And, for advanced students, that ever-popular seminar: Evolution of the Tantrum. All will be taught, of course, by that basketball coaching legend Bobby Knight.
It was lovely to see “The General” back in the game and back in his trademark sweater. To a cheering throng of some 7,500 in his new school’s arena, Knight came out “Guns Up” (that’s the Texas Tech version of the University of Texas’s more famous hand gesture, “Hook, ’em Horns”) and guns blazing. But if this was supposed to be a fresh start for the 60-year-old Knight, why did it feel like such a tired rerun? Perhaps because he took potshots at all the usual suspects: his critics in and out of the press, and, above all, those traitors at the University of Indiana who fired him after 29 years at the helm of the school’s basketball program. There wasn’t enough bile in all of West Texas to convey his contempt for his former bosses, who gave him enough rope to hang a dozen rustlers before finally cutting loose the game’s loosest cannon.
Has there ever been a more apt nickname for a coach than “The General” for Knight? If he weren’t born a few years before Gen. George Patton died in an auto accident, I’d swear he was the reincarnation of “Old Blood and Guts” himself. Patton’s defiance of authority, his slapping of a soldier he regarded as a malingerer, his absolute faith that he was the sole proprietor of truth-all can be seen as precursors of the tarnishes on Knight’s career. It’s hard to imagine any other self-professed leader of young men this side of Fidel Castro who could have induced more than 10 percent of the university faculty to petition against his hiring, as did Texas Tech’s.
I admit to once having been a great admirer of coach Knight. His mid-’70s Indiana teams, which lost just one game in two years (and that due to an injury to the team’s scoring star, Scottie May) may have been the best-coached ever. They played with extraordinary discipline, total dedication to team concepts and a ballhawking fury that wreaked havoc on the opposition. (Was there ever a better defensive tandem than guards Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson?)
Back then Knight’s my-way-or-the-highway approach seemed a welcome antidote to the excesses of the ’60s. He took his military ways (he began his head-coaching career at West Point) and developed a basketball army in the heart of America’s roundball citadel, Indiana. And he did it while playing by NCAA rules and graduating his players. There truly seemed much to admire.
But the world changed and Coach Knight didn’t. Indeed he refused to. Oh sure, in this age of pampered athletes, we all can look back fondly on the days when kick-ass disciplinarians ruled the roost. But it’s easy to confuse obdurate hardheadedness for integrity. For all their bluster, the greatest coaches in history, like Green Bay Packers legend Vince Lombardi or Boston Celtics immortal Red Auerbach, understood that you couldn’t treat all players the same (which, in Knight’s case, happens to be badly). Lombardi made allowances for his star running back Paul Hornung’s nocturnal ways, and Auerbach learned to accept Bill Russell’s lackluster practice habits.
Coach Knight has never made accommodations. Not to his players. Not in his strategies. Not to the press, who, after all, have a job-and a poorly-paid one compared to his-to do. (Wasn’t it a nice touch how he enticed the crowd in Lubbock to ridicule the reporter asking him a question at a press conference?) Why accommodate anyone when you’re always right? It’s hard to sort out all that went wrong in Indiana. Was it Knight’s inability to recruit this era’s blue-chippers or his inability to retain them once they got a taste of his tongue? Were his teams no longer talented enough or insufficiently motivated by the coach’s verbal blitzkrieg? Or had the game simply passed him by? (He had to be the only coach in American who refused to employ a zone defense under any circumstances.) The only certainty was the bottom line: Knight’s Indiana teams became perennial Big 10 also-rans with a bad habit of exiting the NCAA tournament in the very first round.
It is certainly fashionable these days to talk about forgiveness and second chances. Redemption is one of our society’s most enduring and appealing themes. As one of his new Big 12 coaching rivals said, “I’m sure coach Knight has done things he regrets.” But how can anyone be sure of that? If Knight has any regrets, he sure hasn’t revealed them publicly. About all he would concede in his Lubbock debut is that “I’m not right all the time.”
Whew, hold the presses! Then quickly this caveat: “But when it comes to this game, I’m right most of the time.” And if that isn’t sufficient reassurance to quash all your reservations, the coach trotted out Mrs. Coach to sing his praises. She asked folks not to judge her husband by what they’ve heard or read or even what they’ve seen. To know him is to love him, she said. (So remember: don’t judge him by such a shameless stunt.)
Perhaps Texas Tech is its own kind of punishment for coach Knight. He is now exiled from the basketball belt, stuck in the heart of football country. And the Red Raiders are a Big 12 bottom-dweller who in the school’s hierarchy rank not only behind the football team, but well to the rear of the powerhouse Lady Raiders basketball team. (Coach Knight mistakenly called them the “Women Red Raiders,” but then again he mispronounced the university president’s name as well.) Lubbock, Texas, too, may find that in coach Knight it got far more than it bargained for. The town is used to pesky dust storms. But Bobby Knight is capable of stirring up a different kind of storm. And what it rains down is far harder to wash out than dust.
