Bob Knight's death brings the reckoning of a legacy. A day we knew would come.
INDIANAPOLIS – The world is a strange place today, a sadder place, a little emptier. Bob Knight didn’t go easily, as you knew he wouldn’t. He has been in hospice care among family for days, weeks, longer, death reaching for his hand and Knight smacking it away because nobody touches Bob Knight. Not until he’s ready to go.
He was ready Wednesday. Knight died, according to a post on bobknight.com, a website that represents Knight and his foundation. Indiana later announced his death before a women's exhibition game at Assembly Hall. He was 83. It leaves the rest of us to grapple with a legacy of greatness punctuated by perfection but punctured by controversy.
There are two kinds of worlds, and today we straddle them both: One with Bob Knight, and one without him.
There are two kinds of basketball, too. The game played before Bob Knight showed up in Bloomington in 1971. And the basketball that came next.
Bobby Knight: Three titles, a thrown chair, a salad bar
He coached the last undefeated team in men’s Division I basketball, the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers. And he threw a chair across the court against Purdue in 1985.
He coached the 1981 IU basketball team to his second national title. And in 1988 he answered a question from NBC’s Connie Chung about dealing with stress by saying, ”I think if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”
He coached the 1987 IU basketball team to the national title. And was suspended in 2000 for gripping IU player Neil Reed by the throat at practice, leading to his firing four months later when he angrily grabbed an IU student on the arm for asking, “Hey Knight, what’s up?”
Doyel in 2015: Quest for a legendary relic — Bob Knight's infamous chair
What do you do with a man as complicated as this? Do you remember all those things he got right, like the libraries he funded at IU, Texas Tech and his hometown in Ohio, giving tens of thousands of his own money and raising hundreds of thousands more – or wrongs like that incident in 2004 in Lubbock, Texas, where he berated the Texas Tech chancellor at a salad bar?
Good: a team winning percentage generally topped only by its graduation rate. Bad: kicking at his son, Pat, during an IU game in 1993 and head-butting Sherron Wilkerson (accidentally, Knight said) a year later.
He won 902 games in 42 seasons, most in NCAA Division I men’s history when he retired in 2008, fifth today and No. 1 among coaches whose programs were never investigated by the NCAA. But he was a bully picking the wings off a fly, like the moderator at a 1995 NCAA Tournament news conference who’d been mistakenly told that Knight wouldn’t be attending a scheduled news conference. The moderator shared that with the assembled media and was publicly humiliated by Knight when the IU coach appeared moments later.
What do you do with all of this?
What do we do with it today?
Wow moment: Bob Knight's return to IU
The last time most of us saw Bob Knight in public, it was Feb. 8, 2020. IU was playing Purdue on national television, and Knight was back in Assembly Hall for the first time since his firing in 2000. His return had been brokered by former players and managers, a list that includes Quinn Buckner, Mike Woodson, Scott May and Steve Green, and the last two IU athletic directors, Fred Glass and Scott Dolson.
Doyel in 2020: Bob Knight returns to Assembly Hall to tears, cheers
The scene was surreal, Knight walking onto the court at halftime as noise that had been building for two decades thundered off the walls and ceiling. At one point ESPN announcer Dick Vitale approached Knight – The General, baby! – and playfully touched him on the top of the head.
Knight lashed out with agitation, practically an involuntary action for people who, like Knight, suffer from dementia. The crowd gasped.
This was the Bob Knight experience in a microcosm: All that love and respect undermined by an anger that, for one reason or another, he could never control.
More: Top 12 honest and controversial Bob Knight quotes
Everything about him was complicated but pure. The temper was real and unhidden by a man proud of his intolerance, convinced he was correct in every conflict. The basketball was pure too, Knight perfecting a motion offense that turned halfcourt basketball into a free-flowing, unscripted ballet.
Knight didn’t invent the motion offense – Hank Iba was using it to win NCAA titles at Oklahoma State in the 1940s – but he modernized it, combined it with screening action that influenced the NBA offense you see today, including those by the NBA’s last two dynasties, San Antonio and Golden State. Bob Knight’s fingerprints are all over those offenses, just as surely as they were all over Neil Reed’s neck.
Bob Knight’s legacy? It’s complicated. And today, on the day he took his leave, we must honor – and remember – all of it.
Knight won 902 college games without many future NBA greats, because he was that good at teaching the game. His players were more likely to become star coaches than players, including Army’s Mike Krzyzewski, who won five NCAA titles and a Division I men’s record 1,202 games, along with three Olympic gold medals. Knight protégés also include five NBA coaches (Isiah Thomas, Mike Woodson, Randy Wittman, Lawrence Frank, Keith Smart) and three other Final Four coaches: Dusty May (FAU), Chris Beard (Texas Tech) and Mike Davis (IU).
Doyel in 2020: Graduates of the Bob Knight school rule the sports world
The basketball world is full of coaches and executives who didn’t play or coach for him, but attended IU to be student-managers and major in Bob Knight Basketball. That list includes Frank, Dolson, Pistons assistant GM George David and Pacers vice president Ryan Carr. The outside world has been similarly impacted, with former Knight student-managers becoming doctors, lawyers, firefighters, professors and school superintendents.
Knight is the only coach to win an NCAA title, NIT title, Olympic gold medal and Pan-Am gold medal. However – and there’s always a “however” – during that 1979 Pan-Am run in San Juan he was accused of hitting a police officer before practice. By the time he was convicted of assault, Knight was back in Indiana, never to return to Puerto Rico. He left that island nation in 1979 much the way he has left us today, grappling with his unique marriage of victory and rage, a union that followed him for decades, until death does it part.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Bob Knight’s legacy? It’s complicated, but we must remember all of it.
