There was so much bad that happened and that he did over the second and even third acts of his basketball life with Bob Knight that they made you forget all that he did at Indiana University when he was young, and was as great a coach of college basketball as there ever was. John Wooden won more and Mike Krzyzewski would win more after Wooden. Both were loved a lot more. But at his best, when he was winning three national titles at Indiana and then an Olympic gold medal, when one of his championship teams was undefeated, no one ever coached a more beautiful game of basketball than Bob Knight did.
Knight is gone now, at 83. And in death, there is no attempt, certainly not here, to clean up his record, scrub brush away his temper, or chairs being thrown across a court or the worst moment of all for him, the worst of a lot of bad public moments, when he lost his temper in the gym one day and put his hand on the throat of one of his players. He was a big and loud and complicated and controversial figure in his sport, in all of American sports, really.
But if you only remember the times when his face became a clenched fist, when he himself became a clenched fist, if you only remember all the times when he sabotaged himself even before he got older, you are missing a lot today about a big life in sports and, again, not just in his sport.
“There really was so much more good to him than bad,” Mike Woodson was saying last night after we all got the news of Knight’s passing. “I know some people don’t want to hear that. But it’s true.”
Woody paused and said, “All I can do is explain what he meant to me. And he meant a lot from the time I played for him. I saw him at his highest points and his lowest points. I saw him laugh and I saw him cry and whether people want to believe this or want to listen to me about this, I know he was a good man.”
I knew Knight a long time, and well. I did see him at his best in Indiana, and then all the times later when his excesses, and his inability to control his temper and his own mouth, kept obscuring his record as a coach, in a career that never should have left Bloomington, Ind. I often sat in his office at Indiana, and ate pizza with him at his favorite hangouts there. I sat and watched his team practice and saw all the coaches, high school and college, from across the country who would just show up in his gym to watch him to do that, just coach a single practice.
And I was at home one night having dinner with my wife and he called and started yelling at me because I had criticized him for telling Connie Chung in a television interview that if a women was being raped, well, let him tell it the way he told Connie Chung:
“I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it…That’s just an old term that you’re going to use. The plane’s going down, so you have no control over it. I’m not talking about the act of rape. Don’t misinterpret me. But what I’m talking about is something happens to you, so you have to handle it — now.”
He said I had misinterpreted what he said. I told him that I had understood him perfectly. Finally he hung up, and we went years without speaking, until he started working for ESPN after his retirement from coach and he was paired on television with my dear, late friend John Saunders.
He was a 24-year-old head coach at Army when Bill Parcells was an assistant coach on the football team there, and that began a good and deep and lasting friendship between the two men that lasted until Knight died on Wednesday. I remember a day at the old Daily News building on 42nd St. when I was sitting in the sports department and the phone rang and it was Knight. At the time Parcells was in his rookie season coaching the Giants, and all I really knew about him was that I thought he was going to get fired when the season was over, if not sooner.
“Have you gotten to know this guy?” Knight said.
I told him that all I really knew was in Parcell’s press conferences, during the week and after practice.
“Well, you ought to go over there to Jersey and get to know him, because you’re going to be making a big mistake if you don’t,” Knight said.
I said, “Why is that?”
And Knight said, “Because he’s great, that’s why.”
There was nothing for Knight in that phone call other than friendship. He was that kind of friend. But not unconditionally. He was a longtime friend of my friend Dick Schaap. But then, much later, he was tremendously rude when Dick’s son Jeremy, conducted an interview with Knight on ESPN after he had been fired at Indiana. Knight told Jeremy that night that he had a long way to go to be as good as his dad. But Jeremy stayed right with him, refused to be bullied when Knight had once again turned into a bully.
As far as I know, Dick Schaap, who died the next year, never spoke to Knight again. Knight and I did stop talking after the Chung interview. But there came a night four or five years ago, near Christmas, when the phone rang and it was Knight. He told me that he had been sitting with his second wife, Karen, and going over some old clips, and some were things I’d written about him when he was young.
“My wife asked me why we’d stopped talking, and I didn’t have a good reason for that,” Knight said. “And she said, ‘Why don’t you call him?’ So I did.”
We talked for a long time that night. And suddenly it was like all those late nights in Bloomington out of the past, before he couldn’t get out of his way, or refused to even try. Again: I’m not trying to defend the bad parts today. Just remembering there was more to the story with Bob Knight, a story as complicated as he was, but one that won’t be forgotten, the way he won’t be.
The Link LonkNovember 02, 2023 at 07:35AM
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiYWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55ZGFpbHluZXdzLmNvbS8yMDIzLzExLzAxL2JvYi1rbmlnaHQtZGVhZC1hdC04My1iYXNrZXRiYWxsLWNvYWNoLWluZGlhbmEtdW5pdmVyc2l0eS_SAQA?oc=5
Bob Knight was hard to love, but impossible to forget - New York Daily News
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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