I made the short drive back to Assembly Hall one last time and walked into the Cave to find Knight alone and on the phone with Gene Pingatore, Daryl Thomas’s high school coach. He was telling him in no uncertain terms that Daryl was the biggest pussy he’d ever coached and as far as he was concerned there really wasn’t any reason for him to come back to Indiana for his senior year. I felt like I was walking out at almost the same moment that I had walked in.
Knight hung up the phone and looked at me expectantly. “What can I do for you, John?” he said.
“First, I wanted to give you your keys back,” I said, handing them to him. “Second, I just wanted to say thank you for putting up with me all season.”
“That it?”
I shrugged. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Don’t f— this thing up, John. Don’t piss me off.”
“I will do my best not to f— it up, Bob. If I do f— it up, it’s my fault. You gave me plenty to work with.”
“Daryl Thomas is a pussy, you know.”
The season was over. I probably should have stood up for Daryl Thomas at that moment. To this day I feel bad that I didn’t. I had a long drive ahead of me.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
Knight picked up the phone and started dialing a number. That was his way of saying good-bye.
Later, when the book came out, Knight would claim to people that his last words to me were, “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.” It’s one of his favorite expressions. He tends to use it when telling stories. I never actually heard him say it to anyone. He didn’t say it that day either.
I stopped, as planned, in New Castle to see Alford. We had dinner at a Perkins Pancake House, something I couldn’t help but remember when a Perkins waitress was included among the list of Tiger Woods’s many liaisons at the end of 2009. I asked Alford if he ever regretted choosing Indiana at those moments when Knight was railing on him.
He laughed. “I think my dad is still a few ahead of Coach when it comes to throwing me out of practice,” he said. “Coach gets on me because he knows I can take it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t piss me off sometimes, but I can handle it.”
He looked at me. “What about you? Are you sorry you picked Indiana?”
I laughed. “I’ll let you know when the book comes out.
WRITING A BOOK TURNED out to be a lot easier than I had imagined it might be. The reason was simple: I had so much material to work with that sitting down at my computer each day was something I actually looked forward to doing. I had driven to my parents’ house on Shelter Island right after the Final Four in Dallas, where I had seen Knight—he wore a “Go Duke” button the entire weekend—and had spent some time with him. Even though the team had turned itself around after the disastrous ’85 season and had gone 21–8, he was still haunted by the two losses that had ended the season. He had left instructions with the coaches to continue practicing the team through the weekend. I learned later that he had observed earlier postseason practices from a chair, arms folded, commenting occasionally on why a particular play or bad shot or missed screen or box out was the reason for the losses to Cleveland State and Michigan.
I asked Knight if he was going to go to the coaches’ annual dinner on Sunday night, where Krzyzewski was being honored as national coach of the year. He shook his head.
“I don’t think I want to be in a room with all those coaches,” he said.
“Why not? A lot of them are your friends.”
“John, we’re just not very good right now.”
As always, that was the bottom line for Knight.
Being on Shelter Island in April and May was something I always used to look forward to as a vacation once basketball season was over. I loved the solitude of the island during the offseason. Most years, I would sleep in, go pick up the newspapers, and after reading them thoroughly, go have lunch with Bob DeStefano, the golf pro at Gardiner’s Bay Country Club, the (then) unpretentious little club where I had learned the game as a teenager and worked for seven summers in the pro shop.
Back then the clubhouse was open for lunch on weekdays in April, and Bob and I would sit at a corner table and talk for a couple of hours. If the weather was nice I’d hit some balls and play nine holes of golf. If not, I’d go home and read, make myself dinner, and then watch baseball or the hockey playoffs on TV. I was about as content as you could possibly be.
My schedule wasn’t all that different in April of 1986. I woke up earlier to go get the papers. Once they had been read, I would sit down for a couple of hours to review what I had written the day before. Everyone who writes develops habits, especially in terms of when they write. Like everyone else, I’ve read about writers who wait until all is quiet in their home and write until the wee hours. Others are up before dawn to kick-start their writing day.
Perhaps because I spent so many years working at a newspaper, I do most of my writing in the afternoon. Although I covered games at night for years—and still do on occasion—most of my writing when I was young was done in the office after lunch. So it probably wasn’t surprising when that became my habit for writing the book.
As I did when on vacation, I’d have lunch with Bob. But instead of relaxing all afternoon, I sat at my computer, which was still the tiny Radio Shack Tandy that had so impressed the Duke of Kent the previous summer. My parents’ house wasn’t very big: it was one floor with four bedrooms, one of which had been the garage when my dad bought the house in 1960. I set my computer up on the dining room table—it ran strictly on batteries, so it didn’t really matter where I sat it—so I could have a breathtaking view of the water.
I usually wrote for four or five hours. I never set goals in terms of how many words I should write on a given day, I just wrote until I felt tired. I learned quickly that if I forced myself to keep going when tired, what I wrote at the end of the day was usually so poorly written I would end up tossing it the next day anyway. One thing helped me from the beginning: I had read somewhere that Ernest Hemingway always tried to stop writing mid-thought. He didn’t try to get to the end of a chapter or a story line. That way, when he began again the next day, it was easier to get started. Right from the beginning, I did that—sometimes stopping in mid-sentence. This did two things: it made starting each day a little easier, and it gave me at least one thing in common with Hemingway. Actually two: I also like cats.
The writing went faster than I could have dreamed. When you have done your job as a reporter, writing is easy. The only issue was what to leave out. After I had written about thirty thousand words, I sent them to Jeff Neuman. I didn’t want to write the whole book and have him say, “Oh God, this is awful, start again.” He called me after he had read what I’d sent him and said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
That was very comforting.
Every afternoon, when I finished writing, I would walk down to the beach in front of the house and walk west, toward the setting sun. I could only go about a mile before I reached a point where I would have to walk up to the road to get around a patch of water. So I’d walk to that point, sit, and watch the sun until it was almost down, then walk home and fix dinner. It was pretty close to perfect. I felt like a real writer—whatever that means.
I finished the book in seven weeks. When I wrote the final words late on a May afternoon, I felt exhilarated, a little sad, and a lot nervous. I walked down the beach that night saying to myself over and over, “You wrote a book!” Of course it wasn’t official until Jeff finished editing, but still, I’d done it. The last thing I had written was the dedication, which was to my parents: “To Mom and Dad… and that’s nonnegotiable.” That was my father’s term when he was done with an argument.
The question now was how the book would be received. The editing was relatively painless. Jeff and I wrestled over some things, including how many times we should actually use the word fuck. He wanted less, I wanted more. We met halfway and probably got it about right. The funny thing
is, with all the talk about how angry Knight was about my leaving in his profanity, there’s not that much of it in the book.
That summer Larry Kramer, my old metro editor and former antagonist, offered me a job. He had become the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and he was looking for a columnist. I was interested, in part because I wanted to be a columnist, but also because I liked San Francisco. I flew to San Francisco and spent a couple of days with Kramer and his editors, and met with Will Hearst, the paper’s publisher. Kramer offered me the column and a considerable raise from what I was making at the Post.
Because of his past relationship with the Post, Kramer had called both George Solomon and Ben Bradlee before contacting me. When I came back from San Francisco, George called me into his office and asked me if Kramer had offered me a job, and if so what had he offered. I told him.
“Bullshit!” he screamed. “No way he offered you that much. You’re a liar!”
I suggested that George call Kramer while I was sitting there, tell him I was in the office, and ask him how much he had offered. George glared at me for a moment.
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
About a week later he did—offering me a $5,000 raise over lunch while giving me the speech about how lucky I was to be working at the Post. I didn’t disagree with him. Even nine years after my first day as a summer intern, I still found it remarkable that the words “Washington Post Staff Writer” appeared under my name. But the Examiner’s offer was a lot of money—especially since I wasn’t counting on the book, which was about a month from being published at that moment, making me a dollar more than the $17,500 advance. Plus, I was a little hurt that, knowing what I had been offered by Kramer, George was offering me so much less.
“Is that the best you can do?” I asked George.
“Best I can do,” he said. “I took it to Bradlee.”
“Well if that’s the way you guys feel, maybe I should go to San Francisco,” I said.
Again, the glare.
“Give me a few more days,” he said.
“I told Kramer I’d give him an answer by the end of the World Series,” I said. I was getting ready to leave to cover the baseball playoffs.
“Okay,” George said. “I’ll get you an answer by then.”
I headed off to the playoffs, starting in Boston for the first two games of the Red Sox–Angels American League Championship, then going to New York to pick up game three of the National League Championship between my beloved Mets and the Astros. On the morning of game five, which had been delayed a day by rain, I got a call from Jeff Neuman.
“It’s a book,” he said simply.
That meant he had gotten the first copies of the actual book—not a manuscript, not a galley proof, the actual book. “I’ve got two copies I can give you,” he said. “I’ll be at the game this afternoon. I can bring them to you there.”
And so, about an hour before game time, Jeff and I stood on a Shea Stadium ramp and he handed me two copies of A Season on the Brink. It’s a cliché, but next to the births of my three children, being handed those books was the most spine-tingling moment of my life.
“Congratulations,” Jeff said, clearly getting the fact that I was very emotional. “Now I hope the Mets can get you a win today.”
He left me standing there staring at the book cover, Knight looking as if he is trying to glare a hole through the camera. I looked at my name on the jacket and didn’t move for a few minutes. Finally, I walked back up the ramp to the press box level. I saw Dave Kindred, who was someone who knew Knight about as well as anyone. Kindred had left the Post several years earlier to take a job in Atlanta. He’d been offered a lot more money and the Post refused to match the offer. Does that sound familiar?
I held the books out for him to see.
Kindred smiled and said, “Congratulations.”
I was planning to keep one book and give the other to my parents. But I really wanted to know what Dave thought of it. And I knew he would be flying to Houston the next day. “If I give you one, you think you might want to read some of it on the plane tomorrow?” I said.
“I’d love to,” he said.
The Mets won that day, on a Gary Carter single in the eleventh inning, to take a 3–2 lead in the series. The next day I, along with Richard Justice, who was the Post’s number one baseball writer (Tom Boswell was the baseball columnist and I was sort of the rover, thus my bouncing from series to series), caught an early flight to Houston for game six. We went straight from the airport to the Astrodome because the game was scheduled to start at two o’clock. One of the first people I saw was Kindred.
“I didn’t read this on the plane,” he said, handing it back to me.
“Oh,” I said, a bit baffled. Before I could ask why not, he said, “I started it last night at the hotel. I stayed up all night reading it. You should be very proud of what you’ve done. This is a great book.”
I can’t begin to tell you how I felt at that moment. There’s no one I respect more in my profession than Kindred. Plus, he had known Knight for years, and I also knew if he didn’t feel that way he wouldn’t have said it. He would have said, “Nice job,” or, “There’s some really good stuff in here.” Or he might have told me where he thought I’d gone wrong.
“Really?” I said.
“Really,” he said. “It’s not good, it’s great.”
I was still glowing when the game started. Of course, the next few hours were torture as the Astros jumped to a 3–0 lead on Bob Ojeda in the first inning and Bob Knepper shut the Mets down for eight innings. At one point, completely frustrated, I turned to Justice and said, “You’re on your own for game seven. If you think I’m going to sit here and watch Mike Scott scuff the ball all night, you’re nuts.”
Justice laughed. Scott had already beaten the Mets twice in the series, and the Mets were convinced he was scuffing the ball. Since they were convinced, I was convinced.
Fortunately, Scott never got to (allegedly) scuff any more baseballs. The Mets rallied for three runs in the ninth inning and ended up winning one of baseball’s all-time classic games, 7–6 in sixteen innings. Roger McDowell pitched five brilliant shutout innings in relief, and Jesse Orosco barely hung on, loading the bases in the sixteenth before getting the final out more than five hours after the game had started.
The Red Sox had come back from down 3–1 in their series and one out from elimination in the ninth inning of game five to beat the Angels. The World Series started in New York, and the Red Sox promptly won the first two games. Off to Boston we went. When I came upstairs to the press box after batting practice prior to game three, George Solomon was waiting for me. He had flown to Boston to schmooze people for a couple of days. He had also come with an offer for me. We walked to the back of the press box, which was then on the roof of what was a one-deck stadium, one of the great views in all of baseball.
George laid out the deal for me. For all intents and purposes, the Post had matched the Chronicle’s offer. In addition, I would get to write one column a week. As soon as George made the offer, I knew I was going to accept it. But he’d been such a jerk about everything, starting with the “you’re a liar” comment in his office, I wasn’t just going to say, “I accept,” standing on the roof of Fenway Park.
“That’s a really nice offer, George,” I said. “I’ll let you know as soon as the Series is over.”
“What!” George said. “Really nice offer? Are you kidding me? That’s more money than I offered Kindred [five years earlier] and you’re not fit to carry Kindred’s typewriter!”
I didn’t disagree with that, even though Kindred hadn’t carried a typewriter for a good long while. (Tony Kornheiser likes to tell people that when he worked at the New York Times he was often told he wasn’t fit to carry Red Smith’s typewriter. “In fact, toward the end of Red’s career, when Red and I covered events together, I actually did carry his typewriter,” Tony said. “So fit or not, I carried Red Smith’s typewriter.”
)
“I’ll let you know as soon as we’re back in Washington,” I said. “I don’t want to make a snap decision standing here.”
George ranted for several more minutes. Richard Justice said later that when he walked past us, he couldn’t imagine what George was so angry about. “I thought maybe he was trying to get you to cover the Redskins again,” he said.
The Series, as most people remember, turned into another one of the all-time classics, highlighted by the historic game six. After the Red Sox went up 5–3 in the tenth inning, I was resigned to the fact that they were going to win. Then, with two outs, came the remarkable Mets rally: Gary Carter’s single, Kevin Mitchell’s pinch-hit single, Ray Knight’s single to make it 5–4. Bob Stanley then wild-pitched Mitchell across the plate (some think Rich Gedman should have been charged with a passed ball) and Knight to second. It was 5–5. People forget that the score was tied at that moment. Even if Bill Buckner had fielded Mookie Wilson’s roller cleanly, the game would simply have gone to the eleventh inning. Buckner did not lose the World Series for the Red Sox, a fact many, many people forget.
Years later, when I brought up that night to Esther Newberg, one of those crazy Red Sox fans who thinks anyone who has ever worn a Yankees uniform should burn in hell, I asked her what the score was when Buckner booted the ball.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was either 5–4 or 6–5.”
“No,” I said, “it was 5–5. The game was already tied. You need to stop blaming the whole thing on Buckner.”
She looked at me with genuine hatred in her eyes. “No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t care what the score was. It’s his fault.”
Okay, fine.
As soon as the game ended, I raced to the Mets clubhouse. Keith Hernandez was sitting in front of his locker as he always did postgame, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.
“Thank God Buckner booted that ball,” he said. “After I made the second out I came back in here, and I was so depressed I went into [manager] Davey’s [Johnson] office and took a beer out of his fridge. I was dehydrated so I drank it in about ten seconds and opened another one. I’m watching on TV, not even really paying attention when Gary and Kevin got their hits. I opened a third one. Ray gets his hit. I’m still not thinking that clearly, so I finish the third one. Stanley comes in and throws the wild pitch.
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