A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Comparing Dakich to Isiah Thomas was a little bit like comparing a horse and buggy to a jet. Older players constantly kidded Dakich about all the things he could do that Thomas couldn’t: not jump, not run. . ..

  When Brooks did arrive, his teammates were shocked. Not only had he been considered one of the three best high school players in the country the previous spring, he had been one of two high school players Knight had invited to the Olympic Trials. “I knew I was over my head pretty quickly,” Brooks remembered. “First, they had me guard Johnny Dawkins. He made one move and was gone. Then, they had me guard Alvin Robertson. Same thing. I thought, ‘Oh boy, Delray, you have a problem here.’”

  Not being able to guard Dawkins or Robertson hardly made Brooks unusual. What shocked Brooks’s new teammates was that he had trouble guarding them. “I had heard so much about him I didn’t think I’d even be able to play with him,” said Steve Eyl, who was in the same recruiting class. “When we played pickup ball, though, it was like no big deal to guard him. I couldn’t understand it.”

  Neither could Knight. He had expected a taller version of Isiah Thomas, or at least someone who played like 1983 graduate Jim Thomas. He got neither. Brooks was not a good shooter—he had scored most of his high school points by getting inside against smaller players—was not a great jumper and had trouble playing man-to-man defense. He was cursed by his feet, which were big and slow. Brooks’s body—long arms, bad feet—was built to play zone defense. Indiana played only man-to-man, and Brooks, though he tried mightily, simply got lost trying to make the cuts and switches necessary in man-to-man.

  If Knight had seen Brooks play eight or ten times, he would have known these things about him before signing him. Instead, as they became more apparent with each passing practice, Knight became more and more depressed. He wanted desperately for Brooks to succeed at Indiana because he liked him so much. But as Brooks’s sophomore season began this fall, Knight was convinced with each passing day that he would never find happiness playing at Indiana.

  Brooks was the kind of person Knight looked for, but not the kind of player. To be successful at Indiana, you had to be both. That was why, even now, Knight still shied away from some players who were clearly good. A good example of this was Tion McCoy. Quick and spidery, McCoy was a 6-2 guard from Hammond. He played for Jack Gaber, one of Knight’s former managers.

  Knight and his assistants had visited McCoy’s home early in the fall. The family had seemed interested, even eager, but after the visit, Knight heard secondhand that McCoy and his family were telling people that Gaber was trying to con McCoy into going to Indiana. Oklahoma or Maryland, they said, might be a better place for him. This kind of talk turned Knight off; he didn’t like Billy Tubbs, the Oklahoma coach, as a person, and he couldn’t imagine a good player choosing to play for Lefty Driesell at Maryland over him even though he did like Driesell personally.

  When McCoy showed up at the first Sunday afternoon scrimmage of the season in late October, Knight told him exactly what he thought of him. “Why don’t you go play at Oklahoma?” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The last time we played them they had Wayman Tisdale and a lot more talent than us, and we beat them by fifteen. Or Maryland would be great. The last time we played them they had Buck Williams and Albert King and we only beat them by thirty-five. You want to be a good player, Tion? Those are the places for you.”

  McCoy was apparently undaunted by this talk. A week later, Gaber called and said McCoy would like to come down for an official visit that weekend. Knight agreed, but told Gaber, “I have some problems with the way he’s handled being recruited. I can’t see us offering him a scholarship now. Maybe in the spring, but not now. Tell him that, and if he still wants to come down, that’ll be fine.”

  McCoy still wanted to come. This intrigued Knight; if the kid was looking for the easy way out, it had been offered to him. Yet he still wanted to visit. That Sunday, during the scrimmage, Knight sat at the scorer’s table with his arm around McCoy and talked to him about what he would expect of him if he came to Indiana; what he would have to work on. McCoy said he wanted to come. “Well, Tion, if you still want to come in the spring, we can talk,” Knight said. “But right now, we don’t have a scholarship to offer you, just like I told Jack on the phone.”

  Knight was being honest. At that moment Indiana had fifteen players on scholarship—the NCAA limit—and it had Morgan playing without a scholarship. Two scholarship players, Stew Robinson and Courtney Witte, would graduate in the spring. Two players, 6-11 junior college sophomore Dean Garrett and 6-6 Cincinnati high school senior David Minor, had already been offered and had accepted those two scholarships. Knight suspected that the situation might change by spring, but at that moment he had no scholarships. McCoy was welcome to wait, he said, but there would be no hard feelings if he didn’t since Knight could not and would not promise him a scholarship.

  A week later, McCoy announced that, after careful consideration, he had chosen Maryland over Indiana and Oklahoma. Reading this in the newspaper, Knight smiled. “Outrecruited again,” he said. His gut had told him McCoy wasn’t right for Indiana. What was important, though, was that he had done his homework on the player before making a decision one way or the other.

  Putting down the paper, Knight looked at Wright. “Joby,” he said, “did we recruit anybody today?”

  “Coach,” Wright answered, “we’re hangin’ in there.” This year they were doing just that.

  Knight had one other major responsibility as he prepared for the start of the season: Patrick Knight. On the day before practice started, Nancy Knight left Bloomington for a ten-week stay at Duke University. There, she would go through Duke’s famed “rice diet,” and return home in December thirty-five pounds lighter.

  With his wife gone, Knight found himself a bachelor father for Patrick, who had turned fifteen in September. As things turned out, Knight enjoyed the experience—except for the inevitable rumors that cropped up with Nancy Knight away. They were wrong, scurrilous, in some cases cruel. Father and son learned to laugh when they heard them. One day, a friend of Pat Knight’s asked him if the rumors about his father were true. “Oh, yeah,” Pat Knight answered, “he brings a different girl home every Friday night.” The only thing Knight was bringing home were tapes of that day’s practice, some ice cream, and an occasional stray reporter. Their marriage was in trouble, and Knight filed for divorce after the end of the season, but it had nothing to do with the wild rumors.

  Bob and Pat Knight were a true Odd Couple. If one wanted to imagine what the father had been like at fifteen, one needed only to look at Pat. He had shot up to 6-2 over the summer, a fact that disturbed his older brother, Tim, no end. Tim was twenty-one, a Stanford senior. He was stocky, built more like his mother than his father, and had never made it past six feet. When he returned home for Christmas vacation, Pat made a point of walking up to him whenever he could to point out the difference in height.

  Pat’s weight had not caught up with his height. He weighed 135 pounds—maybe—and had a typical teenage diet: soda for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch, dinner, and sometimes a late snack. His father tried to wean him of such things with about as much success as most fathers have.

  Their relationship was interesting. Bob Knight’s world was filled with people intimidated by him in one form or another. He was, almost always, the controller and dictator of his relationships. Things were done on his terms or they were not done at all. Few people—coaches, players, professors, writers—had any interest in incurring his wrath. But to Pat Knight, he was just dad, a guy who had a knack for locking his keys in his car or forgetting his garage door opener.

  When Bob Knight ran his brand-new car through a flooded road one day and drowned its computer system, there were a lot of suppressed giggles at Assembly Hall. When Pat Knight heard what his father had done, he just looked at him and said, “Boy, are you stupid.” He was right and his father knew it. He just glared at his son as if to s
ay, “Who asked you?”

  No one had. But you didn’t need to ask Pat Knight for his opinion in order to hear it. Like his father, he was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, bright and clever. He won most arguments with his father: “I want you in at 10 o’clock, not a minute later.” “But I can’t get a ride until 10:30.” “Okay, be in by 10:45.” Inevitably, Pat would show up at 11:30 with some explanation. “Everyone else was hungry, so we had to stop to eat. I told them not to, but they made me.”

  Knight tried to get angry, but really couldn’t. “The problem,” he said one night, “is I like him too much and he knows it.”

  Being a single father wasn’t always easy. When Pat got sick during the day at school, the single father had to go pick him up. Sometimes, if Pat needed a ride in the middle of practice, Knight would have one of the managers go get him, but more often than not he did the chauffeuring himself. He also spent as much time as he could working with Pat on his game.

  Pat Knight, unlike his older brother, is a basketball player. He is a good shooter who, like his father, has a knack for seeing the game developing in front of him. He is an excellent passer for someone his age, and occasionally when he makes a good pass during a game, his father has to restrain his excitement. Pat Knight was a starting forward on the Bloomington North freshman team, and whenever he played Bob Knight would slip in, sit in as unobtrusive a spot as he could find and watch the game impassively. After the game he would wait until Pat asked for his opinion on his play before he gave it.

  Softly, he would push every now and then. “You really should come in early and work on your foul shooting.” But for the most part he left it up to Pat. If he was going to become a good player, it had to be because he wanted to, not because his father wanted him to. If twenty-four years as a coach had taught Bob Knight anything, it was the dangers of pushy parents. If Pat wanted help from his father, it would be there. But it would only be forthcoming if solicited.

  Each day, Pat would call after his practice was over, looking for a ride. Each day, the father’s side of the conversation sounded like this:

  “Did you have a good practice? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Did you guard anybody? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Did you hit any shots? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Were you tough? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Patrick, how come you say yes to all my questions every day? No one is that good.”

  The coaches, listening to their boss, enjoyed the looseness that Patrick brought out in his father. They thought it was healthy for him, especially if it kept him from getting upset after a bad practice.

  There were bad practices. Some days the team would practice well for an hour, then get tired. Some days it would drill well and then scrimmage poorly. Practice started every day at about 3:30. The players would usually get to the gym at about 2:30 to get taped and to warm up. Their latest classes were over at 2:15.

  Knight was kept apprised of the players’ academic progress by the athletic department’s academic supervisor Elizabeth (Buzz) Kurpius. If a player was struggling with a class, or cutting a class, or missing a session with a tutor, Kurpius would be informed. She would then pass the information on to Knight and to Waltman, the assistant coach responsible for monitoring the players’ academic progress and making certain they were doing what they were supposed to.

  Cutting class and cutting a tutor were inexcusable offenses at Indiana. Giomi had been dismissed because of a pattern of cut classes. If Kurpius sent Knight a notice about a missed class, the player was asked to explain his absence. Short of a hurricane or a flood, no excuse was accepted. The same was true of a missed tutor. The guilty player might have to run the steps after practice or, in the case of a tutoring session, might not be allowed to practice until he had seen the tutor.

  Knight’s toughness in this area was consistent with his approach throughout his coaching career. When he recruited a player he told him that he would have to go to class to play, and that he would be expected to graduate. Certainly, parents hearing this were bound to feel kindly toward Indiana, but Knight had the record to back up what he said: In fourteen years at Indiana only two players who had stayed four years had failed to graduate. One of them, Bob Wilkerson, had all the necessary credits but needed to fulfill a student teaching requirement. The three seniors on the ’86 team—Morgan, Robinson, and Witte—were all on schedule for graduation in the spring.

  Knight tells players that he doesn’t think a player who cuts class can succeed as a basketball player in his program. Going to class requires a minimal amount of discipline, and if you don’t have that, you probably don’t have the discipline needed to learn Knight’s system and flourish in it. “I have never had a good player who cut class,” Knight often said. “I just don’t think that kind of kid can play for me.”

  There might have been exceptions. But they didn’t last long enough for Knight to find that out.

  Once practice began, there was not a lot of free time for the players. They had classes, practices, tape sessions with the coaches, and study time. There was not a lot of party time. That was one reason why Knight had very few specific rules. There was no curfew at Indiana, even during the season. The players knew they were expected to stay out of bars during the season even if they weren’t drinking, and they were told to exercise judgment about the hours they kept. With the schedule most of them had to follow, good judgment usually meant eating dinner after practice, doing some studying, and going to bed—exhausted. This was especially true of Alford, a business major, who was taking a special advanced course known as A-Core. The course was accelerated, and the professor didn’t particularly like basketball players. Alford was struggling.

  And this was still only October.

  5.

  November

  November is the toughest month for any college basketball team. The excitement of starting practice on October 15 has worn off, and practice has become drudgery. There are no games to prepare for or get excited about. There is no crowd to provide electricity or support. There is just day after day of practice—the same faces, the same coaches, the same drills, the same teammates.

  This is especially true at Indiana. Winter is closing in rapidly The days are cold, sunless, and depressing. In 1985, it rained in Bloomington for twenty-seven of November’s thirty days. It wasn’t just a drizzle breaking up a sunny day but cold, steady, depressing rain. And for this team, the weather and the drudgery were only part of the difficulty. Right next to the cloud that dumped rain every day was an even darker cloud: the specter of last season. Each time practice went poorly, last season would come up. “If you guys think I was an awful sonofabitch last year, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Knight said angrily one day. “You boys better think about that.”

  They did. Constantly. Pushed by Knight, Alford had assumed the role of leader on this team. He received a good deal of help in this area from Stew Robinson, a senior and a natural leader. Often, Knight and the coaches would leave the players alone in the locker room to talk after a bad practice or a bad scrimmage. “I don’t know about you guys,” Alford said one day, “but I can’t live through another season like the last one. We have got to start playing better.”

  Knight knew the team was working hard, and occasionally he would loosen up to show the players that he was aware of their effort. One day before practice Knight turned to Kreigh Smith and said, “Kreigh, what do you think we should work on today? I need a few ideas for practice.”

  This was in the locker room after the players had finished warming up. That is the routine each day: Knight walks out of his locker room and announces, “Let’s go inside.” Everyone retreats to the locker room, where Knight will brief them on that day’s practice plan. He can talk for thirty seconds or for fifteen minutes, depending on the day and his mood.

  Smith, a 6-7 sophomore from Tipton, Indiana, was one of Knight’s favorite targets. He was a small-town kid who Knight thought had the potential to be as good as Randy Wittman. But Smith’s concentration sometimes wandered, and Knight had gotten in the habit o
f calling him “Tipton.” The reason: “I often wonder if he understands that our schedule is a little tougher than the one he played at Tipton High School.”

  In truth, Smith was a lot more savvy than Knight gave him credit for. One day in practice, Smith lost his man on defense. The man he should have been guarding was Morgan, who had grown up in Anderson, Indiana.

  “Tipton,” Knight yelled, “who are you supposed to be guarding?”

  “Anderson,” Smith answered without batting an eye.

  Knight paused, his face breaking into a grin. “That’s pretty good, Tipton,” he said, “but remember, there’s only one goddamn comedian on this team.”

  Now, in the locker room, the comedian was asking Tipton for some ideas for practice. Smith knew he was being set up, but didn’t have much choice but to go along. “I think we should work on conversion defense,” he said, bringing up the area that had been bothering Knight lately, the team’s inability to get back on defense.

  “That’s good, Kreigh,” Knight said, still straight-faced. “I really want everybody to help with practice and I thought I would start with you, as one of the most in-depth thinkers on the team.”

  The other players were beginning to convulse with giggles.

  “Conversion defense, okay,” Knight continued. “What else?”

  “The press,” Smith answered. “I think we should work on the press.”

  “You know I’ve always said, you can beat a bad team with a press but not a good team. You still want to work on the press?”

  “No.”

  “Now, Kreigh, don’t let me intimidate you.”

  The whole room broke up. Knight was still smiling when he walked onto the floor. So were the players. In November, every light moment was greatly appreciated.