A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Finally, with Thomas fighting back tears, Knight turned on the rest of his team. For ten more minutes he railed at them, called them names, told them they couldn’t beat anybody. He told them not to bother coming to practice the next day, or the day after. He didn’t care what they did. “Get them out of here,” he finally told the assistants. “Get them the f— out.”

  Knight walked out onto the floor. He was drained. He turned to Kohn Smith. “Go talk to Daryl,” he said. Knight knew he had gone too far with Thomas, and undoubtedly he had regretted many of the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. But he couldn’t take them back. Instead, he would send Smith, who was as quiet and gentle as Knight was loud and brutal, to talk to Thomas.

  Thomas cried. Smith comforted him. Thomas was facing the same question everyone who comes in contact with Knight faces sooner or later: Is it worth it? Does the end justify the means? He knew Knight just wanted him to be a better player. He knew Knight liked him and cared about him. He knew that if anyone ever attacked him, Knight would come to his defense. But was all that worth it for this? This was Knight at his meanest. Every player who comes to Indiana faces the screaming, raving Knight at some point in his life. Some leave because it isn’t worth it to them, but most stay. And most leave convinced Knight’s way is the right way. But now Daryl Thomas wondered. He had to wonder; he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t wondered, if he hadn’t cried.

  They practiced early the next morning, but without Knight: he stayed home, not wanting to put himself or his team through another emotional trauma.

  One morning later, Knight called Thomas into his locker room. He put his arm around Thomas and told him to sit down. He spoke softly, gently. There were no other coaches, no teammates in the room. “Daryl, I hate it when I get on you the way I did Sunday, I really do,” he said. “But do you know why I do it?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Because, Daryl, sometimes I think I want you to be a great player more than you want you to be a great player. And that just tears me up inside. Because there is no way you will ever be a great player unless you want it. You have the ability. But I can coach, teach, scream, and yell from now until Doomsday and you won’t be any good unless you want it as bad as I do. Right now, I know you don’t want it as bad as I do. Somehow, I have to convince you to feel that way. I don’t know if this is the right way, but it’s my way. You know it’s worked for other people in the past. Try, Daryl, please try. That’s all I ask. If you try just as hard as you can, I promise you it will be worth it. I know it will. Don’t try for me, Daryl. Try for you.”

  Thomas listened to all this. Unlike some players who might not understand what Knight was saying, he understood. This was the way his coach coached; that would never change. Thomas was going through the same emotional swings that other gifted Knight players had gone through. One in particular, Isiah Thomas (no relation to Daryl) had come out of the Chicago ghetto and had lit up Indiana basketball for two years with his talent and his personality. He and Knight had fought for two years while Thomas starred for Indiana, and had continued to fight after Thomas left Indiana early to turn pro.

  At a clinic once, someone asked Isiah Thomas what he really thought about Knight. “You know there were times,” Isiah Thomas answered, “when if I had had a gun, I think I would have shot him. And there were other times when I wanted to put my arms around him, hug him, and tell him that I loved him.”

  Those words, perhaps better than any others, sum up the love-hate relationship between Knight and his players, even between Knight and his friends. To know Bob Knight is to love him. To know Bob Knight is to hate him. Because he views the world and everyone in it in strict black-and-white terms, he is inevitably viewed that way by others.

  In less than forty-eight hours, Daryl Thomas had seen the black and the white. He had felt the full range of emotions. That Saturday, when Indiana played its first game of the season, Daryl Thomas was Indiana’s best player. Not for Knight. For himself. But it was only one game. A long season lay ahead.

  2.

  Rise and Fall

  Bob Knight spent the fall of 1985 driven and haunted by the year just past. The high was so high, and the low so low, that the memories were vivid and sharp. Partly because of his prodigious memory, but more because it provided much-needed comfort, he could recall the Olympics in almost minute-by-minute detail, especially the climax.

  It was warm in Los Angeles on August 10, warm yet comfortable, just as it had been throughout the 1984 Summer Olympics. Miraculously, there had been no smog, no giant traffic snafus, and no serious security problems throughout the two weeks.

  Knight awoke that morning feeling the way he always feels on the morning of a basketball game: keyed up, excited, nervous, perhaps even a little more than usual, because this was not merely another game. This was a game, a night, a moment he had waited for his entire life.

  That night he would coach the United States of America in a basketball game to decide the winner of an Olympic gold medal. In speeches long after that game had been won, Knight would say often, “If you cannot fight for your country in war, then I can think of no greater honor than to represent it in the Olympic Games.”

  For Knight, a true, red-white-and-blue patriot, this was far more than a basketball game. This was the culmination of a crusade, one that he had once believed he would never get the chance to carry out. Even though Knight had been recognized for years as a superb coach, the best there was in the opinion of many, his controversial temperament had brought him as much derision as his coaching ability had acclaim.

  Nothing in Knight’s career had drawn more fire than his first experience representing his country as coach of an international team. It was in Puerto Rico in 1979. While leading the U.S. team to the gold medal in the Pan American Games, Knight was arrested for assaulting a Puerto Rican police officer. Witnesses to the incident, which took place during a U.S. practice session, are unanimous in saying that the policeman was far more at fault than Knight, that the policeman was rude and officious and practically begged Knight to get into an altercation with him.

  Even though Knight was put through the humiliation of being dragged from the practice floor in handcuffs, he probably would have been judged a victim in that incident had he simply allowed the witnesses to tell the story. But that isn’t Knight’s way. He is completely incapable of letting an incident—any incident—simply die a natural death. Indiana University vice-president Edgar Williams, one of Knight’s best friends, describes that side of him best: “Bob always—always—has to have the last word. And more often than not, it’s that last word that gets him in trouble.”

  Puerto Rico was a perfect demonstration of Williams’s words. In speeches long after he had left San Juan behind, Knight was still taking shots. He talked about mooning Puerto Rico as he left it, made crude jokes about Puerto Rico, and, ultimately, turned public sentiment around: instead of being the victim of an officious cop, he made himself the Ugly American. Knight thought he was being funny; he couldn’t understand that many found his brand of humor offensive. And because he chose not to understand, the person he hurt most was Robert Montgomery Knight. It was almost as if he wanted to testify against himself after a dozen witnesses had proved his innocence.

  Because of Puerto Rico, Knight thought he would never be named Olympic coach. In 1978, when the coach for 1980 was selected, he thought he would get the job. He had coached Indiana to the national championship in 1976 and had built a program that won sixty-three of sixty-four games over two seasons. But, in a close vote that went to a second ballot, Providence coach Dave Gavitt was named. Knight was crushed by the choice because he wanted more than anything to take a U.S. team to Moscow—site of the 1980 Games—and beat the hell out of the Russians. As it turned out, Gavitt never got that chance either.

  As runner-up for the Olympic job in 1978, Knight became the Pan-Am coach. That led to Puerto Rico and, in Knight’s mind, finished his chances to be Olympic coach. When the selection com
mittee met in May 1982 there were two major candidates: Knight and John Thompson, the Georgetown coach. It took three ballots, but the committee named Knight. It was testimony to his extraordinary ability as a coach that, in spite of Puerto Rico and the aftermath, he was given another chance.

  When Knight learned he had been selected he called three people: Pete Newell and Fred Taylor, his coaching mentors, and Bob Hammel, sports editor of The Bloomington Herald-Telephone—his best friend. All three men remember the emotion in his voice that evening, rare emotion from a man who doesn’t like to admit to being emotional.

  “He was like a little kid,” Hammel said. “I had been at a track meet in Minneapolis, and when I called my office, they said he had called, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that he had left his home phone number with the desk. Usually, he’s very sensitive about giving strangers his number but he had just changed it and wanted to be sure I reached him. When I called, the first thing he said was, ‘You’ll never guess what just happened. They’ve named me Olympic coach.’

  “I knew how disappointed he had been in ’78, and I knew he felt that the scars of San Juan would be too much to overcome. In fact, I didn’t even know that was the weekend they were picking the coach because he never mentioned it to me. He was as private about that as he’s ever been.”

  Once he had the job, Knight was a man with a mission: to destroy the hated Russians, to make sure the world knew that the U.S. played basketball on one level and the rest of the world on another. He would study all the opponents, study every player available to him, select twelve players who would play the game his way, and then he wouldn’t just beat the rest of the world, he would obliterate it.

  He selected three friends as his assistant coaches: C. M. Newton of Vanderbilt, Don Donoher of Dayton, and George Raveling of Iowa. He scouted, organized, and prepared on every level.

  Knight was very much a general preparing to do battle. In the summer of 1983, when Donoher and Knight were in France to scout the European championships, they took a side trip that spoke volumes for Knight’s secret dreams. “I picked Bob up at the airport, “recalled Donoher,” and the first thing he told me was that we were going to Bastogne (site of the Battle of the Bulge). We had to drive all the way across France to get there, but that’s what we did. He knew roads that weren’t on the map we had. He would say, ‘There’s a road coming up here on the left that Patton took en route . . .’ and sure enough the road would be there. After we finished there, we drove back across France because he was determined to go to Normandy. We spent an entire day at Normandy. We must have examined every gun, every foxhole, every cave, every piece of barbed wire. It was like having a history book talk to you. He knew everything. Finally, near the end of the day, we were standing looking out at Omaha Beach. Bob had this faraway look in his eyes. He looked all around and then he looked at me and said, ‘Can you imagine how great it would have been to have been here in a command position on D-Day?’”

  But at the last minute, fate and politics tossed a giant wrench into his plans: the Russians, getting even for Jimmy Carter’s 1980 boycott in Moscow, decided to boycott Los Angeles. Even after the April announcement, Knight kept preparing for the Russians right up until the day in July when it was no longer possible for them to come. Ed Williams, watching his friend during this period, saw him as a general who had prepared the perfect battle plan, trained his troops, raised his sword to lead the charge, and then saw the enemy waving a white flag. Playing Canada and Spain in the medal round of the Olympics was a little like sailing into Tokyo Bay after the atomic bombs had been dropped.

  But Knight never let himself approach the Olympics that way. For one thing, he couldn’t afford to; if, by some chance, he slipped and his team lost to Spain or Canada or West Germany, he would never live it down. He knew how much Henry Iba, the coach of the 1972 Olympic team, had suffered after the stupefying loss to the Russians in Munich. Knight thought Iba a great coach, and looked up to him. It hurt Knight to hear people say that Iba, who had coached the U.S. to easy gold medals in 1964 and 1968, was too old to coach that team and had, because of his conservative style, cost the U.S. the gold medal. Knight was angered by the loss in Munich because he thought the U.S. had been cheated. Cheated by the Russians. To the boy from Orrville, Ohio, that was one small step short of letting the Russians invade. Knight cannot bear defeat on any level; to suffer one on the Olympic level would have destroyed him.

  And so, he drove everyone connected with the Olympic team as if they would be facing a combination of the Russians, the Bill Russell—era Boston Celtics, and Lew Alcindor’s UCLA team. The Olympic Trials, held during an ugly, rainy week in Bloomington in April, were brutal. Seventy-six players practiced and played three times a day in Indiana’s dark, dingy field house, as Knight and his assistants watched from a football-coaching tower.

  The players were pushed into a state of complete exhaustion; by week’s end, Knight had what he wanted. Some wondered why players like Charles Barkley and Antoine Carr weren’t selected while players like Jeff Turner and John Koncak were. The answer was simple: Knight wanted players who would take his orders without question. Barkley and Carr, though more talented than Turner and Koncak, might follow orders, but might not. There would be no maybes on Knight’s Olympic team.

  It was still a team of breathtaking talent: Michael Jordan, the 6-foot-6 skywalker from North Carolina; Patrick Ewing, the intimidating 7-1 center from Georgetown; Wayman Tisdale, 6-9 and unstoppable, from Oklahoma; Sam Perkins, Jordan’s brilliant Carolina teammate; Alvin Robertson, the 6-4 defensive whiz from Arkansas; and Steve Alford, Knight’s own freshman point guard. Alford was easily the team’s best shooter and earned his spot with tough play that belied his baby-faced good looks.

  Knight took his team and demanded more of it than any team he had ever coached—which is saying a lot. He pushed the players, insulted them, yelled at them. Some of them had never been spoken to this way before. None, with the exception of Alford, had ever been pushed this way before. Some of them hated him for it, and cursed the day they had ever shown up at the Olympic Trials. But that was how Knight wanted it. He wanted each of them to understand that this would happen to all of them only once in their lives, and that they had to give him absolutely everything they had. He wanted no close calls, nothing left to chance.

  As it turned out, the team did everything Knight could possibly have asked. It raced through a nine-game exhibition series against players from the National Basketball Association, never beaten and rarely challenged. The preliminary round of the Olympics— five games—was a mere formality. In the quarterfinals against West Germany, they were sloppy but still won by eleven, their closest game. They annihilated Canada in the semifinals, leaving only Spain, a team they had beaten by twenty-five points in preliminary play, between them and the gold medal.

  The team looked unbeatable, but there were still nerves that last Friday. The U.S. hockey team had proved in 1980 that miracles can happen; Knight wanted no miracles in this game. The tip-off was scheduled for 7 P.M. The team arrived at the Forum shortly after 5 P.M. There was a problem, though: Jordan had brought a wrong-colored uniform and several players had brought the wrong warmups.

  “Jesus Christ,” Knight said to his coaches, “these guys aren’t ready to play. All they’re thinking about is going home tomorrow.”

  Donoher, with police escort, was dispatched to go back to downtown Los Angeles to the Olympic Village at the University of Southern California to find Jordan’s uniform. Ater turning Jordan’s room upside down and finding nothing, he returned to the Forum, distraught. Only then did trainer Tim Garl tell him that the people at the front desk had been holding the uniform. They hadn’t recognized Donoher, and therefore hadn’t stopped him to give him the uniform.

  Nerve endings were frayed. Donoher was doing a decent Knight imitation, spraying obscenities off the locker-room walls. But, uniforms and warmups aside, this team was ready to play. When Knight walked into the locke
r room for his final pep talk, he was ready to breathe fire. Already that day, Willie Davis, the former Green Bay Packer, had been the last of a long list of people who had spoken to the team. Davis told them that they might never do anything as important the rest of their lives as what they would do on this night.

  Now Knight was ready to deliver some final words of inspiration. But when he flipped over the blackboard on which he would normally write the names of the other teams’ starters, he found a note scotch-taped to the board. It had been written by Jordan: “Coach,” it said, “after all the shit we’ve been through, there is no way we lose tonight.”

  Knight looked at the twelve players and ditched his speech. “Let’s go play,” he said. Walking onto the floor, Knight folded Jordan’s note into a pocket (he still has it in his office today) and told his coaches, “This game will be over in about ten minutes.”

  He was wrong. It took five. The final score was 101-68. Spain never had a chance. The general sent his troops out to annihilate and they did just that. When it was over, when he had finally reached that golden moment, Knight’s first thought wasn’t, I’ve done it, I’ve won the Olympic gold medal. It was, Where is Henry Iba? Knight had made certain the old coach was with the team every step of the way from the Olympic Trials right through each Olympic game. Now, when the players came to him to carry him off the floor on their shoulders, Knight had one more order left for them: “Coach Iba first.” And so, following their orders to the end, the players carried Henry Iba around the floor first. Then they gave Knight a ride. Then, and only then, did he smile.

  It was, Bob Hammel thought as he watched, more a half smile, a look of relief more than a look of joy. They hadn’t so much won as they had not lost. But still, there was a satisfaction. He had now coached an Olympic gold medal winner, a Pan American Games gold medal winner, two NCAA champions, and an NIT champion. He had won every championship there was to win in amateur basketball. He had reached the pinnacle. He was, without question, the best college basketball coach in the world. Maybe he was the best college basketball coach ever.