COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S TOURNAMENT : Like Him or Not, He’s the Reel Deal

Bob Knight said this. Bob Knight did that. Report this. Don’t report that. Sort it out. Sift through whatever he happens to be slinging. Separate the pertinent from the gibberish. Stick to basketball and somebody wonders why you idiots ignored all of Bob’s latest, greatest stand-up comedy. Quote the gibberish and somebody--often Knight himself--wonders why you idiots can’t stick to basketball.

It is a game he plays. One of two. And he is so good at both.

On the court, Knight, basketball coach of Indiana University for 20 years now, plays a serious game. He plays it for keeps. When Indiana and UCLA vie today for the right to be among the national tournament’s Final Four, the Hoosier coach will be humorless, almost morose, casting baleful glances at officials over calls he might not even have seen; glaring menacingly at players whose bodies might be more in the game than their heads.

Off the court, Knight plays another game. It is called bait-and-hook. Being a dedicated fisherman, he is particularly adept at it. He sets the bait. He mocks you to see how you will react. Or he makes up a phony story to see if you will fall for it. If you follow it up, he gets you to chase the wild goose and prove what a sap you are. If you don’t bite, he can admonish you for not being diligent enough in your work, or perhaps the tale he told could even have been the truth.

You annoy or amuse him.

Either way, he wins.

He is impervious to ridicule or scorn. He has built up an immunity. Bob Knight can do anything, say anything. He can fling chairs, punch phones, stuff a Louisiana man into a garbage can or scuffle with the Puerto Rico police.

He can yank players by their shirts or carry a bullwhip to practice as a gag. He can tell off-color brothel jokes at news conferences (which he did here), toss off wisecracks about people getting shot at the Mexico border (which he did here) or offer social profundity (as he once did to Connie Chung in a television interview) along the lines of: “If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.” Does it get him ousted, censured, protested? No, because he is too good a coach.

“I worry about him,” says Al McGuire, a former coach turned television commentator, who considers Knight both a friend and the best coach in the business, “because I still think someday Bob’s going to go too far, go past the point of no return.”

Knight can make you laugh, make you squirm. He once proposed that if results really do mean more than effort, why not publish the successes and failures of hospital surgeons, the same as is done for coaches? “Doctor John Doe, 10 brain operations, seven wins, three defeats.”

His latest thing is a Torquemada impersonation, coach as torturer, inventing new means daily as to how he allegedly is keeping his players in line. Flogging, five-mile hikes after games, cold showers at halftime, anything he can think up.

It is all an act, to be taken no more seriously than a Far Side cartoon or the Addams Family, and is in response, as far as anyone can tell, to suggestions (real or imagined) that Knight’s cancellation of a team banquet was evidence of what a mean old monster he is.

So, now he never misses a chance to make a grim exaggeration. Like before a boy from the Indiana University student newspaper can get around to a question, the coach will ask: “Those guys didn’t blow it up yet? Damn, they promised me. Have you called home since last night?”

Or, after kidding that last week in Idaho he ordered his players to walk back to their hotel, wading through a deep river, a New Mexico reporter kids back that the Rio Grande is nearby, whereupon Knight says: “I don’t want to walk across that one, because you might get shot at. People can get shot crossing that river. Depends if you’re going north or south.”

Whether or not you laugh depends on whatever sense of humor you have. As it happened, Knight had another audience in stitches here Friday, same as he did two days before, when he recommended that basketball games be moved up to 7 o’clock in the morning so that housewives would have something to do besides trying to lose weight on those “Nordic ski machines” of theirs.

Nobody holds court the way Knight does, on one or off one.

And you have two choices. You can accommodate him, pass along his wit and wisdom to those who prefer it to less quotable details having to do with basketball, amuse them with Knight’s latest musings about “cerebral reversal,” a bit of psychobabble he double-talked for about seven minutes Friday, or about his new assignment writing about sportswriters for New Yorker magazine (sure, Bob) or about his news tip that Don Haskins of Texas El Paso will replace Jerry Tarkanian as coach at Nevada Las Vegas (anything you say, Bob).

The UCLA game? What UCLA game?

It’s the same old story UCLA’s team captain, Gerald Madkins, remembers from the season-tipoff Hall of Fame game against Indiana on Nov. 15 at Springfield, Mass., where nobody wanted to discuss anything or anybody but Knight.

Said Madkins: “It was unreal. We go to a banquet, (Indiana) doesn’t show. We had to listen to four speakers rave over their guys. Then (Knight) comes late and it was like God had just walked into the room. Even before the game, we walk into the elevator and a guy says, ‘You guys worried about Bob Knight?’ I said, ‘He doesn’t play basketball. Does Bob Knight have a jersey?’ Come on, is he God? I mean, he’s a great coach, and I have the utmost respect for the man, but give us some credit, too.”

Knight does. He gives Madkins credit, gives UCLA credit, goes to great lengths to express his appreciation for anyone who appreciates college basketball the same way he does. But this is the side of Knight that gets lost in the storm, because the other side of Knight is so magnetic, so irresistible, that instead of talking about the game, or the opponent, or the tournament, we somehow end up talking about him.

And, falling for it hook, line and sinker, damned if we haven’t done it again.