Bob Knight: The Good and the Ugly

Bob Knight died last week.

Knight was a college basketball coach of the first order at Indiana University. He was also a man who represented the best and the worst of the coaching profession. 

First the good. Bob Knight was honest. He played by the rules. He inspired and forced young men to be the best players, students, and human beings they could be. He taught players to play hard and demanded they do so every night. He preached work ethic and all the good habits that make people better. 

Nobody did this better than Bob Knight. 

His teams at Indiana won three national basketball championships. He graduated great players like Calbert Cheney, Quinn Buckner, Mike Woodson, and Isaiah Thomas, who all went on to great careers in the NBA. 

Knight led the U.S. Olympic Team to a gold medal in basketball in 1984. Remember in 1972, the U.S. lost the gold medal game to the Soviet Union at the buzzer after time had run out. It was the first time the US has lost an Olympic basketball game - ever. And Knight, a die-hard political conservative, was determined to return the U.S. to the top of the basketball heap. The 1984 Olympic win was a fitting return to basketball dominance by the United States, where basketball was invented. 

I coached high school basketball in Vermont for several years and you might say I was a little obsessed with attending basketball clinics given by college coaches. I wanted to know how to run a program and practice, how to set up an offense and defense, build a schedule, work with young students, and deal with parents. No matter what level, coaching sports is a huge undertaking, especially if you want to do it well. Today, you can watch any number of coaching clinics on YouTube. In fact, you can watch Bob Knight teach other coaches how to run practice, or how to run his famous “motion offense.’’ But before the Internet, finding VHS tapes of a Knight-run clinic was like finding a Bob Dylan bootleg tape. 

Knight was captivating. No one ran a more efficient practice. It was solid gold for any high school coach. 

But with all that good, there came an even more sizable helping of bad. Bob Knight was also a toxic, chauvinist bully whose disgusting behavior and temper tantrums overshadowed the good he did for so many.  

He once advised rape victims to “lie back and enjoy it.’’

He angrily choked a player on the court. 

He headed-butted a player. 

He threw a chair onto the court in frustration. 

He was charged with battery during the Pan Am Games and convicted in absentia.

His righteousness about honestly playing by the rules led him to demean other coaches as cheaters. Even when he was right, he was wrong. 

The beginning of Knight’s downfall was his fateful decision to allow Washington Post writer John Feinstein to spend a season with the Indiana team. The resulting book, “A Season on the Brink,’’ details the inside of Knight’s program. The good stuff was there - the high standards, the discipline, the demand that players attend class. But the bad emerged in the book too: tirades, intimidation, and abuse. 

As often happens to very successful people, hubris kicked in for Bob Knight. After three championships and an Olympic gold medal, amid a changing country and a massive shift in cultural values, Knight found that he could not adapt. 

Other coaches did. His star pupil, Mike Krzyzewski, turned Duke University into a powerhouse by understanding the changing needs of individual players and families. Coach K adapted from a tough guy coach from West Point to a master recruiter and parent-whisperer of modern, video game-obsessed high schoolers. Coach K promised parents he would care for their children and turn them into not just NBA stars, but adults for life. 

Knight failed at this. 

Instead of adapting to new rules, new players, and a new culture, Knight dug in his heels. Long before Donald Trump, Knight ignored his own rules of behavior and thought he could and should be exempt. A mix of political conservatism and frustration with cultural changes brought him down. 

In the end, Indiana President Myles Brand fired Knight after repeated violations of a behavior policy. 

Knight held a grudge and promised never to return to Indiana, even when his teams returned several times for reunions and celebrations. 

Knight never understood how cultural change in America - civil rights and redress of past abuses and a need to understand and listen instead of command and control - was a good thing that could make his teams better. 

The most successful coaches and leaders understood this but Bob Knight never did. He benefited greatly from an America that was stratified and fearful of powerful people who could bend the rules to their will. 

But when students, players, and citizens demanded to be treated equally, Knight could not give up the control he prized. He had turned into an abusive old man. His unwillingness to soften ended his career. He lost his job and his reputation over it. He must have been very, very sad at the end.