Taking the Second Chair

Patrick Knight sits at his father’s side on the Texas Tech bench, two coaches whispering basketball secrets, talking motion offense, nodding in agreement, drawing up intricate plays that will soon end up as basketball music, sending five sets of feet moving to a syncopated beat.

As the son of Bob Knight, college basketball’s most publicly volatile coach -- a 64-year-old man who fills a room with unease simply by pausing before answering a question -- Patrick Knight has seen or been part of all of the bad, and is a major part of whatever good Knight is creating now.

His title is associate head coach, but sometimes “I’m the lion tamer,” said Patrick, 33, who does not hesitate to step in his father’s path if he sees the veins bulging, the fists balling, the obscenities falling from his father’s mouth. “I get away with saying stuff [to him] that a lot of people can’t, but I think that’s any father-son relationship.”

For only the second time in school history, Texas Tech will appear in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16, and the first one doesn’t count. The 1996 team went 30-2, but NCAA rules violations were found and its tournament records that season were expunged. The sixth-seeded Red Raiders (22-10) will play seventh-seeded West Virginia (23-10) Thursday night in Albuquerque.

Of Bob Knight’s 15 Sweet 16 appearances, this one may be the first that is truly a team coaching effort.

“Coach Knight and Coach Patrick, you can see how one helps the other,” said senior guard Ronald Ross, who scored a combined 52 points in Texas Tech’s tournament wins over UCLA and Gonzaga. “I think Patrick has a big calming effect sometimes. But Coach Patrick, he’s got a temper too. Sometimes the words will fly from both of them.”

Patrick has been with his father, in college basketball terms, since he became a walk-on player at Indiana in 1991.

It wasn’t an easy time for either of them. In 1993, angry over a pass Patrick had thrown, Knight kicked at his son’s chair. To the crowd at Indiana it appeared Knight had kicked his son, and Assembly Hall erupted in boos. Knight turned and glowered at the crowd, his reaction earning him a one-game suspension. Patrick was ejected for fighting with a Tennessee Tech player in the game his father missed.

The public razzing brought Bob Knight as close to a public apology as he has given.

“If my reaction to the jeering from the stands on Tuesday night offended any true Hoosier fans, I am deeply sorry and wish to apologize,” Knight said at the time. “I realize that you have not always agreed with what I have done or said. I probably wouldn’t agree with all you have said or did either. P.S. We have been working on Patrick’s passing.”

Texas Tech reached the Sweet 16 after upsetting third-seeded Gonzaga on Saturday.

“To be helping my dad now, it means a lot,” Patrick said afterward. “I’d have given anything to have been the type of player to win a game, but I wasn’t. I was a role player just happy to be on the team.

“But as an assistant coach I’m good enough to win him games. I’ve been doing that. This is my sixth year with him, we’ve won 20 games together every year, so it means a lot to me. What I couldn’t do for him as a player, I can do for him as an assistant coach.”

After Patrick went into the stands at Tucson’s McKale Center to hug his wife, Amanda, Knight motioned for him to escort Bob’s wife, Karen, onto the floor. Knight said Karen, a former Oklahoma high school girls’ basketball coach, and longtime friend Pete Newell are the two people in his life who know the most about basketball.

Though Knight omitted his son from such public praise, his value is clear to those in the program.

“In practice you can see it,” Ross said. “Coach Knight is the man in charge, but he talks to Patrick a lot and he trusts Patrick. I think it’s a very good relationship.”

After Patrick graduated from Indiana, he became an administrative assistant and scout for the Phoenix Suns. He also was an assistant coach for the Connecticut Pride of the Continental Basketball Assn.; head coach of the Wisconsin Blast in the International Basketball Assn.; an assistant coach to his father at Indiana; and then, after Knight was fired at IU four years ago, an assistant coach at the University of Akron.

When he was at Akron, the Zips played the inaugural game in Texas Tech’s new arena. When Red Raider Athletic Director Gerald Myers called Knight, an old friend, to talk about the head coaching job, it was Patrick who told his father it would be perfect.

“We’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere,” Patrick said of Lubbock, Texas. “We only have one newspaper. You don’t hear much about Dad. He kind of likes that. Being here, I think, has prolonged his career. Some bigger programs called, but this is the best for him.”

Now, Patrick gives voice to Knight’s pride at having taken a team that hadn’t had a winning record since the 1996-97 season to four 20-win seasons in a row, three NCAA tournament appearances and, now, the Sweet 16.

“It means everything to him. Especially this,” he said. “As well as we’ve done, people keep saying, ‘Our best team before went to the Sweet 16.’ We’re killing ourselves and after all we’ve done, now we’ve matched that. So, to us, it’s kind of a monkey off our backs.”

The son will also say what most people know. Bob Knight is only 25 short of tying Dean Smith with 879 wins, most in NCAA Division I men’s history. “My dad won’t tell anybody it means anything,” Patrick said. “But, come on. Of course it does. The all-time winningest? No matter what else, they couldn’t take that from him.”

With this ragtag group including former walk-ons from backwoods towns in New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana setting school records, Patrick says this is his father’s best coaching job yet.

“Everybody thinks he chews everybody ... out, but he doesn’t. Some kids you can do that to. Like Ronald Ross. He handles it. We have a couple others, you don’t,” Patrick said outside a locker room full of young men very different from the crew-cut, short-shorts teams Knight first coached at Army, then Indiana. “You can’t treat everybody the same.

“But you’re not going to tune in to ‘SportsCenter’ if my dad has his arm around some guy. He’s his own worst enemy. He’s matured, though, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for that.”

When Patrick finished speaking, he looked around. “Where’s my dad?” he asked. “I’d better go be with my dad.”

You won’t see this on “Sports- Center,” either: Bob Knight putting his arm around Patrick Knight as they walk toward the bus and toward the future, to the Sweet 16.