Williams called Newell and Taylor and asked them to convince Knight not to do this. Indiana had just won the national championship and Knight was riding high. Why try to get the last word when he had already had the last word? Newell and Taylor called Knight, and for once, he went along with sound advice. But he still shook his head when he told the story and said, “Boy, would it have been great to do that.”
Knight’s show is different from other coaches’ shows. There are never any features or interviews with the players. The taped highlights are limited. Mostly, Knight just talks. This can be dull, but given the quality of most other coaches’ shows, it would still be above average. More often than not, it is quite entertaining, especially if Knight wants to get something off his chest. Marlowe has done the show for fourteen years. He has gray hair. People joke that he’s only twenty-nine years old, but looks the way he does because he has hosted Knight’s show for so long.
Knight was subdued during the show, wanting to get it done so he could get back to work on Notre Dame. By the time he returned to Assembly Hall, Waltman and Salazar were back and the coaches were almost all the way through the Kent State tape. “Well,” Knight said to Waltman, “can we beat the Irish?”
“I think so,” Waltman said, “if we control the tempo and keep them off the boards.”
“See?” Knight said, starting to get excited. “I think we can pound them.”
But it would not be easy. Knight made that clear to the players that night as they went through the tape. There is nothing that Indiana players like less than going through tape—especially after a game that Knight is not pleased with. At its very best, going through tape is drudge work. At its very worst, it is a nightmare.
Knight rarely stops the tape to show a good play. More often, he focuses on the mistakes, and seeing them again may make him angrier than he was when the play happened in the game. Later in the season, Steve Green was visiting the day before a game, and he was sitting quietly in the back while the coaches took the players through a tape.
Seeing the sleepy looks on the players’ faces, Joby Wright decided a fresh voice might aid the cause. “Steve, when you were a player, what did you want to accomplish when the team went through tapes?”
Green, half dozing himself, stammered for a moment. Finally, his voice rich with sincerity, he said, “Well, Joby, I always tried to look at it as a good chance to learn something that would help me be a better player.”
Wright beamed at that answer. A few moments later, leaving the locker room, Green was laughing at himself. “I didn’t know what the hell to say,” he said. “That was the first time I ever sat through a tape session without getting my ass chewed out.”
That was what players remembered most about tape sessions. If it wasn’t boring it was because you were getting yelled at. The post—Kent State session was fairly mild; even though he hadn’t been completely satisfied with the game, it had been a victory. Knight’s mind was now completely focused on Notre Dame.
He didn’t need to pump Notre Dame up to the players the way he had to pump up Kent State. They knew that Notre Dame had beaten them the year before and would come into the game ranked tenth in the nation. In fact, knowing all this, Knight took a very different tack. He wanted to be certain his players knew they could win. Before Kent State, he had to remind them that they could lose. Now, he would spend the next three days telling them repeatedly that Notre Dame was beatable.
“This game will be there for you,” he said. “But only if you do exactly what we tell you to do the next three days.”
Shortly before 9 P.M.—just about twelve hours after they had arrived that morning—Knight sent them home.
“Well, boys,” Knight said to the coaches after the players had left, “we’re one and twenty-seven.” This was Knight’s way of tracking the team’s record: one game played, twenty-seven to go.
The next three days were just as tough as Knight had promised, but no one seemed to mind. The drudgery of preseason was over. The opponent was someone worth getting excited about. Everyone was sharp, including the coaches. Knight is never better than in the days before a big game. He forgets about mind games. Often, he forgets his temper because there is no time for a blowup. He may speak emphatically when a mistake is made, but there is almost never a tantrum.
“With some teams you can afford to get mad and throw everybody out,” Knight said during preseason. “It gives them some rest and, perhaps more important, it gives you some rest because you get tired of practice, too. But we can’t have that with this team. This team isn’t good enough that we can waste time. It has to work every day to get better.”
Even with that awareness, Knight had tossed them all several times during preseason. But not now. There was no need now because the players were as psyched for this game as the coach was. No extra motivation would be needed.
They practiced for more than two hours on Sunday afternoon and came back that night to go through drills and some tape. Knight reminded them again and again that if they didn’t beat themselves, they would beat Notre Dame. November was over. It was December 1. As the players left practice that night, it was snowing.
Knight ignored his tapes that night in order to watch Duke play Kansas in the final of the Big Apple-NIT. Knight rarely watches basketball for recreation, but Mike Krzyzewski was Duke’s coach. Knight may be closer to Krzyzewski than to any of his other former players or coaches. Krzyzewski was one of his first recruits at Army, a player who personified Army’s style of play in those days. He wasn’t a good shooter and he wasn’t quick, but he would run through a wall to win a game.
Late in Krzyzewski’s junior season, with Army struggling to get an NIT bid—that was the goal at Army each year back when the postseason NIT still meant something—Krzyzewski’s father died suddenly, of a heart attack. Knight flew to Chicago for three days to be with Mike and his mother, leaving the team in the hands of his assistant coaches. Krzyzewski never forgot the gesture, mostly because of what it meant to his mother. “He just sat around the kitchen for hours, telling her stories, keeping her mind occupied. It was as if nothing else mattered to him right then other than helping my mom and me.”
After Krzyzewski completed his Army duty, he coached in 1975 at Indiana before, on Knight’s recommendation, he became the coach at West Point. Five years later, after another Knight recommendation, he became the Duke coach. This was a quantum leap for a thirty-three-year-old. For three years, Duke struggled, and there were cries for Krzyzewski’s head. But now, after two straight twenty-win seasons, Duke was ranked in the top five nationally and was playing Kansas for a prestigious tournament championship. A victory would mark the first time Duke had ever won a national tournament of any kind.
Watching this game was difficult for Knight. Watching any game he cares about is tough for him. Often, he simply won’t watch. This time, he watched. When Duke switched to a zone defense at one juncture Knight moaned. “Michael, what are you doing?” Kansas scored twice against the zone. Duke abandoned it. Knight nodded. “Hope you learned your lesson, Mike.”
In the game’s deciding moments, Knight was almost as tense as he might be during an Indiana game. “We need a basket here,” he announced at one point. Duke got the basket and won the game. Knight was delighted. “That is really great for Mike,” he said. “Boy, that’s great.”
The next morning, Knight called Krzyzewski. “Mike,” he said, “how did you guys do last night?”
Krzyzewski had only about four hours sleep and wasn’t thinking that clearly, so he didn’t recognize a put-on when he heard it. “We won,” he answered.
“You did? That’s nice. Was that the championship game or the consolation?”
Still biting all the way, Krzyzewski answered, “Championship.”
“Oh, who did you beat in the semis?” Knight had watched that game, too.
“St. John’s. Coach, don’t you get a newspaper out there?”
“I’ve been kind of busy, Michael. Oh,
by the way, I’m glad your goddamn zone didn’t work.”
Finally, Krzyzewski realized he was being put on. “Proves I’m Polish,” he said later. Knight, having had his joke, then told Krzyzewski how proud of him he was.
That afternoon, I.U. president John Ryan came to practice. Normally Ryan gives the team a preseason talk, but he had been away the week before. Ryan sat with Hammel through almost the entire practice. “Steve,” Knight yelled at one point when Alford wasn’t in shooting position on time, “you can’t stand there like a f—— statue. That’s what they’ve got in the harbor in New York—a f—— statue. I don’t need that bullshit in here.” And when Harris took a horrendous shot, Knight told him, “Andre, that was the worst goddamn shot anyone has taken in here since October 15. Jesus Christ could not have made that shot.”
Ryan never blinked. He had been hearing his coach talk this way for years. “I don’t use that kind of language myself,” Ryan would say later. “It is not one of Bob’s characteristics that I admire. But it is part of Bob. If I take all the good things that are part of Bob, I suppose I have to take the not-so-good things, too.”
Ryan does occasionally let Knight know that his language doesn’t delight him. That evening, when Knight finished his lengthy, lavish introduction of Ryan to the players, Ryan stepped forward and began by saying, “Thanks for making my speech for me, Bob.”
“Oh no, Dr. Ryan,” Knight answered, “I couldn’t do that. You use all kinds of words I never use.”
“No, Bob,” Ryan said, “you use all kind of words that I never use.”
The players broke up. So did Knight. Score one for the president. Ryan then gave his annual speech. Winning and losing was not as important as representing the university well. “That’s why,” Ryan said, “when I come in here after games, whether it is after a win or a loss, I always just say ‘Thank you’ to each one of you. Because I have always felt that you represent the university well.”
The players nodded. They were glad Ryan told them this because the older players had been wondering about that for years. When Ryan was finished, Knight gave the players an hour for dinner, brought them back, and walked them through Notre Dame one more time. Everyone, including the coaches, was a little bleary-eyed by now. “Get a good night’s sleep,” Knight said, and then he went off to do his weekly radio show.
Knight’s radio show, broadcast every Monday night during the season, is, much like his TV show, an adventure. The host is Don Fischer, who has done play-by-play of Indiana’s basketball games for thirteen years. Fischer is as good at what he does as anyone in the business. He is a consummate play-by-play man, and, like Hammel, like the coaches, like Klinglehoffer, he has long ago learned the ins and outs of the care and feeding of Bob Knight.
Knight usually does the show sitting behind his desk in his office. He never gives his full attention to the show for the whole hour. Most often, he opens his mail during the show. Occasionally, he looks at tape. It used to be a call-in show, but the repetitive questions and an occasional less-than-supportive call changed that. Now listeners are urged to write letters asking questions. Fischer reads them and Knight answers them. Sometimes.
Knight usually bombards Fischer with sarcasm, and Fischer, like any good straight man, just lets it roll right off him. On one night, Fischer made the mistake of phrasing a question this way: “Coach, talk about Iowa’s press.”
“Don,” Knight answered, “is that an order?”
“No, Coach, a request.”
“Just checking, Don.”
During this show, as Fischer was asking Knight about the Big Ten’s new supervisor of officials, Bob Wortman, Knight broke in. “Don, I hate to interrupt, but I just found an ad in this catalogue for a grouse gun that I think I might order. What do you think, Don?”
“Sounds like a great idea to me, coach.”
It went that way almost every week. The better Knight’s mood, the less likely Fischer was to get straight answers. The less straight Knight’s answers, the more entertaining the show—at least for those who knew Knight well. For most of the listeners, the show probably bordered on unintelligible at times.
The same was true of Knight’s pregame radio show. This only lasted ten minutes and consisted of Fischer’s asking Knight several basic questions about the upcoming ballgame. Sometimes Knight answered them. Often, he ignored them. Almost always—unless he was depressed or uptight—he made Fischer go through half a dozen takes before he would do the show in a manner that could be played on the air. Knight almost always asked Fischer to select a starting lineup. “Whatever you think is best, Coach,” Fischer would answer.
“Don, I can’t tell you how much your faith in me means to me, especially going into a big game like this one.”
For Knight, the shows were, more often than not, a way to entertain Knight. For this, Knight was paid handsomely, somewhere in the neighborhood of $40-50,000 a year. The ratings were good, people bought the advertising, and Knight had fun. The real hero of the shows, though, was Fischer, who one way or the other got the pregame show and the Monday night show on the air. Sometimes this was not nearly as easy a task as it may seem to their listeners, and no one knew that better than Knight. Behind Fischer’s back he told anyone who would listen that Fischer was “the best there is in the business.” He said the same things about Hammel. Good things come to those who stand by Bob Knight.
The sun actually made an appearance the next day, a welcome sight if not necessarily an omen. Notre Dame showed up to shoot at 11 A.M., and as they did, Knight sat in the bleachers with Digger Phelps. If their fans had seen the two coaches this way, relaxed and friendly less than nine hours before the game was to start, they might have been shocked. But Knight and Phelps are friends. They have known each other for twenty years, having first met at a summer clinic in Pennsylvania when Phelps was a graduate assistant coach at his alma mater, Rider College, and Knight was an assistant at Army.
During his six years as head coach at Army, Knight often thought the Notre Dame job was the one he would like to have. He even went so far as to call the Reverend Edmund P. Joyce, the Notre Dame vice-president who hired coaches, to tell him that he would be interested in the job should Johnny Dee ever leave.
In 1971, Knight heard from a friend associated with Notre Dame that Dee was thinking of retiring. He was looking around at the time, having decided that six years at West Point was enough. At the Final Four that year in Houston, Indiana approached him about becoming the coach there. Dee still had not announced that he was leaving. There were rumors, but nothing concrete. Knight took the Indiana job.
Two weeks later, Dee announced his retirement. Phelps, one year younger than Knight, had just completed a spectacular 26—3 season at Fordham, taking a dormant program playing in a bandbox gym in the Bronx and quickly turning it into an electrifying, brilliant team. One of Fordham’s victories had been over Notre Dame before a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden. Phelps and Fordham had pumped new life into New York City basketball, and Joyce, who had once received a letter from Phelps telling him that he dreamed of someday coaching at Notre Dame, noticed. So did Roger Valdiserri, an assistant athletic director at Notre Dame who wielded considerable influence because he was widely considered one of the brightest and most charming men in college sports. Valdiserri urged Joyce to hire Phelps, and Joyce took that advice.
And so it was that Knight, then thirty, and Phelps, then twenty-nine, migrated to the Midwest from the New York City area at the same time. They had met once as head coaches during Phelps’s year at Fordham, and Fordham had won a close game. Near the end, Phelps had walked down to shake Knight’s hand. “I have to do this now, Bob,” he said, “because when the game’s over, they’re going to carry me off.” Sure enough, the Fordham fans carried Phelps off the court.
One year later, Knight and Indiana destroyed Phelps and Notre Dame, 94-29. Phelps thought Knight twisted the knife a little hard in that game because he was upset about what had happened the year
before. Not so, Knight insisted. But he remembered the handshake as clearly as Phelps.
They had since become good friends. Much of this was because both were controversial and outspoken. Knight won games and championships, and outraged people with his acts and words; Phelps won games, though few championships, and outraged people with his words. Both were considered arrogant, Phelps especially so. Knight often told him, “I’m the only friend you’ve got in coaching.” Phelps didn’t argue.
They had advanced, rockily, into coaching middle age, their hair now graying, each now an elder statesman of sorts. The previous year when Knight had boycotted the Big Ten meetings in November to protest the cheating he thought was going on in the league, he asked Phelps before their game against one another to defend him at the press conference after the game. Phelps not only did that but endorsed Knight’s actions. They now saw themselves as the Don Quixotes of college basketball, tilting against the windmill of rampant cheating.
They sat in the bleachers swapping stories, comfortable after twenty years of friendship. Knight was 8-4 against Phelps and Notre Dame. Phelps could live with that and still feel close to Knight. Had the record been reversed, it might have been hard for Knight to feel so comfortable. That was the major difference between the two men: Phelps coached basketball; Knight lived it.
Knight left Phelps to go to lunch with his coaches. Most days Knight eats lunch at the same place: the Southside Cafe, better known as Smitty’s. Smitty has sold the cafe twice and twice has bought it back after the new owners failed to make a go of it. It is a small luncheonette, and Knight has been eating there almost since the day he first got to Indiana.
He and the coaches eat in the room marked very clearly, “Executive Dining Room,” which in reality is a storeroom filled with boxes. In the middle of the room is a small table. This is where Knight and his group eat every day—after Knight has burrowed through the kitchen, checking on the home-made soups and pies being cooked.
A Season on the Brink Page 14