For Indiana, this was a chance to make a very good season a magic one. There was no reason to think the game wasn’t winnable. They had handled playing on the road most of the season without any trouble. Knight was brimming with confidence. “Michigan has played like dogs a lot this year,” he told the players. “But I guarantee you they’ll play very hard on Saturday. That’s okay, though, because it will just open up some things for us on the inside.”
They were so high the plane hardly seemed necessary to get to Ann Arbor. On the flight, Knight had an assignment for Hammel. “In fifteen years, nine Big Ten teams each year have had a chance to finish ahead of us in the league,” he said. “How many have done it?” Hammel spent most of the trip burrowing through his record books. Just before landing he had the answer: Out of the 135 teams that could have finished ahead of Indiana, Michigan, by winning on Saturday, could be the twentieth team to do so. Six of those twenty had come in one year—1985.
“That just might be the most impressive thing we’ve done here,” Knight said, settling back with a satisfied smile.
They went straight to the arena after arriving, since the game the next day was in the afternoon. Knight was greeted by an assistant football coach who told him that Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler was away but wanted to be sure Knight got a gift that he had left for him. It was a Michigan football Fiesta Bowl sweater. That sweater was a reminder of the comeback season Michigan had had in football. It also reminded Knight of a speech he had given his team in November, comparing Indiana basketball to Michigan football. His players had lived up to his plea that they make this a comeback season like the one Schembechler’s team had.
Crisler Arena was hot that evening because the CBS technicians had turned on the TV lights so Indiana would have some notion of how the lighting would feel during the game. Knight was loose; Steve Eyl actually made it through the session without having his shooting disparaged. When it was over, Knight called them into a circle at center court. His voice wasn’t very loud, but in the empty arena his words seemed to echo off the seats.
“You do not have to do anything in here tomorrow except play as well as you can play,” he said. “You do not have to play the greatest game ever played. It really doesn’t matter what you’re playing for tomorrow in terms of how you play because you should play as well and as hard as you can every time you play. That’s what you’ve done this season. The teams that do that are the teams and the players that end up playing for championships.”
Michigan was an exception to this rule, however. Indiana had come very close to playing hard and well in every game it had played all season. Michigan had been superb in one game, awful in the next. It had been the kind of inconsistent team that would drive Knight crazy. Indiana, even knowing the special nature of this game, probably could not take its level of play much higher than where it had been for the past several weeks. Michigan, if ready, could play several notches higher. From an Indiana viewpoint, that was the scary part.
But on that frigid evening, that hardly seemed possible. Indiana had just played its best game of the season. It was peaking. And if anyone had a reputation as a big-game coach, it was Bob Knight. It was Tim Garl who said it best that evening: “We’ve caught all the fish. Now, we’re going for Moby-Dick.”
If Garl had remembered the ending of Moby-Dick, he might not have spoken so quickly.
Saturday dawned ugly: overcast and windy, a gusty wind that practically knocked you over when you walked outside. With the moment at hand, Knight wanted nothing left undone. The post-breakfast walk-through was the longest of the season. When it was over, everyone went back up to Knight’s suite for one more look at the tape.
“We can have a lot of fun against this team,” Knight said, repeating the theme he had been harping on since Thursday. “They’re out of shape and they wish they weren’t playing you people today.”
On the bus, he said it all again: “There aren’t a half dozen teams in the country in the position you’re in. You put yourselves here by doing what you’re capable of. All of the pressure is on them.”
Perhaps. But Michigan was going to be ready for that pressure. Crisler Arena was alive long before tipoff. This was the last home game for a distinguished senior class: Roy Tarpley, Butch Wade, Richard Rellford, and Robert Henderson. It was a game for a second straight league title against a vaunted and hated opponent. A huge banner hung from one balcony. It read: “Who Says We’re a Football School?”
The Indiana locker room was tense. Knight was fine, calmly going through mail in the anteroom while conversing with Buckner and Kent Benson, who had driven over from Detroit for the game since the Pistons weren’t playing. But everyone else was wound a little bit tight. Even Dakich, who had predicted victory before every game all season, admitted, “I’m nervous. I don’t why. It’s the first time all season.”
Maybe he knew something. The arena was so loud after the player introductions that Knight could barely be heard, even in Indiana’s tight huddle. “Forget what is going on around us,” he said. “This game is going to be decided out there, inside the lines. Nothing happening off the court is going to have anything to do with who wins this game. The buckets are still ten feet. We’ve been through it all before. You people would not be here if you weren’t good enough to win this game.
“Just like Illinois now, get it settled down the first ten minutes and then let’s win the basketball game.”
If a home crowd doesn’t necessarily intimidate a visiting team it can certainly charge up a home team. Michigan was charged up. The bored looks that the Wolverines had worn for so much of the season were nowhere in sight. Their eyes shone with intensity as they walked out amidst the din.
Rellford began the game with a thunderous dunk. The noise was earsplitting. Indiana hardly seemed rattled. Thomas hit a short jumper to tie it and Morgan followed an Alford miss for a 4-2 lead.
And then the roof fell in. Indiana couldn’t get a rebound. Tarpley, Wade, Rellford, and Joubert looked like they were running a tip drill among themselves. It was 8-4 at the first TV time-out and Knight’s voice was tense. He seemed to sense trouble. “I told you boys patience would win this game. Where is it? Move the ball, look for shots, and be patient.”
They tried. Michigan wouldn’t let them. Thomas picked up a second foul five minutes into the game reaching in on Tarpley. Normally mild-mannered, Tarpley whirled and started talking trash to Thomas. Michigan was that intense. Thomas looked surprised at Tarpley, then laughed. It wasn’t funny.
With Michigan leading 10–8, Joubert scored eight straight points. Chunky, cocky, often lazy, Joubert would not have lasted five minutes at Indiana. But he knew how to beat Indiana. Beginning with Joubert’s spree, it was Purdue all over again. Tarpley went over Thomas for a dunk. Tarpley swished a hook. Thomas turned the ball over, lunged, and committed his third foul. He came out and was greeted by a blast from Knight. Harris shot an air ball, Michigan rebounded and raced downcourt, and Tarpley hit again. It was 24–12.
The next time-out was the Daryl Thomas show. “Why even bother showing up, Daryl? Back to the same old shit, Daryl. Back to where you were. Are you scared? What the hell are you scared of?”
Todd Meier, in for Thomas, threw the ball away and Glen Rice dunked. Gary Grant hit from outside, then stole another bad Meier pass for a dunk. It was 32–16. Even Alford was shaken. He tossed a brick and Joubert hit again. Rellford, a nonshooter, hit a fifteen-footer. The half ended with Alford holding for the last shot as he had done with so much success all season. This time, Grant blocked the shot. It was 44–25 at intermission.
There were no halftime hysterics. No speeches. No declarations. Just disappointment. “I’ve never had a team play scared in a big game before,” Knight said. “I don’t know why you’re scared. You got right out of what we wanted to do and never got back into it. You guys are out there playing your own game out there. Playing my game is what got you here, boys, not playing your game.
“Steve,
if you see them not moving, put the ball on your hip and direct them. You haven’t done that once. Well, let’s see if we can play a half of basketball. Let’s see if we can salvage something here. But you better think about how tight you’ve played. They came at you and you were totally intimidated. Why can we play at Illinois, at Michigan State, at Ohio State, and come out here and be scared to play? Boys, I just don’t understand it.”
The coaches didn’t understand it either. In the hallway, they had no answers. In truth, there were none. Wright made a comment about the Michigan people lacking class. “Forget that bullshit,” said Knight, who often got completely tangled up in it. “Let’s worry about ourselves. We’re getting our ass kicked out there.”
He didn’t even talk to the players about coming back to win the game. Instead, he talked about why they had to play better in the second half. “What surprises me is that you’ve shown you can play with good teams,” he said. “If you have any thought about competing nationally, this is what you’ve got to beat. If you want to play with North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, this is what you’ve got to beat. The country is full of teams like this. This is not an isolated case.
“I almost feel like you are right back where you were at the start of last season. I wonder if any of you thought about this: ‘Hey, we got here by doing exactly what we were told to do. The minute we deviate from that, we’re going to get our ass beat.’ You are not good enough to not listen to us and be any good. Let’s see if we can get back to doing what we can for a half.”
They couldn’t. It took Thomas exactly twenty-three seconds to pick up his fourth foul—an offensive foul. It was almost as if he subconsciously wanted to come out of the game. Knight put Jadlow in for Thomas. That turned out to be the one bright spot of the day. Jadlow played with abandon. He scored eleven points, he mixed it up inside, he went after people. When Rellford threw an elbow in his direction Knight jumped off the bench and yelled, “If he throws an elbow hit the sonofabitch in the mouth, Todd!”
It was all a long roar into the wind. Indiana never cut into the halftime margin. It just built and built. It was twenty minutes of humiliation. With the score 53–29, fourteen thousand voices began chanting, “Throw a chair, Bobby, throw a chair.” A banner was unfurled, reminding Knight of his fishing speech after the Purdue game: “Bobby, wouldn’t you rather be fishing?” Knight would rather have been anywhere else in the world.
Michigan kept running and dunking until the final minutes when Frieder took the seniors out one by one. Indiana had to endure each ovation, each set of hugs and high fives. It stretched on and on. In the final minute, Knight was reduced to telling Thomas that Jadlow had played harder than he had and that was a disgrace. Finally, it ended at 80–52. The walk off the floor and up the ramp was painful. The catcalls echoed in their ears, the laughs. They had worked so hard for so long to get to play this game, and it had been a complete, unmitigated disaster.
Knight knew how hard they had worked, and he knew how awful they felt. He reminded himself of that as he looked around the room at his stunned team. It was back to his old mental tug-of-war. “Jadlow did a hell of a job, he competed, he fought, and he played hard. The rest of you, nothing. You were totally intimidated and they just beat the shit out of you from the start.”
Pause. “Hey, don’t get your heads down. I’m really proud of you. You did a hell of a job with this season. We had a tremendous turnaround from last year’s team, a great turnaround, and I know that you worked awfully hard to do it.”
Pause. “But you played against the kind of people today that you’ve got to beat to be any good nationally. Ricky, you didn’t do shit out there all day. You played like a damn scared high school kid all day. We’ve told you about building your body and your hands. If you don’t get stronger, you won’t play next year. Daryl, same thing. We got the shit beat out of us on the boards. You want to play, you got to compete. Harris, you paid no attention to what we wanted. You won’t play either. We have too many players next year. You won’t play. There’s no way. Four of our best players are being redshirted right now and we got two more coming in who will be right with those four. You people want to play, you better take stock or your ass will be on the bench next year. I guarantee you that.
“Steve, not once did you go up and grab Daryl by the jersey and say, ‘Get in the f—— game, Daryl, goddamn it. Quit playing like a pussy!’ You know how many times Buckner did that to Benson? Do you know? You want to be a leader, Steve, you got to do that. We got nothing from you, nothing from anyone except Jadlow. And Winston, I thought Winston gave us everything he had. The rest of you didn’t scratch or scrape at all. Not at all.”
Pause. “Okay. The hell with this game. Don’t even think about it. It’s over. You’ve had a hell of a regular season, one you should be proud of. Now we’ve got a tournament to play. We can still get the job done there. All of you know we’re capable of it. It’s one bad day, boys, it doesn’t have to ruin everything that we’ve done. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
And so it went all the way home. One minute Knight was telling Hammel and Felling how bad the team had been, the next he just shook his head and said, “Ah, what the hell. Michigan’s got as much talent as anyone in the country. We’re still right where we want to be.”
17.
Back to the Brink
Knight spent the next two days reminding himself that Michigan had been an aberration, not part of a pattern. Still, he was torn. He could not just let go of a twenty-eight-point loss on national television for a Big Ten championship without at least one tantrum.
It didn’t come right away, though. Sunday, Knight’s mood was good, especially when the pairings for the NCAA tournament were announced. Indiana had been placed in the Eastern Regional as the number three seed. That meant that the NCAA Tournament Committee, looking at Indiana’s season, had rated Indiana somewhere between ninth and twelfth in the country. The way the tournament is set up, the top four teams are seeded number one in the four regions; the next four are seeded number two, and so on right through the last four teams, who are the four sixteenth seeds.
As a number three seed, Indiana drew the fourteenth seed in the East as its first-round opponent. That was Cleveland State, a little-known team that had only become a factor in basketball in the last three years. This would be Cleveland State’s first appearance ever in the NCAA tournament. The Vikings were 273 for the season. Their most impressive victory had been a rout of a struggling DePaul team in Chicago. They had played two Big Ten teams—Ohio State and Michigan. At Ohio State, they had lost 99–95. At Michigan, after trailing just 47–45 at halftime, they had lost 105–85. Of course Indiana knew about getting blown out at Michigan.
Looking at the tapes of those two games, Knight concluded that this would not be an easy game: Cleveland State was quick, deep, and it pressed all over the floor. The press had given Indiana trouble during the season. But with a week to prepare before playing the game on Friday in Syracuse, Knight certainly saw it as winnable.
In fact, Knight was excited by Indiana’s draw. The first seed in the East was Duke, Mike Krzyzewski’s team. The second seed was Syracuse. If Indiana won its first-round game, it would face either St. Joseph’s or Richmond. That game would be eminently winnable. Then, in the round of sixteen, the likely opponent was Syracuse, a talented but undisciplined team. Again, a winnable game. And, if Duke were the opponent in the regional final, well, Knight had felt all year that Duke was a vulnerable team that had gone 32–2 largely because of Krzyzewski’s coaching.
“And if we did lose to Duke, I wouldn’t feel very bad about it,” Knight said. “Because at least that way one of the good guys would be in the Final Four.”
In short, Knight believed they could win the regional. There was no team he felt would overwhelm his team. And that is just what he told his players. “You will have to play like hell in every game in this tournament,” he said. “Cleveland State is a very good team, a quic
k team, a tough team. But if you play from buzzer to buzzer you can beat any team in this regional. Any one of them. It’s all right there for you.”
This was Monday. On Sunday, they had waded through the Michigan tape for ninety minutes and then met briefly that evening after they had learned who they would be playing. Now, he wanted them to begin looking at some Cleveland State tape while he went through the Michigan tape one more time. Before he left, he had to remind them that he had not forgotten Michigan yet.
“Daryl, if we’re going to win in this tournament, you have to play,” he said. “You can’t hide like you did Saturday. Now, I want to know right now, are you going to play or are you going to hide?”
“I’m going to play.”
“Okay, you better. Because if you go out there and hide again I have absolutely no interest in having you play next year. You’ve made some great strides this year, Daryl, but you haven’t played a really outstanding game since Illinois. You’ve gotten in foul trouble almost like you don’t want to play. I won’t tolerate it.”
He left to review the Michigan tape. Waltman and Felling began to talk about Cleveland State. Ten minutes later Knight was back. He was angry. “I just started looking at this tape for the fourth time and I’m getting angrier each time I look at it. I want to show you the first two plays of this game because that’s all I needed to see to analyze how much you people wanted to win this game.”
He set the tape up. The first play showed Calloway going for a head fake and leaving his feet on defense. “How long has this gone on, Ricky? I’m getting tired of seeing the same mistakes.” The shot was missed, but Harris had missed the box-out. “Tough to box out, isn’t it, Andre?”
Play two: Harris missed a shot. “You drifted, Andre. The shot had no chance.” Thomas almost tipped it in, a play that at first glance looked like a good effort that didn’t go down. Not according to the tape. “Look at this, Daryl. You did not run down the court hard. In the first minute of the game, you aren’t running hard. If you had been, you would have tipped it in easily. Instead, you had to half-lunge at the ball.”
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