There was almost no one neutral on the subject of Robert Montgomery Knight, who died Wednesday at 83 after being ravaged by dementia for several years. Many swore by him; many swore at him. He was an emotional and intense person who inspired great emotions and intensity.
Let’s begin with the easy part: He was a great basketball coach. He won 902 games at Army, Indiana and Texas Tech, retiring as the all-time winningest Division I men’s basketball — surpassed later by his pupil Mike Krzyzewski and a handful of others. He won three national titles, went to five Final Fours and won an Olympic gold medal. His first national championship team in 1976 is the last Division I men’s team to go undefeated. Knight almost never drank, but each winter when the last undefeated team went down he would treat himself to a sangria and ginger ale.
He played his college basketball for great teams at Ohio State, but he rarely got off the bench, in large part because — ironically — he couldn’t play defense. Coaching was his way of becoming a bigger star in the hoops pantheon than teammates such as Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek and Mel Nowell. Defeat always tore him up, and he always needed to blame someone else — referees, players, the media, even his bosses at Indiana.
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When the Hoosiers finished their undefeated 1976 season, Knight walked out of the Philadelphia Spectrum with his pal Bob Hammel, sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Telephone. Hammel remembered being thrilled and saying to Knight, “You did it, you did it, you won the championship!”
Knight’s response? “Shoulda been two.” He was still upset that his 1975 team had finished 31-1, losing in the region final to Kentucky. Knight never got over losses — it was part of his greatness as a coach and his frequent unhappiness as a person.
Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed. In the late 1980s, he happened to show up on a rare evening when high school recruit Calbert Cheaney had a bad night. He upbraided his assistants for dragging him to see a player clearly not good enough for Indiana. They explained he had caught Cheaney on a bad night and should see him play again. Knight told them he wouldn’t waste any more time, nor should they.
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Cheaney committed to Evansville — coached by Jim Crews, who had played on Indiana’s 1976 team and coached under Knight for eight years. Knight was at a summer camp game a few months later and saw Cheaney again. This time, the real Calbert Cheaney showed up.
“Why aren’t we recruiting that kid?” Knight asked his assistants.
The assistants told him he had ordered them not to recruit Cheaney. “Why don’t you just give him a call and see if he might have any interest in Indiana?” Knight said.
Cheaney, quite naturally, was thrilled. He chose Indiana, was the star of Knight’s last Final Four team in 1992 and is still the Big Ten’s all-time leading scorer. Crews was stunned that his old coach had recruited a player who had committed to him.
“If some other coach did that to me, you’d call him every name in the book,” Crews said to Knight. “I know coaches do this sort of thing, but how could you do this to me?”
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Knight responded by telling Crews he would be nothing in basketball if not for him. Crews finally said, “You know something, Coach: The saddest part of your life is that you treat your enemies better than you treat your friends.”
The truth in that statement is very sad. Although they all stayed publicly loyal to Knight to the end, he got into huge fights with, among others, Krzyzewski, former Indiana star Steve Alford, longtime assistant coaches Ron Felling and Dan Dakich and — far less importantly — me.
I can’t possibly overstate how important Knight was in my life. The access he gave me for “A Season on the Brink” allowed my first book, about Indiana’s 1985-1986 season, to become a No 1. bestseller, which has allowed me to pick and choose book topics for the past 38 years. Not once did Knight back away from the access, even during some difficult moments for his team. Although he didn’t speak to me for eight years after the book’s publication — upset, of all things, with seeing profanity in the book — he eventually decided to “forgive” me, and we had a distant though cordial relationship for the rest of his life.
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He could be cruel, and he could be downright mean. There were times, though, when he was as loyal of a friend as you could have. I saw both sides.
Among his many flaws, there were two that stood out: He always insisted he didn’t care what anyone cared about him when, in fact, he cared desperately and went so far out of his way to prove it that he hurt himself figuratively — and literally.
Early in my season there, Indiana lost a very good game at Louisville, which went on to win the national championship. Exams were starting at Indiana that week, and Knight told his longtime sports information director, Kit Klingelhoffer, to let the Louisville people know he wouldn’t be coming to speak to the media because the team had to get back to Bloomington. It was a legitimate excuse, although Knight could easily have gone in for a few minutes while the players were showering and dressing.
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Somehow, the reason for his absence never got to the Louisville people, who announced only that Knight wasn’t coming in to speak. I know Klingelhoffer delivered the message because I was standing there when he did.
The next morning, all the local paper reported was that Knight had “refused” to come in. Reading this, Knight went ballistic. He sent for Klingelhoffer and read him the riot act. When Klingelhoffer said he had delivered the message, Knight got so angry he kicked the telephone that was sitting on the floor next to his locker room chair. Unfortunately, he was barefooted at the time and began hopping around in pain, screaming profanities. I ran from the room, afraid that if I laughed, he would banish me forever.
Worse than that, he always had to have the last word — whether it was with referees, other coaches, players, the media and even his family.
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His firing at Indiana in 2000 was classic Knight, reacting angrily to an Indiana student walking past him and saying, “What’s up, Knight?”
The kid was being a jerk, and Knight wasn’t wrong to be upset about being spoken to that way by someone 35 years his junior, but he went too far getting in the kid’s face. He was already on a “zero tolerance” edict from school president Myles Brand after a video had come out the previous season showing him choking the late Neil Reed in practice after Knight had insisted such a thing never happened. I was asked if I had ever seen Knight physically abuse a player during my season with him. Physically abuse them? No. Emotionally and verbally abuse them? You bet.
After Brand fired him, he vowed never to return to Indiana and even made a point of visiting archrival Purdue to “show” Brand. When the 1987 championship team gathered for a 20th reunion, Knight refused to attend. The same thing happened when the 1981 title team gathered for a 25th reunion. In 2016, the undefeated 1976 team had a 40th reunion, and Knight refused to come. He was still showing Brand — who had been dead for seven years.
The person most hurt by Knight’s absences was Knight.
Three years later, he finally returned to Assembly Hall after moving back to Bloomington for medical care. Sadly, he was sick by then and couldn’t really appreciate or enjoy the roaring ovation he got from the Indiana faithful.
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His other great flaw: Knight regularly thought he was funny when he wasn’t, and his idea of humor was often offensive.
One day after practice, Felling didn’t hear Knight calling him because he was talking to me. When I finally pointed out that Knight was calling him, we sprinted across the court. When we arrived, Knight, having decided it was my fault Felling hadn’t heard him, made a truly egregious antisemitic comment.
I froze. I knew I couldn’t argue with him in front of his coaches because he would have to win the argument.
But that night, he and I were alone in his car en route to one of the many preseason appearances, and I called him on it.
There was a long pause.
“You know what I hate more than anything?” he finally said. Oh, God, I thought, here we go.
“What?” I said.
“When I say something truly stupid,” he said.
I knew two coaches well who had almost fail-safe memories for names, dates and just about every game they ever coached: Dean Smith and Bob Knight. Both later suffered from dementia, as tragic of an irony as I can imagine.
I feel truly sad that he died in such an agonizing way. He left behind a lot of friends and some emphatic enemies. But he made an indelible impression on everyone who knew him.
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