Commentary : Bob Knight Has Paid His Dues

Once again, Bob Knight has taken the grand sport of college basketball and turned it into his personal carnival of rage and frustration. And once again, the masses are queuing up in separate but equal-sized lines, one defending the Indiana coach as a man of unparalleled integrity, the other castigating him as a grizzly boor.

‘Tis not so elementary, folks.

The complex Mr. Knight is sometimes both and sometimes neither. He is, as Winston Churchill once said of the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and damn if he hasn’t compounded the puzzle in the 19 years we’ve watched him prowl in his plaid.

Through it all, Knight has helped gauge the national mood. During Watergate, when the country was generally wary of establishment figures, he was perceived as an antiquated, somewhat foolish product of the old school.

After the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent coronation of Ronald Reagan, however, Knight’s autocratic methods were reexamined with new-right sympathy. “Kick some A!” the chorus went.

In these two eyes, then and now, he has remained a superior basketball coach whose sermons on such matters as recruiting and scholastics ring of righteousness and common sense . . . and an insufferable jerk bent on usurping the spotlight away from the players, regardless of the cost.

He is Bob, the man, the strategist, teacher and counselor, and he is Bobby, the kid, the overgrown bully unable to cope with a world that doesn’t always cow to his scowls.

A personality such as Knight’s is not terribly convenient. We want our heroes (and our villains) to follow the stereotype standard, bar for bar, and resist any temptations to improvise in public. When they do, we choose to turn away. Don’t get complicated on us, pal.

There is one thing wrong with all of this. It is not very realistic. Everyone has his strengths, and everyone has his frailties; the human community plays not to a one-note samba but a dissonant symphony that sometimes makes sweet harmony and sometimes makes the screeching sounds of suffering and anguish. And so we beat on.

Still, there are boundaries of acceptable behavior that even the most complex person must acknowledge. Knight knowingly, willingly broke those last Saturday afternoon, when, while his team was losing to Purdue, he hurled a chair onto the court in a Conniption of the Ages.

Not since Woody Hayes’ infamous Gator Bowl punch has a coach managed to so thoroughly embarrass himself, his school and his profession. Just another tantrum, you say? Just another momentary but harmless lapse in self-control?

Bunk.

I think it was more than that, a lot more. I think it was the most eloquent statement the characteristically taciturn coach has ever made.

“Help,” it said.

Yeah, help.

As in please, right now, what are all you fools waiting for?

Bob Knight is, above all, a self-styled macho man; he never would use a conventional forum to seek help, like leveling with his bosses, or shooting straight with the public. You start doing that, his reasoning probably goes, and you end up on the Donahue show saying things like “I felt it was time to get in touch with my feelings.”

So he chose another method, sacrificing taste, as it were, for attention. The mission was accomplished. We saw, we cringed, and now, we are ready to listen.

In a profession legendary for its ability to gnaw at the insides of the most even-tempered men, Bob Knight, as high strung as an inbred pit bull, is burning out. Look at him: Pale, baggy-eyed, with a paunch that suggests he eats all the wrong meals at all the wrong times, Knight could even induce an honest appraisal out of Saturday Night Live’s normally effusive Fernando. “You are mah-vulus, Bob,” he’d say, “but why don’t take a week or two off?”

A week or two. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. Maybe longer. For the last few years Knight has fought with his team, his fellow coaches, his fans, his press, his friends--with results that could best be termed bittersweet.

He coached Indiana to a national championship, in 1981, only to watch one of that team’s stars (Isiah Thomas) defect to the pros with two years of eligibility left and another (Landon Turner) get strapped into a wheelchair, the permanently paralyzed victim of an auto accident.

He coached the U.S. Olympic basketball team to a gold medal last summer, but the price was prohibitive. It meant working virtually through the entire off-season, sweating and storming at a here-today, gone-tomorrow squad while he might have been fishing for some bass at sunset and clearing his head.

Prior to the season, NBC-TV basketball analyst Al McGuire brought up an intriguing point: Keep an eye on the Olympians. Deprived of an offseason, McGuire theorized, they will be vulnerable to burnout.

Yet here we are, knocking on March’s door, and the Jordan, Ewing, Tisdale, Perkins, Koncak, Kleine, etc. crew is playing solid, occasionally inspired basketball in both the NBA and NCAA. They didn’t need to burn out. Their coach did it for them.

Funny. As the Olympics’ profit keeps burgeoning, its list of victims builds as well. Carl Lewis, Mary Decker Slaney, Edwin Moses, the “blood boosters” of the cycling team: All have paid some dues to a public that likes to keep its heroes simple.

Now too has Bob Knight, who tried to coach for a year and a half, nonstop, without taking a deep breath, without easing up. On Saturday, as a stunned nation watched, he let us all in on a secret.

He can’t.