Bob Knight still plays by his rules

By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
http://www.kansascity.com/
November 20, 2011

Bob Knight will do this his way. Of course he will. He will be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in downtown Kansas City tonight, finally, and he’ll do it according to his own rules.

How fitting. Especially for him. Especially now.

Hall of Fame inductions are about legacies and memories, and after the past few weeks nothing is more relevant in college sports than coaching legacies. The perfectly appropriate thing about Knight is that, as he cedes the NCAA Division I wins record to a protégé and is given the game’s highest honor in the span of a week, his legacy is exactly what he’s made it to be.

Brilliant coach. Stubborn man. One of the sport’s greats, who by all accounts kept the same admirable priorities even as the game and the people around him changed.

He is principled. Immature. Honest.

And so much more.

He is impossible to label with any simple description, difficult to describe with any single incident. And perhaps more than any other college coach, he has overcome a potentially defining misstep.

Knight is, yes, the guy who head-butted one player and grabbed another by the throat and eventually got fired from Indiana after overreacting to a student goading him with, “Hey, Knight, what’s up?”

But he is also the man who generated enough respect that 4,000 students protested outside the school president’s office after his firing, whose graduation rates consistently exceeded the rest of the student body’s, who was never found guilty of a major rules violation, who helped raise millions for education and cancer research, and who was among the first public figures to back the fight against AIDS.

In his post-coaching life, he has become the gruff broadcaster preaching the shot-fake and ball movement, and last week, the gracious teacher who praised his former point guard Mike Krzyzewski for passing him as the game’s all-time winningest coach.

Part of him can be defined by controversy, but most of him needs something else entirely.

Hopefully, the fans at tonight’s induction at the Midland Theatre will see the engaging and fascinating side of Knight.

He has been particularly busy recently with his broadcasting schedule and Krzyzewski’s record chase. Knight’s flight lands this afternoon, so event organizers hope he can arrive in time to answer a few questions before the ceremony.

He’s been to a handful of these events, and always shines. This is his element, in ways that traditional news conferences and even broadcasting games just cannot match.

Knight is part of college basketball history, but he is also among its greatest advocates. The Hall of Fame induction ceremony is better with Knight, and the same thing can be said in reverse.

One of the best moments in the event’s short history came when Knight introduced Bill Russell. John Thompson was supposed to be the one talking, but the old Georgetown coach got sick and had to cancel at the last minute.

Knight did it instead, and was fabulous, even without preparation, and even without notes. He called Russell “the greatest champion of all-time,” a touching compliment from perhaps its greatest coach.

It’s not just the legends, either. He’s a go-to voice on lesser-celebrated pioneers, men like Bill Wall (who shaped international basketball) and Walter Byers (who drove the NCAA Tournament into becoming a major event).

The quickie definitions of Knight are the images of a chair tossed across the court, his hilarious mocking of a reporter’s question about “game faces,” and the unfortunate line to Connie Chung about rape.

But the truer definition of him takes more effort. He can be legendarily brash when bothered, but also incredibly generous with his intellect.

For instance, Kansas State coach Frank Martin is still grateful for the time Knight pulled him aside after calling a game a few years ago to offer some tips. At least one of them — the angle on screens — is something Martin still emphasizes today.

This isn’t how he expected it to be, you know. Knight wanted to retire at Indiana and live the rest of his life there. He liked it in Bloomington, and the people there liked him.

So he wanted to spend his retirement raising money for the school, being sure not to interfere with the new coach, and give whatever money he generated from a book or appearances to the athletic department.

That’s the way he envisioned it, anyway, before it all went famously wrong.

Knight can hold a grudge, of course, so he skipped his induction to the Indiana University Hall of Fame two years ago (though he did speak at an event shortly after).

Now, Knight lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he finished his coaching career, with new friends and a new life with a new schedule that revolves around broadcasts on ESPN.

It’s interesting that Knight once said he would have preferred to live in the Wild West, in the 19th century, when arguments were settled by which man had the quicker draw. Maybe that would’ve been a better fit.

But for a man who so often has been stubborn and unwilling to compromise, he’s adjusted just fine.


To reach Sam Mellinger, call 816-234-4365, send email to smellinger@kcstar.com or follow twitter.com/mellinger. For previous columns, go to www.KansasCity.com.