Rise and Fall
Bob Knight spent the fall of 1985 driven and haunted by the year just past. The high was so high, and the low so low, that the memories were vivid and sharp. Partly because of his prodigious memory, but more because it provided much-needed comfort, he could recall the Olympics in almost minute-by-minute detail, especially the climax.
It was warm in Los Angeles on August 10, warm yet comfortable, just as it had been throughout the 1984 Summer Olympics. Miraculously, there had been no smog, no giant traffic snafus, and no serious security problems throughout the two weeks.
Knight awoke that morning feeling the way he always feels on the morning of a basketball game: keyed up, excited, nervous, perhaps even a little more than usual, because this was not merely another game. This was a game, a night, a moment he had waited for his entire life.
That night he would coach the United States of America in a basketball game to decide the winner of an Olympic gold medal. In speeches long after that game had been won, Knight would say often, “If you cannot fight for your country in war, then I can think of no greater honor than to represent it in the Olympic Games.”
For Knight, a true, red-white-and-blue patriot, this was far more than a basketball game. This was the culmination of a crusade, one that he had once believed he would never get the chance to carry out. Even though Knight had been recognized for years as a superb coach, the best there was in the opinion of many, his controversial temperament had brought him as much derision as his coaching ability had acclaim.
Nothing in Knight’s career had drawn more fire than his first experience representing his country as coach of an international team. It was in Puerto Rico in 1979. While leading the U.S. team to the gold medal in the Pan American Games, Knight was arrested for assaulting a Puerto Rican police officer. Witnesses to the incident, which took place during a U.S. practice session, are unanimous in saying that the policeman was far more at fault than Knight, that the policeman was rude and officious and practically begged Knight to get into an altercation with him.
Even though Knight was put through the humiliation of being dragged from the practice floor in handcuffs, he probably would have been judged a victim in that incident had he simply allowed the witnesses to tell the story. But that isn’t Knight’s way. He is completely incapable of letting an incident—any incident—simply die a natural death. Indiana University vice-president Edgar Williams, one of Knight’s best friends, describes that side of him best: “Bob always—always—has to have the last word. And more often than not, it’s that last word that gets him in trouble.”
Puerto Rico was a perfect demonstration of Williams’s words. In speeches long after he had left San Juan behind, Knight was still taking shots. He talked about mooning Puerto Rico as he left it, made crude jokes about Puerto Rico, and, ultimately, turned public sentiment around: instead of being the victim of an officious cop, he made himself the Ugly American. Knight thought he was being funny; he couldn’t understand that many found his brand of humor offensive. And because he chose not to understand, the person he hurt most was Robert Montgomery Knight. It was almost as if he wanted to testify against himself after a dozen witnesses had proved his innocence.
Because of Puerto Rico, Knight thought he would never be named Olympic coach. In 1978, when the coach for 1980 was selected, he thought he would get the job. He had coached Indiana to the national championship in 1976 and had built a program that won sixty-three of sixty-four games over two seasons. But, in a close vote that went to a second ballot, Providence coach Dave Gavitt was named. Knight was crushed by the choice because he wanted more than anything to take a U.S. team to Moscow—site of the 1980 Games—and beat the hell out of the Russians. As it turned out, Gavitt never got that chance either.
As runner-up for the Olympic job in 1978, Knight became the Pan-Am coach. That led to Puerto Rico and, in Knight’s mind, finished his chances to be Olympic coach. When the selection committee met in May 1982 there were two major candidates: Knight and John Thompson, the Georgetown coach. It took three ballots, but the committee named Knight. It was testimony to his extraordinary ability as a coach that, in spite of Puerto Rico and the aftermath, he was given another chance.
When Knight learned he had been selected he called three people: Pete Newell and Fred Taylor, his coaching mentors, and Bob Hammel, sports editor of The Bloomington Herald-Telephone—his best friend. All three men remember the emotion in his voice that evening, rare emotion from a man who doesn’t like to admit to being emotional.
“He was like a little kid,” Hammel said. “I had been at a track meet in Minneapolis, and when I called my office, they said he had called, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that he had left his home phone number with the desk. Usually, he’s very sensitive about giving strangers his number but he had just changed it and wanted to be sure I reached him. When I called, the first thing he said was, ‘You’ll never guess what just happened. They’ve named me Olympic coach.’
“I knew how disappointed he had been in ’78, and I knew he felt that the scars of San Juan would be too much to overcome. In fact, I didn’t even know that was the weekend they were picking the coach because he never mentioned it to me. He was as private about that as he’s ever been.”
Once he had the job, Knight was a man with a mission: to destroy the hated Russians, to make sure the world knew that the U.S. played basketball on one level and the rest of the world on another. He would study all the opponents, study every player available to him, select twelve players who would play the game his way, and then he wouldn’t just beat the rest of the world, he would obliterate it.
He selected three friends as his assistant coaches: C. M. Newton of Vanderbilt, Don Donoher of Dayton, and George Raveling of Iowa. He scouted, organized, and prepared on every level.
Knight was very much a general preparing to do battle. In the summer of 1983, when Donoher and Knight were in France to scout the European championships, they took a side trip that spoke volumes for Knight’s secret dreams. “I picked Bob up at the airport, “recalled Donoher,” and the first thing he told me was that we were going to Bastogne (site of the Battle of the Bulge). We had to drive all the way across France to get there, but that’s what we did. He knew roads that weren’t on the map we had. He would say, ‘There’s a road coming up here on the left that Patton took en route . . .’ and sure enough the road would be there. After we finished there, we drove back across France because he was determined to go to Normandy. We spent an entire day at Normandy. We must have examined every gun, every foxhole, every cave, every piece of barbed wire. It was like having a history book talk to you. He knew everything. Finally, near the end of the day, we were standing looking out at Omaha Beach. Bob had this faraway look in his eyes. He looked all around and then he looked at me and said, ‘Can you imagine how great it would have been to have been here in a command position on D-Day?’”
But at the last minute, fate and politics tossed a giant wrench into his plans: the Russians, getting even for Jimmy Carter’s 1980 boycott in Moscow, decided to boycott Los Angeles. Even after the April announcement, Knight kept preparing for the Russians right up until the day in July when it was no longer possible for them to come. Ed Williams, watching his friend during this period, saw him as a general who had prepared the perfect battle plan, trained his troops, raised his sword to lead the charge, and then saw the enemy waving a white flag. Playing Canada and Spain in the medal round of the Olympics was a little like sailing into Tokyo Bay after the atomic bombs had been dropped.
But Knight never let himself approach the Olympics that way. For one thing, he couldn’t afford to; if, by some chance, he slipped and his team lost to Spain or Canada or West Germany, he would never live it down. He knew how much Henry Iba, the coach of the 1972 Olympic team, had suffered after the stupefying loss to the Russians in Munich. Knight thought Iba a great coach, and looked up to him. It hurt Knight to hear people say that Iba, who had coached the U.S. to easy gold medals in 1964 and 1968, was too old to coach that team and had, because of his conservative style, cost the U.S. the gold medal. Knight was angered by the loss in Munich because he thought the U.S. had been cheated. Cheated by the Russians. To the boy from Orrville, Ohio, that was one small step short of letting the Russians invade. Knight cannot bear defeat on any level; to suffer one on the Olympic level would have destroyed him.
And so, he drove everyone connected with the Olympic team as if they would be facing a combination of the Russians, the Bill Russell—era Boston Celtics, and Lew Alcindor’s UCLA team. The Olympic Trials, held during an ugly, rainy week in Bloomington in April, were brutal. Seventy-six players practiced and played three times a day in Indiana’s dark, dingy field house, as Knight and his assistants watched from a football-coaching tower.
The players were pushed into a state of complete exhaustion; by week’s end, Knight had what he wanted. Some wondered why players like Charles Barkley and Antoine Carr weren’t selected while players like Jeff Turner and John Koncak were. The answer was simple: Knight wanted players who would take his orders without question. Barkley and Carr, though more talented than Turner and Koncak, might follow orders, but might not. There would be no maybes on Knight’s Olympic team.
It was still a team of breathtaking talent: Michael Jordan, the 6-foot-6 skywalker from North Carolina; Patrick Ewing, the intimidating 7-1 center from Georgetown; Wayman Tisdale, 6-9 and unstoppable, from Oklahoma; Sam Perkins, Jordan’s brilliant Carolina teammate; Alvin Robertson, the 6-4 defensive whiz from Arkansas; and Steve Alford, Knight’s own freshman point guard. Alford was easily the team’s best shooter and earned his spot with tough play that belied his baby-faced good looks.
Knight took his team and demanded more of it than any team he had ever coached—which is saying a lot. He pushed the players, insulted them, yelled at them. Some of them had never been spoken to this way before. None, with the exception of Alford, had ever been pushed this way before. Some of them hated him for it, and cursed the day they had ever shown up at the Olympic Trials. But that was how Knight wanted it. He wanted each of them to understand that this would happen to all of them only once in their lives, and that they had to give him absolutely everything they had. He wanted no close calls, nothing left to chance.
As it turned out, the team did everything Knight could possibly have asked. It raced through a nine-game exhibition series against players from the National Basketball Association, never beaten and rarely challenged. The preliminary round of the Olympics— five games—was a mere formality. In the quarterfinals against West Germany, they were sloppy but still won by eleven, their closest game. They annihilated Canada in the semifinals, leaving only Spain, a team they had beaten by twenty-five points in preliminary play, between them and the gold medal.
The team looked unbeatable, but there were still nerves that last Friday. The U.S. hockey team had proved in 1980 that miracles can happen; Knight wanted no miracles in this game. The tip-off was scheduled for 7 P.M. The team arrived at the Forum shortly after 5 P.M. There was a problem, though: Jordan had brought a wrong-colored uniform and several players had brought the wrong warmups.
“Jesus Christ,” Knight said to his coaches, “these guys aren’t ready to play. All they’re thinking about is going home tomorrow.”
Donoher, with police escort, was dispatched to go back to downtown Los Angeles to the Olympic Village at the University of Southern California to find Jordan’s uniform. Ater turning Jordan’s room upside down and finding nothing, he returned to the Forum, distraught. Only then did trainer Tim Garl tell him that the people at the front desk had been holding the uniform. They hadn’t recognized Donoher, and therefore hadn’t stopped him to give him the uniform.
Nerve endings were frayed. Donoher was doing a decent Knight imitation, spraying obscenities off the locker-room walls. But, uniforms and warmups aside, this team was ready to play. When Knight walked into the locker room for his final pep talk, he was ready to breathe fire. Already that day, Willie Davis, the former Green Bay Packer, had been the last of a long list of people who had spoken to the team. Davis told them that they might never do anything as important the rest of their lives as what they would do on this night.
Now Knight was ready to deliver some final words of inspiration. But when he flipped over the blackboard on which he would normally write the names of the other teams’ starters, he found a note scotch-taped to the board. It had been written by Jordan: “Coach,” it said, “after all the shit we’ve been through, there is no way we lose tonight.”
Knight looked at the twelve players and ditched his speech. “Let’s go play,” he said. Walking onto the floor, Knight folded Jordan’s note into a pocket (he still has it in his office today) and told his coaches, “This game will be over in about ten minutes.”
He was wrong. It took five. The final score was 101-68. Spain never had a chance. The general sent his troops out to annihilate and they did just that. When it was over, when he had finally reached that golden moment, Knight’s first thought wasn’t, I’ve done it, I’ve won the Olympic gold medal. It was, Where is Henry Iba? Knight had made certain the old coach was with the team every step of the way from the Olympic Trials right through each Olympic game. Now, when the players came to him to carry him off the floor on their shoulders, Knight had one more order left for them: “Coach Iba first.” And so, following their orders to the end, the players carried Henry Iba around the floor first. Then they gave Knight a ride. Then, and only then, did he smile.
It was, Bob Hammel thought as he watched, more a half smile, a look of relief more than a look of joy. They hadn’t so much won as they had not lost. But still, there was a satisfaction. He had now coached an Olympic gold medal winner, a Pan American Games gold medal winner, two NCAA champions, and an NIT champion. He had won every championship there was to win in amateur basketball. He had reached the pinnacle. He was, without question, the best college basketball coach in the world. Maybe he was the best college basketball coach ever.
The next morning, as he had said he would all along, he flew to Montana, put on his waders, and sat in the middle of a river by himself and fished. This was his reward. His release. He sat in the river, having done everything he had set out to do in life.
He was forty-three years old.
Practice began at Indiana that fall with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation in the air. A great team was anticipated. The previous season, a too-young Indiana team had gone 22–9 and had reached the Final Eight of the NCAA tournament with a victory over top-ranked North Carolina that had to rank among the great upsets in tournament history. North Carolina, led by Jordan and Perkins, had a 28–2 record, and some had already declared it one of the great teams of all time.
But Alford, just a freshman, scored twenty-seven points and Dan Dakich, the prototype slow white kid who couldn’t run or jump, kept Jordan under control. Knight completely outcoached Dean Smith, the one man considered in his class as a coach, and the Hoosiers won the game. That they lost in the next round to a Virginia team that wasn’t in the same class with North Carolina was disappointing. But it didn’t change the promise the team had shown in the North Carolina game.
And so, as the 1984-85 team gathered on October 15, there was that sense of anticipation. But trepidation was there, too, because neither the players nor the coaches knew quite how the Olympic experience would affect Knight. He had put so much energy into the summer that they were afraid it might affect his winter. Knight seemed conscious of this, too; during the early practices he was less involved than usual, often content to sit on the sidelines with Hammel, Williams, professor friends who came to practice, or whoever that day’s visitor might be. Jim Crews, the first assistant coach, knew his boss expected the coaches to take some of the burden off him.
“He made that clear to us from the first day,” Crews said. “We were an experienced staff and an experienced team. There was no reason why he had to supervise every little thing that went on. He wanted us to do more of the coaching and, really, there was no reason why we shouldn’t.”
It wasn’t quite that simple, though. To start with, Knight’s staff had worked just about as hard as he had in preparing for the Olympics. They had scouted, organized, looked at tapes, done all the drudge work. They too began the season a little fatigued. The same was true of Alford. A true gym rat, Alford had been playing pickup basketball at home two days after the gold medal game. If he had known just how hard other guards were going to play against an Olympic hero, he might have preferred to rest a little.
The first hint of trouble came early, in the opening game against Louisville. Knight had agreed to a four-year series against Louisville partly because CBS-TV wanted to do the game, and partly because Crews had convinced him Louisville would be a good pre-Big Ten warmup game. Louisville took control of the game before halftime, and Knight angrily benched three starters in the second half in favor of freshmen. They made a run, but fell back, and the game was lost.
Still, the early part of the season went well. Indiana went into Big Ten play with an 8-2 record (the other loss was at Notre Dame) and immediately annihilated Michigan—at Michigan—in the Big Ten opener, winning by an astonishing twenty-five points. Soon, their league record was 3-1, the only loss at Michigan State. Typical Knight team, everyone thought. Knight thought so, too.
But within the team there were some problems. Mike Giomi, a 6-10 junior and the team’s best rebounder, had been having academic problems. He was also getting into trouble around town, failing to pay parking tickets, failing to return library books. He was in and out of the Knight doghouse, a condition not uncommon for Indiana players, but more extreme in Giomi’s case.
The same was true of Winston Morgan. Morgan was then a fourth-year junior, having sat out the 1983-84 season because of a foot injury. Knight moaned all year about how good the team could be if it just had Morgan. But once Morgan was healthy, he became far less wonderful. In fact, he got worse and worse. This was also not uncommon at Indiana; players often joke that the best way to get better is to get hurt. The more Knight sees his players play, the more convinced he becomes that they aren’t any good. But Morgan was also having problems away from the court. He was involved in a messy relationship with a female student, messy enough that she eventually went to talk to Knight about what she saw as Morgan’s dishonesty. There are only three crimes an Indiana player can commit that will get him in serious trouble with Knight: drug use, skipping class, and lying. The incident put Morgan so deep in Knight’s doghouse that his Indiana career seemed over.
Marty Simmons, a promising freshman in 1984, had been a step slower all season, mystifying the coaches. He looked heavier to them, but his weight chart said he still weighed 218, about the same weight he had played at the year before. Finally, exasperated after a loss, Knight had Tim Garl personally weigh Simmons. He weighed 238. Scared to admit that he had eaten himself onto the bench, Simmons had been lying about his weight. His days, not to mention his meals, were numbered.
There was more: Knight wasn’t happy with Alford. He kept harping on the fact that Alford couldn’t play defense, couldn’t pass very well, and wasn’t getting better. Alford was in fact struggling. He was still leading the team in scoring, but some nights he simply couldn’t get shots because defenses were geared to stop him. Dakich, the hero of the North Carolina game, was in and out of the lineup. Uwe Blab, the 7-3 senior center, had worked and worked to improve, but was still awkward, still had trouble catching the ball in traffic, and still left Knight exasperated.
And yet, they were winning. Even though Knight claims that winning doesn’t necessarily make him happy, it goes a long way toward getting him there. His famous quote, “You play basketball against yourself; your opponent is your potential,” sounds pretty, but really isn’t so. Knight coaches basketball to win. If he gets upset during a victory, it is usually when he sees something that he thinks may lead to defeat on another night.
But after the 11-3 start, the winning stopped. They went to Ohio State, Knight’s alma mater, a place where Knight cannot stand to lose, and lost; the final score was 86-84. Furious, Knight refused to let Giomi and Morgan ride home with the team, putting them on the second of the two small charter planes Indiana uses to fly to games. Morgan’s memory of that night is of a horrible game, a screaming coach, and a nightmarish ride home on the eight-seat plane, the weather bouncing them all over the sky.
It got worse at Purdue. They blew a big lead because no one rebounded. This was unforgivable; rebounding, to Knight, is directly related to effort. If you lose because you make no effort, you are in big trouble. Indiana came out of Purdue in big trouble.
Then came Illinois. A Sunday afternoon on national TV. An opponent Knight despised because he didn’t think Coach Lou Henson ran a clean program. When the coaches met to pick a lineup, Knight asked—as he always does—for suggestions. But his mind was made up: bench everyone but Blab and start four freshmen. Bench Alford, too, because, “He doesn’t guard anybody.”
The four freshmen played as hard as they could. They played good defense, but they had little chance to win, losing 52-41. The day after the game, Knight announced that he had thrown Giomi off the team for cutting class. Giomi had met NCAA academic requirements and he had met Indiana’s requirements, but he had not met Knight’s requirements. The team’s leading rebounder, a player the team needed to be successful, was gone.
Suddenly, Knight was being excoriated nationwide. Some people claimed he had started the freshmen to show up Henson. Others implied he had thrown the game to make a point to his team. For perhaps the first time since Knight had become Indiana coach in 1971, his coaching was called into question. Indiana was 3-4 in the Big Ten. Alford, the Olympic hero, had been benched. Had Knight lost control? Was it really just six months ago that he sat atop the coaching world?
Another loss to Iowa—with the starters back starting—was followed by three victories over the bottom of the Big Ten: Minnesota, Northwestern, and Wisconsin. That brought Indiana to a three-game home stretch that would decide the fate of the season. Indiana was 6-5 in the Big Ten and 14-7 overall, with Ohio State, Illinois, and Purdue coming to Assembly Hall. There was still plenty of time to bounce back from the problems of January.
They didn’t. They lost to Ohio State. They lost to Illinois—badly—and Knight put his foot through a chair in frustration. And then Purdue came to town.
Purdue is Indiana’s archrival, the in-state school the Hoosiers love to look down their noses at. Purdue almost always beats Indiana in football, so basketball is Indiana’s only chance to get even. But Purdue is always competitive, always a problem. Even Knight, with all his great teams, has never dominated Purdue; his record going into that day’s game against Purdue was 16-12. With the season fading fast, a victory at home over Purdue was imperative.
Saturday, February 23, was an unseasonably warm day in Bloomington after a typical winter week full of cold rain and snow flurries. Knight, who had made plaid sport coats famous, decided to wear just a short-sleeved shirt for the game that afternoon. It reminded him of outfits he had worn during the glory days of the previous summer when he had been Olympic coach.
The game started horribly for Indiana. Purdue was up, 12-2, when there was a scramble for a loose ball. When the whistle finally blew, referee London Bradley called a foul on Indiana. Knight, who often uses bad officiating to rationalize defeat—and, in all fairness, the officiating in the Big Ten is awful—went crazy. He screamed and yelled and drew a technical foul.
Purdue guard Steve Reid walked to the foul line in front of the Indiana bench to shoot the technical. Knight stood frozen for a few seconds. Later, he would remember thinking that if he had been wearing a sport coat, he could have thrown it. But he wasn’t. So, he turned around and, before anyone on the Indiana bench could stop him, he picked up the plastic orange chair he had been sitting on and threw it.
The chair throw was hardly Olympian. In fact, Knight side-armed it, grabbing it with both hands but never raising it above waist level. The chair skittered in front of Reid and ran out of steam just as it reached the far side of the court. It hit no one. One Indiana manager went to recover it while another put a second chair down in the original’s place. On the Indiana bench, there was no visible reaction. Everyone just watched, waiting to see what would happen next.
Knight insists he threw the chair the way he did intentionally, carefully tossing it and aiming it so it would land where it did. But he had thrown a chair. Thrown a chair. More than 17,000 people in Assembly Hall saw it, as did millions of others watching on cable TV nationwide. Standing in front of her television set in Orrville, eighty-one-year-old Hazel Knight saw her son throw the chair and cried out, “Oh, Bobby, oh no.”
Others who care about Knight had the same thought. Hammel, shocked, thought later that the worst thing about it was the symbolic nature of the whole thing: wild man coach throws chair. Always, forever more, Knight and that chair would be linked. “The worst thing about it,” Hammel said a year later, “was that he didn’t do just what he constantly begs his players to do: anticipate. He never anticipated the consequences. Bob Knight is too smart not to anticipate the consequences of something like that.”
The initial consequence was immediate ejection from the game. Knight walked off to the privacy of the coaches’ locker room. He came to see his players at halftime and calmly told them what they needed to do to win the game, not even mentioning the incident. To his players, the chair throw was not that big a deal, because they had seen him throw so many chairs in practice. The unofficial record was thirteen: Knight had lit into a stack of twenty chairs one day, and his players were disappointed when he ran out of steam with seven unthrown.
But everywhere else, shock waves were forming. As soon as Knight left the game—Purdue went on to win easily—Indiana athletic director Ralph Floyd, a close friend of Knight’s, went to the locker room. “He was in tears,” Floyd would say later. “He knew he had made a mistake. He understood what he had done.”
Close behind Floyd came Ed Williams and Indiana president John Ryan. When Ryan walked into the locker room, Knight looked at him, tears in his eyes, and said, “Dr. Ryan, I’m sorry.”
“If his response had been anything else, I’m not certain what I would have done ultimately,” Ryan said. “But he understood right away that he had made a terrible mistake.”
That night, Knight, looking to escape, went to Kansas on a recruiting trip. But the nightmare of the chair was only beginning. Donoher called. He wanted to drive the 175 miles to Bloomington to talk to Knight. He felt his friend needed help. “When you are in trouble, Bob Knight is the ultimate friend,” Donoher said. “He’ll do anything he can to help you. But a lot of the time when he’s in trouble, he’ll have you believe he doesn’t need help from his friends. Only he does. He’s like anyone else that way.”
Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps called that night. He wanted Knight to meet him the next day in Indianapolis to talk. When Phelps had heard what Knight had done his stomach had twisted in fear. “I worry that he’s going to go out like MacArthur did,” Phelps said later. “One day the President is going to say, ‘General, enough. Come home. You are relieved of your command.’”
Ryan, the president, is a small, soft-spoken man whom the players have trouble figuring out because whenever he comes into the locker room after a game, win or lose, he simply walks around shaking hands and saying, “Thank you.” Ryan has been president of I.U. for the same fifteen years that Knight has been basketball coach. It is a long-standing joke around the state that Ryan considers himself very fortunate that Knight has allowed him to retain his job for so long.
Now, Ryan had to act. Ed Williams went to see Knight after he returned from Kansas. Williams loves Bob Knight, respects him, and worries about him. “I couldn’t feel closer to him if he were my first-born son,” he says. Williams thought it important that Indiana—and Knight—act decisively. He suggested to Knight that Ryan should suspend him for one game, saying that Indiana fully supported Knight and everything he stood for as a basketball coach but that everyone, including Ryan and Knight, recognized that a mistake had been made. The chair should not have been thrown.
“I told Bob I thought we should keep this in the family,” Williams said. “Why let [Big Ten Commissioner] Wayne Duke get involved? If John Ryan didn’t suspend him, Wayne Duke would. So why not let Indiana do it? At the time, I thought Bob would go along. He said that sounded right to him.”
But a day later, Knight changed his mind. He told Williams that he could not deal with a public rebuke, no matter how mild, from Ryan. If Ryan suspended him he would feel compelled to resign on the spot. Williams took this information back to Ryan, advising him to go ahead with the suspension. “For Bob’s sake and for Indiana’s,” Williams said a year later. “I thought then, I think now, that the University had to take some action. It could not publicly condone what Bob did. And Bob needed to be told that. He needed to be told, ‘Bob, we love you, we want you here forever, but there is a line, there is a point where we say no more. And you just came close to it.’”
John Ryan took no action. Instead, he let Duke play the heavy, suspending Knight for one game. Williams, although saying he disagrees with what the president did, disagrees with those who saw it as a sign of weakness. “The easy thing was to suspend him. John Ryan did not take the easy way out. He did what he believed was best for Bob and for the school.”
“I don’t think we condoned what Bob did in any way,” Ryan said. “It was wrong. He knew it, I knew it, we all knew it. I believed though that given that it was one incident, the Big Ten should mete out the penalty. I didn’t tell Bob at the time, but I would not have appealed any penalty Wayne Duke handed down. I would have accepted it. A reprimand, a penalty was in order. My one concern was that if Bob was suspended it be for a road game. I was afraid that we might have a crowd control problem if he was not present for our next home game.”
Knight sat out a 70-50 loss to Iowa, as Crews ran the team. The other assistants, looking for any kind of light touch, kidded him afterward that, judging from that performance, he would never get a job as a head coach. But there were few laughs around Assembly Hall that February. “It was,” Alford says now, “as if a black cloud settled on top of the building and just stayed and stayed and stayed.”
Everyone dreaded coming to practice. Each day seemed worse than the last. The season, it seemed, would never end. Two weeks after the chair throw, Dave Knight, the man who had introduced Knight to basketball when he was eleven years old, was visiting. The two are not related, but Dave Knight is one of many older-brother figures in the coach’s life. As he sat in the coaches’ locker room before practice one day, Dave Knight pitched forward, stricken by a heart attack. The players were on the floor warming up when assistant coach Kohn Smith came running out screaming for Garl. “Quick, it’s an emergency, run,” he yelled.
Every player on the floor had the exact same thought: It’s Coach. He’s had a heart attack. Knight was white-faced with fear when Garl and student trainer Steve Dayton charged in to attend to Dave Knight. They brought him back, saving his life. But they, too, when the call first came, had been convinced that the traumas of the season had finally done the coach in.
The debacle dragged on. Indiana finished the regular season with a 15-13 record, 7-11 in the Big Ten, putting the Hoosiers seventh in their own league after being rated fourth in the nation in preseason. It was the first time in Knight’s fourteen seasons that Indiana had finished below .500 in Big Ten play or out of the first division. Indiana was passed over for the NCAA tournament, and settled for the National Invitation Tournament.
The Hoosiers reached the semifinals in New York, where they beat a struggling Tennessee team. After that game, Knight did a TV interview with Bill Raftery, a former coach at Seton Hall. Raftery asked Knight what he liked best about the way his team had played to reach the NIT final. “What I like best about this team right now,” Knight answered sincerely, “is the fact that I only have to watch it play one more time.”
The feeling was mutual. If the coach couldn’t wait for the season to be over, neither could the players. The final was a microcosm of the season: mistakes, bad defense, a loss. UCLA, the kind of undisciplined team Knight thinks his team should never lose to, won the game and the championship, 65-63. The last chance to salvage something from a lost season had produced another loss.
The plane trip home lasted forever. The twenty-seat Indiana University foundation plane bounced all over the sky. Alford was so stir-crazy he wanted to jump out a window. Dakich still swears the flight took twelve hours. Finally they landed, and the team bus took them to Assembly Hall. It was 4 A. M. when they gathered in their meeting room for final words from Knight. This was part of the tradition. The team gathered here after every trip for a summation—in this case, for a summation of the season. Knight had little to say. He excused Dakich and Blab, the seniors, and told the remaining players he could not—and would not—go through another season like the one just ended. The players felt the same way.
When the team had been dismissed, Knight asked Morgan to stay behind. Morgan had played a total of fifty-eight seconds in the last eleven games. He had one more year of eligibility, but Knight didn’t want him back. Knight was convinced that his attitude toward basketball and college was messed up. Shortly after 4 A.M., Knight told Morgan he didn’t want him back the next season, and that he would try to help him get into school somewhere else. Morgan nodded; this was hardly a shock.
When Knight finished, Morgan turned to go. Jim Crews was slumped in a chair by the door. He had just coached his last game at Indiana because—in spite of the Iowa game—he was about to be named head coach at Evansville. Morgan stopped in front of Crews. “Coach,” he said softly, “I want to thank you for working with me and wish you luck at Evansville. I know you’ll do great.”
Watching that scene, Knight changed his mind about Morgan on the spot. “This kid,” he thought, “is worth trying to save. I tell him at 4 in the morning that he’s through and he stops to wish Jimmy luck. He really isn’t a bad kid.”
It would be two months before Morgan would learn of his reprieve. At that moment, he walked out the door, not knowing his future. A few moments later, the coach who had owned the basketball world nine months earlier also walked out the door. His future was just as uncertain as Winston Morgan’s.