Everyone was tired. And sick. Felling had the flu and Calloway, Morgan, and Alford were so sick that Garl insisted they stay in bed on Sunday and Monday. Their illness, however, was a relatively minor concern. Once again, a week that should have been easy for Knight was going to be full of land mines. And, as always, before the week was over, everyone was going to feel as if they had stepped on a couple of them.
13.
You Can’t Go Home Again
The tribulations began right away on Monday morning. Academic supervisor Buzz Kurpius informed Knight that there was a problem with Andre Harris: since the semester had started two weeks ago, Harris had not been going to class—at all.
Skipping class was not a bright thing to do under any circumstances, but for Harris, the timing could not have been worse. His first-semester grades, with tutoring help and the Dakich chauffeuring service to get him where he had to be each morning, had been a little bit better than C’s. That wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t enough to retire on. Now, during a period when he was playing poorly—he finished the Minnesota game with two points and one rebound—he also wasn’t going to class.
A year earlier, Harris might have been gone. That had been Mike Giomi’s fate. But Knight had a little more patience this season—and a better team. That may have saved Harris. Barely. “He thinks I’m picking on him,” Knight said after telling Harris he was benched indefinitely. “He’s really going to think I’m picking on him when he flunks out and I don’t petition to get him readmitted.”
Three players were sick. Another was deep in the doghouse. Nothing made Knight more uptight than a week with two games that looked easy and could end up tough. But there was more.
There was Ohio State.
Ohio State had not been as lucky at Minnesota as Indiana had. It had not escaped the way the Hoosiers did. And, as it turned out, that humiliation was the last straw. Eldon Miller, who had coached there for nine years, was called in Monday and told he was gone at season’s end. The athletic director, Rick Bay, wanted Miller to announce he was resigning. No way. Miller told the press he had been fired.
Many names would be linked to the job. But one name came up right away: Robert Montgomery Knight. After all, it seemed reasonable: if Ohio State wanted to shake up its program, who better than Knight? Bring the alumnus home—regardless of the cost. What the public didn’t know was that even though Knight was still friendly with many of his old teammates and close to his Ohio State coach, Fred Taylor, that period of his life was one he would just as soon keep behind him.
In fact, Knight’s four years at Ohio State may have been the only time in his life that he had not been a star, not been in control. Knight was used to being the boss. He had almost always gotten his way in life—except for those four years in college.
He was born October 25,1940, the first and only child of Carroll and Hazel Knight. His father, known to one and all as Pat, was a railroad man who had grown up on an Oklahoma farm and moved east as a young man, stopping in Orrville because it was a crossroads of the railroads in those post-World War I days. There, he met Hazel Henthorne, a schoolteacher who lived in Akron but taught in Orrville. Shy, Pat Knight had a friend ask her for a date. She said no. He tried again. She said yes. They were married in 1934. He was thirty-seven, she was thirty-one. Six years later, much to her surprise, Hazel Knight discovered that the cold she thought she had was slightly more than that.
One can almost imagine Bouncing Baby Bobby crashing into the world, gray eyes flashing, looking around the delivery room of the hospital and saying, “Bet you sonsofbitches weren’t expecting me.” It is the kind of scene the adult Knight would have loved.
The world young Bobby grew up in was not your ordinary household. Pat Knight had a severe hearing problem, so father-son communication was often unspoken. There was a closeness between the two, though, much of it coming through hunting and fishing, something Pat Knight taught his son at an early age. Around Orrville, Pat Knight was viewed as a tough, stubborn, uncommonly honest man. To this day, when Bob Knight wants to make a point about how honest a person is, he compares him to his father. They may not have been as close as many fathers and sons, but Bobby revered his father, respected his authority, and learned quickly never to question it.
Bobby’s best friend as a little boy, even as a teenager, was his grandmother. Sarah Henthorne had come to live with her daughter and son-in-law three years before Bobby was born and became the person the little boy turned to most often. “When Bobby would get in trouble, he would come home and tell his grandmother,” Hazel Knight remembers. “He’d always make her promise not to tell me, then he would tell her and ask her what she thought.”
What she thought, for the most part, was that her grandson was the most wonderful little boy in the world. Early on it was apparent that this was not an ordinary child: He was uncommonly bright, made A’s in school with little trouble, and was always a good athlete. He even did well in the second grade when his teacher was Hazel Knight.
He played Little League baseball and was always a good hitter. Before long, he was introduced to basketball by a man named Dave Knight (no relation). Bobby was in the sixth grade when Dave Knight took him to the gym to show him this new sport. “Always stay between your man and the basket,” Dave Knight told him. And so, on the first day he played basketball, Bobby Knight learned his first lesson about playing defense.
He grew quickly and became a star athlete. By the time he was in eighth grade he was 6-1 and he was averaging twenty-nine points per game playing twenty-four-minute junior high school games. He was also good at football and baseball, but basketball was his obsession. They still tell stories about Bobby and his basketball, how he would carry or dribble it the half mile to school every morning; how he would stay in the park shooting until 2 A.M. when the weather was warm—the man who ran the park taught him how to turn the lights on and off—and how he would leave windows in the high school propped open so he could sneak in and shoot on winter weekends. Knight was so sophisticated that he figured out the best window to go through was the one leading to the music room because the room was set up like a little theater and the last row was only a short jump down from the window.
As a freshman at Orrville High School, he was on the varsity basketball team. This was unusual, and some of the parents of older boys not on the varsity were resentful. Kathy Harmon (then Kathy Halder), who was the star of the girls’ basketball team, remembers the resentment and how Bobby would pretend it didn’t bother him. “Except for losing games, he never liked to admit that anything bothered him,” she says. ’But he was sensitive. He always seemed to hear everything people said about him.”
What they said about him was not that different from what they say about him now. He was a superb student, never making lower than a B throughout high school, and he should have been chosen for the National Honor Society at the end of his sophomore year, but the teachers wouldn’t nominate him because of his behavior. He had a bad temper. In Bobby’s sophomore yearbook, Kathy Halder wrote, “To the English brain . . .” at the start; she finished by writing, “watch the temper.”
The temper came more from father than from mother—at least according to mother. But it also came, undoubtedly, from growing up in an environment where he was always the star and the center of attention. Bobby grew up as the only child, for all intents and purposes, of not one but two women. His mother didn’t drive a car, so his grandmother drove him everywhere. When it was time to learn to drive, his grandmother taught him.
In school, he was also a star—an excellent student and athlete. He was always close to his coaches, especially Bill Shunkwiler, the Orrville football coach, and Jack Graham, his basketball coach until senior year. While other boys might spend time with one another talking about girls, Bobby spent time with his coaches talking about how to get better. “He was always asking questions,” Shunkwiler said. “You gave him an answer, it produced another question. He’s always been that way. He can neve
r know enough about a subject.”
Both coaches were strict disciplinarians. No one got on the Orrville football team’s bus without a coat and tie on. Today, no one gets on the Indiana basketball team bus without a coat and tie on. Shunkwiler believed greatly in using film to show players how to do things. No coach in the world makes more use of videotape today than Knight.
When Knight was a sophomore in high school, his parents built a home on North Vine Street, right down the street from the Orrville Power Plant. Hazel Knight still lives in that house. It is a small but comfortable one-story home, and Bobby slept in the sitting room. Shortly after the Knights moved in, Donald and Pauline Boop moved next door.
Don Boop was a dentist who had been wounded twice in World War II and then gone to dental school after the war was over. He was eighteen years older than Bobby when the two met, but they became fast friends. Every day when Bobby came home from practice—whatever the sport—he would stop at the Boops for a soda (Hazel Knight allowed no pop and no booze in her home). Boop was a sports fanatic, and in young Bobby he found someone to talk to, to encourage, and, on occasion, to drive down to Cleveland with when the Red Sox were in town to watch the great Ted Williams play.
By the time he was a senior. Bobby had grown to 6-4, although he was still slender at about 180 pounds. He was handsome with his short-cropped brown hair, the dimple in his left cheek, and the easy smile that lit up his face when he was happy. There were plenty of girls who wanted to date him, among them a junior named Nancy Falk. But most of Bobby’s time was tied up with one sport or another. Often, he would take Halder to a basketball game and bring along a young friend named Bobby Weltlich, who was four years younger than he was. Later, Weltlich, now the coach at Texas, would be an assistant coach under Knight, first at West Point and then at Indiana.
He was an excellent shooter, even though he had a funny-looking jump shot. Instead of releasing the ball from right over his head, Knight would almost push it out of his hand from shoulder level. His college coach, Fred Taylor, believes he patterned the shot after an Ohio State player named Jamie Freeman. Others, including Shunkwiler, think he began shooting that way when he broke his foot as a junior and kept shoting while he had a walking cast on. In fact, Knight shot so much then that he drove his doctors crazy because he kept breaking casts.
Whatever the reason, the strange-looking shot stayed with Knight throughout college. The question in 1958, though, was where to go to college. He could go to a small school and almost undoubtedly be a starter and probably a star. Or he could go to a big time school like Cincinnati or Ohio State and take his chances there. In those days, scouting wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as it is now. To get the big-time college coaches to consider Knight, Boop sent films of him to Cincinnati and Ohio State.
Senior year had not turned out the way Knight had hoped. He had been the leading scorer for Orrville as both a sophomore and a junior, but the team hadn’t been very good, winning just five games his junior year. That was disappointing. But what devastated Knight was the decision by Graham to leave Orrville for the chance to become a principal at another school. Knight was crushed. He felt deserted. He felt worse when the new coach turned out to be a man named Bob Gobin, who wasn’t so much a coach as a recreation director. Gobin believed the games were played strictly for fun and everyone should have a chance to play. If Knight scored five straight baskets, Gobin would take him out, thinking it was time to give someone else a chance to play.
Knight was the star and the captain, and one night when a teammate was hurt and Gobin didn’t call time to get him out of the game, Knight finally called time himself. Coach and player argued. The coach didn’t think the player should act as if he knew more about the game than the coach. The player, in no uncertain terms, told the coach he did know more about the game than the coach.
“Bobby was right, he did know more basketball than Gobin,” Boop says now, remembering the incident. “But at that point, Gobin didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned, Bobby was off the team.”
The following day, Pat Knight, Bobby Knight, and Boop huddled at Boop’s house. If Bobby was not reinstated, his chances of getting a college scholarship would drop considerably. Scouts not only couldn’t see him play, but they would view him as a troublemaker. Something had to be done. Finally, it was decided that Bobby and Boop would go to see Gobin. They did. After a long go-round, a compromise was struck: Knight would sit out a one-game suspension and Gobin would try a little harder to win games. The team finished strong, making the state playoffs for the first time in years, and Bobby Knight averaged twenty-four points a game. Still, the year with Gobin left a bad taste in his mouth.
In the spring, Knight and Boop drove the state visiting colleges. Boop, who had done undergraduate work at Cincinnati, would have been happy to see Knight go there. But when Knight went to a picnic thrown by incoming Ohio State coach Fred Taylor for recruits, he was sold on Ohio State. At the picnic that day were John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas, Mel Noell, Gary Gearhart, and Knight. All Ohio kids. They would become one of the greatest recruiting classes in the history of college basketball. Knight was a bit leery about whether he could play with the group, but finally chose Ohio State.
He graduated eighth in a class of eighty from Orrville High School, was selected the best male athlete in school, and made big headlines in the local paper when he chose Ohio State. He left Orrville a local hero, off to give the town a big name 100 miles away in Columbus. Little did he know that the most frustrating four years of his life were about to begin.
As a student, Bob Knight enjoyed his four years at Ohio State. He was a voracious reader and an avid questioner, just as he is today. As a basketball player, he was miserable. There were a lot of places in the country where Knight could have played a lot of basketball. He was a good shooter. He was tough, hard-nosed, and smart. Most places, that would have been enough.
But Fred Taylor had put together a remarkable program in his brief tenure. Ironically, Knight was a weak defensive player, because he lacked quickness. “He was,” Taylor says today, “a hacker. Bobby got in foul trouble a lot.”
As a result, Knight was never much more than a spot player. He started some games as a junior and a few more as a senior, but always ended up back on the bench. He played on great teams. In 1960, when Knight was a sophomore, Ohio State won the national championship, led by Knight’s classmates Lucas, Havlicek, and Noell. The next two seasons, the Buckeyes reached the national championship game again only to lose to Cincinnati.
Being on a winning team wasn’t enough for Knight. Not playing destroyed him. Boop remembers numerous phone calls over the years from a distraught Knight. He and Taylor would fight, and Knight would want to transfer or quit or just come home. “Bobby hated not playing,” Taylor said. “Which is exactly what you want. You want kids who want to compete, and that’s just what Bobby was. But he was very blunt about thinking he should play more, and there were times when that was difficult for me and for him.”
Knight was often in trouble. Once, on a trip to New York, he stole a bottle of wine just to show off and got caught. Knight was always showing off. He told his teammates that he had been part of a notorious motorcycle gang back in Orrville and earned the nickname “Dragon.” His relationship with Taylor was always borderline, sometimes testy.
“Bobby was—and is—a character,” Taylor said. “I remember in 1960 when we beat Western Kentucky in the regional semifinal, we broke open a close game in the last few minutes. I really thought our conditioning was the difference in that game and I told the players that when it was over. Bobby had played well that night. He came off the bench and hit a couple of key buckets from outside when it was still close.
“When I made this comment about conditioning, Bobby pipes up and says, ‘I guess this means we’re going to be doing that goddamn driving line (conditioning) drill again next year.’ Everyone cracked up. It was a good line. But in truth, it wasn’t Bobby’s place as a sophomore reserve
to say that. He never saw it that way, though.”
Knight, like many players, never quite understood why he didn’t play more. Knight still remembers one game where he came off the bench midway in the first half and played very well. He went into the locker room at halftime certain he would start the second half. “I was sitting on a training table when I heard Fred say, ‘Okay, we’ll start with the same lineup that started the game,’” Knight said twenty-five years later. “I’ll never forget that because I was so crushed.”
To this day if a Knight player comes in during the first half and outplays the starter, he starts the second half. Always.
Off the court Knight did quite well in college. School was always easy for him—unlike basketball. He began as a physical education major, but switched to history because PE bored him. He never had to work very hard and didn’t, cruising through with a B average. If he had worked as hard at his classes as he did at basketball, he undoubtedly would have been Phi Beta Kappa. But classes were not his passion.
Knight talks now about considering a career in law or teaching. But his high school friend Kathy Harmon remembers him telling her when they were high school juniors that he wanted to be a coach. “He wrote an autobiography,” she said. “He wrote in it that he wanted someday to coach the NCAA champions.”
That didn’t change in college. In Ohio State’s 1960 media guide, Knight is described as a sophomore who aspires to be a college coach someday.
It was after Knight’s freshman year that he began dating Nancy Falk. She still remembers his walking up to her at the swimming pool where she was lifeguarding on the day after her graduation from high school and saying, “Well, now that you’re grown up would you like to go out?” That began a courtship that lasted through college and continued until they were married after Knight had gone to Army as an assistant to Tates Locke.
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