A Knight’s Story

Nobody would ever have thought that Bobby Knight was the kind of man who would go gentle into that good night. But two weeks ago, while the sports world was still dissecting the extraordinary Super Bowl upset and awaiting the Clemens congressional circus, Knight just slipped away. On Monday he announced that he was resigning as Texas Tech's basketball coach, departing with 902 wins in his career, ranking him first all-time among Division I coaches.

All Knight offered by way of explanation was that he was tired of bad refereeing. That was most assuredly part of it. He has been tired of refereeing for most of his career, and Knight has always been far less tolerant of the flaws of other folks than he has been of his own. One might also suspect that, at 67 and after 42 years as a head coach, he was just plain tired, even more so because he had been relegated to the basketball hinterlands with a second-rank team in the essentially football town of Lubbock. And perhaps Knight reasoned that by turning the reins over to his son, Pat, in midseason, he gave his kid the best shot at retaining the job. Knight is certainly not one to trust institutional assurances.

If we can set aside questions of behavior and temperament for a minute, then Knight was, to my mind, the best college basketball coach ever. His teams didn't rival those of other coaching immortals like John Wooden and Dean Smith when it came to pure talent, but he got more than anybody out of what he had. His Indiana University squads in the mid-'70s were coaching clinics. The '75 version fell just short of the Final Four when its leading scorer, Scottie May, was injured during the tourney, but the '76 team went all the way to glory, the last Division I men's college basketball team to finish its season undefeated.

Make no mistake: these teams didn't lack talent. Indiana sent six guys to the pros off those teams—May, a sweet-shooting forward, center Kent Benson, a pair of ball-hawking guards in Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson, and two more forwards, Tom Abernathy and John Laskowski. But unlike the UCLA or North Carolina players whose talents in college had been kept under wraps and who blossomed in the pros, the stars on Knight's best teams pretty much peaked in Bloomington. While several went on to have long, productive NBA careers, none became a dominant pro until Isiah Thomas became the leader of the Detroit Pistons' championship teams. It wasn't until Thomas transferred from Chicago to Bloomington in the early 1980s that Knight had a genuine superstar to build around (though Larry Bird had made an abbreviated stop a few years before). Few of the basketball elite were willing to subject themselves to the exacting standards that Knight demanded of his players on and off the court.

To the extent that Knight's tale rises to the level of tragedy—and I'm not really sure it does—it is because he was incapable of meeting the high standards he demanded of others. And he refused to take responsibility for his failures of temperament, casting blame scattershot and pointing fingers at pretty much everyone but himself. It was sad, even pathetic, to see a man of such talent and breadth cast himself as the eternal victim—of idiot bureaucrats, of incompetent refs and of unscrupulous reporters. Indiana finally cut him adrift as a hopeless recidivist before the 2000 season, but in truth that decision wasn't made until Knight's program had slipped to the point where it was first-round fodder in the tournament and no longer a threat to add to his three national titles.

The 2006 hiring of Kelvin Sampson as basketball coach made it clear that high standards were never the paramount issue at Indiana U. Winning was and is. Sampson left the University of Oklahoma under a cloud after recruiting violations, and he started at Indiana with a personal one-year ban on contacting recruits. Now, two years later, Sampson has—surprise, surprise—reportedly committed a series of major recruiting violations, virtually reprising his Oklahoma transgressions and compounding those, according to the NCAA's report, by giving "false or misleading information" to investigators. Indiana's athletic director risked a Pinocchio moment if he pronounced himself shocked by the accusations, so he settled for "profoundly disappointed" and said there would be no "rush to judgment," ignoring the fact that there was precious little judgment used in the first place when Indiana hired Sampson.