Yelling, sure, but nicely this time

The character Bob Knight plays in his ESPN reality series “Knight School” is a still-fierce-but-getting-cuddlier basketball coaching legend looking for a few good men (actually one student) to play on his Texas Tech University basketball squad.

Almost immediately you can tell it’s a kind of fantasy camp for “Sports Center” junkies, like getting to trot down the home stretch aboard last year’s Kentucky Derby winner. At least based on the episode ESPN sent out, none of the 16 walk-on hopefuls vying for a spot on the team seems that much better than the best guys I used to play with in a pick-up game.

But they are, for real, getting a chance to be yelled at and ridiculed by Coach Knight, and to be cut from the team by Knight, and in the context of wish-fulfillment sports reality TV that seems as exciting, if not more so, than getting this close to Donald Trump’s hair.

“Do you know what you should do when you answer?” Knight tells a kid who responds incorrectly to a question. “Make damn sure you know the answer, how’s that.”

But it’s a love tap to the stomach that he gives the kid to punctuate his point. This is PG Knight, PR-rehabilitated, tough but inspirational and bleeped only sporadically, as he stomachs too much dribbling and poor shot selection.

Like an English teacher, he hands out the Rudyard Kipling poem “If” to his “boys,” telling them they’ll discuss it in the morning. “If” -- with its line “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same” -- is an inspirational poem about strength of character, a theme that has remain affixed to Knight in a career also marked by the throwing of chairs, the alleged grabbing of a player by the throat during practice and, in his last fit of pique as longtime Indiana University basketball coach, an altercation with a freshman student on campus who’d called out to him, “Hey Knight, what’s up?”

Despite his Nixon-ian exit from Bloomington, Knight’s long been forgiven because he wins, and because he’s good theater (this is ESPN’s second Knight-inspired piece of original programming, following the TV movie “A Season on the Brink”).

Why Knight decided to do a reality show is beyond me, although perhaps it’s just a matter of melding his ego to the times (it can’t hurt interest in Texas Tech, either. Go to Tech! Run into Bob Knight!).

And yet the specter of Knight doing a reality show, playing the Simon Cowell character in private voting sessions with his coaches (one of whom is his son, Pat), also seems a harbinger that the drill sergeant and tyrant coach is a waning paradigm, replaced by Phil Jackson’s cool-suited image.

Certainly sideline shots of college coaches these days suggest more are aping Jackson than the old guard holdover Knight. And how many top-line players are still up for Knight’s brand of boot camp?

“Anybody got earrings on?” he says to the contestants on day one. Clips from future episodes suggest life in “Knight School” will only get more like “Survivor” (kids crawling through sand, kids in military helmets hiking stairwells).

Of course, ESPN will also manage to shoehorn in a word from Dick Vitale, baby! March Madness, after all, is only around the corner. It’s hard to believe that Knight, legendarily contemptuous of the media, gave ESPN final cut of this little sideshow. That said, weekend warriors will learn a thing or two about how to properly set a screen and what to do on defense. Never lose sight of what? No, not the man, the ball.

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‘Knight School’

Where: ESPN

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Rating: Not rated