Madness defined: Knight joins the media

Bob Knight was late meeting me for brunch. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

“I’d like eggs Benedict, real runny eggs,” he told the server Tuesday morning at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza as I mulled how he would have punished a player who was 15 minutes late to practice.

Boot him from the gym, or just make him run extra sprints?

“It would depend on the circumstances,” Knight said. “Joe Lapchick told me before I ever coached a game, he said, ‘Don’t have set rules. If you have to reprimand or punish a kid, base it on circumstances.’ ”

Based on the circumstances, I gave him a pass. The PR people said it was their fault, and this is Los Angeles. Everybody gets 20 minutes for traffic.

Welcome to the weird days of Knight’s retirement. Only don’t say retirement, because he hasn’t ruled out coaching again.

“I haven’t,” he said. “I think at different times in one’s life, different things have an appeal.”

Somehow, I thought being a member of the media as an ESPN studio analyst or having orange juice with a newspaper reporter would have about as much appeal as a colonoscopy.

“Here’s how I handle that: I just simply say I am a media consultant,” Knight said of his ESPN gig talking basketball with Digger Phelps and Jay Bilas -- a job for which he has been outfitted with a rainbow of sweaters with the ESPN logo.

“I told ‘em, ‘I’m not going to wear a coat and tie. If you want me to do this, that’s the first condition.’ This is sports. It isn’t the Supreme Court.”

He still had to explain why he was having brunch with me.

“Obviously, I’m getting paid to do this,” he said nicely.

Knight was in L.A. for a one-day whirlwind tour as a spokesman to promote DirecTV’s Mega March Madness package.

“That deal that DirecTV has come out with, that Mega March Madness thing, they’re giving you the best thing you can possibly have,” he said. “I mean, the way the NCAA charges for things, if you were at a game, you’d pay $69 for a hot dog and a Coke. Here, with DirecTV, you can see I think damn near 40 games that CBS doesn’t carry for $69.”

He could transform the job of spokesmodel, that Bob Knight.

There are those who say he’s charming and those who say he’s a bully. Let’s just say he’s versatile.

What you want are his picks, and the coach who has won three NCAA titles and more games than any other men’s major-college coach in history chose Pittsburgh to win it all, with North Carolina, Kansas and UCLA joining the Panthers at the Final Four.

“They really, really impressed me because they won that game with Georgetown in a way where they didn’t have to make a miracle shot, they didn’t have to come from behind to do it,” he said.

“Pittsburgh just manhandled ‘em. Played them off the court, really. I’m still high on Georgetown. One game changes the tournament committee’s opinion, never mine, but I’ll get to the tournament committee in a minute.

“Pitt with [Levance] Fields, and [DeJuan] Blair and [Sam] Young inside are just tougher than hell, and [Jamie] Dixon is a tough coach that really works them hard and stays on them.”

He is impressed, too, with UCLA’s Ben Howland, Dixon’s former boss at Pittsburgh. And don’t tell Knight that some people are going to say Howland can’t win the big one if UCLA doesn’t win the title after consecutive trips to the Final Four.

“That’s bull . . .,” he said. “Just getting there is such a difficult proposition. You’ve got to win big ones to get there. Jesus, I wish people would spare me that.”

That said, Knight said he thinks Texas A&M;, Connecticut or Duke could pose problems for the Bruins.

“Let me talk about UCLA. I love Love, to be redundant. But he’s not a great athlete. He’s not fast. He doesn’t have good quickness. He just knows how to play.

“That team, Howland has done more with a lot less talent than people think he’s had. I’m just telling you, I mean, trust me on that one. He’s taken that team a lot further than talent should indicate that team should go. They’ve been good. They’ve won a lot of games. So now they’re picked as one of maybe two or three teams that can win this thing. And if in fact they do, most people will look at quote-unquote great talent. I look at the job Howland’s done with the talent he has.

“People say [Darren] Collison is a great guard, maybe he’s the best guard. Well, how many guards have you seen that are as quick as he is? There’s a bunch. [Ty Lawson], at North Carolina, D.J. Augustin [of Texas], there’s a bunch, and that shoot as well as he does. He’s a kid that’s developed into a smart player. That’s a lot of things. But that’s a team where a coach is probably not going to get the kind of credit that coach deserves.”

Knight said he couldn’t talk intelligently about USC because “I haven’t seen them play.”

But he coached against Kansas State, USC’s first-round opponent, at Texas Tech.

“It will be whether Kansas State comes to play or not. They’ve not always done that,” he said. “When they haven’t done it all the time, there’s reason to wonder.”

Anyone who has wondered what Knight’s retirement -- or sabbatical -- might hold probably will have to keep wondering. He says he wants to talk about causes he cares about and people and businesses he thinks have been good for the game -- as well as things that haven’t.

“This is college basketball, and to keep it college basketball somehow the NCAA has got to do away with one-year players,” Knight said after mention of the USC-Kansas State game. “All you have to do is pass six hours the first semester and you can play right through the NCAA tournament. That’s not what college basketball should be, and the NCAA should be just ripped apart for allowing that to happen.”

He went out of his way to praise broadcasters Dick Vitale and Billy Packer, saying both belong in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

And although he liked the NCAA tournament best when it was only 32 teams -- “That isn’t going to happen, I know that” -- Knight has plans for either a 96-team or a 128-team field. He’d even serve on the selection committee.

“How many of the best 64 teams in the country are not in the tournament?” he said. “I’d say there could be 20.

“I’ve always said if you took 20 teams in the NIT and 20 teams in the bottom of the selection seeds [most of them automatic qualifiers], the 20 teams from the NIT are going to always win the battle. Not every game, but they might go 15-5 or 16-4.

“There’s no way you can pick 128 teams or 96 and not have the best teams in it. Now they’ve had their chance, and if they get beat, that’s their fault.”

As we finished breakfast I remembered 2001, when I went to Lubbock, Texas, for Knight’s first game as Texas Tech coach but was turned down for a press credential because, someone told me, Knight didn’t like an article I’d written. A university official gave me a ticket to the sold-out game as a favor to one of our editors. When I saw an Indianapolis columnist in the stands, I figured he had written something Knight didn’t like too.

As we got up to leave Tuesday I said to Knight, “You know, I thought I was on your enemies list.”

He shrugged.

“You could have been,” he said. “Everybody’s been on it once or twice.”

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com