A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Fortunately, Knight didn’t see the paper that day. His pregame mood was sanguine. He talked during his pregame radio show about how this team was beginning to remind him of the 1984 team, the one that had been expected to do almost nothing and that had come within one basket of the Final Four. Knight was as relaxed as anyone could remember him on a game day.

  The Era of Good Feeling ended quickly. This time, the Iowa press beat Indiana. On the first possession of the game, Calloway walked. He had four turnovers in the first four minutes. The Hoosiers, who had committed fourteen turnovers in two full games, had eleven by halftime. It was 6–0, Iowa. Then it was 22–8, Iowa. Knight called time and ripped them. They scored six straight points to make it 22–14, but Iowa guard Andre Banks was having one of those nights where, going inside consistently, he was unstoppable. His backcourt mate, Jeff Moe, another kid from Indiana, was lights-out from outside. They combined to build the lead back to 36–19. Alford had a shot blocked by Banks. That almost never happened. Iowa scored on nine straight possessions. By halftime it was 44–28.

  Knight was shocked. He had expected a tough game, but never this. In seventeen games, Indiana, even in its four losses, had never been this far behind. It had been in every game until the end, but now it was getting blown out by— in Knight’s opinion—a team it should be able to play with.

  “Did you not listen when we told you this team was quick?” he said. “Did you hear anything we said all week? Jesus Christ, boys, we’re getting hammered. I mean hammered. This game is over—we’ve lost. There’s almost no reason to play the goddamn second half.”

  They played the second half, but it really didn’t matter. Iowa built the lead to as much as 67–45. Knight sat Thomas and Alford for the last ten minutes because he could see no point in playing them. Indiana made a late charge to make the final score a respectable 79–69, but it was no contest. For the first time all season, Indiana had been embarrassed.

  One year ago, Knight almost undoubtedly would have gone off after such a game. He would have called them names, questioned their manhood, and gone on and on. But not this time. He knew they had given him everything they had to win five straight games, and he also knew that a letdown had been almost inevitable. Was he happy about it? No.

  “I worked to get you ready to play this game and you went out and got played off your feet from the beginning,” he told the players. “I think you all owe me an apology for that. You were not ready for what this team threw at you. You should be very disappointed in yourselves. You just went out to play rather than going out and playing to win. You owe everyone concerned with Indiana basketball an apology.”

  But that was all. Until they got to the plane. By then, the frustration was starting to fester. “Boys,” Knight said as they waited to take off, “we’re going to find out what kind of people you are on Saturday. Saturday will determine what kind of a team this is.

  “Steve [Alford], if you were feeling sick again, you did us all a disservice by not coming to me and telling me you were too sick to play. You and Stew both owe us a hell of a game Saturday. Stew, you were just terrible. Do you realize that no team in the Big Ten other than Northwestern has been as far behind in a game as we were tonight?”

  He sat down to let them think about that a little. Felling was seated across from him. “This game was almost impossible for them psychologically,” Knight said softly. “They had won five they had to win and Iowa was coming off a bad loss to Wisconsin.

  We would have to have been very good to win tonight and we were bad.”

  Reasonable. Rational. But a moment later, as the plane started to taxi, Knight began running down botched plays. He was midway through a description of a Steve Eyl defensive error when the plane suddenly, frighteningly, skidded. It slid almost off the runway and stopped. Fortunately, it had not built up much speed.

  For a moment no one moved. No one said anything, including Knight. The pilots pulled the plane back onto the runway, taxied again, and took off without incident. The plane was well above the clouds before Knight started talking again. “Like I was saying about Eyl . . .”

  It was after midnight when the plane landed—without further incident—in Minneapolis. Before they even left the airport they heard some bad news: Minnesota, with its five remaining players, had beaten Ohio State. The Gophers were not going to roll over and die. Saturday’s game would probably be difficult.

  As soon as the bus arrived at the hotel, the players ate and then trooped wearily up to Knight’s room to look at the game tape.

  A session like this one was not apt to accomplish much. Everyone was exhausted, including Knight. For the players, this session was punishment: play poorly and you have to listen to the coach ramble on about your mistakes until all hours of the morning. Of course, Knight didn’t see it that way. After a loss, his mind focused on how much work had to be done. To him, everything that had gone before was wiped out. All he could see was that night.

  “I can’t remember an Indiana team being worse prepared than you people were tonight,” he said as the tape droned on. “Stew, you were no more into the game mentally than a dead man. You are simply incapable of putting two good games together. The way we played this game there is not one team in the Big Ten we could have beaten. I can’t believe that you could work as hard as you work and then go out on the court and play like that. I just cannot understand it.

  “If you play like this against Minnesota you’ll get your ass beat. They came up with a great performance against Ohio State, and they’ll do the same thing against us Saturday. Everyone says they only have five guys, well, hell, it only takes five to play the goddamn game. We lose this game, boys, and we’re right back to last year. Right back. You better be ready to go to work tomorrow.”

  They went to bed with those final words in their ears: last year. Every time the players heard those words they shuddered a little. Saturday’s game would bring them to the midway point of the Big Ten season. They did not want to live through a second half anything like 1985.

  It snowed from the moment Indiana’s plane touched down early Friday morning right through the moment it took off late Saturday in Minneapolis. The streets seemed empty. The hotel was empty. It was like being in a ghost town. Knight and Hammel went for not one but two walks on Friday, Knight alternating between understanding that the Iowa game was almost inevitable and worrying that the team was going to sink to that level and stay there.

  Hammel had learned to just listen to these monologues. He knew that Knight wasn’t looking for input as much as he was looking for a sounding board. But when Knight switched subjects, even for a minute, Hammel would often jump in quickly and try to steer the conversation away from Indiana basketball. It was as if this was a chance to give Knight a mental coffee break. If someone didn’t change the subject, Knight was apt to go on for hours wondering if his team would ever win another game.

  Today’s coffee break subject was Joe Lapchick, the old St. John’s coach who had been one of Knight’s early coaching mentors. Knight had been talking about dealing with criticism when he thought about something Lapchick had told him.

  “Right after I got the job as the coach at West Point I went to Lapchick’s house in Yonkers to tell him about it,” Knight remembered. “He looked at me and said, ‘Do you care what people think of you?’

  “I said, ‘Not really.’

  “And he said, ‘Good, because if you want to be liked, don’t coach.’”

  Knight laughed remembering the line. Hammel kept him on Lapchick and Knight kept reminiscing. “The first time I met him was when Tates (Locke) took me to one of those New York writers’ lunches in the city. Joe took me by the arm and introduced me to everyone in the room. Made me feel really important.

  “Later that year, I went on a scouting trip to the Midwest to see St. John’s play DePaul and Marquette. I was scouting St. John’s because we were getting ready to play them. Lapchick insisted that I travel with them everywhere, eat with them, do ever
ything with them. Of course we ended up beating them.

  “After he retired (in 1965) he would come to the Garden whenever we played. When I would walk onto the court he would look at me and put his hand under his chin and push it up. He always said to me, ‘Keep your nose in the air. Be arrogant. Walk with kings.’

  “He’s the reason I have so few rules on my team. He told me not to make any rules because that way if a bad kid screws up you get rid of him. If a good kid screws up you do what you have to do and let it go at that. Rules just get you in trouble.”

  Knight’s voice softened as the memories of Lapchick kept coming back to him. “I was in my car driving to a basketball camp in the Poconos in August of 1970 when I heard that he had died. It was exactly three weeks after my dad died. I had a scrapbook in the back seat of my car that Joe had put together about the betting scandals of the 1950s. He made every one of his players read it and then sign it each year.

  “I went back to the city for the funeral. Just after I got there, Mrs. Lapchick took me aside into another room. She told me she wanted to be alone for a minute because she wanted to tell me something. She said to me, ‘You know, you never played for Joe, but you should know you were always one of his favorite boys.’ When we won the NIT in 1979, I had her come out to center court with me to accept the trophy.”

  Knight’s eyes glistened. The Iowa loss seemed far, far away. At least for a few minutes.

  Whether it was the passing of twenty-four hours, the nonstop snow, or the huge Italian dinner Knight ate on Friday night with a coterie of local friends, his mood on Saturday morning was 180 degrees different from that of Friday.

  Knight awoke early on Saturday and wanted to look again at the Iowa tape. Knight will often look at the tape of a loss five or six times. Usually, he can figure out exactly what went wrong the first time through, but he looks again and again anyway. Saturday morning, Knight couldn’t find the tape. Manager Jim Kelly had accidentally put it into his pocket and forgotten it was there.

  “Kelly,” Knight asked after breakfast, “knowing my relative lack of patience, do you think I would be upset if I wanted to look at a tape and my Irish manager had it in his trench-coat pocket?”

  “Maybe a little,” Kelly answered, not certain what was coming next.

  “Well, Kelly,” Knight said, putting his arm around him, “that’s where you and I differ. I’m not at all upset. You have to learn to understand human frailties. People make mistakes. Learn some benevolence towards your fellow man—like me.”

  The coaches, listening to this speech, broke up. “If we can just win this one,” Waltman said to Felling, “we could be all right.” He paused. “Why does it seem like I say that every game day?”

  Knight was back to talking about positioning at the morning walk-through. Positioning and opportunities. “We told you at Northwestern and Wisconsin that you had to play your best basketball to get back into position. We told you before Ohio State, Purdue, and Illinois that these were opportunities. You took advantage, something last year’s team never did. But now, after Iowa, we’re back to needing wins to create opportunities. We’ve got this game tonight and then Wisconsin and Northwestern next week. We need those three games to have more opportunities—for the conference, for the NCAAs. But you have to start setting that up tonight. There is no cushion, no margin for error. Now, goddamn it, let’s play the way we can.”

  Before they got on the bus to go back to the hotel, Knight took Andre Harris aside. He knew Harris was struggling and getting down on himself. He also knew that Harris was thinking Knight had given up on him. Not so, Knight told him. “It isn’t that we don’t think you’re contributing, Andre. It’s just that we think you have the potential to contribute so much more if you’ll just try to do what we’re telling you.”

  Harris nodded. But no one was really certain how much he really heard. That morning at breakfast he had called Jim Kelly “Bill.” That had sent the players into gales of giggles. It wasn’t that anyone disliked Harris. He was just different. He and Jadlow were both different. And right now, both were struggling—on and off the court.

  Harris struggled again that night. But he was not alone. All of Knight’s pregame fears became reality quickly. The crowd was wild from the start. This was, after all, the ultimate underdog story: team decimated by scandal holding together and handling opponents they should have no chance against. Williams Arena, the ancient Minnesota field house, was chaotic from the first minute of the game.

  Because of that, Knight desperately wanted his team to get a good start. “Let’s take this crowd right out of the game,” he said in the locker room. “There is no way we can allow playing us to be anything like playing Ohio State was for these people. Let’s jump on them and get things going our way right away.”

  It didn’t happen that way. Calloway and Alford were shooting well, but that was it. No one else could buy a basket. Indiana wanted a quick pace. It didn’t get it. Minnesota controlled the boards and the pace. At halftime, it was 33–29 Minnesota, and the Gophers had scored twelve of their points by rebounding their own misses and putting them back for baskets.

  The players, understanding that they were facing a potential disaster, were snappish with one another. Alford yelled at Morgan for missing a box-out. Robinson was on Harris, who failed to score the entire half. But most of all, when they got to the locker room, Knight was on everyone.

  “Last year all over again, boys,” he said. “We told you and told you that this game would be tough. Did you not believe us? You didn’t believe us when we told you Iowa would be quick. Did you think this team would just die for you? What’s your excuse going to be this time? Huh? I am sick and tired of hearing excuses for this team.

  “We’ve done all we can do. We’ve given you an offense and a defense. That’s all we can do. The rest has to come from you. Daryl, do you want to play? Because if you don’t, tell me and I’ll put Todd [Meier] into the game. If you aren’t tough enough to play, we’ll play someone else. Stew, playing you right now is like playing four on five. You haven’t pass-faked yet in this game. Winston, son, you’ve got to box out. You people have given them twelve points not boxing out. Twelve. It’s like we started the game behind 12–0.”

  And so on. The conclusion: “The next five minutes are more important than any you have played all season. Now, we’ll find out just what kind of team you boys want to be.”

  If that had been the case, Indiana’s season would have been over. The first five minutes were a calamity. Minnesota kept punching the ball inside. Their 7-1 center John Shasky got position on Thomas three straight times, turned, and easily shot over him. His last basket in the series, a soft ten-footer from the baseline, put Minnesota up 44–33.

  Knight called time. No holding back now, he blasted them. He called them quitters, accused them of giving up. “I can’t do anything for you if you aren’t tough enough not to quit when you get behind.”

  Everyone was guilty—especially Thomas. Knight yanked him from the game, and when the time-out was over, he was still screaming. “If you don’t want to play, then don’t go in the f—— game, Daryl. Same old shit with you.”

  In the meantime, Calloway threw away another pass. Minnesota could go up thirteen. But Ray Gaffney missed an open jump shot. Suddenly, remarkably, Indiana revived. Alford hit from the baseline. Calloway made a steal and Morgan scored. Minnesota called a quick time-out. It didn’t matter. Knight asked Thomas if he wanted to play. Thomas said yes.

  Quickly, Alford made a steal and Calloway scored. It was 44–39. Marc Wilson missed for Minnesota, Morgan rebounded and threw a long pass to Calloway, whose layup rolled in as he was fouled. The free throw made it 44–42. Another Minnesota miss and Thomas scored inside to tie the game at 44–44. It had taken less than four minutes, an 11–0 run. It may have been, to coin a phrase, the most important four minutes of the season.

  Minnesota hung on for a while, leading again at 49–48 with ten minutes to play, but fatigue was f
inally catching up. A Thomas follow-up gave Indiana the lead at 50–49. Alford hit a jumper to make it 52–49. Wilson made a foul shot to cut it to 52–50, but that was Minnesota’s last gasp. It did not score a single point during the next 7:07. Even though Indiana only produced six points during that period, it was enough. The Hoosiers had outlasted the game Gophers. The final was 62–54. Minnesota had scored ten points during the last fifteen minutes.

  Victory cures a lot of ills. Knight had reason to be disturbed by the first twenty-five minutes, but they had come back and won the game and that was what mattered. “You played terrible defense for twenty-five minutes to get in a hole,” Knight said. “But you did an excellent job the last fifteen minutes to get out of it. Last year we couldn’t have done that.

  “Daryl, when you went back in, you played. Goddamn it, Daryl, you’re tougher than all these guys. They can’t guard you, Daryl. If they block a shot, fine. Just shoot it again. Keep going after it no matter what, okay?”

  Thomas nodded. Everyone was relieved. With Wisconsin and Northwestern at home coming up, there was an excellent chance that they would be 8–3 in league play and 16–5 overall with four weeks left in the season. After winning seven and fifteen, respectively, all of last season, that wasn’t bad. Morgan, though, was disturbed at some of the sniping. “We can’t be getting on each other,” he said after Knight had left. “Damn, we got enough to worry about without getting on each other.”

  No one answered. But everyone agreed.

  It was three o’clock by the time the plane reached home. Knight talked to the coaches all the way home about how tired he was of not being able to attack teams defensively. “We haven’t been able to play defense the way I want to for three years now,” he said. “Yet, somehow, we’ve won fifty-five games. I guess that’s pretty good. But boy, does it tire me out.”