So many sportswriting colleagues knew Bobby Knight far better than I, and many found him to be as brilliant and charming as he was intimidating and derisive. Can’t say I’m jealous at having missed out on more exposure to the man. What I witnessed during Knight’s infamously antagonistic behavior during the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as well as glancing brushes with his hostility at a few NCAA tournament stops, was quite enough exposure to bullying, demeaning treatment of others: players, women, reporters, officials, et al.
Knight, who died at 83 on Nov. 1, was an enormously successful basketball coach, three times national champion at the University of Indiana and ranked No. 1 in career Division I victories at the time of his 2008 retirement. He was praised widely for sticking to recruiting rules and insisting that his player attend class.
But he was a Professor of Conquest who based his worth on being a winner, and was regularly forgiven his toxic conduct by fellow coaches and basketball administrators because his teams could put the most points on the board. That, in spite of his being publicly and regularly profane, all fury and outrage when things didn’t go his way and never willing to take blame if they didn’t.
Furthermore, he felt put-upon, even when given thoroughly evenhanded evaluations. In a comprehensive 1981 treatment of Knight’s plusses and minuses, Sports Illustrated’s master of human profiles, Frank Deford, cited Knight’s dismissive take on sportswriters (and, by extension, everyone else) with Knight’s argument that “all of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.”
“At the base of everything,” Deford wrote, “this is it: If you’re not part of basketball, you can’t really belong, you can only distort.”
In other words: Who are you to criticize the winningest coach around?
Given uncommon access to Indiana’s daily hoops operation in the 1985-86 season, Washington Post reporter John Feinstein produced the best-selling book “A Season On the Brink” in which he presented Knight’s detailed game preparations, his high expectations of player deportment (something of an irony, given their coach), his demanding training sessions as well as his huge popularity among Indiana fans.
But, since Feinstein also faithfully recorded Knight’s well-known use of obscenities (though Feinstein downplayed that a bit) and other obvious foibles, Knight accused Feinstein of being “a whore and a pimp.” To which Feinstein, a man of wit and not easily cowed, reacted: “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”
“Too many media folks deified him by virtue of his championships and, to a lesser extent, his graduation record,” veteran New York sportswriter Harvey Araton posted upon Knight’s death. “But as the financial rewards created by revenue-producing college sports grew along with his stature, he became what Coach simply cannot be—the most powerful man on campus, subservient to no one. His self-righteousness ultimately consumed all that he was.”
So about the ’79 Pan Am Games. Right out of the box, Knight assumed a superior badgering attitude, bickering with officials from Puerto Rico and Mexico throughout the opening U.S. game against the outmanned Virgin Islands team.
With seven minutes to play in a 136-88 rout by the Yanks, Knight loudly whined about a measly U.S. charging foul and was ejected, leading to a hasty meeting of international basketball authorities the next day to reprimand Knight. Though several U.S. hoops bigwigs refused to condemn Knight, basketball delegates from several Latin American nations flatly branded Knight “the ugly American” and the U.S. Olympic Committee president, Bob Kane, admitted he felt “there is a certain amount of noblesse oblige necessary” from his delegation.
That was before Knight was arrested at a training session for slurring the Brazilian women’s team and getting into a scuffle with a Puerto Rican policeman; before Knight declared that “the only people on this whole goddamn island I care about are my players;” before Knight told a U.S. journalist, whom he assumed to be a local reporter, that “I don’t talk to Puerto Ricans;” before he insulted the natives by saying that “all they know how to do on this damn island is grow bananas.” (Not only a demeaning statement, but inaccurate; Puerto Rico never was known for banana production.)
Knight then justified everything he had done and said, following the United States’ gold-medal victory over host Puerto Rico, by declaring, “I just know we are nine-and-oh [wins and losses] down here. I’m not a diplomat. I don’t know anything about foreign policy. [A worker at the village] told me that when the U.S. picked me to coach, he knew the U.S. had come to win. Well, that’s what we did.”
Worse, Knight would not cease and desist with his rude comments regarding that competition and its hosts. Three years later, at an event sponsored by a hospital in Gary, Ind., Knight told the audience that as he left Puerto Rico, “when the plane was taxiing onto the runway and taking off, I stood up, unzipped my pants, lowered my shorts and turned my bare ass to the window of that plane—because that’s the last thing I wanted those people to see of me.”
Deford wrote in 1981, “Although it’s fashionable to say Knight rules by intimidation, he actually rules more by derision. He abuses the people he comes into contact with…”
Knight and U.S. basketball decision-makers insisted the anecdote in Gary was “just a joke, and dismissed the Hispanic organizations that were calling Knight a racist and demanding he not be kept as the Americans’ 1984 Olympic coach. Ed Steitz, who was president of the U.S. basketball federation, insisted, “We’re not about to tell Bobby Knight, ‘You can’t say this or that.’ He’s a coach of great renown. There is no way we’ll reconsider Bobby Knight’s appointment as U.S. Olympic basketball coach for 1984. We’re convinced he’s the right man to win the gold medal.”
He did win that gold medal. But in the end, that wasn’t the only thing noted in his obituaries. In the end, it wasn’t just about basketball victories.