Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Does anybody else in this universe of shifting sands still have the control of a coach? No wonder it’s difficult for a person like Knight, who tends toward prepossession anyway, to be confused about the limits of his dominion. Puerto Rico, women, writers, shoe salesmen, NCAA bigwigs . . . all of them are just more Rubicons to cross. He’s in command; an awful lot of what you see is a good act. Says Harold Andreas, the high school coach who first hired Bobby as an assistant: “He can be as charming as anybody in the world or he can be the biggest horse’s ass in the world. But he makes that decision, and he does it in a split second.” Everyone identifies Knight with bad language, but the fact is that he can talk for hours, if he chooses to, using much less profanity than the average Joe. He doesn’t have a foul mouth; he simply deploys bad language when it can be a weapon.

  Knight is forever putting people back on their heels, testing them, making them uncomfortable in some way. Stop them from scoring points, and they won’t be prepared to stop you. Although it’s fashionable to say Knight rules by intimidation, he actually rules more by derision. He abuses the people he comes into contact with, taking the license to treat them as he does his players.

  “O.K., it’s true sometimes I intimidate a kid,” Knight says. “Usually when I first get him. That sets up the best conditions for teaching. But that’s only true with basketball players, not with anyone else. I don’t think I’m overbearing with people, but look, that’s an awfully hard thing for a man to judge of himself.”

  Most find him guilty. But, here, you judge. Here’s five minutes of typical Bobby Knight. This isn’t extreme Bobby Knight. This isn’t Puerto Rico Bobby Knight. This is just some everyday stuff, the way he keeps an edge, even over people he likes.

  It’s practice time, and two of Knight’s acquaintances are sitting at the scorer’s table. One is a black man, Joby Wright, who starred on Knight’s first Hoosier team in 1971–72. Six years after his athletic eligibility ran out, Wright returned to Indiana to get his degree; now he’s going for a master’s in counseling and guidance. All along, Knight helped Wright and encouraged him with his academics, as he has many of his players. In Knight’s nine years, only one Hoosier among those who have played out their eligibility has failed sooner or later to get a degree.

  The other person at the table is a white woman, Maryalyce Jeremiah, the Indiana women’s basketball coach. Now it’s an accepted fact of life—disputed, perhaps, only by Nancy Knight, Bobby’s wife—that Knight is a misogynist, but Jeremiah he at least abides. She’s a coach, after all.

  Knight advances on Wright, and says, “Hey, Joby. Do me a favor.”

  “Sure, Coach.”

  “I want you to get my car and go downtown.” Wright nods, taken in. Knight slams the trap: “And I want you to go to a pet shop and buy me a collar and a leash to put on that dog out there.” And he points to one of his players, a kid Wright has been working with.

  O.K., it’s a harmless enough dig, and Wright laughs, easily. But Knight won’t quit: “Because if you don’t start to shape him up, I’ll have to get some white guys working on him. You guys don’t show any leadership, you don’t show any incentive since you started getting too much welfare.”

  Wright smiles again, though uneasily. Now, understand, Knight isn’t anti-black. Just anti-tact. That’s the point. One of his former black stars once recalled a halftime against Michigan when Knight singled out two of his white regulars as gutless, and then went over as they cowered and slapped their cheeks, snarling, “Maybe this’ll put some color in your faces.” It isn’t racial prejudice. Still, still. . . .

  Knight walks down to the other end of the scorer’s table. “Hey, Maryalyce.”

  Brightly: “Yes, Bobby?”

  “You know what a dab is?”

  “A what?”

  “A dab—D-A-B.”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “It’s a dumb-assed broad,” he says, smirking.

  “I don’t know any of those,” she replies—a pretty quick comeback.

  But he won’t leave it alone. The edge, again: “Yeah, you know one more than you think you do.”

  And he moves on. The white woman shrugs. It’s just Bobby. The black man shrugs. It’s just Bobby. But why is it just Bobby? Why does he do this to himself? He’s smart enough to know that, in this instance, he isn’t hurting his two friends nearly so much as he hurts himself, cumulatively, by casting this kind of bread upon the waters, day after day. Why? Why, Bobby, why?

  What a setup he has. Forty years old, acknowledged to be at the top of his profession. Says the very coach who disparages Knight for being a bully, “Any coach who says Bobby’s not the best is just plain jealous.” Knight has already won 317 games, and nobody, not even Adolph Rupp, achieved that by his age.

  Someday Knight could even surpass Rupp’s record 874 wins, a seemingly insurmountable total. Knight has won one NCAA championship, in 1976, and five Big Ten titles in nine seasons; he was twice national coach of the year; he’s the only man ever to both play on and coach an NCAA champion. He’s the coach at one of America’s great basketball schools, one that’s also an academic institution of note. The state worships him; Hoosier politicians vie for his benediction. His contemporaries in coaching not only revere him for his professional gifts, but some of his esteemed predecessors—mythic men of basketball lore—see Knight as the very keeper of the game. The torch is in his hands.

  He’s also a clever man and delightful company when he chooses to be. Beyond all that he has an exemplary character, without any of the vices of the flesh that so often afflict men in his station and at his time of life. He’s devoted to his family, Nancy and their two sons, Timothy, 16, and Patrick, 10. His supporters fall over themselves relating tales of his civic and charitable good works, a light that Knight humbly hides under a basket. In this era of athletic corruption Knight stands foursquare for the values of higher education that so many coaches and boot-lickers in the NCAA only pay lip service to. His loyalty is as unquestioned as his integrity. He is the best and brightest . . . and the most honorable, too. He has it all, every bit of it. Just lying there on the table. He has only to lean down, pick it up and let the chip fall off. But he can’t. For Knight to succeed at basketball—not only to win, you understand, but to succeed because “That’s much harder,” he says—all the world must be in the game. All the people are players, for or against, to be scouted, tested, broken down, built back up if they matter. Life isn’t lived; it’s played. And the rabbits are everywhere.

  II: COACHES

  Perhaps the most revealing statement that Knight makes about himself is this: “You know why Havlicek became such a great pro? Just because he wanted to beat Lucas, that’s why.” Yes, of course, Knight hasn’t even mentioned himself, but that’s the trick. Obviously, if only subconsciously, he’s not really talking about John Havlicek superseding Lucas; he’s talking about himself superseding Havlicek and Lucas both.

  The best thing that ever happened to Knight was that after high school—he’s still the greatest star ever to come out of Orrville, Ohio—he didn’t amount to a hill of beans as a player. Knight the failed hero has not only served as the challenge for Knight the coach, but also Knight the disappointed hero is the model for the Everyplayer Knight coaches. That boy was limited, self-centered, frustrated, a pouter, then a bitcher, ultimately a back-biter against his coach, Fred Taylor, who once called Knight “the Brat from Orrville.”

  The one thing Knight could do was shoot, a strange low-trajectory shot that was deadly against zones when he had the time to get it off. To this day, no Knight team has ever set up in a zone defense. It’s like Groucho Marx, who once said he didn’t want to be part of any club that would have him as a member.

  Although Knight only started two games in three years on the Buckeye varsity, he was a major figure on the team, something of a clubhouse lawyer and a practical joker (which he still is). Dragon and a roommate led the Buckeyes in hustling tickets, and he stunned his wide-eyed t
eammates with his brash high jinks. On a trip to New York he boldly swiped a couple of bottles of wine from Mamma Leone’s restaurant, and not only pilfered a few ties from a midtown shop, but with the contraband under his coat, he went over to a cop who entered the store at that moment and started chatting him up.

  There is little Knight’s players can put over on him because he did just about all of it himself. Taylor wasn’t the only coach Knight challenged, either. In his senior year at Orrville, he defied the school’s new coach by refusing to leave a game for a substitute and was booted off the squad. Although subsequently reinstated, he found that season so unsatisfying that he gave up his baseball eligibility to barnstorm with an all-star basketball team in the spring. “I regret that more than anything I’ve ever done,” he says, because he could hit a baseball and hit with power. Knight probably would’ve been better at baseball than he was at basketball.

  Knight was also a pretty fair football end, and as he should’ve been a baseball player, so, by temperament, he would have made a better football coach. Wilkinson, Bryant, Hayes, Schembechler, Paterno and Royal are all friends and/or models of his, and he has a tape of Lombardi exhortations, plus a Lombardi polemic hanging on his office wall. And, like football coaches, Knight devotes himself to studying film, back and forth, over and over, like some Buddhist monk with his prayer wheel.

  In the dazzle of the tight arena, basketball coaches tend to be popinjays, ruling by force of personality, glint of teeth, while football coaches are distant, solid sorts, administrators, with scores of lieutenants and troops. Being a basketball coach doesn’t seem to prepare you for anything else in life, but even football coaches who can’t win get bumped upstairs to assistant athletic director (a football coach who wins becomes athletic director). “I’ve always thought there’s a greater depth to football coaches,” Knight says.

  But that’s subsidiary to the main point: Knight loves all coaches. He will ask people who knew Rupp well to tell him about the old man. What made the Baron tick? Why did he do this? How? He has spent many hours listening to Sparky Anderson. He calls in the old basketball masters and studies at their feet. In his office, the only photographs (apart from those of his teams) are of Pete Newell and Clair Bee. Even as a boy, he would go off on scouting trips with coaches. Bill Shunkwiler, his football coach at Orrville, remembers that after school, when other kids were hanging out, chasing, Bobby would come by Shunkwiler’s house and the two of them would sit and have milk and cookies and talk coach talk. Knight still keeps in touch with many of his old coaches, still calls them “Mister,” and there is, in Coach Knight, almost a tribal sense of heritage and tradition.

  “I just love the game of basketball so,” he says. “The game! I don’t need the 18,000 people screaming and all the peripheral things. To me, what’s most enjoyable is the practice and preparation.”

  The ultimate contradiction is that Bobby Knight, of all people, profane as he is, seeks after purity. What troubles him is that the game must be muddied by outlanders and apostates—the press, for example. In fact, Knight has studied the subject, and he understands the press better than some writers who cover him understand basketball. He even numbers several writers as friends, and sometimes he will actually offer a grudging admiration beyond his famous institutional assessment: “All of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.” But his truest feelings were probably revealed one day recently when he blurted out, “How do they know what it’s like if they’ve never played? How? How? Tell me: How can they know?”

  At the base of everything, this is it: if you’re not part of basketball, you can’t really belong, you can only distort. He has taken over the microphone at Assembly Hall, the Hoosiers’ arena, and told his own fans to back off, be good sports, even to stop using dirty words. Imagine, Knight telling people to improve their language. “It showed no bleeping class,” he snapped afterward.

  He just always wanted to be Coach Knight, officially expressing this desire in an autobiography he wrote when he was a junior in high school. It was entitled It’s Been A Great Life (So Far). Nancy Knight remembers nothing otherwise: “All Bobby ever wanted was to be a coach, in the Big Ten.” Even now, when Knight deliberates on the rest of his life, he doesn’t go much beyond his one love. “I hope,” he says, “that when I retire I’ll have enough assistants in head jobs so I can live anywhere I want and still have a place nearby where I can go over and help out and watch some films.” As much as there is such a thing, he’s a natural-born coach.

  III: OLDER PEOPLE

  Knight’s father—his square name was Carroll, but everyone called him Pat—was a railroad man from Oklahoma, who came to Orrville because it was a railroad town, a division point. The main Pennsy line passed through, and the city slickers from Cleveland and Akron had to journey down on a spur to little Orrville to catch the Broadway Limited. So, despite having only about 5,000 folks when Bobby was growing up, Orrville was not quite as closed and homogeneous as you would expect of a Midwest coloring-book place, set in a dell, with a water tower.

  Knight was born there, one of the last of the Depression Babies, on Oct. 25, 1940, a couple of weeks before FDR won his third term over Wendell Willkie and the objections of the Orrville electorate. He was reared in the ’50s. Actually, the ’50s were not much different in attitudes and values from the two decades that preceded them, but what sets the ’50s apart is that they came right before the upheaval of the ’60s. But just as the ’60s flowered, Knight went off to coach at West Point, where his ’50s just kept on going, even becoming sort of a badge of separation.

  The ’50s are too often disparaged for being simple, everyone in lockstep. But more accurately, what the ’50s offered, in spades, was definition. In analyzing pre-’60s coaches like the unrepentant Knight, observers tend to confuse definition with discipline. Knight most of all wants to know where people stand—and that they do stand for something. Here’s an example of how rigidly lines were drawn when Knight was growing up.

  Shunkwiler takes out a copy of the 1958 MemORRies, the high school yearbook when Knight was a senior, and peruses the photographs of the boys, skipping the ones with pompadours, stopping on the ones who, like Bobby, wore crew cuts: “Athlete . . . athlete . . . athlete . . . ,” he says. He comes to yet another boy with short hair. “Not an athlete.” And hastily, “But a good kid.” It was that easy then. More than one-third of the 200 or so boys were involved in athletics. Many of these were also involved in girls, too, but only in their place. If a coach so much as saw one of his players holding hands, he would bark out: “Hey, no skin-to-skin!”

  The coach, you see, was a giant of a man in this well-defined culture. Shunkwiler recalls that if a coach was notified by a teacher that one of his players was causing a problem, the coach would take the boy aside and, presto, “That would be the end of the trouble.” Jack Graham, another of Knight’s Orrville basketball coaches, once kicked Bobby out of practice. Knight didn’t head to the locker room, though; he waited patiently in the hallway so he could see Coach as soon as practice ended. “Bobby understood,” Graham says. “I told him, ‘There’s only one man who can be the boss out there, and, Bobby, that’s the coach.’”

  Early this season Knight purposely overreacted one day so that he could boot his star, sophomore Guard Isiah Thomas, out of practice. He needed to show the kid, and the whole team, that there can be no exceptions. Some things don’t change. Coach Knight can throw his star out at Indiana University as sure as Coach Graham could at Orrville High. On the team, on the court, time is frozen; it’s been a great life (so far).

  What Knight didn’t learn from his coaches came by example from his father, though theirs was an unusual relationship. The father and son weren’t buddies, which has led some people to conclude that Knight’s deep affection for older coaches is a manifestation of a perpetual search for a father figure. To some extent this analysis may be true, but the relationships in the Knight household were more complex tha
n that analysis suggests.

  Bobby was born six years into a marriage that had come late in life. Though he was an only child, he had a companion at home—his maternal grandmother, Sarah Henthorne. “A classy lady—the love of Bobby’s life,” says Pauline Boop, who was Knight’s childhood next-door neighbor and remains his friend. No wonder he gets along so well with older people; he grew up in a house full of them.

  Both of Knight’s parents worked—Pat on the railroad, Hazel as an elementary school teacher—and although they were loving, they weren’t enthusiastic about the thing their only son loved the most, basketball. But at least Knight always had an ally in his grandmother. She was the one who followed his basketball closely. No matter what the hour, when Bobby came home he would go and kiss her good night. “I think he was closer to his grandmother than he ever was to me or his father,” says the widowed Hazel Knight, who still lives in the house on North Vine Street, across the field from the high school where Bobby starred for the Orrville Red Riders.

  Knight came home for spring vacation of his sophomore year at Ohio State, right after the Buckeyes had won the national championship. One day he returned to the house in the afternoon, and his grandmother was sitting there in her favorite chair. She had gone shopping in the morning and was tired. It took a while before Bobby realized that she wasn’t napping, that she was dead. He remembers it very well: “She was just sitting there. Her legs were crossed at the ankles.” Knight’s grandmother had been sick all winter, and there are those in Orrville who say she willed herself to stay alive until the season was over and her beloved Bobby could come home from his basketball to see her. It was during the next two seasons he had all the trouble with Fred Taylor.