A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  The four-day honeymoon that had started with Knight’s quiet locker-room talk on Tuesday came to a screeching halt on the cold, rainy Sunday when Knight destroyed Thomas in front of the whole team.

  Knight was up most of that night. He had already decided to talk to Thomas alone because he knew that he had gone too far during the screaming session in the locker room. What is extraordinary about Knight is how sensitive he can seem within hours of being so brutally insensitive. He knew as he began that last week of preseason that another week of screaming was not what the team needed. Lots and lots of work, yes. Screaming, no. That was why he skipped the Monday morning practice.

  Knight arrived at Assembly Hall shortly before noon. The assistants had run the morning practice, and when it was over, Robinson, speaking for the players, had thanked them for sticking with them at a time when Knight was down on them.

  This was not going to be an easy week. The campus was virtually empty because of Thanksgiving break. Since there were no classes, Knight saw the week as an opportunity to get extra work done. Knight didn’t think of practice as “practice” unless the players had their ankles taped and there was an actual practice plan to be followed. So he saw no reason not to bring the players in for a morning session that might consist of some drills and some work looking at tape. For the players this meant a week of getting up early for drills and tape, going to lunch, coming back for practice, going to dinner, and then returning home to an empty dorm or apartment building. With the weather still cold and dreary, it was not a week that anyone looked forward to.

  It was, in fact, fair to say that the players looked at school breaks as a mixed blessing at best. While it meant a chance to get away from the pressures of school, it inevitably increased the pressures put on them as basketball players. With no classes or study time to worry about, Knight wanted them concentrating on basketball full-time. That could be both wearing and, depending on his mood, depressing.

  This week was both. Although Knight had spent much of his rage during the Sunday night tirade, he was noticeably uptight when he returned for practice Monday afternoon. He did not want to get on Thomas again until he had talked to him alone in private, which he would not do until the next morning, so instead he picked on Calloway.

  Knight thought Calloway was going to be a great player. One reason he thought that was the ability Calloway had already displayed to deal with Knight’s temperament. Knight doesn’t often pick on freshmen because they are just that—freshmen. He knows they are feeling their way, learning the system, learning about going to college. During the course of the entire season, Knight would get on Oliphant no more than three times and each time it was a very minor outburst, almost kidding.

  But Calloway was different. He was a precocious talent, and therefore someone Knight felt had to contribute right away for the team to be successful. Calloway had played at Withrow High School in Cincinnati, and in his junior and senior years Withrow had a losing record. Knight reminded him of that often.

  On Monday afternoon, when Knight thought Calloway was a step slow, he jumped all over him. “Ricky, how many games did Withrow win last year?” he asked. “Ten? With you the best player in the Midwest the team was still lousy. Why do you think that was so? Do you think maybe it was because you didn’t play hard enough?

  “Believe me, Ricky, you can’t not play hard and play well at this level. You think Withrow could play in the Big Ten? Do you think you have some kind of special talent? Well, if you do, you’re wrong. There are five thousand players in college basketball with your talent. The only way you’re going to beat them is by playing harder and smarter than they do. And this, Ricky, doesn’t get it done.”

  With that he banished Calloway to the white team. A few plays later, noticing Calloway had taken a break, he exploded again. “You don’t want to play, Ricky, that’s fine. Go take a shower.”

  Calloway had been baptized. As he departed, Knight, his anger still escalating, told Dakich to take him across the way to the field house. “Make him run, Dakich,” he said. “We’ll turn him into a track man.” Thirty seconds later Knight changed his mind and sent a manager after Dakich and Calloway. When Calloway returned Knight told him to get back in—with the white team—“and don’t even think about trying to come out.”

  During this whole interlude Knight’s voice never got much louder than it gets when he is making a teaching point. This was what players and coaches over the years had come to call “BK theater.” Knight was performing. Calloway had committed no real crime; Knight knew that, and Calloway knew that. Calloway was a player who was going to play a lot this season. Knight wanted him to know that being a good player, one looked to for production, carried with it a good deal of responsibility.

  This was a basic Knight mind game. Any player who had taken a freshman psychology course understood exactly what he was doing. But it went beyond that for one rather simple reason: fear. “After you’ve been yelled at by him once,” Calloway said later, “you tell yourself to try never to get yelled at again. Of course, you do get yelled at. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try to avoid it at all costs.”

  This was Knight’s basic coaching philosophy. Beyond all the talk about his complexity, his fundamental approach to motivation has never changed: fear is his number one weapon. He believes that if the players are afraid of getting screamed at or of landing in the doghouse, they will play better. And, if they fear him more than the opponent, they are likely to play better.

  Most of the time this worked—as time and Knight’s record proved. But occasionally it backfired. When the team wasn’t going well, fear often caused the players to play scared, and no team plays well when it plays scared.

  But now, with the season a few days away, Knight had the fear level about where he wanted it. The next morning, after he finished his talk with Thomas, he called Alford, Harris, and Calloway in. “You three,” he said bluntly, “are our three best players. You are going to have to carry a lot of the load if we’re going to win this season.”

  He turned to Alford. “Steve, do you remember last year when I told you that you weren’t playing hard and you didn’t believe me?” Alford nodded. “Was I right?” Alford nodded again. “Tell these guys.”

  Knight had pressed the exact right button. Alford, after a summer off, had come to the conclusion that Knight was right last winter about his not playing hard. Alford was self-critical by nature, not given to copping out. In spite of the emotional ups and downs that were always going to be part of his relationship with Knight, his respect for Knight’s basketball judgments almost never wavered.

  He explained that morning to Harris and Calloway how easy it was to convince yourself you were playing hard. “If you’re a good player, you can still make good plays but you won’t make near as many as you should,” Alford said. “You’ve got to keep going even when you think you’re tired. That’s been our problem this fall. We get tired and we just figure, ‘Well, we’re tired, Coach will understand.’ When the games start, he’s not going to understand. And he shouldn’t.”

  Alford had delivered just the speech his coach wanted, unrehearsed and uncoached. Two months later, Calloway would remember Alford’s little talk clearly because he had been thinking all through fall practice, “I am playing hard, why does he keep saying I’m not?”

  The long week dragged on. Hillman went down with a knee injury. No one knew it at the time, but he wouldn’t play for two months. Pelkowski caught an elbow in the eye from Jadlow and couldn’t practice. Todd Meier took a shot in the kidney and couldn’t practice for two days. Jadlow was out for two days with strep throat.

  That wasn’t all. Alford and Harris both got kneed, and although they didn’t miss any practice they were hobbling. By Wednesday, Felling was convinced the team needed a rest and told Knight so. They had been in uniform twice Monday, twice Tuesday, and twice Wednesday, and each day they had looked at tape after the morning workout. On Thanksgiving morning, they were all in at 10 A.M. to wa
lk through Kent State. The start of the season was now forty-eight hours away. Knight was itchy. Time and again he asked the coaches. “Are we any good? Are we all right? Who do you think we should start?”

  They practiced again on Thanksgiving afternoon. Finally, all the players and coaches—without Knight—went to an I.U. professor’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Most of them gave thanks that preseason was one day away from being over.

  The next day, a carbon copy of the rainy, dreary days of the entire week, they practiced twice and then came back after dinner for one last walk-through in street clothes—their fifth walk-through for Kent State. They had been told how dangerous this team could be. They had been reminded that two years earlier, opening the season against Miami of Ohio, a team from Kent State’s league, they had shown up flat and lost.

  It was not until after the last practice Friday night that Knight decided on a lineup. Alford, Morgan, Harris, and Thomas had been a lock. The fifth spot had been up for grabs among Jadlow, Calloway, and Robinson. Jadlow’s throat had set him back enough to eliminate him. Then, Friday afternoon, Calloway lost his man twice on defense. “Ricky,” Knight yelled, “we’re sitting in there trying to decide whether to start you and you practice like this. That’s just bullshit. We can’t beat anybody with that kind of play.”

  Knight wasn’t really unhappy. He wanted to give Robinson, the senior, the first chance. Calloway’s mistakes had given him the chance to do that while reminding Calloway he had better be ready to play. That was fine with Knight. Finally, shortly before 8 P.M. he sent them home. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “We’ll see you here at 9:15.” The game was at 2 P.M.

  As the players headed out into the rain, too tired to do anything but go home and sleep, Knight returned to his locker room with the coaches. He had two questions: “You think we’ll draw a good crowd?” No one knew the answer. “Do you think we’re ready to beat anybody?” No one knew the answer to that one either.

  7.

  The Season Begins

  The last day of November may have been the ugliest day of a truly ugly month. As the team gathered in the morning, the skies were still dark, the clouds seemed to hang on the roof of the building, and the fog was so thick that one could barely make out the far side of the adjacent football stadium.

  Knight arrived in a snappish mood. He was annoyed because Alford had been quoted in one of the newspapers as saying Indiana would be a quicker team this season. “Steve, just let those assholes figure that kind of stuff out for themselves, okay?” “Those assholes” was about the nicest reference to the media that Knight ever made in front of the players.

  The team walked into the locker room that morning to find a message in red letters awaiting them: “Miami (Ohio) 63 . . . I.U. 57.” Knight believes in these little messages. This was the first of many he would deliver during the season. Murry Bartow, because he had the neatest handwriting on the coaching staff, became the designated message writer.

  After the team had gone through one last walk-through of Kent State, Knight brought athletic director Ralph Floyd in to talk to the players. Knight did this for two reasons: one, he had a standing policy of giving the players another voice to listen to on occasion, but two, and more important, he knew Floyd enjoyed it.

  Floyd had very little to do with the running of the Indiana basketball program. Knight has a clause in his contract that gave him final say in all basketball-related matters, but even if he didn’t, Floyd would have deferred to him. When Floyd’s wife died in the summer of 1984, Knight spent hours and hours with him nursing Floyd through his grief. “I don’t think I would have survived without Bob Knight,” Floyd often told people.

  Floyd was as gentle as Knight was volatile. If Knight wanted something for the basketball program and needed Floyd’s help, he got it. Their relationship was in many ways a prototype of Knight’s relationships with most people: their loyalty to one another was absolute. And, even though Floyd was twenty years older than Knight, and in this case was his titular boss, he almost always deferred to the younger man. But on this morning, Knight deferred to him.

  When Floyd was finished, Knight sent the players to pregame meal. He and Floyd then drove crosstown to watch Pat Knight play in a tournament. Pat Knight, who had been fighting the flu, did not play well. “We’re starting a new program tonight,” Knight said after Pat’s game. “He doesn’t take care of himself. He’s going to be in bed at nine every night.” This program had little chance of surviving the weekend, as Pat Knight was sure to talk himself free.

  Knight would normally have shown up at the end of the pregame meal on a day like this one if Pat hadn’t been playing. Even at ten in the morning, they would eat spaghetti, pancakes, hamburgers, and eggs. On each plate as the players silently sat down to eat was a three-by-five card. On it was written the same message they had seen in the locker room: Miami (Ohio) 63 . . . I.U. 57.

  If the players hadn’t figured this one out by now, they were not likely to anytime soon. Only Kohn Smith spoke at the pregame meal. He reminded them one more time about how tough every game was going to be. “Don’t lie down now,” he said. “Don’t get sleepy.”

  Knight was anything but sleepy. When he came back from Pat’s game, Harold Martin was waiting for him in the locker room. Harold Martin is one of those little-known stories in Bob Knight’s life. He lives fifty miles from Lexington, Kentucky, and was a lifelong Kentucky fan. But in 1977, he spotted Knight trying unsuccessfully to buy a ticket to the Kentucky state high school championships. Martin had extra tickets. He walked up to Knight, introduced himself, and offered Knight two tickets. He would take no money for them because he respected Knight too much to take money from him.

  Shortly after that, Martin got a letter from Knight, inviting him to Bloomington for a game anytime and adding, “If you need a place to stay up here, you are more than welcome to stay at the house.” The friendship built from there. Martin came up whenever he could get away from his job at a Coca-Cola bottling plant and stayed with Knight. He became a rabid Indiana fan. He was a quiet little man who had learned to read Knight’s moods. Knight called him Adolph, after legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp.

  Martin had a problem. The work force at the Coca-Cola plant where he worked was being cut back. He had enough seniority that he wouldn’t be laid off, but he was going to be asked to drive fifty miles each way daily to work at another plant. Martin wanted Knight’s advice. How should he deal with these people? He didn’t think it was fair to ask him to do all that driving, especially for less money than he was already making. On the other hand, having worked for the company for more than twenty years, he didn’t have that many outside options available.

  Knight considered all this for a moment. “Quit your job, Adolph,” he said finally.

  Martin was stunned. “Coach, I can’t afford to do that.”

  “Sure you can,” Knight said. “You can come up here and work for me. I could use some help running my camp, keeping all my speaking engagements straight, all that stuff. I mean, I could really use your help. Listen, just think about it. If they give you a hard time down there, you know you have this as an option. If you want to stay with them, well, I understand that too.”

  With that Knight went off to take his steam. Harold Martin looked relieved, which was exactly what Knight wanted. Knight came out of the steam an hour later and weighed in at 222. “Too much,” he grumbled.

  A few minutes later, dressed in an Evansville basketball sweater that Crews had sent him earlier in the fall, Knight made his way through the catacombs of the building to the players’ locker room. As usual, he was thinking out loud as he walked. “I hope we can play well,” he said for perhaps the hundredth time that week. “But I haven’t got very much faith in this team.”

  Why not?

  “Past history.”

  The tension in the locker room was genuine. All the reminders about Miami, all the memories of last season, not to mention the memories of the forty-eight p
ractices that had led to this afternoon, had combined to create a sense of dread. Indiana would play this game not to lose. That wasn’t the atmosphere Knight wanted but against an opponent like Kent State it was almost unavoidable. Knight would never make light of an opponent’s ability. He thought if the players didn’t think he respected an opponent, they wouldn’t respect it. And, he believed, that would almost guarantee a disastrous performance. So Knight went the other way. As the players sat in the locker room that day, they half believed that when they ran onto the court, Larry Bird and Julius Erving would be wearing Kent State uniforms.

  “This is what we’ve been working for since October 15th,” he told the players. “Everyone in here knows what he has to do for us to be successful.” Knight turned to Alford. “This team had no leadership last season. If that happens again, you are going to be the one I come looking for. Understand that from the beginning.”

  Then, talking to the team again, Knight said, “You cannot just walk out on that floor and think you are going to play well because you’re Indiana. It doesn’t work that way. We had a team that sat in here last year ranked number 4 in the country, and they were so fatheaded and fatassed that they were no more number 4 in the country than Kohn, Joby, Royce, Tim, and I would be.

  “You have to go out there understanding how hard it is to play this game well. If you don’t understand that, you’re gonna get beat. It’s as simple as that. You walk on that floor today and you are privileged just to be here. Only two schools in the country have won two national championships in the last twenty-five years and this is one of them. There have been countless great players who have sat in this locker room and now you’re sitting here. They went out to play just like you people are going out here to play today.

  “The most interested person in this whole arena today in terms of how you people compete and how hard you play and how intelligently you play is gonna be me. Let’s go.”