A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Knight honestly believes it is almost impossible to walk through too much. He believes that the more times the players see the plays developing in front of them, even in slow motion, the better off they will be.

  The team usually meets after dinner the night before a game for a thirty-minute walk-through in their street clothes. Then, for a 7:30 home game, the team gathers in practice gear at about 3 P.M. the next day to go through everything again. Often, Knight will show the players an opponent running a particular play on tape, take them onto the floor to walk through, then return to the locker room to show another play on tape. Sometimes the team will go back and forth between the floor and the locker room six or seven times.

  The players understand exactly what their coach is trying to accomplish. They also have trouble concentrating; by the sixth or seventh walk-through of an offense, boredom becomes a major factor.

  Once the walk-through is over, Knight will talk to the team briefly. Usually, he will harp on a theme for that game. For the Czechs, the theme was, “November 9 to March 9.” In other words, tonight is the beginning of a four-month season that ends on March 9. “Let’s make sure that on March 9 we’ve met the goals we have on November 9,” Knight said. “Let’s get started in that direction tonight.”

  With that, he sent them to pregame meal.

  The pregame meal is step two in the game-day ritual. At home, the team eats in the student union, in an elegant third-floor meeting room. Everyone, players and coaches, wears a coat and a tie—everyone except Knight, who usually arrives in slacks and a sweater. The players sit at a long table and eat spaghetti, hamburgers without rolls, scrambled eggs, pancakes, and ice cream. They drink orange juice or iced tea. The meal is always the same, home or away. Everyone gets vanilla ice cream—except Knight, who gets butter pecan.

  Knight never sits down to eat at the pregame meal. His seat, at the head of the table, is always unoccupied. The players sit in the same seat at every meal. New players take whatever seats have been vacated by graduation; those become their seats for as long as they are at Indiana. If a player is injured and not at pregame meal, no one sits in his seat.

  No one talks during the pregame meal, except to ask for something. Occasionally the assistant coaches sitting at the far end of the table will whisper among themselves, but for the most part the only sound heard is forks and knives clinking against one another. The mood is somber. The players are supposed to be concentrating on the job ahead of them.

  Usually, Knight arrives at pregame at about the same time as the ice cream. He will sit in an anteroom and wait until the players are finished before coming in to give them another talk. The game theme is repeated. Reminders about how to play a particular team are given.

  Knight didn’t come to the pregame meal at all on this day. He left it to the assistant coaches. Wright and Smith both spoke, talking about how this was a chance to begin to wipe out the memories of last season. Once the coaches were finished, the players quickly left, leaving the coaches behind.

  For the four assistant coaches, game day, any game day, was tense. The three holdover coaches all knew how difficult their lives would be after a loss or, in the case of a game like this one, after a poor performance. But the tension also produced a bond among the coaches. They were friends, though about as different as four men could be: one black and southern; one white and a westerner; one white and an easterner; the fourth, a white midwesterner. All were married with children, though Felling was divorced.

  For Felling, the few months he had spent in Bloomington had been a revelation already. He had known when he took the job that Knight would demand a lot of him, but, like the players Knight recruits, he could not possibly understand what he was getting into until he arrived. Felling and Knight were almost the same age, Felling the elder by nine months. They shared a passion for country music and basketball. But where Knight was consumed by basketball, Felling often felt the need to escape from it. Felling had quickly learned the first lesson of survival as an Indiana assistant: never think you’ve done enough. Usually, you haven’t.

  Felling had also learned quickly that when in Rome, one did as the Romans did. The expensive cowboy boots that had been his trademark in Lawrenceville were never seen in Bloomington. Knight didn’t even like the curly perm Felling wore. Maybe it reminded him too much of Kentucky coach Eddie Sutton. The perm stayed, though; one small victory for mankind.

  Felling had been quickly accepted by the other three coaches, partly because he was needed, but mostly because he had an endearing personality. Felling almost never took anything seriously, which at Indiana was a breath of fresh air. “I just like to laugh,” he often said, although he was careful to control that urge when the head coach was in a serious mood. Whenever Knight addressed Felling by using one of his favorite words—cocksucker—Felling would look at him very seriously and say, “Well, coach, I’m tryin’ to quit.” And whenever anyone accused Felling of anything, be it a passion for the opposite sex or a poor choice of sport coat, Felling would just shake his head and say, “Well, I resent it, but I can’t deny it.”

  The players accepted him quickly because of this self-deprecating manner, and by the time the Czech game was played, Felling was one of the boys.

  While all the boys—players and assistant coaches—went off to prepare for that night’s game, Knight returned to his locker room for a pregame steam. This too was a ritual, especially this year, when Knight was making a concerted effort to lose weight. He had not enjoyed the descriptions of his pot belly the previous season and had worked hard to lose weight. He had gotten to as low as 217—twenty-five pounds less than he had weighed the previous March, but as the season approached his weight inched higher. It was 221 an hour before game time, following a solid hour of steam. “I’ve got to be 215 for the opener,” Knight said. “That’s my goal.”

  It would be a tough goal for Knight to reach because he was a prodigious eater. He could put away monumental amounts of food when he was enjoying himself, and the only thing that kept him from truly getting fat was that he didn’t drink. Knight had never liked the taste of beer and never touched hard liquor. Occasionally he would drink a white wine spritzer, but usually would switch after one drink to iced tea or ginger ale, or some awful concoction like orange juice and 7-Up or Coke and tea. Later in the season, when the team was going well, Knight would break down after a game and have a sangria, but even then, if he drank two glasses it was a lot.

  Even though this was just an exhibition game, it was approached in Indiana like the real thing. More than 15,000 seats were sold in 17,259 seat Assembly Hall, remarkable on a rainy November night when the game was being televised statewide. But that is the way Indiana is about basketball, especially basketball at I.U. Every game Indiana plays is televised. If it isn’t on some kind of national TV or Big Ten hookup, it’s televised statewide by WTTVTV.

  While the gym was slowly filling up, the players, dressed now in their white game uniforms, waited in the locker room. The assistants circled the room, softly whispering reminders about getting back on defense, about pushing the ball up the floor, about fundamentals. Some players sat on their chairs in front of their lockers, others stood passing a ball back and forth. There was chatter, but no real talk. Mostly, they filled time waiting for Knight to walk in for a final pregame talk.

  About one hour before tipoff, Knight dressed. He put on slacks, a golf shirt, and a golf sweater. After the Purdue game the previous season, Knight had abandoned sport coats. The plaid jackets that had become his trademark had disappeared from his wardrobe. This season, to feel relaxed and comfortable, he planned to dress in a relaxed and comfortable outfit for games.

  Once dressed, Knight ducked out the side door of his locker room and circled the building through back hallways to reach the players’ locker room. He took a game program from one of the managers and stopped in a small dressing room adjacent to the locker room. Five minutes later, he walked into the locker room and all noise ceased: the
balls stopped bouncing, the chatter halted.

  Indiana’s locker room is large and comfortable. It is carpeted in red with various signs and sayings posted on the walls around the room. “Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes,” is Knight’s favorite. There are two doors to the locker room. The one Knight comes through leads to a private hallway that includes the graduate assistants’ office, a tape room, and the training room. Near that door is a poster that lists the team’s offensive and defensive goals for each game—and how it did in the previous game.

  On the far side of the room is another poster, which, like the goals poster, is kept up to date by the managers. It contains pictures, statistics, scouting reports, and newspaper stories on the next opponent. Reading the stories and the scouting report, one would think every Indiana opponent is the Celtics.

  In that same corner sits the television set that is used to show tapes. When tapes are being shown, the players bring their orange plastic chairs up from their lockers and sit in a semicircle around the TV. The door on that side of the locker room leads to a public hallway and the floor. The locker closest to that door is Alford’s—a coincidence, since players inherit empty lockers the way they inherit empty chairs at pregame meal, but a coincidence that often causes a logjam near the doorway when reporters are in the room because so many of them congregate around Alford.

  On the back wall of each locker are the names and numbers of players who dressed in that locker while playing for Knight. You must graduate to have your name and number posted in your locker when you leave. Transfers don’t make it. In all, there are nineteen lockers in the room, so there is always a little extra space.

  On the far side of the room from where Alford sits is a white marking board. When Knight walks into the room on game night, he has tucked his game program into his back belt. He walks to the marking board and lists the last name and the number of each of the opponent’s starters. The names are already familiar to the players: they have heard them in scouting reports, seen them on tape, and talked about them during walkthroughs.

  Game night is the only time that Knight talks to his players when they don’t have notebooks in their laps. At all other times, each player has a red hardcover spiral notebook. Knight sees no reason why his players shouldn’t take notes when he talks, the same way they take notes in a history or an English class. “The only difference is that in those classes they have a textbook they can go back and use. With me, there’s no textbook.”

  When Knight talks about a game, an opponent, a defense, or a theme, the players take notes. They can write whatever they want in their notebooks, and they can write as much or as little as they want. Usually they are very careful to write down only serious thoughts and not doodle or put down anything snide or funny—not because they’re graded or checked on, but because over the years Knight has occasionally picked up a notebook and leafed through it.

  Now, though, the notebooks are put away. The information written in them is supposed to be in the players’ heads at this point. Next to the name of each opponent, Knight writes the first name of the Indiana player who will guard him. He will then go through details again: a reminder if a player is lefthanded or if he likes to shot fake and drive. Then, a final word, usually going back to the game theme. On this night it was simple: “Let’s just play basketball as well as we can play. Think. Think. Think. Remember, this is the start, only a beginning, but let’s get off to a good start and go from there.”

  They did not get off to a good start. The first two minutes were a disaster. Alford let his man get by him twice and was unceremoniously yanked by Knight. As Calloway reported in and Alford came out with Knight barking in his ear, scattered boos wafted down from the fans. These were memories of last year, and the new season was not yet two minutes old. They missed their first seven free throws and fell behind by as many as seven points.

  But Daryl Thomas was using his quickness inside to destroy the bigger, slower Czech centers. He got them in foul trouble, scored consistently, and, eventually, the Hoosiers began to play the way they were capable. Alford came back midway through the half, and with 5:45 left Brooks stole a pass and fed Alford for a layup. Indiana led for the first time, 23-22. They built the lead from there and had it to eight by halftime.

  That was fortunate. Knight had been extremely upset through much of the half. During one time-out he slammed his clipboard so hard that the sound reverberated around the building. This was not unusual; Garl came to each game equipped with two clipboards. Once, in an earlier year, the game had ended with Knight drawing plays on the top half of the second clipboard because that was all that was left.

  There were no hysterics at the break this time. Knight felt his team gaining command. He knew it had been nervous early because of the crowd. Harris had already become a favorite with two impressive blocked shots. Thomas was playing well. “Let’s put them away quickly,” Knight said at the half. “Let’s jump on them and get a big lead. Don’t let them get back in this thing.”

  They didn’t. A Harris dunk really got the crowd wound up and built the lead to 55-43. The lead eventually was more than 20, and the final score was 94-74. No contest. Still, there were moments. When Morgan threw a foolish pass, Knight screamed in his face during the next time-out. The two were literally nose to nose, one giving, the other taking. Did Morgan resent this treatment? Did he think it unfair? “I was thinking,” he said later, “that I had screwed up again.”

  The screwups were balanced, though, by the potential that showed in flashes. Alford finished with twenty-three points; Harris had sixteen and nine rebounds. Thomas also had sixteen. It was, after less than four weeks of practice, a good beginning. Knight knew this. He also knew there was a lot more to do before this team could beat Notre Dames and Kentuckys. But they were not that far off. As the players congratulated one another after Knight had reminded them one more time, “November 9 to March 9, keep that in mind,” they had little idea that they were about to enter the most difficult three weeks of the season. Over the next twenty days, they would have one day off. They would practice twentyfour times, look at endless hours of tape, and receive absolute hell from their coach.

  After that, if they survived, they would play their first game.

  6.

  Three Long Weeks

  When Knight makes life difficult for his players, which is often, it is not always because he is unhappy with them. He believes that the tougher he makes things for his team in practice, the tougher they will be in games. He points often to Indiana’s remarkable road record in the Big Ten as evidence that this philosophy is effective. “I want them to start the season having faced their toughest times,” he says. “I feel like if they can handle me, they can probably handle any crowd on the road or any kind of adversity that may come up in a game.”

  But there are also times when Knight simply gets furious and reams his team because he is furious. The three-week period between the Czech game and the opening game against Kent State had moments when Knight ripped his team as part of the master plan. It also had moments when he simply ripped his team. Either way, there were not a lot of laughs in Assembly Hall during this period.

  The players got a hint that the last three weeks of preseason were not going to be much fun on the Wednesday after the Czech game. The Monday and Tuesday practices had been prickly, but not wild. Knight had snapped at people on several occasions, but it was mostly in the name of teaching. When Harris reached lazily for a pass with one hand on Monday, Knight crackled at him, “Andre, there is no room for one-handed basketball on this team. If God had wanted you to play this game with one hand you would have an arm growing out of your ass.”

  A few moments later, when Robinson made a good defensive play, Knight again stopped practice. “Stew,” he said, “do you know what a good play that was? See, those assholes watching the game don’t know what a good play that was. But I do. When I see that, I think, ‘God, that Stew Robinson is a great defensive player.’ I mean r
eally great. Do you think, Stew, that I ever think that?”

  Robinson shook his head no. “Not very goddamn often I don’t,” Knight went on. “But that was a great play.”

  Always pushing, always testing, always wanting more.

  On Wednesday, though, the testing and the pushing became an explosion. This one was real. And, as often happens, the on-court explosion had a little to do with poor play and a lot to do with something that had happened earlier off the court.

  At lunchtime that day, Knight went to a local radio station to tape a commercial. The arrangements had been made for Knight to go in, do the commercial, and leave. Knight arrived shortly after noon. In the lobby, he asked someone where he was to go to tape the commercial. Someone told him downstairs.

  As Knight turned to walk in that direction, a young man with long hair, dressed rather sloppily in a T-shirt and blue jeans, arrived in the lobby. He was carrying a chair. He put the chair down in the middle of the lobby and announced, “Okay, I brought the chair.” Knight was confused. He thought he had been told to go downstairs. He started to walk that way, and the young man followed. “I guess no one’s going to laugh at my joke,” he said.

  At this point, Knight understood what was going on. He turned on the jokester. “You know, I’m here to do some business, that’s all,” he said. “I really don’t need any trouble from someone I don’t know.”

  “Sorry you don’t have a sense of humor,” the young man said, stalking away.

  Knight’s reaction was justified. If he had a dollar for every chair joke he had heard since the previous February 23 he could have bought and sold General Motors and IBM. But instead of laughing it off as the ravings of an idiot, Knight seethed. Later in the day he would remember what Ed Williams often told him: “Bob, you have to learn to let things go.” But that would be later.