Mike Celizic

Let’s imagine that there’s a player on your school’s basketball team who’s got an ocean of talent but tends to get down on himself when he makes mistakes. And let’s imagine that the coach works hard to let the kid know that he shouldn’t get down on himself and should forget his mistakes because his team needs him.

That’s a pretty good coach, you’d have to agree. Instead of browbeating the kid for his mistakes, he’s forcing him to hold his head up, to take charge, to embrace the greatness inside him. Way to go, coach.

If this is the case – and it is – why is everybody climbing all over Bobby Knight?

Knight isn’t the most sweet-tempered human being in the world. He’s committed his share of loutish and abusive acts, eventually getting fired at the University of Indiana for the crime of being an uncivilized menace to everyone who looked at him the wrong way. I applauded Indiana for finally summoning up the courage to tell him to pack his bags; he had earned his dismissal many times over.

But I’m not going to hang him for what happened between him and Michael Prince on Monday night in the second half of a game against Gardner-Webb. Prince had made a couple of mistakes, and, as he came off the floor for a time-out, Knight started talking to him, then chucked him under the chin when Prince dropped his head.

“I’m sure there were some cases where I have been wrong, but (Monday night) wasn’t one of them,” Knight told ESPN on Tuesday. “I was trying to help a kid, and I think I did.”

Prince agreed. So did his parents, who were at the game. So did Texas Tech’s athletic director. So, too, did everyone except those who want to find evil in everything Knight does.

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It’s not fair; not to Knight and not to ourselves. Every one of us is a flawed human being – the statement itself is redundant – yet we don’t see others in the same shades of gray that we see in ourselves. The more famous somebody is, the more likely he or she is to be painted as either good or evil. Knight has carved out a niche as one of the arch-villains of sports, so everything he does is seen through that lens.

Although he and Mike Krzyzewski worked together at West Point many years ago, and Krzyzewski shares many of Knight’s qualities. Coach K’s practices are conducted in torrents of obscenity and vituperation directed at his players. Few coaches are better at berating the poor working stiffs with the whistles and striped shirts working the games.

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But Krzyzewski has never thrown a chair, never hit a player, never verbally assaulted the head of the university in grocery store, never blow up during a formal interview on national television. His coaching style isn’t that much different than Knight’s, yet Coach K is viewed as the paragon of coachly virtue, while Knight’s is viewed as the example of everything that’s wrong in the game.