An actual feel-good story about Mr. Knight
Face-to-face encounter with coaching curmudgeon goes amazingly well
 | Bob Knight's 902 Division I wins are a record for men's coaches. |
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And so it ends the way that you always knew it would. Bob Knight would not exit the court for the final time in triumph, on the shoulders of his players, wearing a basketball net around his neck and holding aloft some manner of Lucite award piffle. Instead he would head out a side door near the loading dock, kicking aside a cat. And what he’s brandishing there is his middle finger. Se ya, losers. It’s been fun, or something. [Expletive deleted].
If you were to make a movie about the life of Bobby Knight, no one would have to review it. You could just substitute the reviews from the film “There Will Be Blood.” And hey, you could even reuse the title! Example:
“’There Will Be Blood’ is a rich character study of a fascinating individual who is by turns likable, loathsome, admirable, monstrous, and driven.” -- Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle. Is there a better way to describe Bobby Knight?
Well, I’ll give it a shot, in my own little way.
My first job — right out of high school — was as sports stringer for the Peninsula Times-Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. My editor, being somewhat of a bastard — but not without a sense of humor — decided to break me in gently. He sent me to cover a media basketball clinic in which Knight was one of the speakers. “Get an interview with Knight,” my editor said, urgently. “We’re all counting on you.”
As I came to understand later, this was the journalistic version of a hazing incident. But I knew very little of Knight, so off I went, innocence personified. There were several coaches at the clinic; among them the mercurial Jim Valvano, whose talk resembled a comedy routine more than anything. Eventually Knight came out, and unlike the other speakers, actually began talking basketball. He went over how to set a screen; the importance of spacing; attacking the basket, etc. He dispensed with the usual PR bull and talked the game.
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They very well might have found me later that night, locked in a dumpster, wrapped securely in cellophane. But instead, Knight agreed to talk. And he talked for 20 minutes. With my interview in hand, I returned to the office.
“How did it go?” my editor asked, suppressing laughter.
“Great,” I said. “Although he only gave me 20 minutes.”
I believe his mouth is still agape to this day. It's a big problem on summer evenings when the moths come out.
I met Knight again about seven years later, and he, amazingly, remembered that day and told me why he stopped. “It was,” he said, “because I saw you in the audience taking notes. You were one of the only ones who seemed interested in the basketball part of a basketball clinic.”
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