A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  The Hoosiers reached the semifinals in New York, where they beat a struggling Tennessee team. After that game, Knight did a TV interview with Bill Raftery, a former coach at Seton Hall. Raftery asked Knight what he liked best about the way his team had played to reach the NIT final. “What I like best about this team right now,” Knight answered sincerely, “is the fact that I only have to watch it play one more time.”

  The feeling was mutual. If the coach couldn’t wait for the season to be over, neither could the players. The final was a microcosm of the season: mistakes, bad defense, a loss. UCLA, the kind of undisciplined team Knight thinks his team should never lose to, won the game and the championship, 65-63. The last chance to salvage something from a lost season had produced another loss.

  The plane trip home lasted forever. The twenty-seat Indiana University foundation plane bounced all over the sky. Alford was so stir-crazy he wanted to jump out a window. Dakich still swears the flight took twelve hours. Finally they landed, and the team bus took them to Assembly Hall. It was 4 A. M. when they gathered in their meeting room for final words from Knight. This was part of the tradition. The team gathered here after every trip for a summation—in this case, for a summation of the season. Knight had little to say. He excused Dakich and Blab, the seniors, and told the remaining players he could not—and would not—go through another season like the one just ended. The players felt the same way.

  When the team had been dismissed, Knight asked Morgan to stay behind. Morgan had played a total of fifty-eight seconds in the last eleven games. He had one more year of eligibility, but Knight didn’t want him back. Knight was convinced that his attitude toward basketball and college was messed up. Shortly after 4 A.M., Knight told Morgan he didn’t want him back the next season, and that he would try to help him get into school somewhere else. Morgan nodded; this was hardly a shock.

  When Knight finished, Morgan turned to go. Jim Crews was slumped in a chair by the door. He had just coached his last game at Indiana because—in spite of the Iowa game—he was about to be named head coach at Evansville. Morgan stopped in front of Crews. “Coach,” he said softly, “I want to thank you for working with me and wish you luck at Evansville. I know you’ll do great.”

  Watching that scene, Knight changed his mind about Morgan on the spot. “This kid,” he thought, “is worth trying to save. I tell him at 4 in the morning that he’s through and he stops to wish Jimmy luck. He really isn’t a bad kid.”

  It would be two months before Morgan would learn of his reprieve. At that moment, he walked out the door, not knowing his future. A few moments later, the coach who had owned the basketball world nine months earlier also walked out the door. His future was just as uncertain as Winston Morgan’s.

  3.

  Square One

  Although Knight would never admit it, the horrific 1984-85 season changed him. It changed his attitude toward coaching, toward recruiting, even toward some of his cherished mind games. It reminded him how much coaching—real coaching—meant to him.

  After he won his second national championship in 1981, Knight almost quit coaching. He was forty at the time, and since he didn’t think he had any chance to be Olympic coach, he saw no tangible reason to keep coaching.

  That spring, CBS Sports acquired the rights to the NCAA basketball tournament. College basketball had been owned and dominated by NBC Sports for years, but CBS paid $48 million to steal the tournament from NBC. It desperately needed someone who would give its telecasts impact and credibility. Kevin O’Malley, executive producer of CBS Sports, decided to go for the biggest name in the game: Bob Knight.

  Knight was willing to listen. He was restless in Bloomington. His oldest son, Tim, would begin his senior year of high school in the fall. His younger son, Patrick, was 10; moving at that age would hardly be a problem. It would be a new challenge, and CBS was willing to give him big money—about $500,000 annually—and control of the telecasts: scheduling, halftime shows, all of it. At one point, O’Malley was convinced he had his man. “It was late one night and I really thought he was going to do it,” O’Malley said. “I asked him why he wanted to do it, because I had become fascinated by him. He’s just so extraordinarily bright. He asked me if I had ever seen Ted Williams play baseball. I said I had. ‘Greatest hitter ever,’ Knight said. ‘And now, he’s the best fisherman there is. The best. No doubt about it.’

  “And then he looked at me and said, ‘How many people have ever been the absolute best there is at two things?’”

  But Knight never signed with CBS. On the morning of July 25, Landon Turner was driving his car down Route 46, a winding road in central Indiana. It was early in the morning, and he was sleepy. For a brief second, he lost control of the car and went off the road. He jerked the wheel to try to regain control, but the car fishtailed across the two-lane road and hit a restraining wall. Turner’s 6-foot-10-inch, 250-pound body was folded like an accordian inside the tiny car. He was taken to the hospital, paralyzed from the waist down. Knight was out west on a fishing and hunting trip, trying to sort out his future, when the phone call about Turner came. He flew immediately to Indianapolis, arriving late at night. Hammel picked him up at the airport and the two men drove straight to the hospital. Turner wasn’t conscious, but Knight went in to see him briefly. When he came out, his eyes were red with tears. Hammel knew then that Knight would not—could not—leave Indiana.

  Knight devoted most of his waking hours during the next few months to what became the Landon Turner Fund. Before he was through, more than $400,000 had been raised. Turner, paralyzed for life, had a motorized wheelchair and a van. His parents’ home was redone with ramps throughout so he could get around, and a condominium was purchased for him to live in. When he was ready to return to school, his scholarship was waiting; Knight named him captain of the 1982 team he would never play for.

  Knight stayed in coaching because of Landon Turner. Turner’s injury, and Knight’s instinctive, protective, caring reaction to it, eliminated any thoughts of leaving Bloomington. But this meant that his staying in coaching did not come from a drive to succeed. He had already succeeded. So while on the surface he was the same obsessed person he had always been, still spending long hours looking at tape, meeting with coaches, preparing for opponents, and still finding defeat unacceptable, Knight was not the same coach after the 1981 championship. This showed up most clearly in his avoiding the most important function of any college coach: recruiting. No one—not Bob Knight, not John Wooden, not Adolph Rupp—can win without recruiting well. But he never liked recruiting very much, and now he turned it over almost completely to his assistant coaches. Players the head coach had never seen play were offered scholarships to Indiana. Now Knight only wanted to know two things: Is he a good kid? Is he interested in Indiana first and foremost? If the answer to both questions was yes, offer him a scholarship. To some degree, Knight had come to believe his own press clippings, the ones that said, “Give him five guys who can walk and talk and he’ll outcoach everyone else.”

  While Knight was backing off a little bit, the rest of the Big Ten was catching up. Illinois seemed to be getting every bluechip player in the Midwest. Michigan, under Bill Frieder, was also getting a bunch. Gene Keady, a solid, aggressive coach, had taken over at Purdue. The results of Knight’s recruiting in the late 1970s could carry Indiana through 1983, but no further. Knight had worked as he had never worked in his life to get Isiah Thomas out of Chicago in 1979. Thomas, the magical, baby-faced guard, had been the key player in the 1981 championship but had turned pro after his sophomore season. Knight hadn’t worked like that in recruiting in the early 1980s. His recruiting of Alford, who joined the program in the fall of 1983, had consisted of one phone call to Alford’s father. When Sam Alford told his son, then a junior on the New Castle High School team coached by his father, that Bob Knight wanted him to play at Indiana, Steve Alford was ready to walk to Bloomington. He had gone to Knight’s summer camp since the age of nine, and the chance to
play at Indiana was all he ever dreamed about.

  But recruiting required more than an occasional phone call, and a major part of the problem in 1985 had been the talent gap created by Knight’s laissez-faire approach. Knight realized this during 1985 and made a momentous decision: he would recruit junior college players. He reached the decision on a cold morning in Madison, Wisconsin, during the first three-game losing streak of the season. He told assistant coaches Jim Crews and Joby Wright to put together a list of junior college players who could be recruited by Indiana.

  This was a major step for Knight. In his entire coaching career, he had recruited only one junior college player. That was Courtney Witte, a senior on the 1985-86 team, and his had been an exceptional situation: Witte’s father had played at Indiana in the 1950s and his uncle, Jerry Memering, had played for Knight’s first team there. Witte was considered a little too small and a little too slow when he came out of high school in Vincennes, Indiana. But when 6-10 John Flowers decided to transfer during the 1983 season, Indiana needed a big man for the next season quickly. Witte had grown to 6-8 by the time he was a sophomore at Vincennes Junior College, and Knight offered him a scholarship without ever having seen him play.

  But now Knight was saying, “We need better athletes.” The best athletes in junior college were players who had been unable to meet minimum NCAA academic requirements as high school seniors. At best, they were academic risks. But Knight believed that if you looked carefully, you could find one or two JUCOs who had either learned their lesson or had changed their attitude. “If you find the right junior college kid, he’s going to be so thrilled to have a chance to play at a place like Indiana that he may come in here with a better attitude than the freshmen,” Knight insisted. “A junior college kid is older, he’s been kicked around a little. He may be a little tougher.”

  It was a wonderful rationalization. But it was also a gamble Knight felt he had to take. Shortly after the 1985 season ended, Knight signed three junior college players.

  Knight’s change of life, or midlife crisis, call it what you will, went even further. During the Final Four in Lexington, he talked seriously with his coaching mentor, Pete Newell, about playing zone defense. Bob Knight playing zone defense. It was easier to imagine Spiro Agnew becoming a Democrat or Elizabeth Taylor swearing off marriage. But Knight was serious. He had taken man-to-man defense to a new level of sophistication, but much of that sophistication lay in the zone principles inherent in his man-to-man. With a forty-five-second clock voted into the college rules for 1986, he thought playing some zone would make it a little easier on his players, who at times had looked overmatched playing man-to-man.

  There was more: Knight also wanted to change the tempo of his offense. Rather than walk the ball up and then run his “motion” offense against a waiting defense, he wanted to push the ball up the floor at every opportunity to try to get shots off before the defense could set up. This would at the very least help Alford, who at 6-1 and 160 pounds had found himself hounded all over the court by bigger, stronger players throughout his sophomore season. If they couldn’t catch up to him, they couldn’t guard him. With Uwe Blab gone, Indiana would have a smaller, quicker team anyway; it made sense to use speed to their advantage.

  It was all reasonable and rational. But it also demonstrated that after twenty years as a coach, after knowing almost nothing but success, Bob Knight was stepping back and taking a close look at himself. He knew he still wanted to coach, if only because he could not bear walking away after a season he considered a complete failure. But even though he told friends repeatedly that the 1985 team just wasn’t very good, he acted like a man who also thought that the coach of that team hadn’t been very good.

  And so he went back to square one: He had never recruited junior college players; he started recruiting them. He had never considered playing a zone defense; he considered playing zone. He had almost always played the game at a controlled pace; he considered quickening that pace. And, without saying so at the time, he also was beginning to rethink his twenty-four-hour-a-day mind games with his players. The ravings and rantings of 1985 had not brought the team back as they had in the past. Making an issue of losing had simply produced more losing. Knight always believed that the tougher he made things for his players during practice, the better they would deal with adversity during games. The formula had worked and worked and worked, but not in 1985. Maybe, just maybe, it needed some adjusting, some tinkering.

  Knight had always known that his brinksmanship would be tolerated in most quarters only as long as he won. One more major incident, a chair toss or anything even slightly similar, and he was gone. One more awful season and, quite possibly, he would have to walk away because the losing tore him up so much. “Suppose the chair had bounced funny and hit someone,” mused Bob Hammel, as loyal a friend as Knight has. “If it does, that’s it, it’s over. Here’s a man who has spent his whole life making certain he had control of things, and he allowed things to get that far out of his control. That could have been the end.”

  Hammel spoke for all of Knight’s friends—coaches, professors, ex-players, journalists. The loyalty of Knight’s friends is unsurpassed because his loyalty to them is unsurpassed. Without exception, they can talk about acts of warmth and compassion that he has performed on their behalf. He is incapable of saying no to a friend.

  And, just as much as they revere him, Knight’s friends worry about him. Many of them expect a Woody Hayes-type ending for him. Hayes, who had been one of Knight’s teachers at Ohio State, had punched an opposing player on national television at the end of the 1978 Gator Bowl. That act had finished his lengthy coaching career. Some see that ending as inevitable. As quickly as they say that, they add, “Don’t ever let him find out I said that.” But they say it. They all agree that he has had a lifelong knack for walking right to the brink of disaster and then pulling back. But in 1985 he had stepped across the line and almost gone tumbling over it. If he was going to survive 1986, he had to change. He had to take a step back. He had to bring his life under control. There were no more chances left.

  If ever a basketball team needed an off-season to regroup, it was Indiana. If ever a coach needed a summer off, it was Knight. But prior to the 1985 disaster, Knight had made plans for a summer trip for the team around the world. It would be a thirty-eight-day trip that would start in Canada and proceed to Japan, China, Yugoslavia, and Finland before returning home. There would be eighteen games, including two in Japan against the Russians.

  Several friends tried to talk Knight out of the trip, telling him he needed a rest. But Indiana had made a commitment and, what’s more, Knight thought the experience would help the younger players who hadn’t played that much the previous season. He also thought the chance to go around the world would be a good experience for everyone.

  It didn’t start off well. On the June day when the team gathered to begin practice in preparation for the trip, Knight was almost out of control. Every time someone made a mistake he would begin harping on the season that had ended in March. It was as if no time at all had passed; everyone was still guilty of the sins of the winter. There would be no forgiveness.

  Winston Morgan was one exception. Knight had all but decided to give him another chance after that final team meeting, but he didn’t tell him about the decision until May. That is Knight’s way: He doesn’t believe in making anything easy for anyone. His mind games, he feels, will make them tougher. When Knight did tell Morgan he could come back, Morgan was thrilled. There would be no scholarship, though. Morgan would have to work part-time and pay his own way, and, except for game days, he couldn’t eat at the training table with the team. But he would get another chance if he wanted it. Morgan was thankful for the chance.

  He may have had second thoughts during the first part of the trip. Indiana didn’t play well in Japan. During games, Knight let the assistants coach and sat either at the end of the court or up in the stands. Adjustments were being made: Daryl Thomas,
about to become a junior, was trying to learn to play the center position at 6-7. Stew Robinson was hurt part of the time. Morgan was relearning the game. The four players who would join the team in the fall—two junior college players (only two of Knight’s three JUCO recruits had gotten into Indiana) and two freshmen—were not allowed to make the trip under NCAA rules. Witte, who had sat out 1985 with a broken foot, was on the trip, but also not eligible to play because of NCAA rules. In all, there were only eleven players available, and six of them had just completed their freshman season. Indiana was a small, inexperienced team, feeling its way.

  Indiana lost six of its first eight games, including two to the Russians. After the first Russian game, someone asked Knight to compare the Russians to the 1984 U.S. Olympic team. “There is no comparison,” Knight snapped. “Next question.”

  Even though the games were only practice, the losses were eating at Knight. His temper was worse than it had been during the season, and when Ed Williams joined the entourage in the second week he had serious doubts about whether anyone would survive the trip.

  The bottom seemed to drop out in Hiroshima. After the team played a bad half without the injured Robinson and with Alford resting, Knight stormed from the stands and banished the assistants from the bench. They spent the rest of the game in the stands wondering about their futures. The three of them—Kohn Smith, Joby Wright, and Royce Waltman—walked the streets that night, wondering if Knight was going to fire them as he had sworn he would. They talked about what they would do if they were fired—“I’ll go back down South and pick cotton,” Wright declared at one point—and decided they had better find Garl to get some money in case they were sent home.

  “It was one of those nights where you hope someone tries to mug you,” Smith said. “Because they always say the most dangerous man in a fight is the one who doesn’t care if he lives or dies. That was us.”