Knight had forgiven Krzyzewski for being “responsible” for Season on the Brink not long after the book came out. But he wasn’t thrilled when the Krzyzewski coaching star kept rising—to the point where there were whispers that he just might surpass his old mentor at some point. When Alex Wolff, the superb Sports Illustrated basketball writer, did a long piece on Krzyzewski in 1992 calling him the best coach in college basketball, Knight wasn’t happy.
A few weeks later when Duke beat Knight’s last really good (as it turned out) Indiana team in the Final Four, Knight was even less happy. When the two men went to shake hands, Knight pulled the old “blow-by,” not even slowing down as he went by Krzyzewski and barely shaking his hand. I watched that scene and laughed. Several people said, “What is that about?” My answer was simple: it was Knight being Knight.
A little while later, I walked out of the Duke locker room on my way back to press row to write my column. Someone grabbed my arm. It was Mickie Krzyzewski.
“Hey, Mickie, great win,” I said.
She was shaking her head as if I was wrong. “You have to go talk to Mike,” she said.
I was completely baffled. “Why?”
“Knight,” was all she said.
I didn’t ask for details. I walked back into the locker room, made my way through to the back, and knocked lightly on the door where Mickie had told me the coaches were located. Tommy Amaker, then one of Krzyzewski’s assistants, opened it a crack and, seeing me, opened it so I could walk in.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was walking into a room of coaches who had just lost the national championship game on a half-court shot at the buzzer (something that would almost happen to Duke eighteen years later).
The coaches were all sitting around in a circle: Pete Gaudet, Mike Brey, Jay Bilas, Amaker, and Krzyzewski. No one was talking. Someone brought over an extra chair and I sat next to Krzyzewski.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s no big deal.”
“Then why did Mickie tell me I had to come back here?”
Krzyzewski smiled wanly. “Because Bob Knight is an asshole,” he said.
“Film at eleven,” I answered.
Here’s what happened. The NCAA does everything it can to keep players and coaches from having to actually mingle with the media except in the locker room and the interview room. It had gone to the trouble of actually curtaining off an area leading to and from the interview room podium just in case someone might venture too close to a player or a coach. The losing team goes into the interview room first after games because the winning team has TV obligations that delay the beginning of their “cooling off” period. Knight and his players had just come off the podium and were walking into the curtained-off area as Krzyzewski and his players were arriving.
Knight stopped and shook hands with both Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley as he passed them and wished them luck on Monday night. “Good,” Krzyzewski thought, “he’s over his little postgame funk now.” He walked up to his old coach, hand extended, and was about to say something like “It was a hell of a game” when Knight put his head down, acted as if he didn’t see him, and walked right past him.
Krzyzewski was crushed. No matter how well he understood Knight, he was hurt that Knight couldn’t bring himself to be even a little bit gracious, to offer congratulations at all. When Krzyzewski finished the retelling, I shrugged my shoulders.
“Listen,” I said. “F— him. You’re playing for the national championship on Monday. You need to focus on that.”
“I know that. I’ll be fine.”
He was, although several of his ex-coaches and players who went to see him that night and the next day said he was still disconsolate. He got himself together though and Duke blew out Michigan—the Fab Five—to win a second straight national title.
For most of the next ten years, Knight and Krzyzewski didn’t speak. In 1996, when Duke and Indiana played in the preseason NIT championship game in Madison Square Garden, Krzyzewski took one more shot at repairing the relationship.
I was there that night researching A March to Madness.
Shortly before the teams were going to be introduced, Krzyzewski walked down to the Indiana bench and shook hands with all the Indiana assistants. Then he waited for Knight, who, as usual, was taking his time coming out of the locker room. Krzyzewski just stood there waiting for Knight to arrive.
Finally, with about a minute left on the pregame clock, Knight walked out, accompanied by D. Wayne Lukas, the famous horse trainer. Knight almost always has someone with him, needing an audience at all times. I had been that audience for most of a year. On this night, it was Lukas.
As soon as Knight spotted Krzyzewski, he turned his back on him and began telling Lukas some kind of story. I was standing close enough that I could hear Knight saying, “And then I told the sumbitch…” My guess was I’d heard the story at some point.
The pregame clock hit zero. Krzyzewski shook his head and walked back to his bench. Only when he saw Krzyzewski walk to his bench did Knight stop talking to Lukas and make his way to the floor.
Afterward, I found myself with Krzyzewski and his coaches again. “That’s the period on the end of the sentence,” Krzyzewski said. “I’m done.”
Except he wasn’t done. Unlike his mentor, Krzyzewski is incredibly loyal to friends and doesn’t hold grudges forever. When he was elected to the basketball Hall of Fame in 2001, Krzyzewski called Knight.
“Coach, I really don’t care what’s gone on between us,” he said. “The one thing I know is life is short and we’re both getting older. If I hadn’t played for you and worked for you and known you, I wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. I would really like it if you would give my induction speech.”
Even Knight couldn’t think of a smart-ass answer to that gesture. “Mike,” he said, “I’d be honored.”
Since then, they’ve been pals again. I’m glad because I know Knight means a lot to Krzyzewski, even though he understands and see his flaws. What’s the old saying? A friend is someone you know well and you like them anyway.
I got caught between Knight and Krzyzewski once more in the fall of 2009 when Krzyzewski was being inducted into the Army Sports Hall of Fame. Kevin Anderson, who was then Army’s athletic director, asked me to emcee the dinner. He said Knight was going to give Krzyzewski’s induction speech. I told him I’d be glad to do it but only if my presence wouldn’t cause any problems for Krzyzewski.
By then my relationship with Knight had thawed. It wasn’t as if we were best friends or even friends, but I had interviewed him at length for my book on Red Auerbach (Knight loved Red) and when we saw each other, we were always polite. Still, I wanted to be sure. I called Krzyzewski. “If Knight says he won’t do it if you’re there, I’ll just tell him he shouldn’t come,” Krzyzewski said. “But I don’t think he’ll do that.”
He didn’t. The dinner was black tie—except for Bob Knight, who showed up in a blue sweater. Personally, I thought that was out of line. It was a black tie dinner honoring not only Krzyzewski, but seven other West Pointers, including General Ray Murphy, who had been Knight’s boss when he coached there. I honestly don’t care if ESPN lets him get away with wearing a sweater on air (although I think it’s ridiculous to put his partners in sweaters too; I mean, my God, how much can you pander to one person?), but for an occasion like this, someone should have said, “Bob, suck it up and get a tux.”
Of course no one did.
I had the honor of introducing Knight. Here’s what I said: “Please welcome college basketball’s all-time winningest coach with 902 victories, a member of the Army Sports Hall of Fame, a member of the basketball Hall of Fame, but most important, the man who built my house… Bob Knight.”
I’d used the line before and it cracked up the whole room. Except, of course, for Bob Knight.
As I walked off the podium and he walked onto it, we had to pass each other. He put his head down to do the same
blow-by he had pulled on Krzyzewski seventeen years earlier in Minneapolis. I wasn’t going to let him do it. I stood right in front of him and put out my hand.
Knight glared at me. Then he shook hands and talked about himself for the next fifteen minutes while introducing Krzyzewski.
Krzyzewski handled it all beautifully. First, he thanked Knight for loaning him his tuxedo. “You see, I forgot to bring mine tonight so Coach graciously gave me his and wore that sweater…”
I would have expected nothing less from Krzyzewski. You see, in the end, he did become Dean Smith, and never—thank God—became Bob Knight.
25
The Indiana Boys
IN THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since the publication of A Season on the Brink, I’ve been in touch with many of the players and coaches that I got to know during that remarkable winter.
On occasion I still see Joe Hillman, who works in Indianapolis, and Todd Meier, who went back to his hometown in Wisconsin, and backup forward Steve Eyl, who is now a successful businessman in California. I see Steve Alford every year at the Final Four and talk to him occasionally on the phone, and I have sporadic contact with Tim Garl, still the trainer at IU after all these years, and Larry Rink, who is still the team doctor.
Dan Dakich and I have remained friends throughout. We talked often when he was still on Bob Knight’s staff and after he went to Bowling Green as the head coach. He even invited me to speak at his preseason banquet one season, which I was happy to go and do. Now Dan is a very successful radio talk-show host in Indianapolis and a rising star at ESPN. We talk on a semi-regular basis, and I occasionally appear on his radio show.
When I started working on this book, my first instinct was to track down at least a half-dozen people from that Indiana team and make them part of this book. Brian Sloan, who stood up for me to the security guard that day in Syracuse, is now a doctor in Chicago. Royce Waltman, who first delivered the news that “Coach” was pissed off about the book, had a very successful run as the head coach at Indiana State and now does color on the radio for IU.
In the end, though, not wanting the book to be even longer than it already is, I whittled my IU list to two people: Damon Bailey and Ron Felling. Both were important to Season on the Brink. Both were important to Bob Knight. And, unlike some of the others, they have been out of the public eye for a while now. Which made finding them and talking to them that much more intriguing to me.
Felling and I were good friends during my time in Bloomington. Even though he was the newest member of the staff, I always felt he was the one Knight leaned on the most. He was older than Royce and Kohn Smith and Joby Wright and, perhaps because he hadn’t been around as long, was more likely than the others to tell Knight things he didn’t want to hear.
He also stayed the longest. Royce and Kohn and Joby all went on to head coaching jobs within a couple of years of the 1987 national championship. Ron stayed, and whenever I was at an Indiana game, we’d spend a few minutes talking. When Indiana came to Washington to play in the first and second rounds of the NCAA Tournament in 1998, I asked Ron if he thought this was his last coaching stop.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “I’m almost sixty and so is Coach. I imagine we’ll just ride off into the sunset together.”
As most people know, it didn’t work out that way—for either man. Early in the 1999–2000 season, Indiana blew an eighteen-point lead against Notre Dame before recovering to win the game in overtime. The next day Dan Dakich called Felling from Bowling Green to check in—as he often did. When Dakich asked Felling how Knight had reacted to the blown lead, Felling told him the truth.
“I said he went ballistic, which he did,” Felling said. “I described to Danny what he was like after the game. Heck, it wasn’t anything that unusual. He just asked me how he was after the game and I told him.”
There was one twist to the conversation this time though that made it different than others in the past: Knight, for some reason, had picked up the phone and was listening.
As soon as Felling finished telling Dakich what had happened, Knight broke in and said, “Dakich, I don’t ever want to see you around here again. Felling, you’re fired.”
Knight firing coaches isn’t unusual. Anyone who has ever worked for him has been fired on multiple occasions. It had happened to Felling before. Felling can’t talk about what happened next because it is part of the testimony he gave by deposition in the lawsuit he filed against Knight and Indiana. As part of the settlement—Felling received $35,000 from Indiana and $25,000 from Knight according to several published reports—Felling isn’t allowed to discuss his testimony or anything he knows about Knight’s testimony.
“Honestly, John, I wouldn’t want to talk about it even if I could,” he said. “It was almost twelve years ago now. It’s in the past. I have a lot of good memories of Indiana and the people I knew there. I’m happier leaving it at that. All I know is I told the truth.”
Ron and I were sitting by a swimming pool in the condo development in Naples where he now spends his winters. He ran very successful shooting camps both when he coached high school and during his years with Knight, so he lives comfortably in retirement now. He spends most of the summer on his boat in Steamboat Springs, Arkansas, and he and his wife, Camie, still have a place in Bloomington. He’s seventy-one now and looks like a Florida retiree, wearing shorts and sandals, walking more slowly than he used to. The sense of humor is still intact and so is the sense of sadness about the way his career at Indiana ended.
There’s very little dispute about what happened in the minutes after Knight told Felling he was fired and hung up the phone. Felling went to the Cave—he’d been looking at tape on the other side of the building when Dakich called—and found Knight and assistant coaches Mike Davis (who later succeeded Knight), John Treloar, and Patrick Knight, who had joined the staff a year earlier, all there.
According to everyone in the room, Knight screamed at Felling, who defended himself by saying he had only told Dakich what had happened after the Notre Dame game, nothing more. At some juncture, while Felling was trying to talk, Knight charged at him and knocked him backward into the TV set that was right behind where Felling was standing.
Knight is 6 foot 5 and probably weighed about 250 pounds at the time. Felling was giving away about seven inches and probably 70 pounds. Mike Davis’s testimony was eventually released through a Freedom of Information request made by an Indianapolis TV station. In it, he said he had his head down when Felling went flying, but was told later by Patrick Knight and Treloar that Knight had shoved Felling into the TV. As part of Knight’s settlement, he admitted that he had “shoved Felling in anger.”
Those words were part of a negotiation between the lawyers that appeared to be stalemated in September of 2002. Felling and his lawyer ended up walking out, telling Knight’s attorney they would see them in court. A few minutes later, Knight’s lawyer called Felling’s lawyer and said a compromise could be reached.
“It was like in the schoolyard,” Felling’s lawyer told reporters. “We called their bluff and they backed down.”
The money wasn’t important to Felling. Getting Knight to admit he had done what he’d done was important. Clearly, he felt violated by the attack and by being fired the way he’d been fired. He was also angry when Indiana put out a statement that he had decided to retire in the middle of the season to spend more time with his family.
“That’s the best they could come up with?” he said, laughing. “My youngest child was thirty-five at the time. Spend more time with my family? Who were they kidding?”
It was during that same season that former Indiana player Neil Reed went on CNN/SI and accused Knight of having grabbed him by the neck during a practice. Knight categorically denied that any such thing had happened and trotted out players and coaches to say they had never seen Knight lay hands on a player that way.
I didn’t know Neil Reed, but when people began calling me and asking if I thought it was possible Reed
was telling the truth, I said I had never seen Knight come close to doing anything like that during my year with him. Did he occasionally shove a player? Sure. Had Dakich told me the story about Knight throwing the ball in his face from about a foot away when he was a freshman? Yes. But choking—or anything close to it?
No. I’d never seen it.
Felling had.
“I used to take practice tapes home with me,” he said. “I’d go through them, make notes, and talk to coaches and players about them the next day. When I heard Neil say what he said, I knew he was telling the truth. I remembered the practice and I was pretty sure I still had the tape.”
He did. When he found it, he had someone mail it to CNN/SI, which had aired the original Reed interview. Since his lawsuit with Knight and Indiana was still pending at the time, Felling didn’t want to be accused of leaking the tape. Even so, he was almost instantly fingered as the source when the tape leaked.
The tape is grainy, but it is clear on it that Knight charges in Reed’s direction angrily and grabs him by the neck. When I first saw it I was truly surprised. The fact that Knight had lied didn’t surprise me. In fact, based on my past history with him and stories others had told me, I wouldn’t be surprised if Knight thought he was telling the truth. What really surprised me though was remembering Knight’s press conference in Buffalo the day before what turned out to be his last game at Indiana—an embarrassing 77–57 loss to Pepperdine in a first-round NCAA Tournament game—in which he had trotted out players to insist that Neil Reed had to be lying.
That day was vintage Knight. He talked on and on about all the different things he had done to motivate players through the years. “This is basketball, not canasta,” he said. “Kids get bloodied playing this game.”
Someone brought up another ex-IU player who had defended Reed. Knight responded by saying the kid was an alcoholic. Seriously.
“I sent the tape to the TV station because I knew it had happened,” Felling said. “I saw it happen. Coach just wasn’t telling the truth. I’ve been consistent about all of this. I told Danny [Dakich] before I gave my deposition, ‘All I’m going to do is tell the truth.’ And that’s all I did.”
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