Knight Fallout Brings Sperber Dark Days

Murray Sperber awoke too early again last Friday morning in the little white house a few blocks from Indiana University. It happens often lately, and he hates that his lack of sleep has hardened his personality and reddened his eyes.

He pulled a gray Albuquerque Dukes T-shirt over his head and laced on a pair of running shoes. He has the blocky legs of a hockey player, which he was as a boy in Montreal, and the clunky glasses of an English professor, which he is at Indiana.

His son, Ollie, would have turned 18 Friday. Ollie was 6 when he died. While the memory remains exceptionally painful for Sperber, especially so this morning, it is not Ollie who keeps him awake at night.

Sperber, 59, plodded down the stairs and rallied Tea Pot, the family’s 12-year-old, near-blind poodle, for a walk. They set out together on the uneven sidewalks near the center of Bloomington, past the little shops and cafes. Three blocks out, Sperber and Tea Pot were approached by a large man. He looked to Sperber to be about 60, but working-class solid and gruff.

“You Murray Sperber?” the man asked.

Sperber’s head spun. He followed the leash from his hand down to the little white poodle, which he was sure would be stranded.

“Is this it?” he wondered. “How will Tea Pot get home?”

*

It had been a month since Indiana President Myles Brand imposed the “zero-tolerance” sanctions on basketball Coach Bob Knight, closing an investigation that caught the attention of the basketball public. Knight was fined and suspended for three games, but otherwise sent back to the program he so vehemently defended against the likes of Professor Murray Sperber.

Accused of choking a player, among other abuses, Knight was ordered to conduct himself with appropriate decorum and civility, and he admitted to a problem with anger management. That was pretty much that.

The saga then fell off most of America’s front pages, but it continued to roil for Sperber, a critic of intercollegiate sports in general and Knight in particular. He had called for Knight’s resignation during Indiana’s investigation and has long criticized the university for being “lenient” on Knight. He contends that Knight, a tenured professor, is exempt from adhering to what he says is a “strict code of conduct” for the university’s tenured faculty.

Sperber wrote “College Sports Inc.,” a book that investigated the unwieldy relationships between college athletics and academic programs. Another book, “Beer and Circus, How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” is due out in the fall.

His argument has been with the larger picture of college sports. Over the years, it has become crystallized as Sperber versus Knight, particularly in the eyes of Knight and his loyal supporters. Because of it, and in the absence of other accusers, Sperber became the local face of national anti-Knight sentiment.

In May, he received a telephone call at his campus office. The man on the phone threatened to find him. As proof that he could, the caller began to read from Indiana’s fall schedule--Sperber’s classes, days, times, room numbers.

Sperber took it as a death threat and filed a police report. There were more serious threats by e-mail, including one that mimicked a line from the movie “Sixth Sense,” starting with the words, “I see dead people . . . “

Knight supporters drove past Sperber’s home, or past him on campus, and made derogatory gestures. They shouted at him across parking lots. He was vilified in the editorials and letters to the editor in the local newspaper.

“I have the vision of one of these lunatics coming flying through this class, all primed up,” Sperber said. “And here’s this poor [teaching assistant] sitting there with 25 freshmen. I went to my boss and said, ‘There’s no way this can go down.’ ”

In May, he requested a leave of absence. It is an unpaid leave, and he said he probably will have to take out a second mortgage to survive, unless he gets a research grant. When the leave became public last week, Knight’s backers claimed victory on the Internet.

“I could not see teaching under these circumstances,” Sperber said.

He has found living under them increasingly strenuous.

The man on the street? Sperber admitted to him that he was, indeed, that Murray Sperber. To his surprise, the stranger stuck out his hand. Turned out, he liked what Sperber had been saying, and agreed that Knight had gone unchecked by Indiana for too long.

Relieved, Sperber was pleased to discover an ally, rare as they are in a small town painted Hoosier red.

Only the night before, in a grocery store, he had been approached by a Hoosier fan who told him, “Look, I just wish you’d can it about Bob Knight.” It was, by far, the more common exchange.

“It wasn’t that hostile,” Sperber said, “but I was just trying to buy some breakfast cereal. Then I turn in the aisle and a woman looks at me twice, then comes up and says, ‘Keep saying what you’re saying.’ ”

Sperber fears the next incident. Two foster children live with Sperber and his wife, Aneta. He believes he is vulnerable in the classroom, and that the children are vulnerable on the streets of Bloomington.

He said the university has been supportive, even offering to post police officers at the doors of his classes. Still, he has offers from other institutions, and he will consider them. The lure of normality is strong, particularly for a man who craves it. He will spend the summer in Montreal, where, he said, “Nobody has ever heard of Bob Knight.”

In the meantime, he struggles to regain control of his life. He lost his grip on it before, when Ollie died.

“One of the ways I dealt with it was to go into my library study and just work,” he said. “All the time. Sometimes I’d have to go into the men’s room and cry. But, in thinking about that, I had gotten through this horrible experience where I had zero control. [Ollie] had this horrible seizure disorder and the doctors couldn’t solve it. That’s how I wrote ‘College Sports Inc.’

“Writing the book was sort of a control thing, and every writer does that. You love to shape it and see it come out. . . . And then, suddenly, you’re in a situation like this, where you have no control. That, for someone like me, is very scary. A guy comes up to you on the street, a total stranger. It’s very scary.”

In a coffee shop near his home, there is quiet when he pushes open the door. He draws lingering stares. Most of the observers appear merely curious. Sperber, however, can’t tell.

“I try not to think too much,” he said. “One of the things in the back of my mind is an incident at Berkeley [where Murray and his wife met, in graduate school]. My wife’s favorite professor . . . was sitting in his office with his teaching assistant [when] a guy who had a grudge against [the professor] stepped in the door--the guy was crazy--with a shotgun and shot them. He killed the teaching assistant and blew off half of [the professor’s] face.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe history doesn’t repeat itself. But, you can only work from your individual memory. I just don’t want it to happen. I worry less for me than for the people I’m responsible for. I have this macho thing, ‘I can take care of myself.’ Who knows? It could just be a guy screaming and yelling.”

Sperber hates that he appears to be running. It is possible he has taught his last class at Indiana. Sperber and Knight were hired within weeks of each other, 29 years ago. Sperber has taught thousands of students. Knight has won 763 basketball games.

Sperber hates that Knight probably thinks he won again.

“I don’t see it as a macho thing,” Sperber said. “I grew up in Montreal, across the street from a park, and there were three hockey rinks in the park. I played all the time. You would have to fight. You would be challenged, often by guys bigger than you, or by bullies. You know you would lose sometimes, but if you wanted to play again, you would have to fight. So, you fought. But, that was a fair fight. There were rules. Other guys would not pile in. You would throw your gloves down, you would not hit somebody until you were ready to go. All of that.

“This is not that kind of fight. I don’t know what’s out there. I can’t see the guy. This is not about winning and losing. This is about sanity and insanity. I know which side of the argument I’m on there. I do not feel like I am backing down. I will keep commenting about Bob Knight and college sports. I can be reached through e-mail. The phone system works fine in Canada. I’m not going to shut up.”