The College Court | Who is the real Bob Knight?

Emma Carmichael Columnist

Bob Knight is done. For over 42 years he has patrolled the sidelines of Division I basketball courts, face set in his characteristic scowl.

He has coached 1,273 games of basketball and established and perfected the motion offense. He has won three National Championships and amassed a men’s National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) record of 902 career wins.

He has also thrown one chair, manhandled two players, assaulted a police officer, made countless controversial and often sexist remarks and received, as a result of his outbursts, enough suspensions to put him on par with President Bush for most vacation days in a career and enough fines to match his retirement plan.

Yes, Knight is done. And he couldn’t have had a more fitting exit.

With 10 games remaining in his seventh season of coaching men’s basketball at Texas Tech University, Knight resigned last Monday, Feb. 4, and handed the team over to his son and the team’s assistant coach Pat Knight.

The Red Raiders had posted a 67-60 victory over Oklahoma State that Saturday, Feb. 2, and were 12-8 overall. And then, without warning, their head coach quit. The winningest coach in NCAA men’s basketball history left his team in the hands of his 37-year-old son, whose only prior head coaching experience was in the United States Basketball League with the Wisconsin Blast, who went 19-15 in his only season there.

Who do we look to here? Do we consider Knight the coach, who was possibly the best teacher of man-to-man defense and the motion offense in the history of basketball, or Knight the person, who has consistently acted in a childish, sexist, arrogant, offensive and confrontational manner since his first day coaching? Do we celebrate his victories and accept his apologies, or do we denounce his myriad transgressions and hesitate to honor his successes as a coach?

Let’s see. Knight the coach is the only coach to have ever won the NCAA Championship, the National Invitational Tournament Championship and gold medals in both the Olympics and the Pan American Games. Knight the person told the Basketball Hall of Fame not to renominate him because their 1987 rejection had been “a slap in the face.” Nevertheless, he accepted his induction the following year.
Knight the coach was the first person to be named the Naismith Men’s College Coach of the Year in 1987. Knight the person compared the stresses of coaching to rape in a 1988 interview with NBC reporter Connie Chung: “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” Knight later explained that he simply meant that both stress and rape were out of one’s control.

Knight the coach led Texas Tech to the 2007 NCAA Tournament, giving him the most Tournament berths of any coach in NCAA history. Knight the person was arrested for assaulting a Puerto Rican police officer during the 1979 Pan American Games after finding that his team’s practice gym was not yet open. Indiana Governor Otis Bowen later refused to help extradite Knight to Puerto Rico and the charges were dropped.

Knight the coach was awarded the Claire Bee Coach of the Year Award in 2002, which is, interestingly, named after a coach who was known for caring deeply about his players and helping to promote the positive character of basketball in his career. Knight the person was almost charged with battery in 1999 after choking a man who had confronted him for making a racist comment in a restaurant.
And it’s here that the lines between person and coach start to blur. Was it the person or the coach, for example, who screamed in his son Pat’s face (who was on his Indiana squad in the 90s) in a 101-82 win over Notre Dame and kicked at him before making him sit on the bench?

And I wonder which Knight it was—the person or the coach—who put his hand around Indiana player Neil Reed’s neck in a 1997 practice and shook him? Or who threw a plastic chair at a ref in a 1985 game and was consequently slapped with three technical fouls? And, in the incident that caused Indiana to finally fire Knight in September 2000, was it Knight the person, or Knight the coach who grabbed studen Kent Harvey roughly by the arm and berated him for bad manners after Harvey had said affectionately, “Hey Knight, what’s up?”

In his Sports Illustrated column “The Hot Button”, Phil Taylor imagines what Knight might have done had one of his players waltzed into his office one afternoon following a solid victory and said that he wasn’t going to be practicing that day, or ever again, because he was quitting basketball: “Knight probably would have insulted the kid’s manhood, lectured him about the meaning of commitment and bellowed at him not to let the door hit him on the way out,” writes Taylor, “all in language so profane that your brain should have an ‘explicit content’ stamp just for imagining it.”

Knight the coach, it seems, does not even hold Knight the person to the standards he sets forth for his players and assistant coaches. He snuck out of Lubbock, Texas with his 900th career victory under his hunting belt and the burden of not reaching the NCAA Tournament off of his slouching shoulders and onto his son’s. He left town because the Knight the coach was done with this team and these players, and Knight the person didn’t care whether or not this team still needed him.

They’ve since gone 0-2 under Coach Pat.

—Emma Carmichael ’10 is an urban studies major and a member of the Vassar women’s basketball team. This semester she is editorializing on issues in all divisions of college-level athletics.