They Unload on a Knight to Remember

They held a 50th birthday roast for Indiana basketball Coach Bob Knight at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis Saturday.

Fred Taylor, who coached Knight at Ohio State and accompanied him to the 1979 Pan American Games in Puerto Rico, told of an incident after the Knight-coached American team’s gold-medal victory, during which Knight allegedly assaulted a police officer.

Said Taylor: “We played Puerto Rico for the championship on Friday night without benefit of ever having any practice. We walk in the dressing room, the governor of Puerto Rico is there, and everything got real quiet.

“Bobby said, ‘I just want to say one thing. If we’d had any practice this week, we’d have beaten you by 40.’ ”

Add Knight: Vice President Dan Quayle, a native of Huntington, Ind., sent a videotaped greeting.

Said Quayle: “I’m only sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but the Secret Service wouldn’t allow it. I argued that I met with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, why not Knight? But their answer made a lot of sense to me:

“ ‘You can negotiate with the Sandinistas.’ ”

Last add Knight: Net proceeds went to the Bob Knight Library Endowment Fund, which supports libraries on the Bloomington campus.

If you wanted to attend the roast, you had two options:

For $250, you could go to a private reception at a nearby museum and dine on the floor of the arena.

Or, for $15, you could watch from the stands.

Trivia time: What did the captain of the 1938-39 USC basketball team and one co-captain of the 1964-65 UCLA basketball team have in common?

First-name basis: In a recent story on relationships between NFL owners and their coaches, Ron Reid of the Philadelphia Inquirer momentarily lost it while recalling one owner-coach bond.

Reid wrote: “When Dick Vermeil was coach of the Eagles, he developed a friendship that has lasted to this day with Norman Tose, the team’s owner before Braman.”

Norman Braman, the Eagles’ current owner, bought the team from Leonard Tose.

Neighborhood watch: Dee Brown has moved into a house in Wellesley, Mass.

Last summer, the Boston Celtics’ first-round draft pick was held at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground for a short time by Wellesley police, who believed him to be a robbery suspect.

Brown told Peter May of the Boston Globe: “I think I did the community a favor. I got a ton of letters and I decided to stay there. And already they are instituting awareness programs and things like that for the police department so that something like that doesn’t happen again.”

Little 10-ton piece: The NFL has shipped 10 tons of officially licensed merchandise, including football jerseys, towels, caps, sun visors, sunglasses, sweatbands and copies of its printed products--such as GameDay magazine, Prolog magazine and Pro Set trading cards--to U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf.

Said NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue: “This is our way of bringing a little piece of home into their lives at a very trying time.”

She guaranteed it: Early in the college football season, Joe Namath attended a University of Maryland game, where he met Helen Krivak, mother of Terrapin Coach Joe Krivak.

Namath gave her hug and a kiss.

Said Krivak: “She said she’s not going to wash her face again.”

Trivia answer: They were father and son, Gale Goodrich and Gale Goodrich Jr.

Quotebook: Wisconsin football Coach Barry Alvarez, after making his first trip to the visitors’ locker room at Iowa’s Nile Kinnick Stadium: “The walls are pink and the carpeting is green. I didn’t know whether to throw up or fall asleep.”