He made two recruiting trips. One was to South Carolina to see a player named Rodney Taylor who wanted to come to Indiana. Knight wasn’t sure about him as a player, although he was sure about him as a person. Remembering where that kind of thinking had gotten him, Knight was approaching Taylor cautiously. The other trip was to Kansas to see a junior college guard named Keith Smart. Smart, on the surface, was everything Knight didn’t want: he wore lots of gold chains and oozed cockiness. But he was an athlete, a swift, penetrating leaper.
Two years earlier, Knight would have written Smart off right away and gone after Taylor hard. Now, he withheld final judgment on both.
When he got back to town, Knight’s mind was on recruiting. He and the coaches sat down in the cave and put the names of every player they had recruited since 1980 on the board. Then they put a mark by every name: a check for players who should have been recruited, an X for those who shouldn’t have, a dash for players who were borderline. There were very few checks and lots of X’s.
Knight also used the break to catch up on his mail. It is almost impossible to comprehend how much mail Knight receives. His secretary, Mary Ann Davis, goes through it to try to weed out the cranks and things that she can take care of, like requests for autographed pictures of the team. Knight answers everything else himself, including notes from fans that may say as little as, “Great win last week.” Sometimes, Knight brings his mail on the road with him and goes through it in the locker room before a game.
One letter Knight wrote this weekend was to Isiah Thomas. He had been reading in the newspapers that Thomas was so depressed by the poor play of the Detroit Pistons, his NBA team, that he was actually considering retiring at the age of twenty-five. Of all the truly gifted players Knight had coached, his relationship with Thomas had easily been the most stormy.
It had started even before Thomas arrived in Indiana. Knight and Thomas’s brother had staged a shouting match in Thomas’s living room during a recruiting visit. Knight had left the house convinced he had lost Thomas. “I always thought if he made the decision himself, Isiah would come to Indiana,” Knight said. “But I really wondered if he could withstand the pressure from people in the family like his brother.”
Thomas withstood the pressure. He turned down his hometown school, DePaul, and his homestate school, Illinois, and chose Indiana. From day one, he and Knight were antagonists. Thomas was so good that Knight really couldn’t use his usual threats of “You’ll never play a goddamn minute” and the like on him. Thomas knew he would play. What’s more, Thomas was like Knight: a rebel, not one to back down from authority. One Sunday afternoon when Knight was thirty minutes late for a team meeting—a not infrequent occurrence—Thomas turned to his teammates and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here, we’ve waited long enough.” Thomas was two steps from the door with the others behind him when the managers spotted Knight and the coaches coming. Everyone scrambled madly for their seats. But it was that close.
Thomas was a wonderful freshman and an extraordinary sophomore. He was the lynchpin in the 1981 championship drive, and when the season was over, Knight was fairly certain Thomas would turn pro. He did, and was quickly a star with Detroit. The usual closeness between Knight and his ex-players never grew between Knight and Thomas even though Thomas came back to Bloomington for summer school.
In the summer of 1983, a Fort Wayne sports club that gave an annual award to the Indiana Man of the Year in athletics approached Knight and asked if Thomas would be willing to accept the award from them that summer at their annual dinner. This was a delicate situation. The club had never named a black before, and Knight knew they wanted Thomas because they were under pressure to choose one. Knight asked Thomas how he felt about accepting the award, telling him he would understand if Thomas didn’t want to accept it, but that if he did want it, Knight would go up with him to Fort Wayne and present it to him at the dinner.
Thomas agreed. But the night was a disaster. Before Thomas got his award, an earlier speaker made a couple of racial jokes. Knight, furious but not wanting Thomas to respond, whispered to him before he got up to speak, “You let me take care of that. If you want to get on someone, get on me.”
Thomas did just that. Speaking to a crowd filled with middle-aged men and women, Thomas talked about some of the things he had learned at Indiana from Coach Knight. In particular, Knight’s profane vocabulary, which he then lauched into, leaving almost nothing to the imagination. Knight was horrified. So was the crowd. The next day, when he realized what he had done, so was Thomas. He apologized, verbally and in writing, several times over.
But Knight was not about to forgive him. The next afternoon when Knight went into the field house, he found Thomas playing a pickup game. Angrily, he threw Thomas out, something he had the right to do since he was renting the field house for his camp that week. Thomas tried briefly to explain, but Knight wanted no explanations. Their relationship went into a deep, deep freeze. It thawed slightly the next summer when Thomas played in a couple of the pre-Olympic exhibition games. But player and coach were still miles apart.
Knight felt saddened when he read of Thomas’s depression. He had never thought Thomas a bad kid, in fact he thought he was a good one. And so, he sat down and wrote Thomas a letter, encouraging him, telling him not to give up on the game, the team, or himself. Weeks later, Thomas would ask Joby Wright during a phone conversation to please tell Coach Knight how much the letter had meant to him.
As an avid reader, Knight often saw things in the newspaper that intrigued him. Weeks earlier, he had read a story about a twelve-year-old boy who was a dwarf. In the story, the boy talked about how much he loved Indiana basketball and how he dreamed of seeing Indiana play in person some day.
Knight immediately got in touch with the family. Would they please be his guests at a game some time in the future? The family was delighted. When the boy’s father called back, he asked for six tickets to the Purdue game. Knight’s secretary who was handling the request, Barbara-Jean McElroy, was flabbergasted. Getting six tickets for Purdue was a little bit like coming up with six Super Bowl tickets an hour before kickoff. But McElroy said she would do her best.
Unlike some coaches, Knight does not have access to unlimited tickets for each game. This is because he doesn’t want them—too big a headache. He told McElroy to do the best she could. The best she could do was four tickets, which was actually quite remarkable. But when McElroy called the family back, the father was adamant. He had invited friends to the game. He couldn’t call them back now and say they couldn’t come. McElroy didn’t know what to do. She called down to the cave where Knight was getting ready for practice. This was Wednesday, the day before the game. Knight was telling Hammel about his concern over Andre Harris’s continued lack of improvement—a frequent theme of late—when McElroy called nearly hysterical.
Knight asked for the phone number and called the boy’s father himself. Politely, he explained how difficult it was to get tickets for the Purdue game, how his staff had really had to search to find four, and how this way, the boy, his mother and father, and a friend could still attend the game.
The man remained adamant. He insisted he had been promised six tickets. Indiana—Knight—was reneging on a promise. Knight was aghast. He was also furious. “Now you just listen to me for a minute,” he said. “You berated my secretary, which you had no right to do, and you are acting as if these tickets are owed you. We don’t owe you anything. All I wanted was for your son to come to an Indiana game. I really don’t give a damn if you go and I certainly don’t give a damn about some friends of yours. Don’t you know how much trouble we went to just to get four tickets?”
Apparently not. The man continued shouting. He and his family would just withdraw their future support for Indiana basketball. “Well, that’s just fine,” Knight yelled. “I don’t want your support, Indiana doesn’t want your support, and our players don’t want your support.” He slammed the phone.
For a mome
nt, Knight just sat silently in his chair. Then he turned to Hammel. “Why do I even bother?” he said. “Why try to be nice to people? I wish everybody could have my job for a week.”
He stood up and shook his head. “I hate this job, I really hate it.” His voice was rising. Finally, he turned towards the door and pounded his fist against it. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. I just can’t believe it.” He slammed the door on his way out.
Nothing frustrated Knight more—short of failure by his team to help on defense—than being put in the role of the heavy. He had wanted to do something nice. This was not unusual. Quietly, Knight did a good deal of charity work and was always picking out people to write or call or send things to. Now he had wanted to help a little boy and he ended up in a shouting match with an adult. The last thing he wanted was a shouting match with anyone, especially twenty-four hours before Purdue.
Hammel knew this. An hour later he volunteered to call the man back. “Let’s start over,” Hammel began the conversation. A compromise was reached: the family would get six tickets for the Minnesota game. Still, Knight had been scarred—again.
The other distraction that week was a brief, almost amusing one. Like everyone else, Knight had followed the adventures of Tito Horford with great amusement. Horford was a 7-foot-2-inch stud center, the kind everyone wants desperately. He had been recruited by every bandit school in the country. First, he had signed with Houston, but the NCAA had ruled that out because Houston had broken rules in recruiting him. Then he landed briefly at LSU, fleeing in the face of another NCAA investigation. He had talked to Kentucky and Louisville, who had said thanks but no thanks, knowing the NCAA posse was only a step behind Horford.
Hearing and reading this, Knight had an idea. If there was one program that could recruit Horford without getting into trouble with the NCAA, it was Indiana. If Horford came to Indiana, it would give him instant credibility. Maybe the kid wasn’t for sale, as everyone thought, after all. Knight toyed with the idea. A 7-2 center would be a boon. If Horford couldn’t do the work academically, so be it. He would be told he would have to enroll and pass his classes for a semester before he could play.
That weekend, Knight decided it was worth a try. He called a friend, who was a lawyer, and talked to him about contacting Horford. He didn’t want Horford offered even so much as a visit, but he wanted the scenario explained to him. If Horford was interested, a visit would be arranged. It was a tantalizing idea. But that weekend Horford visited Miami of Florida. Early that week, he enrolled there. End of the adventure.
“Would we have shocked the world or what?” Knight asked the coaches, amused at the very thought of the ultimate bandit recruit signing to play at Indiana.
While all this was going on, there was also the little matter of playing Purdue. This game would be at least as tough as Ohio State had been, perhaps tougher. Purdue was playing very well and was tied for first place in the Big Ten with a 5–1 record. Indiana was 3–2.
Practice on Monday and Tuesday was tense. Knight continued to be angry with Harris. “You know, I’m sick and tired of losing to these sonsofbitches,” he said at one point. “But I guarantee you if you boys aren’t ready for their competitiveness, they’ll come in here and thump you. Andre, I’m so sick and tired of your pouting, I can’t tell you. Just play the game, son. Go after it.”
When practice was over—this was Tuesday—Knight sent Wright to talk to Harris. “Either he needs a personality transplant or I do,” Knight said.
After they had gone through their last walk-through on Wednesday evening, Knight asked the players how they wanted to play this game. “Should we just try to contain them or should we go after them defensively?”
There was only one way for the players to answer this question: go after them. An Indiana player would no sooner vote to play containment defense than he would suggest a two-three zone. Knight knew this, but he wanted the players to tell him.
“I really think,” he told the coaches that night, “that we’re really ready to go. I hope I’m not fooling myself.”
Game day was by far the prettiest seen in Bloomington in months. It was sunny, breezy, and warm, the temperature pushing towards fifty. Knight’s mood was good when he and the coaches went to Smitty’s, and they lingered over lunch as if knowing that once it was over there was serious work to be done.
The game was about as difficult as one could imagine. The intensity level on both sides was high from the start. Purdue coach Gene Keady was guaranteed to do two things every season: dress worse than any coach in the country and produce a team that played as hard as any in the country. When Keady’s center, Melvin McCants, picked up his third foul early, Keady took off his jacket and hurled it into the stands behind the bench. If Knight had tossed the jacket, it would have made headlines. Keady just looked better without the jacket on.
Alford caught a knee on the thigh early, but he never left the game. At halftime it was 34–34. “They’re just hanging on,” Knight told his team. “We make a couple plays early and we’re gonna be just fine.”
But the first play that mattered wasn’t made by Indiana. On the first possession of the half, Purdue’s Doug Lee nailed Calloway with a knee and Calloway crumpled. He had to be helped off. Calloway had scored twelve first-half points, high for both teams. His absence was crucial.
It became one of those games where every possession is painful because it is so important. The tension was almost unbearable. Hammel was almost silent the entire second half. Neither team led by more than two points for the first nine minutes until a Harris tip-in made it 54–50 Indiana with eleven minutes to go. But Purdue came back. A jumper by Troy Lewis, the same Troy Lewis Indiana passed up because of Delray Brooks, put Purdue up 57–56 with 9:30 remaining.
The lead continued to seesaw. Harris fouled out with 6:30 left. Thomas, still not 100 percent on his ankle, was gone a minute later. McCants’s two foul shots made it 66–62, Purdue. The situation could hardly be more grim: Harris and Thomas had fouled out. Calloway couldn’t play. Todd Meier and Steve Eyl were playing the inside positions now. They should have been overmatched.
Purdue went to a box-and-one, four men playing zone, one hounding Alford. Keady was willing to let anyone but Alford shoot the ball. When Morgan tossed a brick with 4:20 to go and Lee nailed a twenty-footer, it was 69–64. The crowd was completely silent. Hammel just shook his head. Knight stood in front of the bench, his sweater rolled up, his hands on his hips. He didn’t say anything, either. What was left to say?
Thirty seconds later, Alford turned the ball over, and with 3:30 left it was Purdue’s game. The Boilermakers had a five-point lead, they had the basketball, and Indiana’s entire starting front line was out of the game.
What happened next was nothing short of miraculous. During the last four minutes of regulation, Purdue did not score again. Meier made a steal that led to one Alford free throw. When he missed the second shot, Meier rebounded. He fed Stew Robinson, who missed. But Eyl got the rebound and put it back and suddenly it was 69–67. Meier and Eyl—overmatched—had made it a ballgame. A moment later, Alford put his 6-1, 160-pound body in the path of 6-9, 215-pound Melvin McCants and did what Knight swore he never did—he took a charge. He made both foul shots to tie the game at 69–69.
No one scored the rest of regulation. Alford got the last shot, but his twenty-five-footer bounced off the rim. In the overtime, Purdue scored first, taking a 70–69 lead when Jeff Arnold made one of two free throws with 4:33 left. Amazingly, that was Purdue’s last point of the game. But Indiana couldn’t score either. Alford missed. Eyl turned the ball over. Eyl missed the front end of a one-and-one. Finally, with 1:52 left, Alford scored his twenty-seventh point on a baseline jumper. It was 71–70.
That was the final score. But the game wasn’t secure until Purdue’s Mack Gadis had missed a short jumper in the lane and Meier somehow got the rebound. In nineteen minutes, Meier got seven rebounds. The last was his biggest. The deed was done. Indiana had held Purdue t
o one point in nine minutes and somehow had won a game that it had absolutely no right to win.
“Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff,” Knight said much later that night. Before that, though, Knight had to meet with the press. He never said a word about the game. Instead, he talked about what a beautiful day it had been and how he had gone fishing and had sat thinking how unimportant basketball truly was. He went on in that vein for several minutes, holding his audience spellbound. Finally he said, “I’d like to answer your questions, but I have to go plan another fishing trip for tomorrow,” and walked out.
Exactly why Knight pulled this routine only Knight knows for certain. But he enjoyed it greatly. In fact, he grabbed several friends in the hallway before walking in, saying, “Watch this.” For the first time all season, the locker room was not open to the press. “When you leave, tell those assholes you can’t talk,” Knight told the players. “Don’t tell them I said you couldn’t talk. Just tell them . . . Oh, tell them I said you couldn’t talk.”
Why?
“Just a little victory for me,” Knight said. “Why not?”
Once again, the schedule wasn’t doing Indiana any favors. The Illinois game would be at 1 P.M. on Saturday because of national television, meaning the players had just thirty-six hours to recuperate from Purdue. It had probably been the most physical—not to mention emotional—game of the season. Knight knew there was no sense even trying to practice on Friday. He wasn’t feeling very good himself; his head was stuffed and he was again having trouble breathing.
The person suffering the most that day, though, was Harris. He had shot four for eleven against Purdue and committed a foolish fifth foul. Harris was now occupying the penthouse suite in the Knight doghouse; Jadlow had an apartment down the hall. Looking at the Purdue tape, Knight had commented to the coaches, “We didn’t get any bargain with these junior college players.”
A Season on the Brink Page 25