He’s Dancing Knight Away

Indiana fans walk up to Mike Davis sometimes, hat in hand, and ask for his autograph.

The caps say Texas Tech.

Davis fumes, but he signs.

“I wonder if they realize the message they’re sending to me,” he said.

Bob Knight has been gone for two seasons, but the shadow he casts over Indiana is still bigger than the man.

When Davis leaped into the arms of guard Tom Coverdale after Indiana’s monumental upset of defending national champion Duke on Thursday, it was the very image of catharsis.

So often tormented by the pressure of succeeding Knight, Davis has brought Indiana within a victory over Kent State in the NCAA South Regional final today of the Hoosiers’ first Final Four since 1992.

In two weeks, Davis has won more NCAA games than Knight has in his last seven tournaments, beating Utah, North Carolina Wilmington and Duke to reach the Elite Eight. Knight, in his much-anticipated return to the tournament with Texas Tech, went home after a first-round loss to Southern Illinois.

Whether that makes Davis a Hoosier hero, well, wait and see.

“You’ve got to know Indiana fans,” forward Jared Jeffries said. “No matter how many national titles you win, no matter how many Big Ten titles you win, some people are going to stay loyal to Coach Knight for various reasons.

“But Coach Davis is building a tradition at Indiana, and this team’s building a tradition. I think people who were with us before, loyally, are our biggest fans now. The people who are just now jumping on, they’ll jump back off if things get hard.”

Until these past few days, Davis often looked like a man who could not handle the demons that come with following Knight.

He cracked after a game last season, wondering out loud if he was the right man to coach the Hoosiers.

After a loss to Butler this season, he went on a tirade against officials, saying, “If I wasn’t the lowest-paid coach in the Big Ten, I’d tell you how I really feel about this game.” He proceeded to anyway, and was fined $10,000 by the Big Ten--a penalty that perhaps should have endeared him to the Knight fans who are so cool to him.

Only in recent days has it seemed Knight’s legacy is loosening its grip.

“The ghosts will never go away because what you have is people who, I won’t say are crazy, but, I don’t know, there’s no way to describe it,” Davis said. “I try to put those people out of my mind, but it’s very difficult sometimes.

“I’m growing as a coach. I’m growing every single game. The thing I wasn’t prepared for was the media part and being able to control my emotions.

“As a player, I played as hard as anyone, and as a coach, I try to coach the same way. But you can’t coach that way. You have to coach the basketball team and not get caught up in everything else.”

Davis, a former stutterer, seems more and more at ease, bantering with and courting rival Kentucky fans against Duke. A father who lost a 1-year-old daughter from his first marriage in a car accident in 1990 now bounces his son, Antoine, 3, on his knee during interviews.

“We have a lot of Indiana people who love Indiana basketball. They’re the happiest people in the world right now because we played well and we’re doing well,” he said. “Those are the ones I’m concerned about--the ones who love Indiana basketball, because we want to make them proud.”

The Hoosiers are doing that. Coincidentally, their biggest chance yet comes today against the team that knocked them out in the first round last year and raised questions about Davis’ future.

“There were two teams I didn’t want to play, that was Texas Tech and Kent State,” he said. “They almost cost me my job last year.”

Davis served as interim coach after Knight’s firing and was awaiting word on whether he’d earned the job despite swirling Steve Alford rumors when Indiana was upset by the Golden Flashes. Before March was over, Davis had been awarded a four-year contract.

Said guard Dane Fife: “You know, as a player, I had been around Coach Davis for three years, and truthfully, in my mind and most of my teammates’ minds, we knew Coach Davis had the ability to coach, so we were going to fight for him as we did for Coach Knight.

“We felt he earned his spot as the Indiana head coach, and we weren’t going to let him lose it.... We knew he deserved it.”

No matter what Davis has done, it usually hasn’t been enough.

When Indiana blew a halftime lead and lost at Minnesota, a Knight loyalist in Minneapolis said, “Well, that never would have happened if Coach had been here.”

A share of the Big Ten title this season? Why not win it outright?

The Sweet 16? Let’s see you get to the Final Four.

A Final Four? Knight won three titles.

But that victory over Duke, that was a big one.

“I think winning that game proved to some people that it’s no fluke,” said Davis, who collapsed to his knees when Fife made his ill-advised foul against Jason Williams on a made three-pointer with four seconds left, a gaffe Indiana survived when Williams missed the free throw.

Fife said he would have been like Bill Buckner of the Boston Red Sox--or worse--had Duke come back to win after he committed the foul on Williams.

“I thought I was going to be like the guy in the World Cup, the guy from Colombia,” Fife said. “Or if we went to overtime and we were to lose, how many hate e-mails am I going to get?”

That’s Indiana basketball. They never forget.

That quality also has its good side.

“I told Dane and [forward Jarrad Odle] that on my radio show, they have trivia questions all the time, and there are people that answer questions about 1955, about 1947,” Davis said.

“I mean, I played basketball at Alabama, and you ask them a question about 2001 and they wouldn’t know.

“My point to them was that playing basketball at Indiana is a great honor. If you do something special, the fans of Indiana will remember you for the rest of your life. We made it to the Sweet 16, but what memories will they have, what lifelong friends will they have, if we went to the Final Four?”