Bob Hammel | Guest columnist
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – In a state known for its passion for basketball, in a self-proclaimed “nation” proud of its traditions and identity-defining banners, his tenure, his era, was the best of the best.
The death of Bob Knight at age 83 on Wednesday brought back memories of the 30-year-old Ohio native who was almost unknown in Indiana but already had a six-year head coaching career at Army and with the experience of a three-year opponent The player was uniquely familiar with the Hoosier hysteria in 1971, when he was introduced as a surprise candidate to revive the Indiana style of basketball, of which Poe wrote: “The glory that was Greece and the greatness that was Rome. “
Certainly, over the next 29 years, his Hoosier teams exceeded the most optimistic expectations, hopes and even dreams: those of Indiana and perhaps even his own.
More: Legendary Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight has died at age 83
But that leads into areas that everyone knows, into a world full of numbers. The Bob Knight I want to talk about had a quality that was rarely, perhaps never, mentioned on sites like this. This man, a major college basketball head coach at 24 years old, revered his elders, both in practice and in life, like no one I have ever observed.
The sport continues to evolve, each decade different from the previous. This tends to make successful coaches of one generation disinclined to listen to greybeards from generations before because “they played a different game.” That was never Bob Knight.
At the age of 24 and over the next six years, during which he gained his first experience as a trainer in the army, he took advantage of geography. Just a few miles upstate lived Clair Bee, who didn’t invent basketball, but came damn close to inventing basketball coaching. His Long Island University teams dominated the college game in the 1920s and 1930s before there was a national championship tournament. The East had all the respect of college basketball back then; Madison Square Garden was the mecca of the game. Clair Bee’s LIU Blackhawks owned the East, the Garden and the game of this era.
The New York-based college basketball gambling scandals of the early 1950s affected some of his LIU players and broke his heart. He gave up the sport and retreated to a country house, where the new recruit from the nearby army sought him out, asked him lots of questions and drove him into town to occasionally meet with trainers from Bee’s time.
This close father-son relationship broadened Knight’s field of questioning and listening to include Joe Lapchick of St. John’s and Nat Holman of CCNY – City College of New York, the only team ever to win both the NCAA in the same season (1950). also won the NIT) and was at the center of the gambling scandal.
The relationship between Knight and Lapchick became so close that after Lapchick’s death, his wife passed on to Knight a scrapbook that Lapchick had compiled and regularly shown to his St. John’s teams, a scrapbook of newspaper articles that recounted what gambling had done to the New York college basketball had an impact on other college giants of the time, most notably Kentucky.
More: Bob Knight’s timeline of Indiana basketball becoming the winningest coach of all time
In his later years, Knight was able to provide the Yonkers street address of the Lapchick home, where he often went to ask coaching questions. He would enjoy repeating the advice Lapchick had given him on one of these visits: “People will come after you to speak at banquets and stuff. Never do anything like that for less than $25.” And the young coach, who grew up in Orrville, Ohio, population 5,000, thought as he drove home, “Who would ever pay me $25 to talk?”
More important things emerged from these conversations. In his coaching life, he adopted Lapchick’s ideas about training rules (“none at all – except: If you do anything that I think is detrimental to this basketball team, the school, or yourself, I will treat it that way.” I think it’s right”).
In the same conversation, Lapchick asked, “How important is it to you that people like you?” Knight’s after-thought response was, “I want to be respected as a coach, but I don’t care about being liked.” Lapchick laid down Another thing Knight adopted as a principle: “Good. If you worry about whether people like you, you can never make difficult decisions properly.”
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In his six years at Army, Knight’s teams went 102-50 and 6-0 in the rivalry of all rivalries against Navy, a contrarian bubble in a series dominated by the Middies. His teams became the darlings of Madison Square Garden, representatives of an institution admired for its integrity and, 6-6 and all, combative indomitability.
Knight loved the Garden and the National Invitational Tournament, its showpiece in March, so much that he once turned down an NCAA tournament bid so that the cadet corps could follow his team to the Garden and the Army could bid for an NIT championship. Some of his teams came close and never quite made it to the finals, but in 1979 he took a Mike Woodson-led Indiana team there and won.
The man who won three NCAA championships and an Olympic gold medal never responded like he did that night, throwing things in the air, jumping across the Garden Court and shouting, “We won! We won! We won the NIT!” Ms. Lapchick was his guest at the game and on the field to celebrate. The watch he wore in his senior years was from that NIT championship.
It was only after a few of his first sessions with Clair Bee that he realized that this brilliant coach was the only one in the Hall of Fame with a winning average over .800 and that young Bob was also the author of the Chip Hilton book series Knight had it devoured in Orrville. His teacher-mentor accompanied him into a life in which he almost always had a book in his hand, something to read on every team flight, in every free moment.
In elementary school he once said, “In the library there was a ‘reading tree’ with the names of the ten children who read the most books written on it – always nine girls and me.” He particularly loved biographies and books by Chip Hilton.
His father, an agent for the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad, had his own influence, introducing Pat and Hazel Knight’s only child to fishing, hunting (only birds, never ground animals) and golf. They became lifelong passions.
And then there was the third adult who lived in his home throughout his childhood: Robert Montgomery Knight’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Montgomery. She taught him how to drive. She showed him how to negotiate with farmers to get the best buys for the freshest fruits and vegetables. She had his lifelong devotion and was certainly the reason he had such great respect for his elders.
Clair Bee was the archetype of that. Before he died in 1983 at age 87, he spoke regularly to Knight’s Army teams, often including his Indiana teams. He wrote a beloved letter that pulled Knight out of the deep doldrums as the team of his life went undefeated through the entire 1975 Big Ten season. but lost its top All-American Scott May to a broken arm and, in the most depressing loss of the Knight era, fell in the Elite Eight to a Kentucky team it had defeated in May.
Days after that loss came an elegantly handwritten letter of just over 100 words:
Take a deep breath.
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The next year was the last perfect season a major men’s college basketball team had, a span that now stands at 47 years. Knight, whose second son is named Patrick Clair, flew Bee, nearly blind and 80, to Baton Rouge to watch the 1975-76 team fight its way to the Final Four and had him speak to the team just before It went on the field to face the once-beaten No. 2 seed Marquette in the regional final. Bee didn’t make it to the Final Four in Philadelphia the next week, but Knight counted him there. His comments after the game included the following:
“Somewhere in upstate New York there’s a lucky man tonight.”
And there were others. His search for older coaches for both veneration and learning purposes did not end at West Point. His fellow IU bannerman, Branch McCracken, had passed away before Knight arrived at IU. However, McCracken’s own trainer, Everett Dean, was one of those he contacted early on and was able to count on his advice from then on.
When Knight took his IU team on a 37-day summer basketball trip around the world in the summer of 1985, he took 87-year-old Dean and three-time Olympic coach Henry Iba, 81, with him in an advisory capacity. Each – along with another who made the trip, IU athletic director Ralph Floyd – had lost their wives in the past few months, and Knight, without telling them, denied them that first summer of feeling alone.
Then there are these numbers.
He won more games at a higher rate, leading to more outright conference and national championships and Final Four appearances than any other coach in Big Ten history. He reached more milestone levels, 300, 400, 500, at a younger age than anyone else. He was the first ever to reach 900.
He did all this while providing his “children” with degrees of a nearly unsurpassed standard while also doing old-fashioned things like supporting the university library. One of the presidents during his IU years, Thomas Ehrlich, estimated that Knight was responsible for more than $5 million in gifts to the library during his coaching tenure.
He wore no halos. He had a wild temper, a sailor’s obscenity and a roughness in speaking to and dealing with players that modern society rejects.
He never hid these things, never tried to hide them. He kept some things secret, particularly his willingness to obey in return for secrecy, which amounted to hundreds of written or telephone requests over the years along the lines of: “My father is your biggest fan, and he’s in the hospital and is dying.” Is there a chance that you…”
Of course, variations of this have also been expressed for mothers, often for children… for people in senior care centers and hospice homes. Somehow, in an almost unimaginable number of cases, you found time, probably after work so no one would notice, and there was a signed basketball or IU gear or something – including a smile and a handshake, often a hug – to show that affection and real appreciation went both ways.
Thousands of letters were answered and pictures were signed. For secretaries Linda Stines and Mary Ann Davis, it was the bulk of the work, but in retirement, Ms. Karen stuck with it as long as she could.
Among the people most upset about his abrupt dismissal from IU in September 2000 were the people with the least visible stature: building managers and caretakers, background people who had their own relationships, who asked for no favors, none Looking for souvenirs and understanding real respect. These were the ones who, during my own visits to the meeting hall to watch a practice, would stop what they were doing and ask, “How’s Coach?”
This was a complex package, this coach who worked out the game plans that – you look at the lineups and figure out how it could be – somehow No. 1 ranked North Carolina and Michael Jordan in the 1984 NCAA Tournament that bested a vastly superior UNLV team in the 1987 semifinals, when everyone thought Indiana’s only chance was to slow the game down and live or die by Steve Alford’s shots. The score that day was 97-93.
These games weren’t all that unusual. Maybe you didn’t know that Jordan leads a 10-man list of great players – college All-Americans and future NBA stars – whose last collegiate loss was to Knight and IU. Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal (LSU, 1992), always two of the highest-ranked NBA players of all time, are at the top of this list.
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Pay …
Of course, it all starts with the championships:
- 3 nationally, the three banners (1976, 1981, 1987) that hang in Assembly Hall next to those won by Branch McCracken’s teams in 1940 and 1953, combining to equal the win totals of all other Big Ten teams.
- 11 Big Ten, a total equaled by early-era Purdue coach Ward “Piggy” Lambert, but Knight’s eight total championships surpasses Piggy by two.
- All sorts of others: Olympic and Pan American gold medals, NIT, even the short-lived Conference Commissioners Association tournament, major league runners-up in the era when the NCAA accepted only one team from major conferences.
The 2023 NCAA national championship game was the 46th since Knight’s 1975–76 team became the last undefeated champions in major college men’s basketball. Every champion has lost at least two games since then.
This team capped a period in which Indiana had endured two straight Big Ten seasons undefeated – an unprecedented, never-before-seen 18-0 each season, victories over every other league team home and away. Their 37-game conference winning streak bests the next best at 10-27, achieved by teams at Ohio State, where he was the sixth man for three seasons and played in the national championship game all three years.
As the new IU coach, he came into a league that had averaged 165 points per game in league play in 1971, 171.3 in 1970. By his fourth year, 1975, the figure had dropped to 148.1, even though his own team averaged 87 that year, shot .513 in league play and won his 18 games with a league-record average of 22.8 points per game. That was the year Knight introduced his homegrown “Motion” offense, the year his team was ranked No. 1 in the country for the first time.
He shared everything his teams had ever done in high school and college coaching clinics. In January 1976, a new coach in the league, Lute Olson of Iowa, asked him to speak at a game day luncheon about the Hoosiers’ visit there, the only intrusion into his busy game day schedule that I ever remember him making this was granted by an opponent.
In introducing Knight, the man who became one of his fiercest rivals called him “one of the true innovators in coaching,” adding, “He has done more than influence the way high school players play today.” every other coach in the country. “You can see high school players all over the country applying Bobby Knight’s defensive philosophy.” He called Knight’s ’75 Hoosiers “the best college team on both ends of the field that I have ever seen.”
His colleagues showed their respect in other ways. The movement offense quickly appeared not only on high school and college teams across the country but also in his own league, and how he – its inventor – tried to defend it was noted and copied. His private reaction: “We just have to do better than them.” And that’s what we should do.”
This love of sharing everything had roots. In his second year at Ohio State, a team that started three future Naismith Hall of Famers and two other long-time NBA players entering the Big Ten played looser defense than coach Fred Taylor wanted. He had attended a Pete Newell clinic the previous summer, taking notes and introducing Newell’s defensive principles, so he sent his assistant Jack Graf with film to California, where Newell was coaching its reigning NCAA champions.
Newell watched the films and sent Graf back with some instructions that helped the Buckeyes win the Big Ten and the NCAA championship, beating Cal and Newell in the finals. That always stayed with Knight. “Pete never thought about how he contributed to beating himself,” Knight often mused. “He helped the game.” That was part of the philosophy he always told his teams: Regardless of whether you are playing against a national power or a supposed weakling: “You don’t play against an opponent. You’re playing against your potential.”
Newell, who coached the 1960 Oscar Robertson-Jerry West U.S. Olympic team that was the primary opponent of Knight’s Michael Jordan-led team in 1984 and was considered the best of the Olympic pre-pro era, became another of Knight’s coaching “fathers,” who was extremely close to him. Newell, a California resident, kept up with all the Knight-IU teams and came to Bloomington every year to attend practices and game trips.
As the Hoosiers became a powerhouse in 1974-75, Newell accompanied them to a Christmas tournament in Hawaii and left a 10-minute tape speaking directly to the players. He didn’t spare his criticism, but he also told them in a voice that one player after another still remembers clearly today, 48 years later: “You are within your grasp of the best season Indiana has ever had.”
The challenge will be “to prepare yourself emotionally and mentally,” he warned. Sure, you’ll get up for the Purdues, but when the Iowas are down, you gotta make sure you’re up.” It was a cassette that Knight gave them only once and, in particularly pertinent parts, for the rest foreshadowed this remarkably consistent season.
Newell, then 78, was also part of that geriatric coaching group around the world in 1985.
That coach Newell helped to the 1960 national championship, Fred Taylor – in his final, physically difficult days, none of his former players cared as much for him and his family as the non-starter who lives four hours away in Bloomington… the man , whose IU coaching staff in 1976 notably included Harold Andreas, the head coach at Cuyahoga Falls High when Bob Knight was his coachable, attentive and appreciative jayvee coach.
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His love for his small hometown of Orrville, where they now play basketball at Bob Knight High School, never waned. He loved to recite his favorite advertising slogan (about Orrville’s other best-known product: “With a name like Smucker’s, you have to be good”), and he helped his high school football coach and longtime friend Bill Shunkwiler find a job in retirement as a scout the Indianapolis Colts.
His special respect, admiration and warmth, a generation older, extended to areas beyond the coaching realm: to IU administrators John Ryan, Bill Orwig, Ralph Floyd (and Anita Aldrich, Marianne Mitchell), faculty friends at Bob’s helm Byrnes and Harry Pratter, equipment manager, and fishing friend Red Grow.
He had nicknames for many of his insiders, including two who ignored the expected IU-Purdue neutrality and openly supported his teams: the universally known “Doc” for Gov. Otis Bowen, a teasingly personal “Grampa” for the state high school commissioner , Phil Eskew. He was impressed that all-time baseball player Ted Williams became a late fishing buddy and that retired football coaching icons Red Blaik and Bud Wilkinson each set aside a day to visit him and delve into his thoughts.
All the voices he listened to – and I’m leaving out many who were closer to his age – had their own role in his achievements and felt their own satisfaction at his achievements, including:
- In nearly 120 years of Big Ten play, only three of IU’s 30 coaches have won an overall championship – other than Knight’s eight: McCracken had three (1953, ’54 and ’58) and Tom Crean had two (2013 and 2016).
- In nearly 80 years of polls, eight IU teams have been ranked No. 1 in the country. Five were Knight teams (’75, ’76, ’80, ’83 and ’93), two were McCracken (’53 and ’54) and one was Crean (2013). No other Big Ten program will be able to catch up for a while. Ohio State is second with four, including two when Knight played there.
- There was no coach named Big Ten Coach of the Year before 1973, and Knight was the first recipient, then several times after that. Of course, when the time came, Knight was named the Big Ten’s basketball coach of the 20th century – which, given the age of the sport, meant forever.
This raises another point: In the first 33 NCAA Tournament years (1939-1971), Big Ten teams won four championships. In Knight’s 29 IU seasons (1972-2000), Big Ten teams won six. Since he left the league 22 tournaments ago, the now 14-team Big Ten hasn’t won a single one.
Only Knight and his long-time friend and rival Dean Smith continued to play and coach a national champion. They are also the two most responsible for the global rise in basketball popularity and the success of national teams. During the peak years of their careers, both spent summers in Europe and other continents, where they led seminars and distributed educational films, and then hosted national trainers for training at home and abroad. This season is about how America plays the game.
So this year the No. 1 NBA draft pick came from France, foreign players now often receive the “MVP” or “All-Star NBA” award and colleges are recruiting more and more foreign players.
The first major college men’s coach to win 900 games, he won 662 of them in those 29 IU years. Of the 93 others, IU has won 1,250.
And when it ended for him here in the most turbulent dismissal in modern, perhaps all, IU history, the breaking point cited was his reaction – more offended than angry: He grabbed and reprimanded a young student who, almost 60, had called him ” Ritter “had addressed” instead of “Mr. “Knight” or “Trainer”.
Perhaps fate, in some way, gave him a uniquely fitting exit.
Bob Hammel was the HT sports editor who covered Bob Knight’s first 25 years of coaching at IU, including the 1976, 1981 and 1987 NCAA championships. He wrote six books about the Knight years and co-authored Knight’s autobiography from 2002.