There was 2:30 left. Indiana had to score. Alford, never one to back off because of a mistake, wanted the ball. He flashed to the corner. Morgan whipped the ball to him and Alford never even paused. Twenty feet. Swish. It was 72–69. The building exploded. A moment later, Jones drove the baseline. Waiting, in perfect position as always, was Meier. The shot rolled off. Harris grabbed it. Indiana used the clock and ran the same play. This time Alford was in the other corner. Same result. Swish. It was 74–69 with 1:07 left. Ten seconds later, Horton walked. Finally—finally—it was over.
They were 20–6. Knight was ecstatic. One year earlier, a Knight-coached Indiana team had lost its final home game for the first time ever. Knight had been so distraught that he skipped the postgame ceremonies for Dakich and Blab. Now, he gleefully introduced Morgan, Robinson, and Witte. But first, a word from our sponsor.
“You know Indiana has the greatest basketball tradition in the world,” Knight told the fans. “Last year, we were all kind of down because we didn’t think we gave you the kind of basketball you people are used to seeing and enjoy seeing. I know I’ve enjoyed it greatly.”
He left the floor to the seniors. It had been an almost perfect day. Duke had beaten North Carolina to win the ACC championship. True, Cornell had lost to Princeton and Texas had lost on a fluke shot by one point on the buzzer; Knight took that last one hard. But the Hoosiers had reached the Promised Land. And Moses had even entered it with them, at least for a few days.
16.
For the Championship . . . Thud
Knight might have been giddy after the Iowa victory, but the Michigan State game was on Wednesday and he did not want another loss to the Spartans. For one thing, Michigan State had beaten Indiana four straight. In the ten seasons that Jud Heathcote had been coach there, State had a 10–9 record against Knight; Heathcote was the only Big Ten coach with a winning record against Knight.
He also had a sharp enough wit to outdo Knight occasionally in one-liners. Once, when Knight had been feuding with other league coaches, he called Heathcote and said, “Jud, you’re the only coach in this damn league that likes me.”
“Bob,” Heathcote answered, “Don’t take anything for granted.”
Knight certainly wasn’t taking this game for granted. If he had believed in January that his team had lost at home to a mediocre team, the season had proved him wrong. Scott Skiles had been truly unreal, even with probable revocation of his probation hanging over him. He was averaging twenty-seven points a game, and Michigan State, picked seventh in the league preseason, was clipping at the heels of Indiana and Michigan with an 11–5 league record. The leaders were 12–4.
Knight hated the fact that Skiles was playing so well. As wonderful a season as Alford was having, Skiles was even better. Alford had no trouble admitting, “He’s the best guard in America.” But Knight would not so much as shake Skiles’s hand as part of his last-game-against-a-senior ritual. Skiles’s arrest record, in Knight’s opinion, disqualified him from meriting such respect. In truth, if anyone merited a pat for being a competitor, it was Skiles.
If Knight’s concern before the Iowa game had been the defense, his concern preparing for Michigan State was their offense. Led by Skiles, the Spartans had become a team that pushed the ball up the floor so quickly it was almost impossible for the defense to have time to set up. Skiles could not be allowed to score in conversion. Stopping him would not be easy.
But this was a team riding high. Since the opening two losses and the subsequent fishing trip, Indiana had won twelve of fourteen games. For the players, this meant relief. Last year’s nightmare had not been repeated. The season had become fun. They were enjoying the winning, they were enjoying one another, and they were even enjoying their coach. The locker room was a loose, happy place. Alford would make several All-American teams that were being announced during this week—deservedly so. Calloway was the Big Ten rookie of the year. And Harris, owing to his play in the last five games, was tabbed by one magazine as a member of the “All-JUCO newcomer” team. In this era, there weren’t many JUCO newcomers to choose from. But Wright grabbed the magazine and proudly showed it to anyone he could find—the coaches, the players, Harris, the secretaries, little old ladies on the street. He was entitled, though. No one had sweated longer or harder with a player than Wright had with Harris.
The team flew into East Lansing on a frigid, snowy night. When the coaches went to dinner, Knight sat down and found a woman standing over him with a menu, but not to take his order. “Coach, if you give me your autograph, I’ll even bring you a chair.”
She laughed hysterically at her cleverness. Fifteen weeks earlier, such hilarity had put Knight in a bad mood for an entire day. Today, he took the menu, signed, and said softly, “Ask the Spartans not to beat up on us too bad, okay?”
The angry young man of 1985 had become a very satisfied middle-aged coach in 1986.
Naturally, he wanted more. That was only human. The team had already met every preseason goal he had set, but now it had a chance to do more. A Big Ten championship with this team would rank very high on Knight’s list of coaching accomplishments.
Skiles was going to be a problem. He was in a shooting groove not unlike the kind that baseball pitchers get into when they feel they can get every batter out. Skiles was so confident he thought he could make any shot he took. That kind of player is tough to stop.
East Lansing was hardly a cheery place. It was snowing when Indiana arrived and very cold even though it was March. On game day it started snowing at midday and snowed eight inches in a matter of hours. What’s more, none of the hotel telephones were working. No calls could come in, none could go out—except from the lobby pay phones. The team felt as if it had been cut off from the outside world.
The morning practice on game day seemed destined to try Knight’s patience. Jenison Field House is one of those old gyms that is an anachronism except on a game night, when it is packed and jammed and becomes alive and electric. There are no doors to shut in order to have a closed practice. Joggers abound, and on this morning, workmen were everywhere. The acoustics caused every sound in the building to echo all over.
Knight was uptight, but it wasn’t the acoustics. It was poor Steve Eyl’s shooting—again. “Steve, you’re falling backward every time you shoot,” Knight yelled, jumping from his seat as the players warmed up. He walked over to Eyl to demonstrate. He came back shaking his head. “I wish he had been a better football player,” Knight said. “I’m not sure I can survive watching him shoot the ball for another two years.”
Knight sat down and immediately noticed Eyl falling backward again. This time he called Alford over. “What’s he doing every time he shoots?” he asked his best shooter.
“Falling backward,” Alford said.
“Well, will you please go tell him that? Maybe he’ll listen to you. You’re a better shooter than I was.”
Knight’s frustration with Eyl’s shooting had more to do with aesthetics than anything else. Eyl had done just about everything he had been asked to do coming off the bench. He had rebounded, played tough defense, and come up with a key follow shot here and there. But Knight was too much of a basketball purist to bear the sight of someone shooting a ball so incorrectly so often. He was like a conductor who kept hearing a note played wrong. Maybe no one else could hear it, but every time he heard it he winced. Watching Eyl shoot was painful for Knight.
Being watched was painful for Eyl, a quiet, easygoing sort who bore a remarkable resemblance to Ivan Drago, the Russian boxer in Rocky IV. Eyl was one of those players who had seen both ends of the Knight ladder up close. He had started for much of his freshman season and had been thought of in preseason as a starting candidate. He was one of the best athletes on the team, a player who could do everything on a basketball court except shoot.
But that malady hounded him, as did the misfortune of being named Steve on a team whose best player had that name. As a result, he was constantly referred to by everyo
ne as SteveEyl as if it was one word. Even on the court, when other players wanted to get his attention, they would yell “SteveEyl” rather than just “Steve.” This was not a problem for the team’s two Todds—Jadlow and Meier—partly because their status was almost equal, but mostly because everyone called Todd Jadlow, “Jadlow.” So there was Todd and there was Jadlow and there was Steve and SteveEyl.
SteveEyl was never going to be a shooter. He knew it and Knight knew it, yet the reality was often painful for both. With practice over, Knight went back to the hotel for some soup, trying all the while to push the mental picture of Eyl shooting out of his mind. The snow was so bad that he and Hammel skipped their walk.
It was still coming down hard when the team bused to the arena that evening, and the possibility of having to bus the 300 miles home was discussed. The very thought of a six-hour bus ride with Knight after a loss was enough to make everyone just a little tighter.
Jenison was jammed. Michigan State and Skiles had captured everyone’s imagination because of their abandon and because of Skiles’s charisma. Whatever one thought of his off-court behavior, it was impossible not to admire his guts and guile on the court. And the crowd was waiting for Knight. One sign hanging from the balcony identified one group as SACA—Students Against Chair Abuse.
To get to the floor from the locker rooms, the teams had to walk right between the bleachers. Even though a path was cleared, people pressed up against the ropes so that they were almost breathing in the faces of the coaches and the players. But this was not an ugly crowd like those at Kentucky or Purdue. They just wanted to be up close, to feel as if they were part of the game. Many even applauded Knight as he walked past them.
Also waiting for Knight when he walked onto the floor was Walter Adams. Walter Adams is a professor at Michigan State, a rabid fan of the basketball team who has sat for many years right behind the visitors’ bench. He is a world-class heckler. One year, shortly after Knight’s arrival at Indiana, Adams was all over Knight during a game. Knight turned around and pointed at Adams’s wife. “If he’s with you,” Knight said, “I suggest you quiet him down so he can leave with you in one piece.”
No one quite knew how to take that, but Adams quieted. The next year Knight showed up before the game looking for Adams. He had brought a gift, a peace offering. Give me peace, Knight was saying. Walter Adams did just that. The next year he showed up with a gift for Knight, and over the years their pregame exchange of gifts had become a tradition.
Knight, the history buff, had brought Adams a copy of the book Grant and Lee. Adams had brought Knight a green-and-white Michigan State seat cushion to sit on during the game, and a handsome framed plaque extolling the virtues of Knight. Adams was another Bob Knight convert; once he had gotten to know Knight, he not only liked him but would hear no words spoken against him. Knight took Adams’s glasses from him to read the plaque. A crowd had gathered to watch the scene, as always, and both men enjoyed it immensely.
Finally, it was time to play. And Indiana was ready.
This night it all came together. Five months of work, all the yelling, all the hours, all the tape was worth it at least for these two hours. Everything clicked.
Skiles was still Skiles. He had twenty-one points by halftime and thirty-three for the game even though he played the second half with a hip-pointer suffered near the end of the first half. But Skiles could not beat Indiana alone and that was what he was left trying to do. His teammates were very mortal on this night. Larry Polec, the perennial Indiana-killer, had just four points. Carlton Valentine, who had come up with the twenty-one killing points in the first game, had just two.
In the meantime, Alford was matching Skiles shot for shot, scoring thirty-one points himself. Skiles and Alford put on a shooting duel for the national cable-TV audience the likes of which had not been seen for a long time. But Alford had more help. Calloway was superb with nineteen points. Daryl Thomas had fourteen. SteveEyl came off the bench to get two key baskets in the first half—from close in, of course—and Stew Robinson added nine. Harris had foul problems again and only played twenty-one minutes, but he managed ten points, six rebounds, and four steals while he was in the game.
Indiana, down 7–2 early, took the lead at 14–13 on a baseline jumper by Alford with 13:15 left and Michigan State never caught up. Alford and Calloway lit up creaky old Jenison and by halftime the lead was 48–35, Alford ending it with a spinning twelve-footer just before the buzzer.
Nothing changed after halftime. Knight made one small defensive adjustment to take the middle away from Skiles and that kept him off the foul line—he had been there eight times in the first half. The only suspense came when the Hoosiers went through a one for six free-throw shooting spell and let a sixteen-point lead melt to ten with 8:10 to play. But Skiles, doubled-teamed in the middle, missed an off-balance jumper, and SteveEyl rebounded. Alford fed Thomas for a pretty layup. The Spartans clawed back one last time, getting to within 81–73 with 3:13 left. Knight called time.
One adjustment: He wanted to go out of the regular offense and into a triangle—meaning that two players would go to one side of the lane and one to the other with two others outside. He wanted Alford inside, on the baseline, because he was convinced that if Alford drove baseline, Michigan State would be forced to foul.
It took Alford twelve seconds to draw a foul. He made both shots. One possession later, after an MSU miss, Alford drove baseline and fed Meier, who was fouled. The last three minutes were straight from a textbook. The Hoosiers outscored the Spartans 16–6 and the final was 97–79.
“They played just about a perfect game,” Heathcote said. “It was a clinic.”
Nothing makes Knight happier than watching his team put on a clinic. That they had done it on the road against a team that had given them fits for three years and had put themselves one game from a Big Ten championship made it that much sweeter.
Knight enjoyed this one immensely. When a radio reporter trailed him out of the press conference to ask what changes Knight had made to bring about this team’s turnaround, Knight said, straightfaced, “I think our zone defense has really been the difference. We’ve worked awfully hard on it.”
The reporter, giving Knight just the response he wanted, nodded knowingly and said, “Interesting, since you never liked to play zone in the past.”
Still straightfaced, Knight nodded just as eagerly. “That’s right, but as you probably noticed tonight, we play a lot of different zones. Maybe someday we can sit down and talk about the concepts of our zone defense.”
He walked away delighted with himself. Hammel, a step behind, groaned. Knight had scored yet another point in their running battle over the question, “Is the media really as stupid as Knight thinks it is?” On this night, the prosecution had some overwhelming evidence.
Inside the locker room, there were no qualifiers in Knight’s praise of the team. Not a discouraging word was heard. “Look at what you’ve done now,” he told the players. “You’ve got it down to one game for a conference championship. You can’t ask for more than that, I can’t ask for more than that. We’re exactly where we wanted to be when we started on October 15. You should feel damn good about that. That’s one hell of a turnaround.”
They felt very damn good about it. As the players congratulated each other, Waltman put a tired arm around Felling. “Do you know what this means, Felling?” he said. “This means, we don’t have to get into position to get into position anymore. We’re in position.”
Finally.
The bumpy flight home through the snow bothered no one—with the possible exception of Robinson, who was easily the team’s most nervous flyer. Knight was already talking Michigan up front.
It was after two o’clock before they reached Assembly Hall. It was too late to look at tape, at least on a euphoric night like this. Knight was too wound up, too high to sleep, so he and Waltman went to the only open restaurant in town—Denny’s—for something to eat.
An hour
later, Knight pushed himself back from the milkshake he had treated himself to and looked at Waltman. “Remember how we felt a year ago tonight?” he said. “We had just lost to Michigan State at home and we knew we weren’t going to the NCAAs. What a turnaround. I’m really proud of this group of kids. They deserve an awful lot of credit.”
As he drove home that morning with his team 21–6, Knight had no way of knowing that Indiana had just won for the last time in this season. If he had known, he would have been shocked. Because at that moment, he had every reason to believe that the ending for this team would be a happy one.
Euphoria was still in the air the next afternoon. Knight almost sounded cocky talking to the players. “Hey, it doesn’t matter that we’re playing up there,” he said. “We’ve proven all season it doesn’t matter where we play. We can have a lot of fun with this game, boys. All the pressure is on them. The last place in the world they wanted to be Saturday was playing us for the Big Ten championship.”
That was certainly the way the game shaped up. Both teams were 13–4 in the league. Everyone else had at least six losses. It was a two-team race, one game for first place outright. A bad Indiana team had won in Crisler Arena in 1985, and there was no reason to believe a good one couldn’t repeat in 1986. The pressure was on Michigan because it had been the preseason Big Ten favorite. Frieder even admitted the pressure was on his team.
“It may not be fair, but I told our seniors that in spite of everything they’ve done here, their whole careers may very well be judged on this game,” he said. “When you’ve won as much as they have, that isn’t right. But it’s true.”
True or not, Frieder had apparently decided to take the tack of telling them that was the way it was. He apparently wanted pressure on his team in this game. On the surface, that didn’t seem like a brilliant strategy.
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