A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Lunch was no different on this day than any other game day. The closer a game gets, the more apprehensive Knight becomes. Watching Notre Dame shoot that morning, he had been surprised by their size, not so much their height as their bulk. “They’ll get us in foul trouble,” he kept saying. “I’m just not sure we have the talent to beat good teams. And this is a good team. Their size really shocked me. I didn’t remember them being that big.”

  The players came in at three o’clock for the final walk-through. Knight wanted nothing overlooked. Seven times he showed the players something Notre Dame did on the tape in the locker room and then marched them to the floor to go through it. The players must have been dizzy by the time Knight was through. Even after he had finally sent them to pregame, Knight fretted. “Is there anything else?” he kept asking the coaches. “Are we all right?”

  The pregame meal was even quieter than normal. For this game, Knight would give the pregame talk. “You know, before this season is over, you boys are going to play against a lot of assholes,” he said. “You’re gonna play a lot of people that I don’t have much use or respect for. That is not the case tonight. Notre Dame is a lot like us. They do things the right way and they play good basketball. This game will be the biggest game in the country tonight. That’s why you came to Indiana—not to play games like this but to win them.”

  Knight liked the “biggest game in the country tonight” theme. It was one he had used often over the years. It was effective. The players enjoyed the notion that their game was somehow more important than others. It pumped them up. That was exactly what Knight had in mind.

  Knight had just finished his pregame steam—“We go into the ring at 221,” he announced—when Ralph Floyd came into the locker room. There was a problem. Two conferences, the Missouri Valley and the Atlantic Coast, had assigned officiating crews to the game. For years, Notre Dame and Indiana had used Big Ten officials when they played, but Phelps had balked at using them this year. Knight, after all his disputes with Big Ten officials, didn’t mind the change, and the two coaches had agreed on neutral officials. But there had been a communications screwup somewhere and both leagues had sent crews. There were six officials in the building ready to work. The contract had called for Missouri Valley officials. Apparently, the problem was with the ACC.

  Knight put out a call for Phelps, who came to Knight’s locker room. With Phelps present, Knight called Fred Barakat, the supervisor of ACC officials, to see what had happened. Barakat wasn’t certain. Knight and Phelps agreed that they would use the Missouri Valley officials and that the two schools would chip in to pay the ACC officials if need be.

  Throughout this discussion, with the pregame noise of the band and the fans echoing just outside the door, Knight sat in his chair naked. Phelps was wearing a gorgeous blue pinstriped suit, a red tie, and a matching red handkerchief in his pocket. He looked like he had stepped right out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. What Knight looked like isn’t really describable. But there they were, one hour before tipoff, Phelps looking like a fashion model, Knight naked. Somehow, it seemed exactly right.

  Knight finally got dressed after Phelps left, and made his way to the players’ locker room. The place was crowded. In addition to the players and the regulars, some nonregulars who were Knight buddies were in attendance. This was a big game. Among them was the Reverend James Higgins, one of Indiana’s chaplains. In spite of Knight’s nonreligious approach to things, he and Higgins were friends even though Knight had once been forced to calm Higgins down during a game when Higgins started getting on the officials.

  “My first game at Army, I had someone say the Lord’s Prayer,” Knight recalled. “As we were walking out of the locker room, our trainer turned to me and said, ‘Coach, that Lord’s Prayer thing just isn’t you.’ I said, ‘Thanks for telling me, I didn’t really think it was either.’” That was the last time anyone prayed in Knight’s locker room. At least openly.

  When Knight walked in, as always, the room went silent. The tension was palpable. Knight started to turn to the board to write down the starters’ names but then he spotted Higgins.

  “Padre,” he said warmly, “how’s the God business?”

  While hands around the room were clapped over mouths to stifle giggles, Higgins, never missing a beat, replied, “About the same as the coaching business, Bob.”

  Knight, back now turned to Higgins as he wrote down the starters’ names, nodded his head. “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.”

  Even as the teams warmed up, Knight sat in the locker room, wondering if there was anything else he could do. Was he forgetting anything? He called the coaches into the hallway. “What would you guys think if we opened the game in a two-three zone? Just to show it to them even if it was just for one possession.”

  Knight was serious. The coaches looked stricken. There was silence for a moment. Finally, Felling spoke. “I’d hate to give them an easy two,” he said. Kohn Smith jumped in. “Coach, we’ve never used gimmicks here before.”

  That was enough for Knight. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Why start now?” And yet, the idea clearly intrigued him. If nothing else, it would have shocked Phelps right out of his pinstripes. But this game meant too much to play around with anything new—even for just one possession.

  There was no need for a pep talk for this game. Alford was so ready he couldn’t sit still. He jiggled his legs nonstop as Knight went through matchups one last time. Even the crowd, so dead on Saturday, was excited. Indiana crowds are not normally very loud. Because Assembly Hall was built with close to 17,000 theater seats, fans tend to get comfortable during a game. That comfort doesn’t often lend itself to jumping up and down and creating havoc. But when Alford scored the game’s first basket on a seventeen-foot jumper, the place exploded.

  Knight’s plan against Notre Dame was simple: make the Irish shoot jump shots all night and don’t let them run. David Rivers, Notre Dame’s extraordinary sophomore point guard, was a game-breaker in the open floor but rather ordinary in a halfcourt game. The man assigned to keep Rivers under control was Morgan. He had strict orders to play off him, not let him penetrate. That was Rivers’s game—penetration.

  Morgan followed his orders perfectly. Rivers kept yoyoing the ball up and down while going nowhere. He had scored twenty-three points the year before against Indiana while Alford had been held to six. Indiana needed a big game from Alford. The first jump shot was a good sign.

  But less than a minute later, Alford caught an elbow in the chest. As small as he is, weighing just 160, Alford is vulnerable in a physical game. He was having trouble breathing, and he missed his next three shots. Still, the Hoosiers led early, by as much as 22-13 with 8:23 left.

  But Notre Dame, an experienced team with four seniors playing, came back after a Phelps time-out. A Rivers jumper closed the gap to 25-23 with six minutes left. Knight was off the bench, clapping, trying to get his team to hold together. It was exactly at this point in many games a year ago that Indiana had fallen apart: midway in the first half at Notre Dame last year they had led 22-15; by halftime, Notre Dame led 45-30. Knight was afraid of a repeat performance.

  But Alford was not about to let that happen. During the last four minutes of the half, he took over. Two free throws. Then a double-pump jumper. A quick pass from Todd Meier that led to a layup. An eighteen-footer. Then another one, this one from the baseline. In all, Alford scored ten straight Indiana points, and by halftime the lead was up to 41-31. Alford had sixteen points. Suddenly, all the preseason work, all the screaming and yelling and torment, was paying off. A ten-point lead.

  But it was only halftime. Alford was still having trouble breathing, and Garl worked on him throughout the halftime break. Thomas and Harris were both in foul trouble—just as Knight had feared—with three each. Thomas’s third had really irked Knight because he had swung an elbow after grabbing a rebound and been called. “Stupid, Daryl, just plain stupid,” Knight said. Thomas couldn’t argue.<
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  With Thomas and Harris in foul trouble, Meier and Steve Eyl had come off the bench and played well. They had held their own on the boards and that had allowed Alford to have his little binge. But twenty minutes was a long time to play, especially against an explosive team.

  “Now you can see what can happen if you play the way we want you to,” Knight said during the break. “You’re halfway there, boys, but now comes the tough half. They will come back at you, I promise you that. There’s no way this is going to be easy. But keep doing what we’ve been doing and we’re gonna be okay.”

  Knight’s eyes were alight as he spoke. He had looked tired so often during the fall, but now he looked energized. Just seeing his team play basketball this way seemed to pump life into him. If sitting on the bench and watching the team play poorly against Kent State depressed him—and most assuredly it did—then seeing his team play well pumped life into him.

  “I still coach,” he had said before the season started, “because there is nothing that gives me more pleasure than seeing our system work. If good kids like Alford and Thomas and Calloway and Morgan and Robinson can come here, go to class, graduate, and play the game well enough to compete with anybody, then it’s all worthwhile to me. I want people to understand that our way is the best way to play.”

  More than anything, Knight had been torn up the previous season because he believed that the team’s failures would be seen as an indictment of his system, that people would say he had lost it somewhere, that discipline and toughness couldn’t overcome sheer talent anymore. He wanted this team to succeed to prove that last season had been an aberration, not a turning point. A loss to Notre Dame at home would have people pointing again to last season. Knight couldn’t bear the thought.

  The second half, as Knight predicted, was a struggle. Briefly, it looked as if Indiana would turn the game into a blowout. Alford was still sizzling. He drove the baseline for a basket, then made a pretty steal and fed Calloway for a dunk. A moment later he knocked in a twenty-footer for his twentieth point. Indiana led 49-33 and Phelps called time.

  “I knew before the game they would be pumped up and I knew they were capable of beating us,” he said later. “But I never expected to be down sixteen.”

  They didn’t stay down sixteen. Thomas picked up his fourth foul setting an illegal screen, a problem that would plague him and the offense throughout the season. Harris picked up his fourth a moment later. Notre Dame clawed back. Rivers hit a jumper. Ken Barlow, an Indianapolis kid whom Knight had recruited and lost, hit twice. Harris committed his fifth foul with 9:08 left when he lost control of a rebound to Donald Royal. Royal laid the ball in just as Harris fouled him.

  If Harris had grabbed the rebound, Indiana could have had the ball and a fifteen-point lead. Instead, the lead was cut to twelve, Harris was gone, and Notre Dame had a big boost. Forty seconds later, Thomas committed number five. This was the scenario Knight had feared: playing a big, strong team with his two best big men fouled out. With the lead at ten, Knight sent Robinson in, wanting a smaller ballhandling lineup in the game. Rivers promptly burned Robinson and Knight threw up his hands in despair.

  The lead was down to eight when Calloway picked up his fourth foul with 7:07 left. A moment later, Alford missed a short jumper in the lane and Notre Dame freshman Mark Stevenson hit one at the other end to cut the lead to 67-61. There was still 6:15 to go. Disaster loomed. “Oh my, this would be terrible,” murmured Hammel, thinking of the sixteen-point lead. The building was almost quiet. Alford was tired. Thomas and Harris were gone. Calloway had four fouls. Robinson had one foot in the doghouse. Who would score?

  Morgan. He drove the left side, pulled up from ten feet, and with no hesitation at all shot the ball softly over Stevenson. A miss and the lead could be four with an eternity to play.

  Swish. Explosion. It was 69-61. Rivers hit one free throw a moment later but here came Morgan again, breaking the press and scoring. 71-62. Rivers missed, Morgan grabbed the rebound and was fouled. He made just one, but the crisis had passed. The lead was ten and the clock was under five minutes. Notre Dame was finished. Indiana’s last points of the game, appropriately, came on a Morgan dunk after Eyl had broken the Notre Dame press with a lovely pass. The final was 82-67. Knight and Phelps hugged at midcourt. For Phelps, it was a loss. For Knight, a moment of vindication. Take note, world: The System still works.

  They were celebrating even before Knight walked through the door. They knew there would be no critiques tonight and no complaints. “Is there any better feeling than this?” Knight asked. “You boys should be proud of yourselves. I’m damn proud of you. You beat a very good basketball team and I mean you really beat ’em. Steve Eyl, Todd Meier, you gave us exactly what we needed coming off the bench. You were terrific. Daryl, Andre, you’ve got to avoid silly fouls—you see that, don’t you? Steve Alford, you hung in and did what you had to do? And Winston, dammit Winston, what am I gonna do with you. You see how good you can be when you think out there? Do you?”

  Morgan nodded. Knight looked at him for a moment, trying very hard to keep a straight face. He couldn’t. The whole room broke up. Knight walked out to join his friends and leave his players to their celebration. He knew they were entitled.

  No one deserved to be part of the celebration more than Morgan. No one had been through more land mines and lived to tell about it than Morgan. He had come to Indiana from Anderson wanting to follow in the footsteps of Bobby Wilkerson, the brilliant defensive guard on the 1976 championship team. Like anyone else in the state, Morgan knew all the Knight stories. But he was not highly recruited, largely because he was barely 6-4 and played center, and so when Knight told him he’d like to have him at Indiana, Morgan jumped at the chance.

  That spring, Knight was the speaker at Morgan’s banquet. At the end of his speech, Knight called Morgan up to the podium. “He took a dollar out and laid it on a plate,” Morgan remembered. “He told me to take it because it was the last thing he’d ever give me for free.”

  Morgan had come to understand the truth of those words the hard way. His first two years he had been a Knight favorite because he was tough and willing to work hard. But an injury suffered during the summer in Korea had forced him to sit out his junior season. When he came back in the fall of 1984, he was not the same hungry player and his relationship with Knight was not the same.

  Knight suspected that being away from basketball had changed Morgan. He had hung out with “the wrong crowd,” and he seemed more interested in having a good time than in being a good player. Secondhand, Knight heard stories that backed up his instincts. He rode Morgan hard, giving him a spot in the doghouse right next to Giomi. When Morgan played horribly in the loss at Ohio State, Knight banned him from the plane ride home. Morgan played a total of fifty-eight seconds in the last eleven games of the 1984–85 season, getting in only when Knight didn’t have a healthy body available to finish a game. Knight made it clear that he didn’t want Morgan back even though he had an extra year of eligibility because of the injury. But Knight had softened on Morgan, partly because of his kindness that night to Jim Crews, partly because he honestly thought Morgan was a good kid who had done a bad thing rather than a bad kid. And through it all, Morgan had never lost his sense of humor. He and Stew Robinson, who had been high school teammates in Anderson, Indiana, were known as Daddy Rap (Morgan) and Rap Junior (Robinson) because they spent a lot of time rapping, much of it with or about members of the opposite sex. Whenever someone asked Daddy Rap how he thought he was doing, Daddy Rap inevitably would shake his head and say, “Can’t call it.” That became the team’s credo: “How’s Coach Knight’s mood today?” “Can’t call it.”

  Tonight, Daddy Rap could call it. After being told all fall that he was on the verge of extinction, Morgan had taken full advantage of his last chance. He was a hero again when he had thought that part of his life was over. “I never thought I’d get to be part of something like this again,” he said that night. “I can’t rememb
er the last time I was this happy.”

  Neither could Knight.

  Knight didn’t celebrate very long, though. While the players went off to party—“We can worry about Kentucky tomorrow,” Alford said—Knight and the coaches began to worry about Kentucky. As soon as Knight had finished his press conference and had seen all the well-wishers, he turned to his staff and said, “Well, let’s go figure out how to beat Kentucky.”

  He was on a high. He knew—knew—they could beat Kentucky. Waltman had gone to see Kentucky play that evening, and Knight was itching to see the tape. When Waltman returned at 12:30 A.M., the coaches were spread around the locker room, well fed but exhausted. They had been through the Notre Dame tape. Knight wanted Wright to take Morgan aside the next day to remind him that this game was “just a start.” He wanted a tape made to show Thomas and Harris how they committed their silly fouls. He wanted Alford to work briefly the next day driving the ball to the basket against big men since he had missed a couple of shots in the lane.

  When Waltman walked in, Knight’s first words were, “You got the tape?” Waltman nodded. “Pop it in there.” And so they went back to work. Knight likes to work late on the night of a game because, win or lose, he is too wound up to sleep. Rather than waste time trying to sleep, he works. The assistants know that on a game night their work is often just beginning when the game ends. The only real question is what the atmosphere will be like as the hours stretch on toward morning. On this winter morning, it was buoyant.

  It was after 2 A.M. when they stopped. The writing board was filled with things to work on. Practice would be light the next day. Knight was going on a recruiting trip. As Knight walked to his car, a light snow falling, he looked back at the now-empty building.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said, “just how good that felt tonight.”