October 15
In college basketball, no date means more than October 15. On that day, basketball teams all around the country begin formal preparations for the upcoming season. The players have probably played against each other every afternoon from the day school opened, but October 15 is the real thing. The coaches no longer sit high in the stands to observe—though even doing that is a violation of a universally ignored NCAA rule—but are down on the floor, teaching, coaching, and yelling.
October 15 fell on a Tuesday, and it also fell right in the middle of a week when Indiana was staging a major fundraising event in Assembly Hall. That meant that the first four days of practice would take place away from Assembly Hall, in the Indiana Middle School Building. The players dressed in the Assembly Hall locker room, then drove to practice.
When they arrived, they were greeted by a total of eight coaches: Knight, Kohn Smith, Royce Waltman, and Joby Wright were the holdovers from the previous season. Crews was gone to Evansville, replaced by Ron Felling. There were also three graduate assistants: Dan Dakich; Murry Bartow, son of Knight’s close friend Gene Bartow, the coach at Alabama-Birmingham; and Julio Salazar, a Colombian who had worked Knight’s summer camp for several years after meeting him in San Juan during the Pan-American Games.
The status of the graduate assistants was quite different from that of the four full-time coaches. They didn’t dress in the comfortable coaches’ locker room, but in a tiny office a few feet down the hall from the players’ locker room. They didn’t look at tape with the other coaches; their job was to gather the tape and help prepare it to be used. They only occasionally went on the road with the team. They were coaches training to be coaches, paying their dues by doing scut work for the older coaches. One of Dakich’s assignments each morning during the fall semester was to pick up Andre Harris, who lived off campus, to make sure he got to his first class or to a study hall.
Felling turned out to be a delight for the players. He was forty-five, a curly-haired ex-high school coach who loved to talk about two things: basketball and women. Felling had won four state championships in Illinois at tiny Lawrenceville High School, but had retired in 1983. He had coached, among others, Marty Simmons, who had come to Indiana as a future star only to move on to Evansville with Crews after his weight problems the previous season. Over the years, Felling and Knight had become friends through clinics and camps, and when Crews got the Evansville job, Knight called Felling at 2 A.M.
Sound asleep, Felling picked up the phone and heard a voice say, “Well, are you gonna come work for me or not?” It was Knight, and that was the job offer. Felling took it.
Knight had been serious about Alford; he began the first practice in a white uniform. At Indiana, the starting team wears red uniforms in practice, and the subs wear white. During the course of the season, every player will spend some time in red and some time in white; there are days when the entire starting five finds itself in white.
But putting Alford in white was a clear signal from coach to player. The talk on the airplane coming home from Europe wasn’t just talk. Knight was going to make the preseason difficult for Alford. Everyone on the team understood what was going on; they also understood that if anyone on the team was tough enough to handle the situation, it was Alford.
Alford, with his baby face and short-cropped, always neat brown hair, doesn’t look very tough, but he is. He takes a physical pounding in every game he plays because he is small and his great shooting ability makes him the target of a lot of tough defense. Beyond that, though, Alford had earned the respect of his teammates because he didn’t let Knight get to him. Every time Knight told Alford how bad he was, Alford just shrugged and played a little better. Which was exactly what Knight wanted.
“When I first came here, with his reputation and everything he had won, I figured Steve would be spoiled and not too tough at all,” said Daryl Thomas. “But he proved himself to me. In fact, I think he proved himself to everybody.”
Ironically, Thomas was the one whose toughness Knight questioned. Like Alford, Thomas was exceptionally bright, but he wasn’t nearly as driven as Alford. He liked basketball, but wasn’t obsessed with it. He wanted to be good, but he didn’t live to be good. Where Alford would just set his jaw and think, “You’re crazy,” when Knight told him how bad he was, Thomas tended to believe it.
Even before the late November blowup when Knight brought Thomas to tears, he had called Thomas every name there was. Knight knew this wasn’t always good strategy with Thomas. “The problem with calling Daryl Thomas a pussy,” he said one night, “is that he believes you.”
Much had been made over the years of Knight’s use of profanity with the players. It is no exaggeration. Knight uses profanity when he is angry, when he is happy, and whenever he feels like it. He once taped an outtake for a TV show explaining why he used the word fuck so much. “I just think,” he said, “that fuck is the most expressive word in the English language. It can be used to express surprise as in, ‘Well I’ll be fucked!’ Or, it can be used to express anger, as in ‘Fuck you!’ Or, it can express dismay as in, ‘Oh, fuck!’”
Knight used it to express all these things and more. Some of his friends had talked to him over the years about trying to curb that language, and he had gone through periods of trying to do so. But when things went bad in practice, Knight would backslide, occasionally reeling off seven or eight of them in one sentence. Once, in a fit of temper, Knight decided he wanted the floor cleared of everyone except his players and coaches. This was a typical Indiana practice: several professors, Knight hunting cronies, and other assorted friends were present. So was Ed Williams.
“I want all these cocksuckers out of here right now,” Knight yelled.
When a manager politely asked Williams if he would please leave, the I.U. vice president shook his head. “You heard what he said,” Williams told the manager indignantly. “For his sake, I hope he wasn’t referring to me.” When the manager told Knight what Williams had said, Knight broke up.
But even Thomas would admit that Knight’s number one target during the first days of practice was Alford. The little kid, as Bob Hammel affectionately called him, could do little right. He was shooting superbly and consistently, but Knight wanted more. He wanted defense. He wanted better vision on offense. He wanted better passes. He wanted him to take a charge. And take charge.
Twice, during the first ten days, Knight threw Alford out of practice. Throwing a player out of practice, especially in preseason, is not uncommon. Sometimes Knight will throw the whole team out of practice. But there was a lot of tension between Knight and Alford. The second kickout came early in practice when Knight didn’t think Alford had fought through a screen properly. Alford thought he had, but before he could say a word he was banished.
When an Indiana player is thrown out of practice he is supposed to go to the locker room and wait. He may be called back, or Knight may come in to add some comments to what he has already said, or he may just sit there until the rest of the team arrives. This time, though, Alford didn’t wait. He was frustrated. He got dressed and went home. Shortly after he left, Knight sent a manager in to get him. The manager reported back that there was no sign of Alford, only his practice clothes piled in a heap in front of his locker.
“Call him and get him back here,” Knight ordered. Alford was called and came back. More angry words. Alford listened and didn’t answer, but he was furious. Finally, Knight told him, “You can just get out and don’t bother coming back until I call you. I don’t want to see you.”
This is another Knight test. The proper response is to show up at practice the next day as if nothing has happened. In this case, though, Knight was taking a risk. Alford had spent ten days in white. He had been thrown out twice and then called back to receive more abuse. Maybe, just maybe, he would call Knight’s bluff and not come back.
“It may run through your mind,” Alford said later. “But, hey, my dad still leads Coach 7-5 in kicking me out. I understand what they’re both doing when they do it. I don’t always like it, I don’t always think it’s fair. But I understand. I have to be an example.”
And so the next day Alford came back. He was sitting on a training table having his ankles taped before practice when Knight walked in. “Did I have a dream that I called you and told you to come back?” Knight said. Alford didn’t answer. Knight walked out. Practice started. About fifteen minutes into the workout, Knight said quietly, “Steve, put on a red shirt.”
Alford was a starter again. He had passed his first test of the season.
There was, during those early days of practice, an unspoken tension that was felt by everyone. Every player, every coach knew that another season like ’85 would be unbearable. Yet this was a team full of question marks. On some days, even at only 6-7, Thomas looked unstoppable playing the low post; on others, he looked helpless. Some days, Harris was a wonder to watch; on others, he was a disaster. Both would have to play well against bigger players for Indiana to be successful. Calloway was also up and down. The two seniors who would be doing a lot of playing, Morgan and Robinson, were working as hard as could be asked, but both had their bad days, too.
The only real thread of consistency was Alford, who just showed up every day regardless of shirt color and knocked in jump shots from all over the floor. With each passing day, Knight had less and less to say to Alford. He even began complimenting him in his speeches to the public.
Preseason often seemed to Knight like one long speech. He spoke to alumni groups, charity groups, and whenever friends asked him to. He spoke all over the state, more often than not for nothing. Every night it seemed there was another speech. Vincennes one night, Petersburg the next. Indianapolis at lunch, the rotary club in Bloomington at dinner. Chicago to talk to five hundred alumni on Wednesday, a local restaurant to talk to forty business associates of a friend on Thursday.
Knight is an exceptional speaker. More often than not, he talks without notes. He talks about the Olympics and about Indiana basketball. He even developed a routine to explain why he threw the chair.
“A lot of people have asked me about throwing that chair,” he would begin, “and I’ve had to explain myself because my mother asked me about it. Well, if you want the truth, here’s what happened. See, I had been up a lot during our last game against Illinois two nights before trying like I always do to give the officials whatever help I could. [Laughter.] Well, now we’re playing Purdue, and I’m up, and I keep hearing this voice. Usually in Assembly Hall I don’t really listen to all the people trying to give me advice, but this one voice kept piercing right through the crowd noise: ‘Bob, Bob.’ So, finally I looked over there and I see this little old woman, in fact, she reminded me a little bit of my mother.
“She said, ’Bob, Bob.’ So I looked at her and I said, ’Ma’am, can I help you?’ And she said, ’Now Bob, if you aren’t going to sit on your chair the way you didn’t sit on it the other night, these bleachers over here are very hard and I’d really like to use that chair.’ Now, how can anyone get on me just because I threw that chair over there so she could sit on it? [Gales of laughter.] In fact, when I told my mother the story, she apologized for getting on me in the first place.” (Applause; Knight owns the audience.)
Most places, Knight owns his audience. To start with, his very presence at most functions in Indiana is like a visit from above. Driving into a small town to give a speech, Knight is apt to encounter a dozen signs on the local main street reading, “Welcome Coach Knight.” He enjoys himself during these speeches, even on nights when he is exhausted. One night he drove three hours through a driving rain to give a speech because he had promised an older friend he would be there. No one would have complained if he had canceled because of the weather.
Knight’s speeches are funny, but also rousing. He usually finishes with some patriotic theme. “America, America, God shed his grace on thee,” he said one night. “I can’t think of eight words that mean more to me than those. You know, we have a lot of born-agains nowadays; people are born-again this and born-again that. Some of them mean it and a lot of them are phonies. But one thing I hope we’ll never have is a born-again American. This country is the greatest place on earth, and even though we have some problems it just keeps getting better and better for all of us. Let’s remember that.” Usually, that brings the house down.
But Knight can also rip people in his speeches. The first time he ever addressed an Indiana alumni group he told the audience, “You know, I wish all alumni would be canonized. That way we coaches would only have to kiss your rings.”
Last fall, during his annual speech to alumni in Chicago, someone asked Knight about Big Ten commissioner Wayne Duke, a longtime antagonist. “You know, if any of you someday are on the street and you see that Wayne Duke is about to get run over by a car, I would encourage you, I think, to try to save him. But not if it’s in any way inconvenient for you to do so.” Knight was delighted with himself for that shot. Duke was furious.
Mostly, though, Knight delights during his speeches. He is charming, signs every autograph, and has a kind word for almost everyone. He is especially good with kids. “Coach Knight,” a little boy asked one night, “can I play for you at Indiana some day?”
“How old are you, son?”
“Eleven.”
“Well, I’ll do my best to last that long, but I can’t make any promises.”
Knight also gives an annual speech to the Indiana student body in October. Always, the auditorium is packed, with kids hanging on the rafters. Knight will talk for as long as the students want him to, opening the floor for questions when he is finished with his talk.
Student: “Coach, do you think it’s fair to make athletes submit to drug testing?”
Knight: “If I were in charge, I’d drug test all you sons-of-bitches, not just the athletes.”
Female student: “Coach, what do I have to do to become a basketball team manager?”
Knight: “Change your gender.”
Knight’s comments invariably draw some hoots and boos and offend some people. But for the most part, the students enjoy him. Much of that is because there is absolutely no bullshit in Knight’s approach. He doesn’t patronize them, speak down to them, or try to win them to his side. He just shows up and answers their questions. If some of them don’t like the answers, that’s life.
Knight went a step further with the students in the fall of ’85, opening practice to them twice. A big crowd showed up each time, and when practice was over the first time, one student stood up as the players were leaving the floor and said, “Thanks, coach.” “You’re welcome,” Knight answered, surprised at how much he had enjoyed the spectators. “Maybe we’ll do it again.” Sure enough, they did.
The first few weeks of practice were extremely hectic for Knight. He thought the six weeks before the opening game on November 30 against Kent State were crucial for this team because of the new players and the new roles many of the old players were being asked to fill. Each practice was crucial, and bad execution was agonizing for him.
But there was more. There was the speechmaking. And especially, there was the new emphasis on recruiting.
More than any other area, Knight had been forced to reevaluate his recruiting following 1985. The conclusion he reached was simple: he had done a poor job. Perhaps the assistants were to blame somewhat for not being more critical in their evaluations, but ultimately, recruiting is the head coach’s job. He must decide who he wants and then decide what must be done to get them. If he chooses the wrong players or can’t get the players he chooses, then something is wrong.
For Indiana, it was primarily a matter of choosing the wrong players. Because Indiana was Indiana and because Knight was Knight, the school was going to have an excellent chance of recruiting most of the players it went after, especially in the Midwest. A few players wouldn’t want to play for Knight, and Knight wouldn’t want some good players playing for him. But there would be a bevy of good players that Indiana could get.
Knight’s recruiting approach, in six years as coach at West Point and fifteen at Indiana, has varied little. If he wants a player he tells him why; he tells him what his role can be if he comes to Indiana, and that if he does come to Indiana, it will be “the hardest place in the country to play.” Very straightforward. You will go to class or you will not play. You will get yelled at. You will graduate. And you will become a better basketball player. It is, like the man himself, a black-and-white approach. If you like it, you’ll sign right away. If you don’t, you run right away.
Knight’s lapse in recruiting in recent years had hurt the program. But now he was starting over. Crews, the number one recruiter for several years, was gone. In his place was Joby Wright. The new number two recruiter was Kohn Smith. Wright and Smith are about as different as two people can be. Wright, who was thirty-six, is black and from Mississippi, a huge man whose laugh could fill an entire room. He had been intensely recruited out of high school and had chosen Indiana from among the many bidders for his playing services. And that is what they had been: bidders. In Wright’s senior year, Knight became the Indiana coach. Everything changed. Suddenly, he was being ordered to go to class. Knight counseled him to work toward the degree he had virtually ignored for three years. After Wright had played pro ball for several years, he returned to Indiana at Knight’s behest and earned both his undergraduate and master’s degrees. In 1981, he became a graduate assistant coach, and in 1982, a full-time coach. He was now the senior assistant coach on the staff.
The players liked Wright because he spoke their language. He made them feel comfortable; it was his way of saying, “We’re all the same.” The players loved to tell the story about the night before a game in 1983 when Wright had decided to impart a few final words of wisdom. “Now don’t be out chasin’ no bitches tonight,” Wright had said. “I guarantee you Coach ain’t out chasin’ no bitches. So why should you?” From that day forth, Indiana players constantly cautioned one another not to be out chasin’ no bitches the night before a game. Once when Knight was trying to tell the players that they had better get to bed at a decent hour (Knight has never had a specific curfew), he told them, “If you boys think there’s a trick you can try that I didn’t pull, you’re wrong. And if there is one, I guarantee you, Joby’s tried it.”
Kohn Smith could no more talk to the players in street language than he could talk to them in Swahili. He had arrived at Indiana the summer after the second national championship in 1981. He was thirty-three, a Mormon, married, with three children and a fourth one due. He had been raised in Utah and had become a successful high school coach in Idaho. He met Knight at a coaching clinic, and the two became summertime hunting and fishing partners. One reason Knight enjoyed Smith’s company was that Smith was better than he was at both hunting and fishing. Knight always enjoyed competing with people who were tough to beat, regardless of the sport or setting. Smith was delighted when Knight offered him not just a college coaching job but a job at Indiana, the defending national champion. Smith’s role with the players was that of a soother; when Knight blistered the paint off the locker room walls with his harsh words, he would often send Smith back to check the damage.
Most mornings when the coaches gathered to talk about the day’s practice plan, Knight would begin by saying, “Joby, did we recruit anybody today?” And Wright would shake his head and answer, “Well, Coach, we’re hangin’ in there.”
These meetings took place in the coaches’ locker room. The players’ locker room sits on one side of Assembly Hall and that of the coaches on the other. This gives both players and coaches an oft-needed feeling of separation. The coaches’ locker room was known to one and all as “the cave,” partly because it was on the basement floor of the building, but more because of the long hours the coaches put in there.
The room was comfortable, but it often felt like a prison. This was where the coaching staff did most of its work. After games they would sit in the cave for hours going through the tape of the game. Knight would sit in his chair working the remote control while all the coaches sat around him. Everyone had pen and pad out to take notes. After a bad game, it might take hours to get through the tape because Knight would run back the poor plays so many times. Garl would go out and bring back huge quantities of food. No one ever went hungry at Indiana—sleepless, yes; hungry, no. There were times when the secretaries arrived the morning after a loss to find the coaches still in the cave, having not gone home yet. Wright, Smith, and Waltman were veterans of the long postgame sessions and were accustomed to them. Felling had some trouble adjusting; he occasionally nodded off to sleep while sitting on the couch as the tape ran on and on.
Wright and Smith were encouraged by Knight’s attitude toward their recruiting reports. He was interested, even eager, and when Wright would suggest that Knight go to see a player practice, he was delighted when Knight willingly went. Early in December, Knight even flew up to Elkhart to watch a 6-10 high school sophomore named Sean Kemp practice. A sophomore; this was a breakthrough.
Knight needed to see players—lots of them, and often. If he didn’t, emotional as he was in his evaluations of the players already at Indiana, he might see a kid once and decide he was better than anyone he had, simply because on that night anyone would seem better than the players he had. Indiana’s recruiting thus far in the 1980s might best be summed up by the sad case of Delray Brooks.
Anyone who ever met Delray Brooks would put him on the list of the five nicest people they had ever known. He was generous, sweet-tempered, patient, funny, and everything you would want in a friend. He was, almost without question, the best-liked player on the Indiana team. He was as comfortable with the white players as he was with the other blacks; even on a team like Indiana’s, where racial problems seemed almost nonexistent, this was unusual.
If Brooks had been just another guard trying to make it in college when he came to Indiana, he might have had a happy four years there. But Brooks was one of those high school kids built into a phenomenon by the time he was sixteen years old. He was almost 6-4 with long arms. He was mature beyond his years, and his size allowed him to dominate high school guards while playing at Rogers High School in Michigan City, Indiana.
By his junior year, everyone in the country was recruiting Brooks. When he visited Notre Dame to see the Irish play Indiana that year, Knight grabbed him before the game and told him, “Delray, we need you at Indiana. I expect to see you there.” Brooks was thrilled. Bob Knight needed him.
That summer, Brooks was the big name at the Five-Star Basketball Camp—the basketball camp at the time—winning most of the awards. Knight had seen him play only once, during his junior year, a game in which Brooks played little because of foul trouble. And so, when the early signing date for high school seniors rolled around that November, Brooks chose Indiana. Knight was thrilled at the thought of Brooks and Alford in the same backcourt. It looked like a dream backcourt. Because of Brooks, he didn’t even try to recruit Gary Grant, who went on to Michigan, or Troy Lewis, who landed at Purdue. Both would have been very interested in Indiana. Both turned out to be better players than Brooks.
Throughout the 1983-84 season, whenever Alford screwed up in practice Knight would tell him, “When Delray Brooks gets here next year, you’ll never play. Your ass will be so far down the bench, no one will ever hear from you again.”
These pronouncements hardly shook Alford. Knight’s telling players that they would never play again was hardly unusual. His most famous pronouncement along those lines came in 1981 after a loss at Purdue. On the bus trip home, Knight walked back to where Isiah Thomas was sitting. “Isiah,” Knight roared, “Next year we’re bringing in Dan Dakich. He can do so many things on a basketball court that you can’t do, it isn’t even funny.”
Comparing Dakich to Isiah Thomas was a little bit like comparing a horse and buggy to a jet. Older players constantly kidded Dakich about all the things he could do that Thomas couldn’t: not jump, not run. . ..
When Brooks did arrive, his teammates were shocked. Not only had he been considered one of the three best high school players in the country the previous spring, he had been one of two high school players Knight had invited to the Olympic Trials. “I knew I was over my head pretty quickly,” Brooks remembered. “First, they had me guard Johnny Dawkins. He made one move and was gone. Then, they had me guard Alvin Robertson. Same thing. I thought, ‘Oh boy, Delray, you have a problem here.’”
Not being able to guard Dawkins or Robertson hardly made Brooks unusual. What shocked Brooks’s new teammates was that he had trouble guarding them. “I had heard so much about him I didn’t think I’d even be able to play with him,” said Steve Eyl, who was in the same recruiting class. “When we played pickup ball, though, it was like no big deal to guard him. I couldn’t understand it.”
Neither could Knight. He had expected a taller version of Isiah Thomas, or at least someone who played like 1983 graduate Jim Thomas. He got neither. Brooks was not a good shooter—he had scored most of his high school points by getting inside against smaller players—was not a great jumper and had trouble playing man-to-man defense. He was cursed by his feet, which were big and slow. Brooks’s body—long arms, bad feet—was built to play zone defense. Indiana played only man-to-man, and Brooks, though he tried mightily, simply got lost trying to make the cuts and switches necessary in man-to-man.
If Knight had seen Brooks play eight or ten times, he would have known these things about him before signing him. Instead, as they became more apparent with each passing practice, Knight became more and more depressed. He wanted desperately for Brooks to succeed at Indiana because he liked him so much. But as Brooks’s sophomore season began this fall, Knight was convinced with each passing day that he would never find happiness playing at Indiana.
Brooks was the kind of person Knight looked for, but not the kind of player. To be successful at Indiana, you had to be both. That was why, even now, Knight still shied away from some players who were clearly good. A good example of this was Tion McCoy. Quick and spidery, McCoy was a 6-2 guard from Hammond. He played for Jack Gaber, one of Knight’s former managers.
Knight and his assistants had visited McCoy’s home early in the fall. The family had seemed interested, even eager, but after the visit, Knight heard secondhand that McCoy and his family were telling people that Gaber was trying to con McCoy into going to Indiana. Oklahoma or Maryland, they said, might be a better place for him. This kind of talk turned Knight off; he didn’t like Billy Tubbs, the Oklahoma coach, as a person, and he couldn’t imagine a good player choosing to play for Lefty Driesell at Maryland over him even though he did like Driesell personally.
When McCoy showed up at the first Sunday afternoon scrimmage of the season in late October, Knight told him exactly what he thought of him. “Why don’t you go play at Oklahoma?” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The last time we played them they had Wayman Tisdale and a lot more talent than us, and we beat them by fifteen. Or Maryland would be great. The last time we played them they had Buck Williams and Albert King and we only beat them by thirty-five. You want to be a good player, Tion? Those are the places for you.”
McCoy was apparently undaunted by this talk. A week later, Gaber called and said McCoy would like to come down for an official visit that weekend. Knight agreed, but told Gaber, “I have some problems with the way he’s handled being recruited. I can’t see us offering him a scholarship now. Maybe in the spring, but not now. Tell him that, and if he still wants to come down, that’ll be fine.”
McCoy still wanted to come. This intrigued Knight; if the kid was looking for the easy way out, it had been offered to him. Yet he still wanted to visit. That Sunday, during the scrimmage, Knight sat at the scorer’s table with his arm around McCoy and talked to him about what he would expect of him if he came to Indiana; what he would have to work on. McCoy said he wanted to come. “Well, Tion, if you still want to come in the spring, we can talk,” Knight said. “But right now, we don’t have a scholarship to offer you, just like I told Jack on the phone.”
Knight was being honest. At that moment Indiana had fifteen players on scholarship—the NCAA limit—and it had Morgan playing without a scholarship. Two scholarship players, Stew Robinson and Courtney Witte, would graduate in the spring. Two players, 6-11 junior college sophomore Dean Garrett and 6-6 Cincinnati high school senior David Minor, had already been offered and had accepted those two scholarships. Knight suspected that the situation might change by spring, but at that moment he had no scholarships. McCoy was welcome to wait, he said, but there would be no hard feelings if he didn’t since Knight could not and would not promise him a scholarship.
A week later, McCoy announced that, after careful consideration, he had chosen Maryland over Indiana and Oklahoma. Reading this in the newspaper, Knight smiled. “Outrecruited again,” he said. His gut had told him McCoy wasn’t right for Indiana. What was important, though, was that he had done his homework on the player before making a decision one way or the other.
Putting down the paper, Knight looked at Wright. “Joby,” he said, “did we recruit anybody today?”
“Coach,” Wright answered, “we’re hangin’ in there.” This year they were doing just that.
Knight had one other major responsibility as he prepared for the start of the season: Patrick Knight. On the day before practice started, Nancy Knight left Bloomington for a ten-week stay at Duke University. There, she would go through Duke’s famed “rice diet,” and return home in December thirty-five pounds lighter.
With his wife gone, Knight found himself a bachelor father for Patrick, who had turned fifteen in September. As things turned out, Knight enjoyed the experience—except for the inevitable rumors that cropped up with Nancy Knight away. They were wrong, scurrilous, in some cases cruel. Father and son learned to laugh when they heard them. One day, a friend of Pat Knight’s asked him if the rumors about his father were true. “Oh, yeah,” Pat Knight answered, “he brings a different girl home every Friday night.” The only thing Knight was bringing home were tapes of that day’s practice, some ice cream, and an occasional stray reporter. Their marriage was in trouble, and Knight filed for divorce after the end of the season, but it had nothing to do with the wild rumors.
Bob and Pat Knight were a true Odd Couple. If one wanted to imagine what the father had been like at fifteen, one needed only to look at Pat. He had shot up to 6-2 over the summer, a fact that disturbed his older brother, Tim, no end. Tim was twenty-one, a Stanford senior. He was stocky, built more like his mother than his father, and had never made it past six feet. When he returned home for Christmas vacation, Pat made a point of walking up to him whenever he could to point out the difference in height.
Pat’s weight had not caught up with his height. He weighed 135 pounds—maybe—and had a typical teenage diet: soda for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch, dinner, and sometimes a late snack. His father tried to wean him of such things with about as much success as most fathers have.
Their relationship was interesting. Bob Knight’s world was filled with people intimidated by him in one form or another. He was, almost always, the controller and dictator of his relationships. Things were done on his terms or they were not done at all. Few people—coaches, players, professors, writers—had any interest in incurring his wrath. But to Pat Knight, he was just dad, a guy who had a knack for locking his keys in his car or forgetting his garage door opener.
When Bob Knight ran his brand-new car through a flooded road one day and drowned its computer system, there were a lot of suppressed giggles at Assembly Hall. When Pat Knight heard what his father had done, he just looked at him and said, “Boy, are you stupid.” He was right and his father knew it. He just glared at his son as if to say, “Who asked you?”
No one had. But you didn’t need to ask Pat Knight for his opinion in order to hear it. Like his father, he was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, bright and clever. He won most arguments with his father: “I want you in at 10 o’clock, not a minute later.” “But I can’t get a ride until 10:30.” “Okay, be in by 10:45.” Inevitably, Pat would show up at 11:30 with some explanation. “Everyone else was hungry, so we had to stop to eat. I told them not to, but they made me.”
Knight tried to get angry, but really couldn’t. “The problem,” he said one night, “is I like him too much and he knows it.”
Being a single father wasn’t always easy. When Pat got sick during the day at school, the single father had to go pick him up. Sometimes, if Pat needed a ride in the middle of practice, Knight would have one of the managers go get him, but more often than not he did the chauffeuring himself. He also spent as much time as he could working with Pat on his game.
Pat Knight, unlike his older brother, is a basketball player. He is a good shooter who, like his father, has a knack for seeing the game developing in front of him. He is an excellent passer for someone his age, and occasionally when he makes a good pass during a game, his father has to restrain his excitement. Pat Knight was a starting forward on the Bloomington North freshman team, and whenever he played Bob Knight would slip in, sit in as unobtrusive a spot as he could find and watch the game impassively. After the game he would wait until Pat asked for his opinion on his play before he gave it.
Softly, he would push every now and then. “You really should come in early and work on your foul shooting.” But for the most part he left it up to Pat. If he was going to become a good player, it had to be because he wanted to, not because his father wanted him to. If twenty-four years as a coach had taught Bob Knight anything, it was the dangers of pushy parents. If Pat wanted help from his father, it would be there. But it would only be forthcoming if solicited.
Each day, Pat would call after his practice was over, looking for a ride. Each day, the father’s side of the conversation sounded like this:
“Did you have a good practice? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Did you guard anybody? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Did you hit any shots? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Were you tough? . . . Uh-huh . . . . Patrick, how come you say yes to all my questions every day? No one is that good.”
The coaches, listening to their boss, enjoyed the looseness that Patrick brought out in his father. They thought it was healthy for him, especially if it kept him from getting upset after a bad practice.
There were bad practices. Some days the team would practice well for an hour, then get tired. Some days it would drill well and then scrimmage poorly. Practice started every day at about 3:30. The players would usually get to the gym at about 2:30 to get taped and to warm up. Their latest classes were over at 2:15.
Knight was kept apprised of the players’ academic progress by the athletic department’s academic supervisor Elizabeth (Buzz) Kurpius. If a player was struggling with a class, or cutting a class, or missing a session with a tutor, Kurpius would be informed. She would then pass the information on to Knight and to Waltman, the assistant coach responsible for monitoring the players’ academic progress and making certain they were doing what they were supposed to.
Cutting class and cutting a tutor were inexcusable offenses at Indiana. Giomi had been dismissed because of a pattern of cut classes. If Kurpius sent Knight a notice about a missed class, the player was asked to explain his absence. Short of a hurricane or a flood, no excuse was accepted. The same was true of a missed tutor. The guilty player might have to run the steps after practice or, in the case of a tutoring session, might not be allowed to practice until he had seen the tutor.
Knight’s toughness in this area was consistent with his approach throughout his coaching career. When he recruited a player he told him that he would have to go to class to play, and that he would be expected to graduate. Certainly, parents hearing this were bound to feel kindly toward Indiana, but Knight had the record to back up what he said: In fourteen years at Indiana only two players who had stayed four years had failed to graduate. One of them, Bob Wilkerson, had all the necessary credits but needed to fulfill a student teaching requirement. The three seniors on the ’86 team—Morgan, Robinson, and Witte—were all on schedule for graduation in the spring.
Knight tells players that he doesn’t think a player who cuts class can succeed as a basketball player in his program. Going to class requires a minimal amount of discipline, and if you don’t have that, you probably don’t have the discipline needed to learn Knight’s system and flourish in it. “I have never had a good player who cut class,” Knight often said. “I just don’t think that kind of kid can play for me.”
There might have been exceptions. But they didn’t last long enough for Knight to find that out.
Once practice began, there was not a lot of free time for the players. They had classes, practices, tape sessions with the coaches, and study time. There was not a lot of party time. That was one reason why Knight had very few specific rules. There was no curfew at Indiana, even during the season. The players knew they were expected to stay out of bars during the season even if they weren’t drinking, and they were told to exercise judgment about the hours they kept. With the schedule most of them had to follow, good judgment usually meant eating dinner after practice, doing some studying, and going to bed—exhausted. This was especially true of Alford, a business major, who was taking a special advanced course known as A-Core. The course was accelerated, and the professor didn’t particularly like basketball players. Alford was struggling.
And this was still only October.