KNIGHT AND DAY? : Some Claim They Have Seen a Difference in Behavior of Indiana Coach This Season

Barely two hours after a heartbreaking 70-67 loss to Big Ten Conference rival Illinois, the Indiana Hoosiers are huddled in their locker room at Assembly Hall, reviewing what went wrong.

The word soon spreads: the team is going to hold a full practice session, complete with scrimmage. This prompts the recounting of a tale from two years ago when, after a two-point loss at Illinois that ended with Indiana guard Steve Alford missing badly on a last-second shot, the Hoosiers returned home and practiced more than two hours almost exclusively on that very situation.

The drill, it is said, was repeated for a full week of practice, and, of course, a month later the Hoosiers won the national championship when Keith Smart sank a shot in the waning stages of the title game against Syracuse.

That the practice story is apocryphal (“It didn’t happen,”) said Coach Bob Knight. “We practiced on it at the workout the next day--that was it, period.” It doesn’t matter. Legends are made of such things, and should Indiana go on to win this season’s NCAA championship, there’s no telling how much Sunday’s episode will grow in the retelling.

For the Hoosiers faithful, this season already is close to being the stuff of fantasies. Picked in pre-season to finish fourth or fifth in the Big Ten, Indiana didn’t look even that good after starting 3-4 and giving up more than 100 points to Syracuse, North Carolina and Louisville. Since then, however, Knight’s team has won 22 of 25 games.

If the Hoosiers win the conference crown, Indiana probably will be seeded No. 1 in one of the four NCAA regions.

Not bad for a team whose coach isn’t sure it is nationally competitive. “By that I mean that you could go out and play a series of games against people that are nationally competitive,” Knight said. “I don’t know that we could do that. I think that we apparently have shown over the last several games that we can play in given circumstances with a lot of pretty good teams but I’m not sure if we could play four or five good teams in a row.”

After the near-disastrous start, Knight changed his starting lineup, benching larger players and moving to a three-guard unit of senior Joe Hillman, Jay Edwards and Lyndon Jones--both sophomores.

Hillman, who almost passed up this season to concentrate on a professional baseball career, is 6-2, which means he’s outsized by most of the natural forwards he defends. The same could be said of the other two starters, Todd Jadlow and freshman Eric Anderson, both 6-9.

Nevertheless, Indiana has thrived. Turnovers, the biggest early-season problem, have been sharply reduced with the guard-oriented quintet. And the tenets of Knight basketball--helping man-to-man defense and a patient, cutting offense--have come to the fore.

“I think coach really likes this team, teaching them and watching them grow. He’s been into it and they’ve really responded to it,” assistant coach Joby Wright said. “It’s a very neat team to be around. They understand what they have to do to be successful and they’re willing to listen and learn.”

It has been widely suggested that Indiana’s success this season and Knight’s marriage lastspring to Karen Edgar, a former high-school girls basketball coach from Oklahoma, have combined to make the coach more mellow.

“Maybe he thinks if he lightens up with them he’ll get more out of them but he’s been like a teddy bear this year,” Illinois forward Nick Anderson said. “Last year, I never saw a coach like him. Maybe he’s getting too old now, maybe he can’t take it anymore.”

It’s said that further evidence can be found in the fact that Edwards, who was briefly suspended from the team his freshman year and then failed a school drug test last summer, was allowed to continue playing by Knight, a longtime hardliner on the subject of drugs. Then came the news that Lawrence Funderburke, a talented Ohio high-school player who was suspended five games into his senior season, was still being granted an athletic scholarship to play for Indiana next season.

But perhaps the biggest shock came last weekend, when it was revealed that Knight not only attended a high-school game with Illini Coach Lou Henson but wasn’t upset that his son, Pat, was being recruited by Illinois. That reportedly was the focal point of Knight’s earlier complaints to the conference offices regarding irregularities.

“Henson and I have been good friends since he got in the Big Ten,” Knight said. “But Neale Stoner (former Illinois athletic director) I had absolutely no use for whatsoever. Henson and I never had a problem, but I had great problems with how his athletic director went about handling intercollegiate athletics.”

Knight explains away the other supposed evidence of his softening. “With Edwards, I think you make a real mistake if you think that no one can make a mistake,” he said. “I think the kid makes a real mistake if he thinks he can make the mistake again. I don’t have a problem letting him play but if there were another test and a failure, it would be a real problem. He’d have no chance then.

“Maybe Funderburke’s problems aren’t all his doing. . . . I like the kid, where he’s coming from, what he’s about. He comes from a terrible background but if a kid can come from that and do what he’s done academically, then there’s something there that’s really worth working with.”

It has been said that time heals all wounds. And with the passage of time, some athletes, such as Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, come to an accommodation with, if not acceptance of, the media. Perhaps such a time will come for Knight, but not yet. The closest Knight will come to a reconciliation with the fourth estate is saying that at one time reporters irritated him, but now he’s merely amused by them. He was clearly not amused by the best-selling book, “A Season on the Brink,” by former Washington Post reporter John Feinstein. The book drew Knight’s ire and brought even more attention to him when published two years ago. He never specifically mentioned it in an interview this week.

“You want me to list all the things that I’ve read about me that are absolutely untrue?” he asks. “Well, no, I don’t have time to do that. . . . I read this stuff that I’ve mellowed this year. Hey, nobody knows better than I do and I say, what didn’t I do before? What did I do before that makes me different than now? I don’t feel any different. I don’t think I’m any different.”

Knight portrays himself as perhaps the most misunderstood man in the world, or at least in the NCAA. He says all the incidents that have placed him in the spotlight--tossing a chair across the court against Purdue, taking his team off the floor in an exhibition game against a team from the Soviet Union, the trouble in Puerto Rico during the Pan Am Games, a comment about rape during a television interview with NBC’s Connie Chung--either were taken out of context or are things that any other coach might have done.

Of course, it’s not just any coach who has won 500-plus games, three NCAA titles and an Olympic gold medal. But Knight says he fails to see why more attention is paid to him than the average coach.

“What difference does it make who it is? How many coaches have kicked chairs, thrown chairs, thrown jackets?” he said. “Why is it me? If I threw 500 chairs in 900 games that would be one thing but I’ve thrown one and now I’m the chair-thrower. . . . It seems to me that pounding on a table pales in significance to 97% of our players graduating. How many stories are written, not about academics, where somewhere there’s a line that says, ‘By the way, Coach Jones has graduated only 20% of his players in the last 10 years?’ You’ll never see it, but to me, that should be the same as sticking in a line that says I threw a chair.”