Still a Beautiful Mind

One of the upsides about becoming infamous in America is that it doesn’t matter how badly you mess up so long as you have a good agent and Larry King on speed dial.

We’re the forgive-and-forget types, ready to Tammy Faye-hug our tabloid headliners at the drop of a dime or a tear.

So, in a year in which Monica Lewinsky signed on with HBO and Paula Jones inked a boxing deal, we proudly welcome Bob Knight back to ESPN SportsCenter stage.

Dismissed as a pariah after his fit-to-be-tied firing as Indiana basketball coach in 2000, Knight has been recast as coach at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, heretofore known only as a launching pad for Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

It seems we may have underestimated an important component in chronicling the zero-tolerance diaries that once dominated the Knightly news.

We became so consumed with the Loch Ness-grainy videotape that depicted Knight choking (or did he?) one of his Indiana players, Neil Reed; so caught up in dissecting the seemingly pathological pattern of Knight’s behavior, we somewhat whiffed on the whole picture:

The man can really coach.

Unlike other “bad boys and girls” of lowest common denominator fascination, Knight holds a valuable trump card: talent.

This does not excuse Knight’s anger issues, or the chair he threw on the court against Purdue, or the cop he punched in Puerto Rico, or the nose he once busted (his son’s), or the vase he chucked at his secretary, or the enmity he engendered.

Yet, a year in exile distanced Knight from the noise and allowed him to prove in hardpan isolation what even his detractors cannot deny: that he is probably one of the three, four or five best college basketball coaches who ever lived.

What can you say about his 12-step recovery program at Texas Tech? He inherited a 9-19 team and pushed it clear into a Big 12 Conference tournament semifinal, where the Red Raiders at last swallowed a reality pill in the form of a 40-point loss to Kansas.

“To me, it’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen in coaching, maybe the greatest coaching job I’ve ever seen,” legendary coach Pete Newell said before the Kansas game.

You knew Knight would resurface somewhere after his five-alarm firing in 2000 following 29 seasons as Indiana coach, yet his abdicating to Lubbock had sort of a Napoleon-to-St. Helena feel.

Knight was supposed to disappear into an oil slick, not turn muck into March madness.

With the help of a couple junior college transfers, though, and some nurturing of leftovers, Texas Tech is 23-8 and headed into the NCAA tournament.

Asked this week if he expected Knight to make Texas Tech a winner this fast, retired Texas El Paso Coach Don Haskins croaked, “I’ve been doing this a long time and I damn sure didn’t.”

Rather than focusing on his personality flaws, people are talking about Bob Knight The Coach again.

“I can’t say this enough,” said Haskins, who led UTEP, then known as Texas Western, to a national title in 1966. “His team didn’t overachieve, it over, overachieved. I’ve seen three of his Indiana teams win the national title, I thought they had good talent. But this is the best job ever from what I’ve watched.”

Bob Hammel, the retired Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times sports editor and one of Knight’s closest friends, says this was at least Knight’s most impressive coaching job since 1989.

That year, Indiana surrendered 100 points to three opponents in an early four-game stretch yet rallied to win the Big Ten title.

“And that’s the year Illinois and Michigan played in the Final Four and Michigan won,” Hammel offered in an interview before he fell ill while watching Texas Tech play Friday at the Big 12 tournament. (Hammel had an apparent diabetic seizure but is expected to recover.)

Knight needed only time and some elbow room to regain his coaching traction.

Hammel, who has covered Knight since the coach arrived in Bloomington in 1972, said context had been lost at Indiana. Twenty-win seasons weren’t good enough anymore and fans seemed fixed on the fact Indiana hadn’t made the Sweet 16 since 1994.

“It got to the point where they were sniping at him,” said Hammel, who coauthored a soon-to-be-released biography on Knight, “Knight: My Story.” “They talked about how the game had passed him by but, in 1993, he had the No. 1 team in the country. Boy, that game certainly speeded up in a hurry.”

Knight has put those man-out-of-time notions to rest; rebuilding a program has repaired his reputation.

“He’s really enjoying basketball again,” Hammel said. “Anyone who knows it can see it in his demeanor. He’s much more relaxed. I’m sure the people at Texas Tech wouldn’t consider that relaxed, because he is intense, but it’s nowhere near the same bottled-up anger he had to live with the last few years.”

Funny how fast things change.

This week, Knight almost busted a chair while fielding questions at Big 12 media day, then playfully tossed it aside, saying “that’s the furthest I’ve thrown a chair in a long time,” a reference to his infamous 1985 chair-throwing incident against Purdue.

Friday, after Hammel collapsed courtside, Knight rushed to his side and, immediately after the game, went directly to the hospital.

The kinder, gentler Bob, or the Bob we never allowed ourselves to know?

Knight’s coaching legacy was secure long before his firing at Indiana, yet this season’s performance has served to amplify his skills as one of the game’s masters.

“In coaching, he’s very kind of Woodenesque,” Utah Coach Rick Majerus said. “In personality, they’re dramatically different, but not in their approach to the game.”

In the throes of “ChokeGate,” Knight had become a public caricature, obscuring how revered he was in inner circles.

“He gave a writer a column and a cartoonist his strip for two or three days,” said Newell, one of Knight’s closest friends. “But what he really stands for, what a great teacher he is, it got lost.”

Knight always considered Newell more of an inspiration than Wooden, but Majerus’ comparison speaks volumes.

In the February issue of Basketball Times, Wooden was asked what separates good coaches from great ones.

“The biggest difference is in coaches that are able to get the players under their supervision to play together as a team, and coaches who can get their players to recognize and accept their roles,” Wooden is quoted as saying.

And that, many say, is what separates Knight from his contemporaries.

Majerus said Knight “gets the players to see the game the way he sees it, which is the essence of coaching.”

Just how good a coach is Knight?

Newell, who coached California to the NCAA title in 1959, says Knight’s motion offense revolutionized the sport.

The motion concept utilizes court spacing, picks, back-cuts, movement and patience. The center position in the motion offense plays the high post, and is more of a passer than inside presence.

Knight was drawn to the concept after watching the Bill Bradley-led Princeton teams in the 1960s, coached by Butch van Breda Kolff. The object of the motion game is to react to what defenses do rather than running predetermined plays.

So many high school and college coaches have cribbed variations of Knight’s offense that he has effectively diminished the role of the low-post center.

Newell says it’s the reason he has been in the business of retraining centers for the NBA at his “Big Man” camps.

Said Majerus: “A lot of people with the motion offense want to run it but don’t want to commit to it. It’s a difficult thing to do at the pro level because you don’t have a five-second count, and you have a wider lane, and there’s more of a post presence. I mean, you want to give Shaq as many touches as you can in the paint.

“What Knight does, he gets guys to move without the ball, share the ball and accept their roles.”

Knight does it better than most because he is demanding, a stickler for detail and is constantly tinkering. While Knight might sometimes act like a know-it-all, he has actually spent much of his career scouring for knowledge and picking some of the game’s greatest brains: Newell, Clair Bee, Fred Taylor and Henry Iba.

Knight calls these men his “cornerstones.”

Hammel recalls a summer in the early 1970s when Knight and Newell spent many hours diagraming plays on the gym floor.

“His sense of detail is astonishing,” Hammel said. “One of the coaches he respected was [former Cleveland Brown coach] Paul Brown. Everything was so detailed. Nothing was an accident. With him, he’s forever tinkering.”

Knight, even in his 60s now, isn’t above a long-haul drive for insight. Last fall, he made the several-hours trek from Lubbock to El Paso to visit Haskins.

“We spent five, six hours, talking nothing but basketball,” Haskins said. “I mean, he’s up and out of his chair. That night at the Holiday Inn, I was thinking, ‘He needs somebody to guard right now.’ He was ready to go.”

Yet even Haskins thought Knight would struggle this season, especially after booting three players off the team. Texas Tech, unlike Indiana, was hardly a mecca of college basketball.

“I was actually feeling sorry for him,” Haskins said. “I thought he had two or three pretty good players, but I had no idea how much better they were going to be.”

Knight didn’t inherit a complete dust pile. Two holdovers, center Andy Ellis and guard Andre Emmett, were talents, and Knight was able to sign a key junior college player, forward Kasib Powell.

“I think they really worked hard right from the beginning in trying to do what we wanted done,” Knight said in a recent conference call. “Kids can be with you, and be really good kids, and be good players, and have good teams, and they still get things screwed up.

“It’s a game that cannot be played perfectly no matter how much you try. It’s a game of mistakes. It isn’t great plays that wins games, it’s reducing mistakes.”

Haskins thinks Texas Tech is playing as hard as any Knight-led Indiana team.

“They pick better than I’ve ever seen them pick,” Haskins said. “They play defense better. He [Knight] doesn’t like to lose. He gets his players that way. I can tell this bunch is listening. I can tell the way they play.”

Majerus, considered one of the modern game’s top basketball strategists, says going against Knight is like a math major going up against his professor.

“He’s exceptionally bright and astute,” Majerus said. “And his players become very cerebral. I played his teams a number of times and it’s always fun. It’s challenging. He’s a master strategist in terms of identifying certain aspects of your play that he feels he can disrupt or take away.”

Knight’s offense has been mimicked by hundreds of coaches across the country, and Newell says no coach has been more willing to share with others what he has learned.

So why is Knight better?

“Why are some teachers better than others in the same subject?” Newell answered. “They just have more of a gift for it. He’s a teacher, a very, very demanding teacher. There’s no slippage. What he says today he’s going to say tomorrow.”

Hammel thinks Knight’s late 1990s “slump” at Indiana was due more to a couple of bad recruiting classes than anything Knight had lost on his coaching fastball.

“There was never any less than an effort,” Hammel said. “He was just as involved in trying to do things.”

There were plenty of dark days for the FOBs (Friends of Bob), that handful of media types and coaches who walked the plank to defend Knight even when his actions seemed indefensible.

Hammel is unabashed in his feelings about Knight’s most important lesson in rebounds.

“I’m happy to see him back to where he was as a person,” Hammel said. “He’s a guy who’s not beset by demons at this point. He obviously was fighting a lot of things and he’s not doing that now. Yeah, I’m happy to see that. But he’s not going to become Santa Claus overnight.”

Majerus on Knight: “Anybody who wants to be a better coach would take something away from him.”

Haskins says if what goes around comes around, it’s time to give Bob Knight his due and his day.

“I think those other distractions deterred from that,” Haskins said. “I never heard anybody say he couldn’t coach. Even the writers that didn’t like him, they never said he couldn’t do that.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

On the Rise

Texas Tech had four consecutive sub-.500 seasons before Bob Knight took over as coach this season:

2001-02...23-8

2000-01...9-19

1999-00...12-16

1998-99...13-17

1997-98...13-14

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TEXAS TECH IN NCAA

Texas Tech made 10 NCAA tournament appearances before this season, advancing past the first round three times:

1954 (West) lost to Santa Clara, 73-64; 1956 (West) lost to SMU, 68-67; 1961 (Midwest) lost to Cincinnati, 78-55; 1962 (Midwest) beat Air Force, 68-66; lost to Colorado, 67-60; 1973 (Midwest) lost to South Carolina, 78-70; 1976 (Midwest) beat Syracuse, 69-56; lost to Missouri, 86-75; 1985 (Midwest) lost to Boston College, 55-53; 1986 (Midwest) lost to Georgetown, 70-64; 1993 (Midwest) lost to St. John’s, 85-67; 1996 (East) beat Northern Illinois, 74-73; beat North Carolina, 92-73; lost to Georgetown, 98-90.