College Basketball's Knight-Errant

By Tom Callahan

If Bobby Knight had played a little more at Ohio State 25 years ago, college basketball might be a little seemlier today. By expert accounts, he was a better player than many people remember, though not as good as he thought. The trouble was, his college teammates in 1960 included John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Larry Siegfried, who went on in the pros to amass 14 championship rings. Knight began on the bench, and is still on the bench. His space in the Hall of Fame has been fashioned out of pine.

In order to start coaching at West Point, he was obliged to join the Army. PFC Knight earned $89 a month and all the cadets he could eat. Under an intemperate head coach named Tates Locke and an institutionalized system of hazing, Knight instantly burst forth as the most undisciplined disciplinarian since General George S. Patton, or at least Woody Hayes. By 24, he was the head coach at Army; by 30, he had moved over to Indiana University, and as of last week Knight's Hoosiers are the national champions for the third time in twelve years.

Hoosiers is a hard term to define, though a current movie of that name picks at the synonyms of Indiana, basketball and Knight. The opening scene of rural roads, buckets and barns is faithful to Knight's picture of the place. Driving along, he likes to count the hoops. His best player, Guard Steve Alford of New Castle, learned to count on a scoreboard. Ever since Alford was a high school "Mr. Basketball," the Midwestern equivalent of a peerage, even his regimen on the foul line has been as famous in Indiana as the frost. (Touch your socks, your shorts; one dribble, two dribbles, three; shoot, swish.)

The coach in the film, like Hayes at Ohio State, once punched a player and disappeared. But the object of his assault, much more like Knight, was his own player. Knight regards himself as a teacher with a classroom full of difficult students, though he is no missionary. "The state of Indiana pays the corrections officer one salary and me another. Let him work with the incorrigibles." Knight only treats them like incorrigibles.

"Do you think I'm unyielding?" he asks Dean Garrett playfully, clasping a fist to the back of his center's neck. "No," Garrett answers sheepishly. "Am I unyielding?" he turns to Forward Daryl Thomas. "No, sir." It is the eve of the title game, and the press invites Alford into the discussion. Socks, shorts, one, two, three. "I've survived for four years," he backs off in a panic. "I've only got one more game." Indiana won it, 74-73, over the Syracuse Orangemen. Their perfectly competent but strangely insecure coach, Jim Boeheim, was slightly outflanked at the end of both halves. As always, Knight was worth a few points from the bench.

He reveres the old coaches like Henry Iba, Joe Lapchick and Pete Newell. When Clair Bee was 85 and blind, Long Island's great coach painstakingly scratched out a message for Knight that read: "Clair Bee and Bob Knight do not believe that repetition is gospel." Lately Knight, 46, has actually dabbled in zone defenses and, as the euphemism goes, "broadened his recruiting base." A junior-college transfer, Keith Smart, made the last two jumpers against Syracuse.

| Knight's fascination has never been with winning, though, so much as excelling. "Bob reminds me of Alexander the Great," says Al McGuire, the TV coach, "who conquered the world and then sat down and cried because there was nothing left to conquer." Knight admits, "Victory has never been a particularly satisfying thing to me. It's really hard for me to say, 'Well, we won.' " He startled the players earlier this year when instead of screaming after a squeaker he sighed, "Well, maybe we ought to win a game by a point now and then."

Among his unofficial consultants are the old Packer lineman Willie Davis and Reds Catcher Johnny Bench, who gave a Final Four pep talk. Ted Williams telephoned. ("He may never have played basketball, but he knows.") Knight is a Vince Lombardi man. Flashing back to West Point, he calls Lombardi a "profane Colonel Red Blaik." Judging from the best-selling biography A Season on the Brink, which Knight refuses to read, he may be the most profane coach in history. But it is only fair to add that his particular whipping boy in the book, Daryl Thomas, found himself in the perfect position to take a bad last shot against Syracuse and had the discipline to get the ball to Smart.

In January the Indiana faculty council adopted a declaration that "athletes shall not be subjected to physically or verbally abusive, intimidating, coercive, humiliating or degrading behavior." It passed by a huge margin, 18 to 16. Sometimes he throws a chair, but Knight seems to get the big things right, beginning with academics. A six-month sentence is forever pending in Puerto Rico, where Knight was convicted in absentia for assaulting a policeman at the 1979 Pan Am Games. But the officer's story collapses when he swears that Knight called him "nigger." Any other vile expression would be eminently believable. But a legion of young black men can testify that Knight does not think in those terms.

"I'm still not sure we're a really good basketball team," he humphed. Knight was "very pleased for the players," though, "and very pleased with them." Especially, they heard the second part. Well, maybe they ought to win a game by a point now and then.