Bob Knight: Forever a Hoosier Icon

"I wish I could give you a little bit of an idea on what our starting lineup is going to be, but I can't. The Bloomington Faculty Council was supposed to have it to me by four o'clock this afternoon, but they got caught up in a debate over whether to put petunias or daffodils in a flower bed behind the old library building."
~Bob Knight on his radio show as the Indiana basketball coach


If Indiana had an icon, who would it be? Larry Bird? Oscar Robertson? Evan Bayh? Richard Lugar? Amelia Earhart? David Letterman? John Mellencamp? Kurt Vonnegut? Of all those deserving candidates, are any of them more closely associated with and representative of the Hoosier state than Bob Knight? I doubt it. Knight was brilliant, fiercely loyal, and never boring. Perhaps most importantly in this state, he won a lot of basketball games (without resorting to cheating, reportedly), which is why many IU fans still revere him.

So almost midway into a semester of grad school and teaching, my mind took a little intellectual tangent away from academic articles and toward The General himself. I often arrive at the discourse a bit late, and this is no exception. The two books I read--John Feinstein's A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers and Steve Alford's Playing for Knight: My Six Seasons with Coach Knight--were written and published in the 1980s. Somehow it felt like getting in touch with my heritage. Fittingly, one of my favorite movies, Hoosiers, also came out during this time.

Feinstein's book was predictably better written, since he is a journalist, but Alford's work provided an interesting contribution as well. Everyone knows that Knight threw a chair onto the floor during a game later in Alford's career at IU, but one of my favorite anecdotes--"war stories" the IU players called them--was after an early-season loss to Purdue during Alford's freshman season when Knight kicked them out of the locker room for a few days, told the assistant coaches not to show up for practice, and told the players to coach themselves until their next game against Michigan State. "You didn't put enough effort into the Purdue game to deserve coaches and managers," he said, according to Alford. Knight quietly watched the practices that players designed. He also forced them to order their own transportation and a place to stay for the trip, though he relented on those plans after they executed them.

Alford, like so many other IU players that graduated, seems to reconcile the methods with the results. Feinstein is a little more detached, a little more objective. "In a good mood," he wrote, "there is no one in the world more delightful to be around (than Knight) because he is so bright, so well-read. In a a bad mood, there is no one worse." According to Alford, Knight--who gave Feinstein surprising access during the 1985-1986 season--wasn't thrilled with how Feinstein's book was written, although Alford claims it was accurate. The relationship between Knight and Feinstein apparently soured.

Could I have played for Knight? Well for one, I wasn't good enough. But if I had been? I don't know. I probably wouldn't have handled his "mind games" very well, kicking players out of practice and such, riding the older players. Keeping my mouth shut has never been a strength. But then again, maybe I could have become one of those players who channeled my disgust into working harder and getting better. Who knows. Either way, I feel connected to him for what he did for the sport I love in my state.