A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  The next morning, as he had said he would all along, he flew to Montana, put on his waders, and sat in the middle of a river by himself and fished. This was his reward. His release. He sat in the river, having done everything he had set out to do in life.

  He was forty-three years old.

  Practice began at Indiana that fall with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation in the air. A great team was anticipated. The previous season, a too-young Indiana team had gone 22–9 and had reached the Final Eight of the NCAA tournament with a victory over top-ranked North Carolina that had to rank among the great upsets in tournament history. North Carolina, led by Jordan and Perkins, had a 28–2 record, and some had already declared it one of the great teams of all time.

  But Alford, just a freshman, scored twenty-seven points and Dan Dakich, the prototype slow white kid who couldn’t run or jump, kept Jordan under control. Knight completely outcoached Dean Smith, the one man considered in his class as a coach, and the Hoosiers won the game. That they lost in the next round to a Virginia team that wasn’t in the same class with North Carolina was disappointing. But it didn’t change the promise the team had shown in the North Carolina game.

  And so, as the 1984-85 team gathered on October 15, there was that sense of anticipation. But trepidation was there, too, because neither the players nor the coaches knew quite how the Olympic experience would affect Knight. He had put so much energy into the summer that they were afraid it might affect his winter. Knight seemed conscious of this, too; during the early practices he was less involved than usual, often content to sit on the sidelines with Hammel, Williams, professor friends who came to practice, or whoever that day’s visitor might be. Jim Crews, the first assistant coach, knew his boss expected the coaches to take some of the burden off him.

  “He made that clear to us from the first day,” Crews said. “We were an experienced staff and an experienced team. There was no reason why he had to supervise every little thing that went on. He wanted us to do more of the coaching and, really, there was no reason why we shouldn’t.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple, though. To start with, Knight’s staff had worked just about as hard as he had in preparing for the Olympics. They had scouted, organized, looked at tapes, done all the drudge work. They too began the season a little fatigued. The same was true of Alford. A true gym rat, Alford had been playing pickup basketball at home two days after the gold medal game. If he had known just how hard other guards were going to play against an Olympic hero, he might have preferred to rest a little.

  The first hint of trouble came early, in the opening game against Louisville. Knight had agreed to a four-year series against Louisville partly because CBS-TV wanted to do the game, and partly because Crews had convinced him Louisville would be a good pre-Big Ten warmup game. Louisville took control of the game before halftime, and Knight angrily benched three starters in the second half in favor of freshmen. They made a run, but fell back, and the game was lost.

  Still, the early part of the season went well. Indiana went into Big Ten play with an 8-2 record (the other loss was at Notre Dame) and immediately annihilated Michigan—at Michigan—in the Big Ten opener, winning by an astonishing twenty-five points. Soon, their league record was 3-1, the only loss at Michigan State. Typical Knight team, everyone thought. Knight thought so, too.

  But within the team there were some problems. Mike Giomi, a 6-10 junior and the team’s best rebounder, had been having academic problems. He was also getting into trouble around town, failing to pay parking tickets, failing to return library books. He was in and out of the Knight doghouse, a condition not uncommon for Indiana players, but more extreme in Giomi’s case.

  The same was true of Winston Morgan. Morgan was then a fourth-year junior, having sat out the 1983-84 season because of a foot injury. Knight moaned all year about how good the team could be if it just had Morgan. But once Morgan was healthy, he became far less wonderful. In fact, he got worse and worse. This was also not uncommon at Indiana; players often joke that the best way to get better is to get hurt. The more Knight sees his players play, the more convinced he becomes that they aren’t any good. But Morgan was also having problems away from the court. He was involved in a messy relationship with a female student, messy enough that she eventually went to talk to Knight about what she saw as Morgan’s dishonesty. There are only three crimes an Indiana player can commit that will get him in serious trouble with Knight: drug use, skipping class, and lying. The incident put Morgan so deep in Knight’s doghouse that his Indiana career seemed over.

  Marty Simmons, a promising freshman in 1984, had been a step slower all season, mystifying the coaches. He looked heavier to them, but his weight chart said he still weighed 218, about the same weight he had played at the year before. Finally, exasperated after a loss, Knight had Tim Garl personally weigh Simmons. He weighed 238. Scared to admit that he had eaten himself onto the bench, Simmons had been lying about his weight. His days, not to mention his meals, were numbered.

  There was more: Knight wasn’t happy with Alford. He kept harping on the fact that Alford couldn’t play defense, couldn’t pass very well, and wasn’t getting better. Alford was in fact struggling. He was still leading the team in scoring, but some nights he simply couldn’t get shots because defenses were geared to stop him. Dakich, the hero of the North Carolina game, was in and out of the lineup. Uwe Blab, the 7-3 senior center, had worked and worked to improve, but was still awkward, still had trouble catching the ball in traffic, and still left Knight exasperated.

  And yet, they were winning. Even though Knight claims that winning doesn’t necessarily make him happy, it goes a long way toward getting him there. His famous quote, “You play basketball against yourself; your opponent is your potential,” sounds pretty, but really isn’t so. Knight coaches basketball to win. If he gets upset during a victory, it is usually when he sees something that he thinks may lead to defeat on another night.

  But after the 11-3 start, the winning stopped. They went to Ohio State, Knight’s alma mater, a place where Knight cannot stand to lose, and lost; the final score was 86-84. Furious, Knight refused to let Giomi and Morgan ride home with the team, putting them on the second of the two small charter planes Indiana uses to fly to games. Morgan’s memory of that night is of a horrible game, a screaming coach, and a nightmarish ride home on the eight-seat plane, the weather bouncing them all over the sky.

  It got worse at Purdue. They blew a big lead because no one rebounded. This was unforgivable; rebounding, to Knight, is directly related to effort. If you lose because you make no effort, you are in big trouble. Indiana came out of Purdue in big trouble.

  Then came Illinois. A Sunday afternoon on national TV. An opponent Knight despised because he didn’t think Coach Lou Henson ran a clean program. When the coaches met to pick a lineup, Knight asked—as he always does—for suggestions. But his mind was made up: bench everyone but Blab and start four freshmen. Bench Alford, too, because, “He doesn’t guard anybody.”

  The four freshmen played as hard as they could. They played good defense, but they had little chance to win, losing 52-41. The day after the game, Knight announced that he had thrown Giomi off the team for cutting class. Giomi had met NCAA academic requirements and he had met Indiana’s requirements, but he had not met Knight’s requirements. The team’s leading rebounder, a player the team needed to be successful, was gone.

  Suddenly, Knight was being excoriated nationwide. Some people claimed he had started the freshmen to show up Henson. Others implied he had thrown the game to make a point to his team. For perhaps the first time since Knight had become Indiana coach in 1971, his coaching was called into question. Indiana was 3-4 in the Big Ten. Alford, the Olympic hero, had been benched. Had Knight lost control? Was it really just six months ago that he sat atop the coaching world?

  Another loss to Iowa—with the starters back starting—was followed by three victories over the bottom of the Big Ten: Minnesota, Northwestern, and
Wisconsin. That brought Indiana to a three-game home stretch that would decide the fate of the season. Indiana was 6-5 in the Big Ten and 14-7 overall, with Ohio State, Illinois, and Purdue coming to Assembly Hall. There was still plenty of time to bounce back from the problems of January.

  They didn’t. They lost to Ohio State. They lost to Illinois—badly—and Knight put his foot through a chair in frustration. And then Purdue came to town.

  Purdue is Indiana’s archrival, the in-state school the Hoosiers love to look down their noses at. Purdue almost always beats Indiana in football, so basketball is Indiana’s only chance to get even. But Purdue is always competitive, always a problem. Even Knight, with all his great teams, has never dominated Purdue; his record going into that day’s game against Purdue was 16-12. With the season fading fast, a victory at home over Purdue was imperative.

  Saturday, February 23, was an unseasonably warm day in Bloomington after a typical winter week full of cold rain and snow flurries. Knight, who had made plaid sport coats famous, decided to wear just a short-sleeved shirt for the game that afternoon. It reminded him of outfits he had worn during the glory days of the previous summer when he had been Olympic coach.

  The game started horribly for Indiana. Purdue was up, 12-2, when there was a scramble for a loose ball. When the whistle finally blew, referee London Bradley called a foul on Indiana. Knight, who often uses bad officiating to rationalize defeat—and, in all fairness, the officiating in the Big Ten is awful—went crazy. He screamed and yelled and drew a technical foul.

  Purdue guard Steve Reid walked to the foul line in front of the Indiana bench to shoot the technical. Knight stood frozen for a few seconds. Later, he would remember thinking that if he had been wearing a sport coat, he could have thrown it. But he wasn’t. So, he turned around and, before anyone on the Indiana bench could stop him, he picked up the plastic orange chair he had been sitting on and threw it.

  The chair throw was hardly Olympian. In fact, Knight side-armed it, grabbing it with both hands but never raising it above waist level. The chair skittered in front of Reid and ran out of steam just as it reached the far side of the court. It hit no one. One Indiana manager went to recover it while another put a second chair down in the original’s place. On the Indiana bench, there was no visible reaction. Everyone just watched, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Knight insists he threw the chair the way he did intentionally, carefully tossing it and aiming it so it would land where it did. But he had thrown a chair. Thrown a chair. More than 17,000 people in Assembly Hall saw it, as did millions of others watching on cable TV nationwide. Standing in front of her television set in Orrville, eighty-one-year-old Hazel Knight saw her son throw the chair and cried out, “Oh, Bobby, oh no.”

  Others who care about Knight had the same thought. Hammel, shocked, thought later that the worst thing about it was the symbolic nature of the whole thing: wild man coach throws chair. Always, forever more, Knight and that chair would be linked. “The worst thing about it,” Hammel said a year later, “was that he didn’t do just what he constantly begs his players to do: anticipate. He never anticipated the consequences. Bob Knight is too smart not to anticipate the consequences of something like that.”

  The initial consequence was immediate ejection from the game. Knight walked off to the privacy of the coaches’ locker room. He came to see his players at halftime and calmly told them what they needed to do to win the game, not even mentioning the incident. To his players, the chair throw was not that big a deal, because they had seen him throw so many chairs in practice. The unofficial record was thirteen: Knight had lit into a stack of twenty chairs one day, and his players were disappointed when he ran out of steam with seven unthrown.

  But everywhere else, shock waves were forming. As soon as Knight left the game—Purdue went on to win easily—Indiana athletic director Ralph Floyd, a close friend of Knight’s, went to the locker room. “He was in tears,” Floyd would say later. “He knew he had made a mistake. He understood what he had done.”

  Close behind Floyd came Ed Williams and Indiana president John Ryan. When Ryan walked into the locker room, Knight looked at him, tears in his eyes, and said, “Dr. Ryan, I’m sorry.”

  “If his response had been anything else, I’m not certain what I would have done ultimately,” Ryan said. “But he understood right away that he had made a terrible mistake.”

  That night, Knight, looking to escape, went to Kansas on a recruiting trip. But the nightmare of the chair was only beginning. Donoher called. He wanted to drive the 175 miles to Bloomington to talk to Knight. He felt his friend needed help. “When you are in trouble, Bob Knight is the ultimate friend,” Donoher said. “He’ll do anything he can to help you. But a lot of the time when he’s in trouble, he’ll have you believe he doesn’t need help from his friends. Only he does. He’s like anyone else that way.”

  Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps called that night. He wanted Knight to meet him the next day in Indianapolis to talk. When Phelps had heard what Knight had done his stomach had twisted in fear. “I worry that he’s going to go out like MacArthur did,” Phelps said later. “One day the President is going to say, ‘General, enough. Come home. You are relieved of your command.’”

  Ryan, the president, is a small, soft-spoken man whom the players have trouble figuring out because whenever he comes into the locker room after a game, win or lose, he simply walks around shaking hands and saying, “Thank you.” Ryan has been president of I.U. for the same fifteen years that Knight has been basketball coach. It is a long-standing joke around the state that Ryan considers himself very fortunate that Knight has allowed him to retain his job for so long.

  Now, Ryan had to act. Ed Williams went to see Knight after he returned from Kansas. Williams loves Bob Knight, respects him, and worries about him. “I couldn’t feel closer to him if he were my first-born son,” he says. Williams thought it important that Indiana—and Knight—act decisively. He suggested to Knight that Ryan should suspend him for one game, saying that Indiana fully supported Knight and everything he stood for as a basketball coach but that everyone, including Ryan and Knight, recognized that a mistake had been made. The chair should not have been thrown.

  “I told Bob I thought we should keep this in the family,” Williams said. “Why let [Big Ten Commissioner] Wayne Duke get involved? If John Ryan didn’t suspend him, Wayne Duke would. So why not let Indiana do it? At the time, I thought Bob would go along. He said that sounded right to him.”

  But a day later, Knight changed his mind. He told Williams that he could not deal with a public rebuke, no matter how mild, from Ryan. If Ryan suspended him he would feel compelled to resign on the spot. Williams took this information back to Ryan, advising him to go ahead with the suspension. “For Bob’s sake and for Indiana’s,” Williams said a year later. “I thought then, I think now, that the University had to take some action. It could not publicly condone what Bob did. And Bob needed to be told that. He needed to be told, ‘Bob, we love you, we want you here forever, but there is a line, there is a point where we say no more. And you just came close to it.’”

  John Ryan took no action. Instead, he let Duke play the heavy, suspending Knight for one game. Williams, although saying he disagrees with what the president did, disagrees with those who saw it as a sign of weakness. “The easy thing was to suspend him. John Ryan did not take the easy way out. He did what he believed was best for Bob and for the school.”

  “I don’t think we condoned what Bob did in any way,” Ryan said. “It was wrong. He knew it, I knew it, we all knew it. I believed though that given that it was one incident, the Big Ten should mete out the penalty. I didn’t tell Bob at the time, but I would not have appealed any penalty Wayne Duke handed down. I would have accepted it. A reprimand, a penalty was in order. My one concern was that if Bob was suspended it be for a road game. I was afraid that we might have a crowd control problem if he was not present for our next home game.”

 
; Knight sat out a 70-50 loss to Iowa, as Crews ran the team. The other assistants, looking for any kind of light touch, kidded him afterward that, judging from that performance, he would never get a job as a head coach. But there were few laughs around Assembly Hall that February. “It was,” Alford says now, “as if a black cloud settled on top of the building and just stayed and stayed and stayed.”

  Everyone dreaded coming to practice. Each day seemed worse than the last. The season, it seemed, would never end. Two weeks after the chair throw, Dave Knight, the man who had introduced Knight to basketball when he was eleven years old, was visiting. The two are not related, but Dave Knight is one of many older-brother figures in the coach’s life. As he sat in the coaches’ locker room before practice one day, Dave Knight pitched forward, stricken by a heart attack. The players were on the floor warming up when assistant coach Kohn Smith came running out screaming for Garl. “Quick, it’s an emergency, run,” he yelled.

  Every player on the floor had the exact same thought: It’s Coach. He’s had a heart attack. Knight was white-faced with fear when Garl and student trainer Steve Dayton charged in to attend to Dave Knight. They brought him back, saving his life. But they, too, when the call first came, had been convinced that the traumas of the season had finally done the coach in.

  The debacle dragged on. Indiana finished the regular season with a 15-13 record, 7-11 in the Big Ten, putting the Hoosiers seventh in their own league after being rated fourth in the nation in preseason. It was the first time in Knight’s fourteen seasons that Indiana had finished below .500 in Big Ten play or out of the first division. Indiana was passed over for the NCAA tournament, and settled for the National Invitation Tournament.