the other.
There had been other moments in which I had started to argue with Knight about something and realized I simply couldn’t do it in front of people, especially in front of his coaches. Now, though, he had crossed a line I considered uncrossable. Several answers ran through my head while Knight was yelling at Felling about something. But I knew—knew—if I challenged him in front of his coaches he would have to win. And I knew once I started I wasn’t going to back down. I reminded myself what my goal in being there was: get through the season with my access intact and write the book.
So I shut up.
That night, Knight and I were again in the car en route to a speech, and it was just the two of us.
“I gotta say something to you,” I finally said. “Because if I don’t I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I think you know I have no problem with you making jokes about me being Jewish or liberal or whatever,” I said.
“In fact, you’re really good about it,” Knight said.
“I think so,” I went on. “But I gotta tell you, Bob. Hitler wasn’t funny. Not on any level.”
There was dead silence in the car for what felt like five minutes. It was probably no more than thirty seconds—maybe less.
“You know what I hate more than anything?” Knight finally said.
Oh God, I thought. He’s going to lecture me on being ungrateful and drop me off by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“When I say something stupid,” he said.
It was the closest I ever heard Bob Knight come to saying I’m sorry, to me or to anybody.
We drove in silence for a good long while after that. He introduced me that night as “a friend of mine who works for the Washington Post and is a great writer.”
AS TIME WENT BY I began to understand what Mike Krzyzewski had been talking about that night in Lexington. As the start of the season drew closer, Knight became more uptight and more impatient, with everyone. I hadn’t become a target for his anger—yet.
On the day after the team’s first exhibition game, Knight completely lost it with Daryl Thomas, the team’s starting center. I ended up using that Sunday afternoon as the starting point for A Season on the Brink because it provided such a clear illustration of what it was like to play for Knight. One thing I did not do in the book was repeat the word Knight called Thomas fourteen times during a three minute tirade. Hint: it rhymes with bunt. I used a slightly less offensive word in its place and used it four times instead of fourteen. That was pretty typica
l. My editor, Jeff Neuman, and I decided during the editing of the book to leave that word out completely; to take a tirade in which any profanity was repeated, say fourteen times, and use perhaps three or four to make the point; and to write f— on occasions when Knight used his favorite word repeatedly.
Knight loves that word. He once made a video describing all the ways to use it. “You can use it to express surprise, as in ‘Well I’ll be f—ed!’ Or to express admiration: ‘What a f—ing great guy he is!” Or anger…”
You get the idea.
That’s why I found it so remarkable when Knight’s objection to the book was my use of his profanity. When Royce Waltman called shortly after I had sent Knight an advance copy and said, “This is your official phone call, Coach is really pissed,” I wasn’t surprised. One thing I had figured out long before I left Bloomington was that Knight was going to find something to not like about the book. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I never for one minute expected to get a phone call saying “You did a great job.”
That’s not Knight. Reminding people that they have not done as well as he had hoped is one way he maintains control of his relationships. That’s also why he has gone long periods not talking to people such as Mike Krzyzewski and Steve Alford (among others). Everything has to be done by Knight’s rules.
The best description of Knight I ever heard came from another of his former assistants. He and Knight were having an argument. It was a classic Knight double standard: he had continued to recruit a player who had made a verbal commitment to this former assistant. If another coach had done that to the ex-assistant, Knight would have hammered the guy for it. Rather than defend what he had done, Knight began screaming about how the ex-assistant never would have been anything in basketball if not for him. Which may have been true. It also entirely missed the point. To this day the ex-assistant doesn’t want to put his name on the story, not because it would affect his career at this point (he’s not even in coaching anymore), but because he still cares about Knight’s feelings. But at that point, really angry, he just said, “Coach, you know what your problem is? You treat your enemies better than you treat your friends.”
Knight’s friends constantly have to live up to a standard of loyalty that is almost impossible to maintain. Knight was angry with Krzyzewski—although I’m sure he would claim different—because Krzyzewski’s Duke team beat Knight’s Indiana team in the 1992 Final Four. He was furious with Alford because Alford refused to skip his father’s summer camp (which he had worked since he was a kid) to come play a cameo role in the movie Blue Chips, on which Knight was an advisor to Nick Nolte.
And he was mad at me for leaving a fraction of his profanity in A Season on the Brink.
When Waltman said to me that Coach was pissed off because I’d left his profanity in the book, this is exactly what I said: “No, seriously, Royce, what’s he really pissed about?”
It literally took me a couple of minutes to believe Waltman wasn’t joking, that this wasn’t some kind of not funny Knight joke or prank. Nope, it was the profanity. I had promised Coach I would leave it out of the book.
No, I hadn’t. We had discussed it. It came up one night at dinner when Knight had been especially profane—if that was possible—in practice, and I joked that the book might be the first sports book in history to have to be wrapped in brown paper.
Knight laughed. “You aren’t going to leave all my profanity in, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “For one thing, I don’t want the book to be longer than War and Peace. But you understand I have to leave some of it in for it to have credibility. If I write a book about you without the word fuck, it would be like writing a book about you without the word basketball. It wouldn’t be taken seriously. People would just say, ‘Knight let Feinstein in the locker room and he wrote him a love letter.’ ”
“I get that,” Knight said.
Except in the end he didn’t get it. Or chose not to get it. I have never honestly been sure why he decided to be angry about the profanity that showed up in the book. Not only did I take most of it out, but how many people reading that book didn’t know Knight used profanity? He was proud of it, liked to make a point of using it in public, and could certainly be seen and heard using it during games. Bob Knight says fuck a lot is film-at-eleven news?
To this day I believe Knight thought, in spite of all our talks, that I would write him a love letter, that the book would read as if Hammel had written it. The irony, of course, is that the book did exactly what Knight hoped it would do when he granted me access: it showed that there were methods to the madness. Everyone had seen and heard the cartoon character side of Knight. What people asked all the time was “Why do the players put up with it? Why are they so loyal to him when they graduate?” The book provided answers—firsthand because I was right there.
When ESPN made the book into a movie in 2001, they went the cartoon route with the script. Except for one fictional scene with Alford—there were plenty of those in the movie—the entire movie was the crazed Knight: throwing chairs and screaming at officials and players and the president of Indiana and assistant coaches and anyone else who happened to wander into the path of Brian Dennehy, who played Knight about as well as he could be played, given the quality of the script and the directing.
I had done some work for ESPN, but we had gone through an ugly divorce shortly before the movie was made. As a result, Mark Shapiro, who was in charge of making the movie, had ordered that I not see a script until and unless I agreed to come back to work for ESPN—on his terms. He even dispatched two people, Len DeLuca and Vince Doria, to fly to Washington to try to make a new deal with me—part of which involved having me fly to Winnipeg where the movie was being shot to try to doctor the script, and part of which involved me helping with the promotion of the movie.
I was willing to do that, but not to give in to Shapiro’s continuing professional coercion on other issues. Actually DeLuca and Doria signed off on the deal I offered, and then Shapiro said no to it. So I never went to Winnipeg. I did however see the script because someone working on the movie sent it to me. I could not believe how bad it was.
I never thought Season on the Brink was a good candidate to be turned into a movie. For one thing, it didn’t really have a “movie” ending. That 1985–86 season ended with an absolute thud: a blowout loss at Michigan with the Big Ten title on the line and an upset loss to fourteenth-seeded Cleveland State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. It didn’t hurt the book, but it meant there was no real ending to the movie, unless you could somehow spin it forward to the next season, when Indiana won the national title.
But the movie didn’t have to be terrible. If I had been given the chance to doctor the script, I would have added two scenes from the book. The first came after Indiana lost its first two Big Ten games, both at home, to Michigan and Michigan State. In mid-tirade during a review of the Michigan State tape, Knight suddenly stopped the tape.
“You know, boys,” he said. “I tell you all the time that you can’t be good basketball players if you’re selfish people. You don’t really understand what I’m saying when I say that, do you? I’m not talking about helping on defense or passing the ball, it’s more than that. I’m talking about Winston [Morgan] seeing Stew [Robinson] lose his man and not thinking for an instant, ‘Oh, that’s Stew’s guy,’ but scrambling over to pick the guy up. You boys never do that. You only worry about yourselves.”
He paused, standing in front of the screen in the pitch-dark locker room. “Let me ask you boys a question. On Thanksgiving Day, Dr. Rink [team doctor Larry] and his wife had you all over for Thanksgiving dinner. Mrs. Rink shopped for you, cooked, cleaned up after you left. All so you could have a nice Thanksgiving. Any of you in here who called her, wrote her, or sent her flowers to say thank you raise your hand.”
Not a hand went up. “Exactly what I thought,” Knight said. “This is what I’m talking about. As long as you are selfish people, yo
u will never be good basketball players.”
He turned and walked out. As all the coaches followed him and I followed them, Kohn Smith turned to me and said, “Now that was coaching.”
Coincidence or not, Indiana won its next seven games.
The second scene was in a Bob Evans restaurant. Knight was approached by a young boy named Garland Loper (I think he was thirteen at the time) who wanted to know if he could bring his father and older brother over to meet Knight. A bit baffled, Knight said of course. Garland explained that his father and brother were deaf and mute and he spoke for them. Would that be okay? Knight nodded.
Garland brought his dad and brother over and they signed to him and he spoke to Knight. It was normal stuff: we love IU, we’re proud of the way you play and represent the university and our state. Knight was blown away by Garland Loper. He invited the family to a game and brought the three Lopers into the locker room beforehand. There, he had Garland speak to the team on behalf of his family. It was a remarkable scene to witness. When Garland was finished, as was always Knight’s custom when visitors came, each player stood up, shook hands with the Lopers, and introduced himself. After they had left, Knight said to the players, “I don’t ever want to hear how hard your lives are.”
That was his pregame talk that night.
It is that side of Knight that people hadn’t seen before the book. If you had added those two scenes to the movie, it would have at least been—as Mary Tyler Moore used to say—not awful.
There were a lot of emotional moments during the season, also some cringe-worthy moments. Knight grew fond of telling people after the book came out that he had gotten tired of me by the time the season ended. I found that interesting since he called me a couple of times while I was writing and asked me to come out to Bloomington to play golf. I said no thanks, in part because I had a tight deadline, but also because—being honest—I had gotten pretty tired of Knight. Even those who are most loyal to him will tell you that being around him on a daily basis wears you out. That was what Krzyzewski had been talking about.
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