“That’s when it hit me: the score’s tied and I just drank three beers. I’m buzzed. I was sitting there frozen, trying to figure out how I’d go out and play first base when Mookie hit the ball.” He pulled on his cigarette. “Holy shit. How lucky did I just get?”
I ran down the hallway to the tiny Red Sox locker room. You could still see signs of plastic that had been put up to cover the lockers in anticipation of a champagne celebration that never took place. Buckner was repeating his story for probably the third or fourth time. I stood and listened as new wave after new wave of reporters came at him. He never blinked or complained or said, “Hey, I’ve already answered that five times.”
He took the blame, said he should have made the play. It was about as classy a display as I’ve ever seen from someone who would become a pariah in Boston for years. Overjoyed Mets fan that I was, I walked out of that clubhouse feeling sick for Bill Buckner. I wrote my story on the two first basemen and how different their lives might have been had Buckner fielded the ball. I had no idea just how different.
Two nights later, after an all-day rain pushed game seven back twenty-four hours, the Mets won the World Series, rallying from 3–0 down in the sixth inning (another thing Red Sox fans forget when they rant against Buckner) to win. I flew back to Washington the next morning and told George I was staying at the Post.
“Smart decision” was all he said.
I didn’t disagree.
7
Book Two
THE FIRST SMALL CLUE that Season on the Brink wasn’t going to be what the folks at Macmillan had envisioned—a nice little regional book that might sell close to twenty thousand copies—came in a couple of pre-publication reviews. The first came from Kirkus, a service that specializes in writing short, synopsis-like reviews of books, mostly to give booksellers an idea of what the title is about and some sense of whether they think it is worth ordering a lot, a little, or none at all. The review was the kind of rave you dream about: never been a book like this; gives a view of Bob Knight you never would have imagined…. Perfect. Still, just one review.
The official publication date for the book was November 15, but it began arriving in stores on November 1. The first printing was exactly the same as my advance: 17,500—books instead of dollars. Jeff Neuman told me almost right away that orders for the book were strong, so strong in fact that they were going back to print another 5,000. Gee, that’s nice, I thought, still hoping all this was going to lead to a second book contract.
Macmillan had scheduled a two-day book tour for me in Indiana: one day in Indianapolis doing media there and the next day in Bloomington doing a couple of book signings, appearing on the one local TV station, and doing a couple print interviews—including one with Mike Leonard, a local columnist who had written a piece about me when I first got to town a year earlier. Hammel had already written his column, having been sent an advance copy, saying the book had some insights into the program, but that I had betrayed Knight by leaving his profanity in the book. I wasn’t surprised or even disappointed. Given a choice between Knight and me, Hammel had to choose Knight. I was a little hurt when I called Hammel to try to talk to him and he said, “I’m just telling you this right now: you better not come around here anymore.”
Why not? Was Knight going to show up somewhere and start a fight? Or send someone else to start one? I told Hammel I’d take my chances.
By the time I got to Indiana for my “tour,” the book was starting to get national attention. Knight still hadn’t said anything publicly about it—that would come later—but people were saying and writing that no outsider had ever written a book as inside as this one. When one reviewer called it “the Ball Four of college basketball,” I shook my fist happily. To be compared to my all-time favorite sports book was about as good as it could possibly get as far as I was concerned.
Promoting a book was a whole new world to me. At my first TV stop, one of the hosts began screaming at me almost before I had walked in the door: “Didn’t you bring a copy of the book? I only have one and I need one for my nephew.”
I actually did have a copy out in the car, but I certainly wasn’t giving her one for her nephew. I’ve always found it remarkable the entitlement people feel to free books. In fact, I try to make it a point to go out and buy books written by friends because I know how much it bothers me to be asked for freebies. There’s one writer I’ve known for years who has never once written a word about any of my books but still comes up to me every time I have a book out and says something like, “Hey, I haven’t gotten your new book yet and I’ve got a coast-to-coast flight next week. How about getting your publisher to get moving and send me one.”
But this was a complete stranger who already had a book. She then told me she had read the book, which I would learn later is unusual. Most TV and radio types love to start interviews by saying, “So, tell us what your new book is about.” Or they’ll say, “Your publisher sent me a copy, but I haven’t had time to look at it.” Great. If you got a free book sent to your doorstep and didn’t read it, why should anyone else bother to go out and buy it?
Someday I am going to write a book about book tours. Then I’m going to refuse to go on a book tour to promote it.
My not having a book for the nephew of the local host put her in a bad mood. The interview didn’t go terribly well either.
“Have you ever met Coach Knight?” was her opening question.
I was kind of stunned. She had said she’d read the book.
“Well, yes,” I said. “I spent an entire season with him.”
“But did he know you were there?”
Okay, I couldn’t answer that one with a straight face. “Well, I weigh close to two hundred pounds,” I said. “I think it would have been hard for me to stay invisible the whole time.”
She glared at me.
“So why should people buy your book?”
That one was easy. I went into a lengthy answer about the access I’d had, told a couple of stories, and made sure I used the rest of the time I knew I had left to keep talking so she wouldn’t get a chance to ask me if I knew that Bob Knight’s first name really was Coach. I was learning on the job.
It wasn’t until I got to Bloomington that it really hit me that something I had never expected or planned for was happening. My first book signing that day was at a bookstore right near the Indiana campus called T.I.S. I parked my rental car across the street from the store and saw a line of people down the block. I groaned: what in the heck was going on at the store today that would draw this sort of crowd? How was I going to get anyone to even notice I was there if some celebrity was also doing a book signing? I was early; maybe the other signing had already started and would be over by the time mine began at two o’clock.
When I walked into the store, the manager was waiting for me at the front door.
“Like the crowd?” he asked.
“Who’s it for?” I answered.
He looked at me for a moment as if trying to figure out if I was kidding. “They’re here for you,” he said. “We ordered a thousand books. I hope it’ll be enough.”
I was truly amazed. Those people were all waiting for me? One thousand books? At one store? Whoa.
I was supposed to sign from two to four. I had been worried that I would spend a lot of that time looking around for something to do. That wasn’t a problem. I stayed until 5:45 and left then only because I had another signing to do at six o’clock at a Walden’s in a nearby mall. The notion of stopping to get something to eat in between signings went up in smoke. My hand was ringing with pain when I left, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
When I saw the line outside the Walden’s, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, when the manager at the first store had cut off the line, he had told people I would be at Walden’s, and many had said they were going to go there. I signed books at Walden’s until they closed at nine o’clock. I probably signed close to two thousand books that day.
Two thing
s happened during the Walden’s signing that made me feel very good. Because of Hammel’s column, the word was out in Bloomington and around the state that Knight wasn’t happy with the book. I was surprised when I looked up and saw Todd Meier standing in line. Todd was a backup forward who had overcome numerous injuries to become a real contributor to the team. He was a Wisconsin kid, as friendly and as down-to-earth as you might expect someone from a small town in Wisconsin to be. There were TV cameras there doing a story on the sensation the book was starting to cause, and as soon as I saw Todd I was concerned he might get in trouble if word got back to Knight that he had shown up at my book signing.
“I’m really glad to see you, Todd,” I said when he got close to me. “But are you sure this is a good idea?”
Todd smiled. “What’s Coach going to do, yell at me?”
He had a point.
A few minutes later an attractive young woman handed me a book. As I opened it to sign it, she said, “There’s a note for you in the back.”
Baffled, I turned to the back of the book. “When you’re done, I’m at the other end of the mall in the ice cream shop—Steve.”
I looked at the young woman and just mouthed “Alford?” so no one could hear me.
She nodded.
When I finally signed the last book and thanked everyone, I walked to the other end of the mall. Alford was alone, sipping on a soda.
“So look who’s a big star,” he said, laughing.
“You know Meier came down and stood in line with all those people watching and TV cameras rolling,” I said.
“Meier’s not very bright,” Alford said. “What do you think coach would do to me if I showed up on TV having you sign that book?”
I laughed. “Has he brought it up to you guys?”
Alford nodded. “Oh yeah. Said he made the worst mistake of his life letting you in and none of us should read the book.”
“I sent copies for all you guys to [Tim] Garl,” I said. “He called and told me it would be an NCAA violation if he gave them to you.”
“I heard,” Steve said. “Someone brought a copy on the plane the other day. We took the jacket off so Coach wouldn’t recognize it and passed it around.”
A few months later at the Final Four’s Sunday press conference, someone asked Alford if he had read the book. With Knight sitting right next to him, Steve said with a straight face, “No, I haven’t.”
“Come on,” the reporter said. “You really haven’t read it?”
Alford glanced at Knight and said, “I didn’t need to read it. I lived it.”
After Indiana had won the national championship, I called Alford to congratulate him. I told him he’d done a good job with his answer when the book question had come up. “No way was I going to tell the truth,” he said, laughing. “I still had one more game to play.”
Indiana won that last game, beating Syracuse in New Orleans to win the national championship on a Keith Smart jumper from the corner with five seconds left. My feelings from that night are hard to describe: I was thrilled for the players, knowing firsthand what they’d gone through to get to that moment. On the other hand, I was pretty worn out from all that had gone on in the months leading to the Final Four.
After my “official” phone call from Royce Waltman, I sat down and wrote Knight a letter. I told him I truly found it hard to believe that seeing his profanity in the book had made him feel betrayed. I reminded him of our “shorter than War and Peace” conversation and told him that, in fact, I had probably left out at least 80 to 90 percent of the profanity I actually had on tape. And then I wrote this: “The book, I believe, does everything you and I set out to do. It shows people what it is really like inside your program; it shows why the players not only put up with you, but come away admiring and respecting you; it gives people a firsthand understanding of why you do the things you do.”
I believed that then, I believe that now. I think Knight knows it’s true, and I know—because people have told me—that he’s received hundreds of letters from people who read the book telling him just that. It didn’t matter. Knight had decided I was a villain because I hadn’t written a G-rated book about someone whose language was decidedly X-rated.
His second move—the first was to have Waltman call me—was to call Mike Krzyzewski and tell him the whole thing was his fault. In Knightworld, he never would have given me access if Krzyzewski had not spoken up on my behalf. The fact that Knight had agreed to do the book without so much as even saying, “Mike, what do you think?” on the night I’d proposed the idea didn’t matter. The irony, as I pointed out to Krzyzewski, was that he’d tried to talk me out of the book.
Krzyzewski was completely caught in the middle. On one side, he had his college coach and professional mentor telling him that he had been betrayed and it was his fault. On the other side, he had someone he trusted telling him his mentor hadn’t been betrayed on any level.
We sat down and talked about it after Duke had played an early-season game in the Meadowlands against Alabama. “I have no choice here,” he said to me. “I have to side with Knight. I don’t know what happened between you guys, I wasn’t there. But he’s basically given me an ultimatum: I can be his friend or your friend, but not both.”
I was hurt if only because I thought Krzyzewski should know me well enough to know that betrayal wasn’t my M.O.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Do you think after six months there I didn’t know just about everything there was to know about his divorce, about his relationship with his wife and his two sons and the woman he’s dating?”
“You probably did.”
“Other than one sentence in which I report that he filed for divorce, which was a matter of public record and had been in the newspapers [and was the way Pat Knight found out his father was leaving his mother for good], is there one word in the book about his personal life?”
“I haven’t read the book.”
“So you haven’t read the book, but you’re prepared to judge it based on what Knight—who also says he hasn’t read the book beyond Chapter One—has told you about it?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Krzyzewski, not knowing what to say next. We were in a small, bare room right next to his team’s locker room, which he had used for his postgame session with the media. The only other person in the room was Mickie, Mike’s wife. I looked at Mickie, who shrugged as if to say, “I can’t help you right now.”
“Okay, Mike,” I said. “I’ll see you later. Nice win.”
I walked out of the room. Mickie followed me. “Listen to me,” she said. “One of Mike’s great strengths is his loyalty. I’ve already told him he’s misplacing it here. I understand why it’s tough for him, and I think you do too. You have to give him some time. He’ll figure it out.”
As it turned out she was right. Krzyzewski never called me to say “I’ve changed my mind” or “You were right all along,” but as time went on, it became apparent that he knew I hadn’t betrayed Knight. Later that season, I was at Duke doing a Sunday story on Tommy Amaker, who was from Fairfax, Virginia, and thus a local kid for the Washington Post. I was sitting in the locker room alone with Amaker after practice when Krzyzewski walked in to get something.
“If you’ve got time, come by the office when you’re finished with Tommy,” he said.
I did. He started talking about the game the previous day against North Carolina—a close loss. “Paul Houseman missed two calls that killed us,” he said, talking about one of the ACC’s better officials. “The second time he ran by the bench and said, ‘If I missed that one, Mike, I’ll buy you a Coke.’ When the game was over, I went back, watched the tape right away, and sent someone down to the refs’ locker room to tell Houseman he owed me a f—ing Coke.”
We both laughed. The tension broke. A lot more would happen over the next few years between Knight and Krzyzewski. None of which, I’m happy to report, had anything to do with A Season on the Brink.
&nbs
p; THE FIRST INDIANA GAME I attended that season was at Notre Dame. By then (late November) Knight had told enough people that he was angry about the book that the story was starting to pick up some steam. Gary Nuhn, an old friend from the Dayton Daily News, wrote a column about it that day and predicted that Knight would try his bully act on me after the game.
He didn’t. He did, however, send Hammel to me before the game carrying the letter that I had sent him. “Bob said to tell you he wouldn’t read this,” Hammel said, handing it back to me.
“Very mature of him,” I said.
“I wouldn’t come around Bloomington very much in the future if I were you,” he said, repeating what he had said on the phone.
I liked Hammel a lot. He is an extraordinarily decent man. But at that moment I felt sorry for him.
“Bob, when did you become Knight’s personal messenger?” I asked.
He didn’t answer that one.
The one funny moment of the evening came when Joe Hillman, who had been a redshirt the previous year, walked over to inbound right in front of my seat. “Oh boy,” Joe said, looking at me and smiling. “Here we go.”
We didn’t go anywhere. George Solomon and I had discussed how to deal with any potential postgame problems. I wasn’t going to ask any questions in Knight’s press conference because that could be seen as baiting him. If Knight did what he had done to Sports Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick a few years ago and refused to answer questions unless I left the room, I was going to say, “Bob, with all due respect, I’m credentialed to be in here. If you want to make me the story by not answering questions from the rest of the guys about the game your team just won, that’s your prerogative.”
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