Damon Bailey on Bob Knight: 'There are things I do today that I learned from coach Knight'

The image chronicled in John Feinstein’s bestselling book “A Season on the Brink” is so striking, so quintessentially Indiana, that it makes sense now, looking back nearly four decades later that Damon Bailey’s name would be forever linked to Bob Knight.

Bailey’s legend grew in the coming years in high school at Bedford North Lawrence, where he played in a state championship – and won – in front of more than 41,000 fans. The legend began in a tiny gym in Heltonville in Southern Indiana, where Knight sat on the wood bleachers, signed autographs and watched Bailey play as an eighth grader in 1986.

He was famously impressed.

“Damon Bailey is better than any guard we have right now,” Knight told one of his assistants after watching Bailey play, as told by Feinstein. “And I don’t mean potentially, I mean better today.”

With that quote, the legend of Damon Bailey exploded. When Knight died Wednesday at age 83, Bailey’s phone lit up with reporters and broadcasters asking about his thoughts on his former coach.

“I think for all the faults he may have had, or was perceived to have had, the people who were closest to him, like his players, there were very few bad things that you heard,” Bailey said. “Obviously the public and the media can think what they want; for those of us who played for coach, we may not have always agreed with him, but he taught us a lot of life lessons through basketball. There are things I do today that I learned from coach Knight.”

It was almost impossible for Bailey to live up to the hype and standard that he set as a high school player at Bedford North Lawrence, where he set a state scoring record in boys’ basketball that still stands with 3,134 points and won IndyStar Mr. Basketball and a state championship in 1990. But Bailey’s legend went beyond the numbers and accolades in an era before social media and YouTube videos.

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Knight, probably the last person you would expect to contribute to the fervor of an individual player, contributed to the legend with his comments in Feinstein’s book on the 1985-86 IU team.

“As a junior high kid, I didn’t know what to think,” Bailey said of his reaction to Knight’s presence in Heltonville. “I was fortunate that I had very strong parents to keep me in line. It would have been easy for me to get a big head. But my parents approached life and things very similar to the way coach Knight did. They were there to keep me grounded and knock me back down. Obviously, coach and I, and certainly other players, are more linked than others, whether it is the 1976 team or Steve Alford, and a big reason for that is ‘A Season on the Brink.’ It threw me in the spotlight at a very young age. I’m not sure a kid is ready for that. I wasn’t ready for it. But I grew up with it and, again, there were positives and negatives. But coach definitely threw me out there with it because of the book.”

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With the passage of time, Bailey’s college career looks even better in retrospect than it might have at the time considering the enormous expectations. Bailey, who was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016, won 108 games during his four-year career at IU and finished sixth on the school’s all-time scoring list with 1,741 points. The Hoosiers won two Big Ten titles during his tenure and reached at Final Four in 1992.

As a senior in 1993-94, Bailey averaged 19.5 points and was named a third-team All-American.

“The thing that made coach great was his level of expectation he had on every player,” Bailey said. “It really didn’t have to do with your athletic ability or how well you could shoot or anything like that. It was, ‘Are you getting the most out of your ability?’ Not comparing yourself to being the best IU player of all-time. I think that’s the thing that separates (Knight) from most coaches is his level of demand no matter the talent he had on the floor. You did things the right way, played together as a team and you were not going to get outworked. If you look at it from that standpoint, there are a lot of former coach Knight players who are very successful outside of basketball.”

Bailey said he appreciates those life lessons now more than he might have as an 18- or 19-year-old college student. “You can’t explain how good it was when it was good and how bad it was when it was bad,” Bailey said. “When we were 17-1 in the Big Ten my junior year, I’m not sure there was a better place on earth to be.”

Because Bailey’s college career came on the back end of Knight’s tenure (1971-2000) at IU, there was not an opportunity for Bailey to come back to Bloomington and connect with Knight in the role of former player/coach. Bailey played one season with the Pacers before playing in the CBA for a few years. He retired from professional basketball right around the time Knight was dismissed from IU in 2000.

That is not to say Bailey did not have a relationship with Knight after IU. Bailey visited Knight when he was coaching at Texas Tech and connected with him at various functions over the years.

“I quit playing the year coach got fired,” Bailey said. “So having the time to where I was back in town and spending time around the program when I was done playing, we didn’t have that. I did have about as good of a relationship as you can have with coach. That’s not a negative, but coach was a challenging person to get extremely close to. We all kind of moved on in our lives and he did as well. That relationship was not bad, but it probably would have been closer, like some of those guys who played for him early in his career, if we had the opportunity to be around the program for another 15 or 20 years. We didn’t have that.”

Still, Bailey would not change anything about his experience playing for Knight. Though the spotlight was intense, in large part due to Knight, Bailey said it was remarkable honor to play at IU.

“We were in the national championship hunt every year,” Bailey said. “Because of that, there were more good days than bad days. The media or public will say he played mind games and as a kid you think maybe they are mind games. But there was also the understanding that he is an authoritative figure and this is the way we are going to do things. You don’t have explain why we are doing things. My upbringing was similar. You don’t question authority, so you didn’t have to tell me why we were doing things a certain way. As time went on, things changed, and society got a little softer. There was no middle ground with coach, which is probably what got him in trouble later on.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Bob Knight: Ex-IU player Damon Bailey forever tied to IU coach