A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  He snapped the tape off. The lights stayed out. “Boys, I am not used to having teams come in and lay an egg in a game this important. That is not the way you go after a championship. I just can’t believe how bad you were. This tape is making me sick. Daryl, you sucked. You chickened out. You all better think about what I expect in this tournament.”

  There was some BK Theater involved in this outburst. Knight had treated the team with kid gloves with few exceptions since the painful aftermath of the first Michigan game. Now, with the tournament upon them, it was time to turn up the fear level at least a little bit. He wanted them reminded that the last five months had been to prepare for this month, these games, and that he would judge their season on what they did in March. He wanted no letdowns.

  Knight went back to the cave with Kohn Smith. A few minutes later, Smith was back. Time for some more BK Theater: guest star, Kohn Smith. “Hey, I just walked out of there, he’s so mad,” Smith told them. “It’s like being in a cage with him in there. He’s stayed off you all season long and then you go into that game with everything at stake and you play with your heads up your ass. You can’t let that happen again. Coach shouldn’t have to rant and rave and throw guys out of practice to get you ready to play in big games.

  “You guys have to have some pride. Daryl, aren’t you sick of being called a pussy? Andre, aren’t you tired of being told you play dumb? Hey, we don’t like it when he goes nuts and starts throwing things and cursing and ripping up carpets. We work our ass off to keep that from happening. We’ll all look back at Michigan and say, ‘It could have been.’ But that opportunity is gone—forever. Now we’ve got a chance in the NCAAs. Let’s not blow it.”

  Smith told the players that Knight had not sent him to talk to them. They knew he was lying and he knew they knew he was lying. It was back to the old Knight mind games. Rather than come back and scream again, Knight sent Smith to tell the players he was on the verge of screaming again. Smith was not the tough talker on the staff. It was not his role and not his forte. He knew it. Walking out of the locker room, he shook his head. “That was terrible,” he said. “They didn’t buy a word of it.”

  How could they? They knew that one of the coaches would never walk out of the cave on Knight to deliver a speech to the players. Especially not Smith. If he was giving a tough talk it was because he had been told to give a tough talk.

  It was that way all evening. Mind games. They went on the floor to begin walking through Cleveland State, and Knight, sitting with Ed Williams, called them over to say he had just told Williams he thought they would win the regional. Then, back inside the locker room, the managers handed out Xerox copies of a newspaper story quoting Cleveland State coach Kevin Mackey as saying he was excited to play Indiana.

  Again, he told them they could beat anybody. Then, one more time, he told them they had been awful on Saturday. Back and forth. “Cleveland State will look at this like an unknown heavyweight getting a shot at the champ.” “Syracuse, boys, we can handle Syracuse. I guarantee it.” “Ricky, why were you so bad Saturday? Have you even thought about it?”

  And on and on and on. It hadn’t been this way for a long time. It was last year’s daily routine.

  When Knight finally sent the players home, his message for the week was clear: Play well and Michigan will be forgotten; play poorly and it could be a long off-season. In spite of the mind games, everyone’s mood was generally good. The players were making their usual bets—the average bet ranges from a soda to a dollar—on various first-round matchups and on the other regionals. The coaches were giggling about Purdue’s draw, a first-round game against Louisiana State at Louisiana State. Keady had whined to Knight just two weeks earlier about “always getting screwed by the NCAA Tournament Committee.” Now, he had truly been screwed and everyone at Indiana was amused.

  The other thing that made Knight’s postpractice mood bright was the news that Keith Smart, the junior college guard from Kansas, wanted to come to Indiana. Knight had given Hammel the story for the next day’s newspaper and was almost giddy. The junior college experiment, judged a failure in January, was now judged an unqualified success. Harris had played well down the stretch and Jadlow had been the team’s best player at Michigan. Knight was so excited about Jadlow that he was comparing him to Mark Alarie, Duke’s silky-smooth All-American forward. With Smart committed and 6-11 junior college sophomore Dean Garrett already signed, Indiana would have four JUCOs on its roster in 1986-87. “We’ll redshirt Jadlow,” Knight said. “The other three will probably start.”

  Indiana—JUCO heaven.

  Spring arrived in Bloomington the following day. The sun was out and the temperature climbed into the seventies. That alone was enough to brighten moods and energize everyone. Everyone was in early. The graduate assistants had by far the most arduous task of the week. They had to call around the country to track down tapes of possible opponents. More Cleveland State, lots of St. Joseph’s and Richmond, and be thinking about the following week, too.

  This was not an easy job. College basketball teams routinely trade tapes with one another, but some schools and conferences have rules against tape trading, and some coaches won’t give a stranger tape on a friend’s team. Dakich and Bartow sat in their little office with lists of phone numbers and made arrangements to acquire as many tapes as possible. How many would be enough? There was no such number.

  The coaches spent the morning going over Cleveland State tapes again before retiring to Smitty’s for lunch. Knight was in an expansive mood, remembering his days at West Point when the team would get ready to play the NIT each March while talking yet again about how much the JUCOs had helped the program.

  Practice began that afternoon as strictly business—no games—but went straight downhill. The red team was having trouble with the press. Knight had seen this show before and it didn’t please him. The only time all season that Indiana had faced a really good press and handled it had been the second Iowa game. In that game the players had been keen and honed in because they had been embarrassed at Iowa. Cleveland State’s press had at least as much potential to create trouble as Iowa’s. But the players were not apt to take Cleveland State as seriously as Iowa.

  “The problem you had against Michigan, boys, was that you developed an inflated opinion of yourselves after Michigan State. You did not have a tough mentality for that game. Cleveland State will have a tough mentality, I promise you that. You are going to have to play an entire game Friday and an entire game Sunday or you have to wait until October 15 to play again. There’s no second chance. If you aren’t ready, it’s over. The first guy I see trotting out there on Friday is coming out. If you want to play in this game you are going to have to bust your ass from start to finish.”

  Knight thought that Cleveland State could hurt Indiana with its press. He also thought that Cleveland State was too quick for Indiana to go out and pressure on defense. He wanted his team to play in a defensive shell. It would look like a man-to-man but it would do what a good zone does: force a lot of jump shots. “From twenty feet in we have to be red-tail bitches,” Knight said. “Make them shoot outside. Inside twenty feet we can’t give up anything.”

  This was a day for spectators. Most of Knight’s friends knew it was a good idea to stay away on the Monday after a loss—especially one like Saturday’s—so they were out in force on Tuesday. In spite of the intensity he directed at the players, Knight was much looser than he had been the day before. At one point he sat with his crew of professors discussing the significance of degrees: “Here’s the way I look at it,” he said, ’A BS is just what it stands for, an MS is More of the Same, and a PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper.”

  Knight was just finishing his speech when he looked up and saw Thomas fail to get open. “Goddamn it, Daryl, you got to be hard to guard!” he screamed.

  From there, the tension built. A Calloway turnover precipitated a ball’s being kicked fifteen rows into the stands. Morgan went from red to white, then the
Todds began switching back and forth. The turnovers continued. “There isn’t a white shirt in here as quick as anyone on Cleveland State,” Knight roared, kicking the chair he had been sitting on. “This crap is no better than the crap I watched on Saturday. Get out of here. Go home. If you don’t want to play any more than this then f— it.”

  They went into the locker room. The screaming continued for several more minutes. What had started as BK Theater had escalated into real anger. Knight walked out of the locker room and punched one of the mats underneath a basket on his way back to the cave. He calmed down quickly, though.

  “Boys,” he said to the coaches, “let’s go eat a steak tonight.”

  Whether it was the steak or the return to normal weather the next day—rain—Knight’s mood was considerably brighter. This would be the team’s last practice at home before leaving for Syracuse on Thursday morning. Under NCAA rules, each school has to be at the game site the day before it plays and is assigned one hour of practice time on the floor that day. Since the practice is required to be open, a lot of teams practice a second time somewhere private.

  Because of the travel schedule, Knight didn’t want to schedule a second Thursday practice unless he had to. It was important, then, to get a lot done on Wednesday.

  But this was one of those practices that was cursed from the start. It was almost reminiscent of the day when Daryl Thomas got hurt and Calloway and Pelkowski both sprained ankles before Thomas went down. It started early, when Alford, reaching for a pass, jammed the thumb on his shooting hand. Bartow, standing nearby, bolted for the training room in search of Garl.

  Alford tried to come right back, but couldn’t hold the ball. Knight ordered him out. Alford stood on the sideline icing the thumb while everyone else kept casting nervous glances in his direction. Knight could make a million speeches about how to play the game and they wouldn’t do any good without Alford.

  Even with Alford out, the team was sharp. So was Knight. When Thomas made a mistake and began to explain what he had done wrong, Knight interrupted. “Daryl,” he said, “remember this old saying: Never complain or explain.”

  A moment later, when Thomas set a good screen, Knight stopped play again. “Daryl, was that an accident or did you actually figure out what to do?”

  Buckner, who would be making the trip to Syracuse, was at practice, and he spent a good deal of time working with Robinson, Morgan, and Calloway. Buckner was a natural floor leader as a player, just the kind of general that Knight thought this team lacked. His presence always seemed to comfort Knight.

  Disaster two came shortly after Alford, thumb taped, had come back in. Calloway, picking his way through the lane, ran smack into a Courtney Witte elbow. Witte didn’t throw the elbow, Calloway just ran into it. He reeled and keeled over like a bowling pin. He was out cold. Garl, who was having a very hard time getting a free minute to finalize travel plans, was sent for again. Everyone was shooting free throws. The nervous glances were now directed at Calloway.

  It took Garl a couple of minutes to get Calloway up. He struggled up like a boxer looking for his corner. “Ricky,” Knight asked from ten feet away, “how many fingers am I holding?” Calloway correctly answered one. “Now, how many?” Knight asked, still holding up one finger. Calloway stuck with one. “Ricky, you’re going to be all right.”

  Two plays later, Robinson got nailed in the groin. He went down in considerable pain, the kind that everyone grins at because they know how much it hurts but also that it will pass quickly. “Stew,” Knight asked, “you weren’t planning on using them tonight were you?” Robinson shook his head. “Then let’s go.”

  Calloway was okay, so was Robinson. Alford said he was okay. Knight cut practice off soon after Robinson’s mishap as if remembering not to push his luck on a day like this one. As he and Buckner walked to the locker room before the evening walk-through, Knight nodded his head as if he had just reached a decision.

  “Quinn, if we can beat Cleveland State, I really think we can win this whole regional.”

  His eyes were lit up like a little boy who thinks he’s getting that red fire engine on Christmas. But there would be no fire engine this year; Indiana had just held its last practice of the season in Assembly Hall.

  The trip started poorly and went downhill from there. The trouble began when Hammel of all people was late for the bus. This was very unlike Hammel. He was always careful to arrive in plenty of time because he always believed that Knight would leave him behind without batting an eye.

  Knight waited. He waited fifteen minutes before Hammel chugged up. He and Garl had gotten their signals crossed; Garl had said the team would leave at 9:30, meaning from the airport, but Hammel thought he meant from Assembly Hall. It was a measure of the depth of the Knight-Hammel friendship that on the day before an NCAA tournament game, Knight waited for him. If a player—any player—had been that late, Knight probably would have left without him.

  Of course, Knight was not going to let such an act pass without mention. “Hamso,” he said, “any chits that were out are even now.” Hammel nodded. No one knew this better than he.

  They arrived in Syracuse on a gray, ugly day, even grayer and uglier than most days in Bloomington. If there is a gloomier town anywhere in America than Syracuse, it has not yet been discovered. The sun in Syracuse is considered a myth along the lines of the Greek gods.

  The bus went directly from the airport to the cavernous Carrier Dome, one of those awful indoor football-basketball arenas that have sprung up in the 1980s. Domes are a terrible place to watch basketball, but the NCAA loves them because they seat lots and lots of people who pay lots and lots of money for tickets. As domes go, the Carrier Dome is not as bad as some others because a giant curtain is drawn right through the middle of the building. It certainly isn’t intimate, but with thirty thousand people in for a Syracuse game the place does shake.

  It was cold and almost empty Thursday. Reporters milled around, most wondering exactly what to write. The NCAA tournament is tough on writers because by the time you reach the game site, there are so many reporters around that all interviews are like gang bangs. If one shows up at these practices looking for a story, one is generally in big trouble.

  Still, a lot of writers were hoping to write something about Knight off of the mandatory postpractice interview session. If anyone in America would eschew the usual pregame clichés and say something interesting it was Robert M. Knight.

  But Knight had no interest in entertaining the press on this day. He was honed in now, his mind focusing only on Cleveland State. After the practice session, before he went to the interview room, he asked the coaches what they thought about practicing again in the evening. He left them to mull that one over as he went to see his friends with the notebooks and microphones.

  The session was calm, except for the presence of an idiot TV reporter from Cleveland who wanted somehow to create news where there was none to create. “Coach,” he began, “most people in Cleveland think that Cleveland State has two chances in this game, slim and none. What do you think?”

  Knight, who was very nervous about this game, answered honestly. “If that’s true,” he said, “then the people in Cleveland don’t know very much about basketball.” Note that Knight said, “If that’s true.”

  Kevin Mackey had not followed Knight into the room by more than two minutes when the same guy said to him, “Coach, Bob Knight was just in here and he said the people in Cleveland don’t know much about basketball.”

  There are days when Knight’s complaints about the media ring disgustingly true.

  The coaches were against another practice. The players had been up since 7:30; they had traveled and practiced and not had any rest. Better to let them rest, eat, and do a walk-through at the hotel than get on another bus and get dressed to practice again. Knight agreed. The kids got their rest and the coaches ate a wonderful Italian dinner. Yes, there was a reason for Syracuse to exist: a restaurant called Grimaldi’s.

&nb
sp; They went to bed early, hoping for sunshine and a victory.

  It rained all day. The temperature never climbed out of the thirties. Knight, who would normally eat breakfast with Hammel while the team was at pregame meal, skipped breakfast. He was tight, noticeably tight. In a way, that was a good sign. The loosest he had been all year had been the three days leading up to the Michigan game.

  Everyone was ready to play. Alford had quieted any doubts about his thumb by making fifteen straight shots during Thursday’s shooting drills. The assistants left early to scout the noon game between Richmond and St. Joseph’s. Indiana would meet the winner Sunday. Coaches from both schools had already been talked to about borrowing tapes from the loser of that game.

  Everyone and everything was prepared. Most of the Indiana family was there: the redshirts, who normally didn’t travel, had traveled. So had Ralph Floyd, Ed Williams, and Quinn Buckner. The weekend looked a lot brighter than the weather. Knight, though, fretted. As the team warmed up he walked around the huge locker room, unable to sit still—unusual for him. “Are we all right?” he asked repeatedly.

  They came back in for a final word. “Boys, we’ve told you and told you that every minute you play in this tournament has to be all-out,” Knight said. “But I want to tell you something. No one in this tournament has worked harder to get here than you have. It’s five months exactly today. You know what you’ve been through and it was pointing towards this. We are right where we want to be right now. So let’s go out and make sure we didn’t do all this work for nothing.”

  Knight wanted a good start. He believed, with good reason, that in spite of all the brave talk, a quick Indiana start might make Cleveland State think it was in over its head. Get their confidence down early and the game might not be as tough as he had thought it would be.