Knight was college basketball's last brand

The coach who won three championships and stood at the game's center stage passes away at 83.

What we should be discussing is the team that went undefeated. 

The 1976 Indiana Hoosiers were a grinding, muscular defensive machine. They began the season No. 1 and they ended it in the NCAA championship by beating Michigan for the third time that season. Six of them played in the NBA, and they shot 53 percent together. Quinn Buckner and Bobby Wilkerson were a Berlin wall defensively, and Kent Benson was a first-overall NBA draft pick as a center. They began the year with a 20-point spanking of UCLA, beat the Bruins again in the national semis, and won a lot of games by merely warming up.

It is highly unlikely that anybody else will do this, what with 40-game schedules and super-conferences. NBA feeder systems, like UNLV in 1991 and Kentucky in 2015, couldn’t do it. Neither could tightly-knit teams like Wichita State in 2014 and Gonzaga in 2021, although the Zags got to the NCAA finals and lost to Baylor. Most people would lean toward UCLA ‘68 as the best team of all time, but that’s the beauty of living with “and 0.” If you’ve never lost, nobody can convince you that you ever would have.

But the ‘76 Hoosiers are not the main thing we’re discussing in the days after Bobby Knight died, at 83, on Wednesday in Bloomington. They were players, after all. Anything about Indiana basketball had to start and end with Knight, the coach, master and commander.

He personalized his profession the way nobody else has in college basketball, before or since. He lured the cameras and the media and the fans because nobody knew what he might do. Not Steve Alford, not Mike Woodson, not even Isiah Thomas, who helped win the second of Indiana’s third NCAA titles with Knight coaching. None of them would throw a chair or punch a cop or grab a player by the throat or, through his tirades, reduce an official to half his normal stature. There was always the possibility that Knight would. He was college basketball’s last One Man Brand.

The truth is that you could attend a month of Indiana games and not see Knight do anything untoward, the same way you could attend a month of John McEnroe’s tennis matches without cringing. Most of the time, the Hoosiers played the cloying defense and the unselfish motion offense that Knight mandated, and did it with exactitude.

If not for May’s injury they probably would have had a barnburner NCAA Final Four game with John Wooden’s last UCLA team in 1975 (hence, the 1975-76 opener stood as a what-might-have-been statement). That 1975 team won its first 31 and lost to Kentucky by two points in a regional final, a game in which May played seven minutes, and was probably better than the undefeateds because it had Steve Green and John Laskowski.

Knight’s teams won titles in 1976, 1981 and 1987 and got to the Final Four in 1973 and 1992. Only Mike Davis, among the five fulltime coaches who have followed Knight at Indiana, has reached a Final Four, and that was in 2002, two years after Knight was fired.

Knight is probably more renowned for a Sweet 16 game in 1984 when Indiana’s defense frustrated Michael Jordan and North Carolina, but the Hoosiers lost to Virginia two days later. An overlooked masterpiece is the 1992 regional final in Albuquerque, when UCLA was waiting with eight future NBA players, including the Pac-10’s alltime scorer in Don MacLean, a distinction he’ll hold forever.

On the off day, Knight canceled practice. He had noticed that the altitude in Albuquerque was a real thing. When the game arrived, the Hoosiers were several steps quicker and several miles more cohesive and they embarrassed UCLA, 106-79. At any moment, Knight’s best teams could disassemble you and then sell your parts. They had an appropriate fear of what might happen if they ever let up.

Otherwise, Knight had the earmarks of a vulgar egomaniac, a sub-adolescent who lacked the discipline and impulse control that he demanded of his players. This did not make him unique among coaches. Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun was probably harsher and more profane, and had fewer supporters in the coaching and media fraternities, but also won three NCAA championships, at a place that was a basketball desert before he showed up. Louisville’s Denny Crum also won three, but no one ever said, “Let’s go out and watch Denny Crum coach.”

No one knew how low Knight could go until John Feinstein wrote “A Season On The Brink,” a diary of the 1985-86 season. Knight granted Feinstein unfettered access to practices, meetings and games. That’s how we learned just how blue his language could be in the locker room, and what lengths he reached to tear down players. 

It showed the extent of Knight’s bullying, but also the willingness of players to live with such nonsense because they wanted to be part of his program. It was one of the most important nonfiction books ever written about sports, and Knight froze out Feinstein for years because he felt he’d been betrayed somehow.

Todd Jadlow, an ex-player, wrote that Knight would put pictures of female genitalia in the lockers of those players he considered soft, and the New York Times reported that he put sanitary napkins in the lockers of others. That would have gotten Knight fired in about two minutes today. It also demonstrated an alarming lack of biological knowledge, especially for the father of two boys.

This goes back to being “complicated.” Knight wasn’t complicated. He was contradictory, yes, like approximately 7.88 billion others on earth. He loved to rail about the media and humiliate individual reporters, but no coach in any sport has been more proactively friendly with more writers, particularly the ones he felt were influential.

He is famous for saying he wasn’t going to “kiss anybody’s ass” but also said that he wanted to be buried face down so anyone and everyone could also kiss his ass. That actually  was his preferred position. Few people anywhere have needed that sort of nonstop sycophancy.

It’s true that Knight had an inordinate number of players and coaches follow him into the coaching profession but, for the most part, their success was dependent on how little they emulated the boss. Mike Krzyzewski, of course, exceeded Knight’s accomplishments at Duke after he had played and coached for Knight at Army. His biggest obstacle, at first, was to pry himself from the association. “People thought I was going to drive a tank on campus,” he said. Chris Beard coached Texas Tech to the championship game in 2019, and Dusty May, a former manager, built the Florida Atlantic program to Final Four status last spring.

What was overlooked was the hold that Knight had on the Hoosier state itself, the friends he made and the little gestures that were massive to those who received them. The movie “Hoosiers,” in which Gene Hackman’s Norman Dale is somewhat reminiscent of Knight, is at its best when it shows that Indiana basketball, on all levels, is a personal issue, an identifying characteristic that binds all those small towns on all those 2-lane roads, and all the gyms that have stages on the baseline. A visit from Knight was papal in scope.

He also extended kindnesses to all sorts of coaches, some of whom were in distresss. When Penn State’s Bruce Parkhill left his job job, exhausted, Knight called him when the next season’s practice sessions began, just to make sure Parkhill was sure he’d done the right thing.

So it’s beyond ironic that the university president who fired Knight was a guy named Brand.

Although Myles Brand came to admire Knight for his impact around the state and sympathized with the pedestal on which he found himself, Knight’s misbehavior had reached critical mass. In a nimble bit of jujitsu, Brand suspended Knight in 2000 for choking a player, Neil Reed, during a practice three years prior. Then he laid down a dictum of “zero tolerance,” meaning that Knight could no longer smudge the line.

This is a coach-god who had struck a Puerto Rican policeman during the Pan American Games and had, of course, tossed a chair across Assembly Hall. Brand knew Knight couldn’t restrain himself, and it took only three months before a student said, “Hey, what’s up, Knight!” during a chance meeting on campus. Knight grabbed him in what Brand called an “unwelcome fashion” in an “uncomfortable exchange.” That was one of the least consequential lapses Knight ever had. But it wasn’t zero, and it wasn’t tolerated.

Would Brand have fired Knight, or felt so secure in doing so, if the basketball team was still relevant at the time? Good question. Four of Knight’s last seven teams finished the season unranked, and only one of them got to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament. By then the game was getting away from him.

Still, police had to disperse students from the front of Brand’s house, where they hung him in effigy, and there were the same disturbances in Bloomington as there were in State College when Joe Paterno was fired.

Brand also brought up Knight’s criticisms of the university’s trustees and his “disrespect” for alumni.  Afterward, Knight refused to appear for reunions of various Indiana teams, including the undefeated one, which irked several ex-players.

Brand died in 2009 but Knight still boycotted IU until Woodson, one of his former players, was named coach. Knight had been an ESPN game analyst, a surprisingly restrained one, and he had publicly endorsed Donald Trump in his presidential campaigns.

Dave Kindred, the nationally-renowned columnist and author, was Knight’s friend and was clear-eyed about the contradictions. On social media Thursday he wondered how it might have been different if Knight had learned to laugh at himself.

Woody Hayes, who lost his spectacular career at Ohio State because he slugged a Clemson player at the Gator Bowl, had warned Knight about the enemy within, and Knight was fond of saying that an athlete’s toughest opponent is “human nature.” It’s a difficult lesson for children, no matter how old. 

Add it all up and Knight was good for the business of basketball, good for his state’s self-esteem, good for his players once they got their diplomas and went into the world, and pretty bad for himself. But those conclusions are paved over a sinkhole of ugliness that simply didn’t have to be there.

The best way to remember him, ultimately, is to find the film of the guys of 1976. the ones that, on 32 occasions, actually practiced the things Bobby Knight said he wanted to preach.