Bob Cook

Hey, Knight, what’s up!

Whoa, whoa, easy there, Coach Knight! I don’t mean any disrespect! I was only trying to get your attention. You know, like how you were trying to get Michael Prince’s attention when you gave him that light uppercut to the chin with four minutes to go in your Texas Tech team’s 86-74 defeat of Gardner-Webb Monday night. I know you meant no harm in brushing Prince’s chin — that you were only trying to get him to look you in the eye so you could tell him to buck up and not worry about making mistakes.

Well, I’m trying to get you to look me in the eye (hard, I know, with me only 5-foot-11, and you 6-foot-5) so I can tell you to buck up. However, unlike you with Prince, I want you to worry about your mistakes.

The problem is, you make the same mistake again and again — letting your temper and emotions get the best of you. As far as the Prince incident is concerned, this ranks far, far below, say, the time you kicked your son Pat (or rather, the chair he was sitting in — you meant to miss, right?) on the Indiana sideline, or the tape with you choking Neil Reed that helped get you fired after 30 years at Assembly Hall. Or below the time you punched a cop in Puerto Rico, or the time you stuffed an LSU fan in the trash can, or the time ...

I heard a lot of ex-players and coaches — including Gene Keady, your former rival at Purdue — defending you on ESPN Radio Tuesday morning. They said what you did to Prince was no big deal, that it happens all the time. But when asked, did you ever see any other coach do what Knight did to Prince, they said, well, not really.

You preach discipline and emotional control to your players — I remember when you yanked Todd Jadlow out of a game at Indiana because he pumped his fists after a dunk — yet you can’t discipline yourself. Perhaps you preach discipline because you don’t have it. To be fair, many coaches often push their charges into not having their same flaws. As David Maraniss described it in his book, When Pride Still Mattered, about another famously volatile coach — Vince Lombardi stressed playing through pain because he never could.

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But the problem is greater than a lack of discipline. It’s a lack of being able to sense how the world around you has changed — namely, that you just can’t lay a hand on a player, for any reason. Especially you, with the way your reputation — I believe longtime Illinois coach Lou Henson referred to it as "classic bull" — precedes you.

The world didn’t change overnight. There were two firings long ago that should have clued you in that coaches couldn’t just go wild whenever they wanted to anymore. In 1978, your hero and old Ohio State buddy Woody Hayes was fired, practically immediately, after a long and storied career for punching a Clemson linebacker who had the temerity to intercept a Buckeye pass in the Gator Bowl, then slugging one of his own players who tried to hold him back. The next year, Arizona State fired football coach Frank Kush in mid-season after he got caught orchestrating a cover-up over allegations he hit punter Kevin Rutledge, who had sued Kush and the school. Rutledge lost the lawsuit, but the message was sent — hands off.

Special feature on Bobby Knight Highs, lows of legend’s coaching career

Of course, for years at Indiana you had an administration that chose to look the other way, figuring the good you did in donating money to the library and generally having honorable student-athletes outweighed your temper tantrums. As time went on, and you were the last so-called old school, hard-as-nails coach still standing, you were practically a national symbol for each side of the debate over how a coach/educator should conduct himself, and whether today’s (spoiled rotten) players indeed needed a literal kick in the tush. But as you learned in 2000 — especially after that 1997 tape of you choking Reed got out — an administration can only look the other way for so long.