A Season on the Brink

by John Feinstein

  Knight spent a good deal of time during that weekend with Mike Krzyzewski, whose Duke team reached the championship game before losing to Louisville, 72-69. Knight wore a Duke button everywhere he went, spoke to Krzyzewski’s team about playing in the Final Four, and went to Krzyzewski’s room after the final to console him. There was irony here: Knight would have been inconsolable after such a loss, yet he insisted on trying to help console Krzyzewski.

  In the days following the final, Knight called Krzyzewski several times to make sure he was okay. Krzyzewski was fine. He was far better equipped to deal with a crushing loss than his mentor was.

  In fact, Knight was still brooding about the Cleveland State loss in Dallas. When a friend asked him why he wasn’t going to the NABC banquet, Knight answered, “I’m laying low. I’m kind of struggling right now.”

  Why?

  “Our team just isn’t very good.”

  But, it was pointed out, he had done all that could be done, squeezed all there was to squeeze for twenty-seven games.

  “But we played twenty-nine.”

  Knight paused. Then he added, “And Daryl Thomas is still a pussy. I don’t know what to do about him.”

  So there it was. To Knight, the epitaph for 1985-86 was that Daryl Thomas was still a pussy and Indiana had lost two games in embarrassing fashion. Undoubtedly, that would pop into his mind again and again during fall practice, after the first bad half, after the first loss. . . .

  The key for Bob Knight remains the same: He is as brilliant a coach as there is. He is an extraordinarily compassionate, caring, sensitive person. No one has ever had a better or more loyal friend. And yet everyone who cares about him remains concerned about his ability to hurt and to cause pain. And the person he hurts most often is Bob Knight.

  People around him—friends, coaches, players—want, like Isiah Thomas, to hug him and tell him that they love him. Yet he shies away from that, often acting as if he doesn’t think himself worthy of that kind of feeling and then going out and doing something to prove it.

  He has won 438 games as a coach, and if he were to coach another twenty years, he could well break Adolph Rupp’s all-time record of 880 victories. There is no reason for him not to coach another twenty years. He loves the game, the challenges, and the players. And yet, he still remains unhappy so much of the time. Losses destroy him, and when they do he seems to feel obligated to make everyone and everything around him as miserable as he is. Often, he succeeds.

  If only he could let go of things: losses, grudges, tantrums. He is rich and he is famous. In a good mood, there is no one in the world more delightful to be around because he is so bright, so well-read. In a bad mood, there is no one worse. Just as he sees everything in black-and-white terms, he, too, is black and white. Bob Knight never has an average day.

  In 1985-86, he saw firsthand what patience could do for a basketball team. He found that he did not have to make a major issue of each defeat in order to get his team to bounce back. He found that if he made the effort, he could control his temper. One can only hope that he will remember these lessons and use them.

  He has so much to give—and has given so much. And when he begins his twenty-second season as a college basketball coach this fall, he will only be forty-six years old. A young man with a bright future. If he doesn’t destroy it.

  Moby Dick

  The 1986 season did not end at Indiana until seventeen days after the stunning loss to Cleveland State. True to his word, Knight had the players back scrimmaging during the final week of NCAA tournament play. It was, to say the least, less than fun for the players.

  Knight’s mood was so dark that he even barked at Dakich and Bartow for refereeing poorly. On one particularly unpleasant afternoon Uwe Blab, the leading scorer from the still-remembered 1985 disaster, came to practice. Blab, who was playing in the NBA for the Dallas Mavericks, had let his hair grow and was wearing a ponytail and an earring. Knight ignored him. When the practice was over he told the players in the locker room, “I better not ever catch any one of you coming back here looking like that.”

  Fortunately for everyone—including Knight—Knight went to Dallas for the Final Four, leaving the assistant coaches in charge of the last few days of scrimmages. The Final Day finally came on March 31. While Knight was parading around Dallas wearing a Duke button on his sweater (a show of support for Mike Krzyzewski) his team scrimmaged for the last time.

  The atmosphere that last day was loose. There was a sense of relief because the angry coach wasn’t there, and because the players knew they would not have to see another formal practice until October 15. But there were also questions, the unpleasant residue of the Michigan and Cleveland State debacles.

  As the players dressed after the final practice, many of them were as bewildered as they had been the year before after the loss in the NIT final. They had little idea as they left Assembly Hall that evening that exactly one year later they would be rolling on top of one another in the Superdome, celebrating a national championship that even Knight had to concede was a remarkable feat.

  There were changes during the off-season. Andre Harris, without basketball as a motivator, had slipped back into bad habits academically. He flunked out at the end of the semester and, as promised, Knight did not offer to help him gain readmission. Harris transferred to Austin Peay.

  That certainly did not leave the junior college experiment on solid ground. Harris, with all his ability, had been a headache from the beginning. Jadlow had shown potential in flashes, but would be redshirted in ’86–’87. He needed time to mature.

  The new JUCO arrivals were Dean Garrett and Keith Smart. Garrett, 6–10 and raw, had been signed early when Knight still had stars in his eyes from watching Harris run and jump during the early workouts. Smart’s signing, however, was testimony to Joby Wright’s persuasiveness. Knight’s initial reaction to Smart—“He wears gold chains”—had come at a time when Harris and Jadlow had already spent considerable time in the doghouse.

  And yet, Wright had kept after Knight, convinced him to invite Smart in for a visit and to go back and see him play. Smart had been so impressive, both on and off the floor, that Knight decided to give the JUCO project one more all-out shot. It turned out to be one of the crucial decisions of his coaching career.

  There were other decisions to be made during the off-season. In June, Knight filed for divorce after twenty-two years of marriage to Nancy Knight. He knew that this decision, though not surprising, would be traumatic for both his sons, especially Patrick, who would turn sixteen in September. But he honestly believed it was the best thing for everyone—including Nancy.

  The decision came as a surprise to no one inside the basketball program. Everyone knew that Knight had purchased a house in Ellettville the previous summer to prepare for just such an eventuality, and the general sentiment was relief that the issue was finally going to be resolved.

  There was one hitch, though. As soon as the divorce papers were filed and became a matter of public record, the Bloomington Herald-Telephone reported it. Somehow, Knight had thought he could keep the move a secret. When the story hit the paper, he was furious. Naturally, Hammel was caught in the middle of the whole debacle.

  Later in the summer Hammel was talking about what had happened and Knight’s anger with the newspaper. “But doesn’t he understand that filing for divorce is public record?” Hammel was asked.

  “Wait a minute,” Hammel answered, half joking. “Are you using understand and Bob Knight in the same sentence when it comes to the media?”

  The summer was not without its funny moments. Knight went off to Spain for the world championships to be a TV analyst and to conduct several clinics for Adidas. One night, driving on a country road, Knight’s car broke down. He began walking, looking for help. Finally he spotted a house with lights ablaze. He knocked and asked if the people there would help him. Could they help? They could help him with just about anything he wanted.

  He had stumbled into a
brothel.

  Remembering the wild rumors that had circulated the year before when word had leaked out about his purchase of the Ellettville house, Knight couldn’t help but laugh when he returned home and told friends the story.

  Knight also spent a couple of days in the early fall visiting his old friend Bill Parcells, the New York Giants’ coach. The two had been buddies when they had coached at West Point, and they remained close. When Parcells took Knight into his locker room shortly before kickoff one Sunday, Lawrence Taylor, the Giants’ All-Pro linebacker, spotted him immediately.

  “Hey,” Taylor said. “Look, everybody, it’s the chairthrower.”

  Maybe Knight was in a good mood or maybe he looked at Taylor’s chiseled, 6-foot-3-inch, 245-pound body closely. Either way, he didn’t snap. There were no cracks, as one might have expected, about Taylor’s off-season drug treatment.

  “You just worry,” Knight told Taylor, “about getting out there and tackling somebody.” Taylor tackled, the Giants won easily and Knight returned home full of stories about his buddy Parcells. The Giants would go on to win the Super Bowl, a victory that gave Knight almost as much pleasure as what would take place in March.

  The team that gathered to begin practice on October 15 had almost as many question marks as the one that had started practice twelve months earlier. Gone, in addition to Harris, were ’86 seniors Winston Morgan, Stew Robinson and Courtney Witte. Knight was less than pleased with Robinson, who had failed to graduate.

  Morgan and Robinson had, in essence, shared one starting spot the previous season, and Harris had been the power forward and the leading rebounder. Ideally, those two spots would be filled by Garrett and Smart. Both had a lot to prove, however.

  There were some givens. Alford, who had played superbly as a junior, was locked in, not just as a starter but as the captain and leader Knight had spent most of the previous season convincing him he had to become. Alford was now just that. This would be his team, just as the ’76 team had been Quinn Buckner’s team, just as the ’81 team had been Isiah Thomas’s team.

  Daryl Thomas would start at Harris’s forward spot—if Garrett could produce at center. He had done a good job playing center at 6-7 in ’86, had handled more abuse from Knight than anyone not named Alford and would be more comfortable playing forward as a senior. The other forward spot belonged to Rick Calloway. He was a sophomore now, established as a rising star.

  The other two spots would be competitive, though, and that was healthy. The five redshirts from a year ago—Joe Hillman, Kreigh Smith, Brian Sloan, Magnus Pelkowski and Jeff Oliphant—would get a chance too. So would Todd Meier, the third senior who had played so well in spots the year before in spite of his aching knees.

  And then there was Steve Eyl, or, as the players called him, SteveEyl. As good an athlete as Eyl was, basketball did not come easy to him, especially shooting a basketball. Knight had tried everything to make Eyl a better shooter, but had succeeded mostly in making Eyl tight as a drum every time he felt his coach’s watchful eye upon him.

  But during the offseason pickup games, there was little doubt among the players about who the most improved player around was: SteveEyl. He was shooting better, more consistently. Feeling more confident as a shooter made him more confident as a player. By the time practice started Eyl had come a long way from the day in Wisconsin when Knight had told Eyl if one of his assistants ever recruited another player like him he would be fired.

  As always, the preseason had its share of rotten evenings. That was no surprise. It was part of the routine. But three weeks into practice, the players were hit by a lightning-bolt that shook them and put the whole season in jeopardy.

  They were sitting in the locker room waiting for Knight to come in and give his pre-practice talk. The next night, they were scheduled to go to Fort Wayne for the annual red-white scrimmage. Knight walked in, the assistants following, looking somber. Knight had a piece of paper in his hand. He began reading from it.

  It was a letter from the academic staff. One of the players—Knight didn’t use his name while reading the letter—had been cutting class. He was in danger of failing a course. This had been going on for several weeks. When Knight finished reading, he turned to Alford.

  “Steve,” he asked, “what do we usually do in situations like this?”

  Almost in a whisper, Alford answered, “Well, usually the guy would be gone.”

  “That’s right,” Knight said. He looked across the room at Thomas. “Daryl, you’re gone.”

  It looked like Mike Giomi revisited. Thomas, a good student, was not failing by NCAA or Indiana standards. But he was cutting class, and that was below Knight’s standards. He knew the rules and he had broken them. The team made the trip to Fort Wayne without Thomas. A brief Indiana press release said Thomas had been thrown off the team for cutting class.

  These were nervous days for the players. Most preseason publications were picking Indiana in the top five and, after watching Smart and Garrett practice, the players and coaches really believed this team could be very good. But not without Thomas. He was, by consensus, the second best player on the team. He was a senior, he was smart, he was experienced and he had been toughened by three years under Knight. For the Hoosiers to excel, Thomas had to play.

  Knight knew all this. But he certainly was not about to compromise his academic standards. And yet, Knight is not inflexible. Recidivism in his program is inexcusable, but first offenders, especially if they have been solid citizens in the past, get a second chance.

  “Only two things I will never ever excuse,” Knight had once said. “One is lying, the other is using drugs.”

  On the second issue, Knight had once given a player who had been a solid person a second chance when he had tested positive for marijuana. And so, Daryl Thomas, good kid, good student, would get a second chance. Make up the missed class time and the missed work and you can come back, Thomas was told. He did just that. One week after the incident in the locker room, Thomas was returned to the team. Three nights later, he scored twenty-two points in an exhibition victory over the Russians.

  The season’s first crisis had been survived.

  If there was another significant event during preseason, it was the gradual change in the Knight-Alford relationship. Even as he drove him and haunted him and attacked him during the winter of ’86, Knight had been mellowing on Alford. He had started that season threatening not to start him, throwing him out of practice, questioning whether he could ever be the leader he had to be for the team to succeed.

  At times, he had been brutal after Alford had not played well. More than once, he had told the coaches, “We’ll never be any good until we get rid of Alford.”

  But deep down, Knight knew that wasn’t true. He knew how hard Alford had worked to please him, and how much he had improved. That didn’t mean there weren’t going to be moments during this final season when Alford got ripped. There were. But with Alford’s last days in an Indiana uniform approaching, Knight knew it was time to use the boxing gloves less and the kid gloves more. Alford had earned at least that.

  And so, on the day after Thanksgiving, twenty-four hours before the season would begin with a game against Montana State, Knight called Alford into the cave. Alford had been there before but usually because he—or the team—was in some kind of trouble. Now though, Knight didn’t scream or yell. As Alford told friends later, his voice and his words were soft.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Knight said, “how much I appreciate you. You stand for everything this program is about. . . I don’t think I could care about you more than I do if you were my own son.”

  Alford was both stunned and touched by this gesture. He knew this side of his coach existed; he had seen it in things he had done for others over the years. But this was the first time Knight had ever really reached out to him this way.

  “Coach,” Alford said at the door, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you just said.”

  “St
eve,” Knight answered, “I hope you know how much I appreciate you.”

  Finally, Alford knew. When he told friends about the incident, none of them was amazed as he was. They had always known how Knight felt about Alford. Only Alford hadn’t known. Perhaps Knight had sensed that.

  The season began with a walkover victory over Montana State. Hillman, at least for the moment, had beaten Smart out for the second starting spot at guard. Garrett, despite a shaky preseason, was the starting center.

  The win was a costly one. With 17:28 left in the game and the Hoosiers leading comfortably 48-35, Calloway went down with a knee injury. Initially, it looked very serious, perhaps season-ending. He would be gone, it was thought, at least a month.

  This was a potential disaster. Calloway would miss several tough December games. More importantly, he would miss time developing, getting used to the new players, improving his own game. Even after the 90-55 victory, the season had not gotten off to a good start.

  Notre Dame was next. Smart started in Calloway’s place. As it turned out, this was to be a historic night. Indiana’s 67–62 victory was expected. That was no surprise. What was a surprise, even a shock, was the zone defense in which the Hoosiers opened the game.

  Knight had talked about playing zone as far back as the end of the ’85 season. He had even practiced it a little that summer on tour. He had practiced it even more during this preseason. A year earlier, prior to playing Notre Dame, he had thought that a zone would be the best defense against David Rivers, Notre Dame’s penetrating guard. He had even thought about playing it for one possession at the start of the game, just to throw the Irish off.

  But he had not done it that night or any night in ’86. But now, having practiced it, Indiana was ready to play it. Ironically, when Digger Phelps had read that Knight considered playing zone against his team, he had considered it a slap in the face. When Indiana arrived at Notre Dame on the morning of the game an angry Phelps was waiting for Knight. The two good friends retreated to Phelps’s office, where Knight spent close to an hour explaining to Phelps that playing zone was not a slight to Notre Dame but testimony to Rivers’s ability as a penetrator.