A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  They went home dreading what was to come. The assistant coaches were genuinely frightened about what might happen next. Wright, Waltman, and Smith had talked before the season about the need to stick up for the players when Knight got down on them. The previous season had turned into a circus, with players going from forty minutes to zero minutes and back again. All those elements were there again. Players were being yanked for mistakes. Knight was an emotional yo-yo.

  The tape session was brutal. Knight would run a playback, get disgusted, and walk out of the room. Once, he walked back in, sat down, grabbed Waltman’s coffee mug, hurled it against the wall, and stormed out again. It was Wright who spoke first after he was gone. “Guys, we have got to stick with these kids. We’ve got to tell him that we know they’ve got a long way to go, but we can’t give up on them. This is all we got. This is the hand we’ve been dealt. We just can’t quit on Andre Harris now.”

  For Wright, Harris was a special project. He was the kind of athlete Wright believed Indiana had to recruit to win. If Harris washed out, it might be a long time before Knight was willing to take a risk on a good athlete/bad student again. The other coaches, who had not been nearly as happy with Harris in preseason as Knight had been, understood this. They had been nervous when Harris had been handed stardom before playing a game because they saw his deficiencies. But now they knew Wright was correct. He could not simply be washed down the drain after two games.

  “What bothers me,” Waltman said to Wright, “is the rebounding. You can miss shots, okay. But a leaper like him should be able to rebound. He hasn’t.”

  “You’re right,” Wright said. “But what else have we got?”

  The others nodded assent. They had to stand up for the players before the circus started again. This was easier said than done when Knight was in this mood. Knight returned. The tape began again. “Look at this, will you look at this shit?” Knight kept saying. “We cannot play with these people. We just can’t.”

  Silence. Finally, Wright, his voice barely a whisper, spoke. “Coach, I know we’ve got problems with these kids right now. But I really think it’s important that we keep working to try to make them better. We’ve only played twelve games. I’m discouraged too, we all are, but until those other kids get here next year, we’ve got to try to make these guys play better.”

  “I know that, Joby, but Jesus, why are they so dumb?”

  “Coach, I don’t know. I know they aren’t any damn rocket scientists, but I really think they’ll get better.”

  Knight slumped in his chair. “Why don’t you guys go home. I want to be alone for a while.”

  They walked out. “That was good,” Kohn Smith told Wright. “That’s what we have to do.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Waltman said, “but will we get through tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Felling said, “It’s only eight o’clock. At least one of us will be back here tonight.”

  It was Felling. Knight called him thirty minutes later. “You got anything [tape] on Northwestern?” That was Felling’s signal to go back to work. He walked in and put on a Northwestern tape. “I don’t want to look at that crap,” Knight said. He wanted to talk. They sat and talked until after midnight. Felling went home wondering, like Waltman, if they would make it through the next day.

  11.

  Will We Ever Catch Another Fish?

  This crisis was real. The players hadn’t been given a time to come in the next day. All they could do was wait by the telephone. Knight was still depressed when he came in the next morning but at least he wasn’t wild and screaming. “Maybe,” he said to Kohn Smith, “you and I ought to just go hunting.”

  Even though he had the flu, Smith thought that was a terrific idea. He and Knight would hunt while the other assistants met with the players. Then they would all go through tape that night. Knight’s willingness to go hunting showed that he knew he needed to stay in control of the situation. Northwestern and Wisconsin were the league’s two weakest teams. Without Thomas, though, neither game looked like a lock, especially on the road. The team was on the brink of complete chaos. Hunting was the best thing Knight could do for himself and for the players that afternoon.

  The players came in shortly after Knight and Smith left. Waltman, Felling, and Wright each spoke to them. What did they think was wrong? Did they understand why Coach was so upset? “It’s not so much this mistake or that mistake,” Waltman said. “It’s competing. You guys have got to understand that if Coach is nothing else, he’s a competitor. And he likes to think that there’s enough of him in you that you’ll be just as competitive as he is. Right now, he doesn’t think you are and that’s killing him.”

  They went around the room, asking each player how he felt. Some gave stock answers. Others admitted being uptight, nervous. Maybe even scared to make a mistake.

  “How many of you,” Waltman asked, “worry about making a mistake because you’re going to get yelled at by Coach?”

  For a moment, no one moved. Finally, Calloway put his hand up. Soon, sixteen hands were up. “Do you feel that way, Steve?” Wright said, turning to Alford, the player least likely to be bothered by yelling.

  Alford folded his arms. “Well,” he said. “It’s not a feeling. It’s reality.”

  That broke the tension. They all laughed, including the coaches, because it was so true. “Look, I think I know what you’re feeling right now,” Waltman said. “I think we all got to know each other pretty well overseas and we all know what’s facing us. But everyone has got to stick together. Someone makes a mistake, pick him up, help him out. Don’t get down on each other. Everyone in here is trying like hell. Coach may not always know that, but you guys do. So stick together.”

  Everyone nodded. Everyone felt better. But what would happen that night?

  In the meantime, there was another problem. Delray Brooks’s mother had called Wright that day. Delray, she said, was terribly unhappy. He had played zero minutes against Michigan and four against Michigan State after starting against Mississippi State. What was going on? Would he ever play? Maybe he should transfer.

  This didn’t come as a shock to Wright or any of the coaches. Brooks’s transferring had been discussed. But the timing, smack in the middle of a major crisis, wasn’t great. Wright told Knight about the phone call before he met with the players that night. “We’ll deal with it after the meeting,” Knight said.

  The hunting trip had saved the day, perhaps the season. Knight was firm as they went through the tape, often emphatic, occasionally angry, but there were no hysterics, no profane tirades. He even found some positive things to say, some kind words for Todd Meier—who had played zero minutes against Michigan State—and for Stew Robinson, who had missed the last vital shot.

  “I want to tell you people about Todd and about Stew,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone in here gives us more than Todd does. He’s got bad knees, so bad he maybe shouldn’t even be playing. I looked down the bench at him at the end of the game, he’s got tears rolling down his cheeks—and he didn’t even play.

  “Andre, I looked at you and you were no more into the game than someone sitting in a home for the mentally ill in Northern Indiana. We’ve got guys like Todd rooting like hell for you, and when it’s your turn to root, you just sulk. I think there are people here in this room who resent that.”

  Knight paused. “If any of you disagree with my assessment, say so. I’ll respect the hell out of you for standing up and disagreeing.” Knight waited. No one said a word. He went on.

  “I want to tell you something else, Andre, you too, Todd Jadlow. Stew has been here four years. He’s helped us win some big games. He’s started, he’s come off the bench, he’s not played at all. He had no idea Sunday how much he would play, if at all, and there was no one more into the game than he was. If we had fifteen guys like that, this team would be a lot different than it is.”

  More than anything, Knight was philosophical. “You know, I tell you all the time that bas
ketball is thinking and playing smart and working hard. You hear that so much from me you probably stop hearing it after a while. But I was thinking this morning about Scott May. I can remember Scott May coming in here on Sundays, his one day off, and working for two hours on not walking with the basketball. He ended up a two-time All-American and player of the year as a senior. And I’ll tell you something, he didn’t have any more athletic ability than a lot of you do. But he wanted to compete so much, he made himself better.

  “See, boys, basketball should be your favorite class. Because what basketball has done for teams here in the past is taught those kids how to compete. That’s a great thing to learn. I guarantee you we’ve had players who have sat in the classroom with people who had 3.7 cums, who they no way should have been able to compete with after college, and have gone on and done much better than those kids did.

  “Why? Because they knew how to compete. They knew how to stay after something. They knew how to get knocked down and get up. Those other guys, 3.7 and all, some of them couldn’t sell handwarmers to eskimos. But until this team, or the last two teams, we always had players who wanted to play and wanted to compete. I feel like with you guys that you are required to play. And I hate using that word—required.”

  The lights were off in the locker room, the tape machine was frozen right behind where Knight stood. He hadn’t raised his voice once, but he certainly had everyone’s attention. “Let me take a wild guess at something here,” Knight went on. “On Christmas night, all of you had dinner at Dr. Rink’s house. I would imagine that Mrs. Rink spent the better part of three days cooking that dinner for you. What did you, as a team, do to thank her for dinner? Tell me. Did you all kick in a dollar to send her some roses? Did anybody write a thank-you note? Anybody? Speak up, anyone who did anything to thank Mrs. Rink.”

  He looked around the room. No one looked back. He turned to Alford. “Steve, why do you think I was able to ask that question with absolute and complete confidence that no one had done anything?”

  “Because we’re selfish.”

  “Exactly. And that is reflected in the way you play basketball. The most selfish thing in the world is only worrying about guarding your man or only worrying about boxing out your man. If Winston helps me when I lose my man, you better believe I’m going to try like hell to help on his man when he needs it. But you don’t do that. You just worry about yourselves. And as long as you do that, you’ll continue to play selfish basketball, you’ll continue to make the mistakes that cost us this game and you won’t be able to beat anybody. Think about it.”

  This time, when Knight left his players alone, they did have something to think about. As the coaches followed Knight out of the locker room, Kohn Smith said softly, “Now that was coaching.”

  The next morning, Mrs. Larry Rink received two dozen roses, courtesy of the Indiana basketball team.

  Delray Brooks’s name was on the card that went with the flowers. It was his last act as an Indiana basketball player.

  Knight met with Brooks after the team meeting on Monday to ask him if he was as miserable as his parents said he was. Brooks said he wasn’t miserable, but confused. He wanted to play more. Knight understood. He had spent three years in college wanting to play more. He had almost quit the team several times each year only to be talked out of it by friends.

  He understood Brooks’s frustration, but just as Fred Taylor couldn’t guarantee young Bobby Knight more playing time, Coach Bob Knight could make no guarantees to Brooks. “I think you should talk to your parents and make a firm decision on what you want to do,” Knight told Brooks. “If you want to leave, I understand. If you want to stay, I’ll do everything I can to help you improve.”

  Knight suspected Brooks would opt to leave. Brooks was such a gentle person that he would never think of questioning his playing time even if it was bothering him. But his parents were not that gentle. Like any parents, they thought their son should be playing all the time. When a high school star from a small town goes to college and doesn’t play, it is hard on the player. But it may be even tougher on the parents who are back home being asked all the time why their son isn’t playing.

  Brooks talked to his parents again that night. They decided that he should find a school where he would have a chance to play. That did not appear to be Indiana. The next morning, Brooks told Knight his decision. He was leaving Indiana. Knight told him that if he wanted to come back to Indiana for graduate school or ever needed any help, not to hesitate to call. Brooks thanked him and told him, “Coach, I know I tried hard and so did you. Thank you.”

  Knight sat staring into space for a long time after Brooks had left the cave. “I doubt,” he finally said, “if we’ve ever had a nicer kid here than Delray Brooks.”

  The first practice that Brooks missed may have been the most brutal of the season. Knight had given them philosophy on Monday night. Tuesday morning he gave them hell. Almost every tough drill, those used almost exclusively in preseason, was part of the practice. When Knight caught a gasping Harris bent over with his hands on his knees, he jumped him.

  “Dammit, you’re not that tired. I don’t want to see anybody with their hands on their knees. You boys have got to learn some toughness.”

  Harris, of all the players on the team, had a legitimate excuse for fatigue. Six years earlier, when a player named Glen Grunwald had been having terrible fatigue problems during games, Bomba had called Dr. Rink to see if he could run some tests and figure out the problem. Rink’s tests showed, among other things, that Grunwald had a smaller lung capacity than anyone on the team, far smaller than average capacity for a normal man his height (6-9), much less someone trying to play basketball.

  From that time on, Rink had tested every Indiana player every year for lung capacity. Harris had the weakest lung capacity on the team since Grunwald. Part of his problem in games was that he started lunging at the ball when he got tired. A practice like this was simply too much for him. During a one-on-one drill, Harris died completely. He just stopped. Fortunately for everyone, Knight was looking the other way at the time.

  The practice could have been a disaster. Knight was at his most snappish, angry from the start. Perhaps he was still upset about Brooks. Or perhaps he wanted to make a point. Twice, he ran them into the locker room and screamed at them. He exploded at Dakich for allegedly running a drill incorrectly. He yelled at the coaches for not being tough enough on the players. For one hour it was boot camp again.

  But it didn’t last. A pat on the back here, a compliment there. And finally, “Better, boys, that’s a lot better.”

  He still wasn’t happy. But he wasn’t berserk, either.

  More than anything that week, Knight was searching. He felt like a researcher who had checked every book in existence on a subject without finding any answers. How could he get this team to play better? How could he end the two-season streak of 7–13 in the Big Ten and 3–8 at home? Those numbers were incomprehensible to him. Yet they kept piling up and he, Bob Knight, Supercoach, didn’t seem to have any solutions.

  He looked at tape. He asked the coaches over and over what they thought. He called Pete Newell and Fred Taylor. He lay awake in bed thinking, thinking, thinking. There had to be a way out of this. He had always found a way before. Why not now? What hadn’t he tried? He had tried everything: anger, threats, pleading. Philosophy, quotations. Long drills, short drills, different lineups. Everything.

  Almost everything. Knight sat up almost all night that Tuesday going over and over in his mind the last two seasons. Finally, he decided there was one approach he hadn’t tried. In fact, it was an approach that no one had ever thought of—ever. Anywhere.

  The players arrived for a ten o’clock practice the next morning a little tired. They had thrown Brooks a going-away party at his apartment the evening before, sending out for pizza and then sitting around together reminiscing. It was hard for them to see Brooks leave because they liked him so much, but they understood.

 
When the players walked onto the floor, their coach was standing under one basket holding a fishing rod. “Boys, the biggest problem you have as basketball players is that you don’t see,” Knight told them. “I am now going to show you why basketball is just like fishing. Because if you don’t see what’s going on around you as a fisherman, you’ll never catch a fish. The same thing is true in basketball.

  “You can have the very best equipment. You can have a great rod, like this one. You can have the right bait. You can have great-looking clothes. But if you can’t see a rock in front of you when you cast your rod, you’ll be in trouble. If you can’t see a tree over your shoulder, you’ll be in trouble. If you don’t know what to look for in a stream, you’ll never catch a fish.

  “The same is true in basketball. You can be a great leaper. You can be a great shooter. You can be quick. You can be all those things. But if you don’t see what is going on in front of you or behind you or around you, if you don’t know what to look for, you can’t play basketball.”

  For almost an hour, Knight stomped around the gym floor, casting his rod over and over, talking about fishing. He told stories about catching fish when others claimed there were no fish. At one point, he began tromping around the gym screaming, “Kohn, where are the fish, Kohn? I don’t see any damn fish here. Why can’t I see the fish? Where are they? Boys, if you don’t look, you can’t see.”

  As Knight stalked around in endless circles, the players broke up. It was the first good laugh the team had had since New Year’s. The fishing analogies were wild, but they made sense. It was a different way of saying the same thing. Knight made his points at great length, but everyone listened and everyone enjoyed it. No one got yelled at. There was no tape droning on and on. And the sight of their coach stamping around acting as if he couldn’t find any fish was a story that would certainly be told and retold for years to come.