Raiders of the Knight
From the Cheap Seats
by Chris Hahn
Last week, Coach Robert Montgomery Knight reached win #800. Perhaps now we can finally acknowledge one fact that has grown impossible to dispute— Bob Knight is one of the greatest college basketball coaches ever. For those of you that just cringed, I ask you to set your opinion of Bob Knight the person aside and focus on Bob Knight the basketball coach.
After starting at Army at a young age, he trekked to Bloomington, where he made believers out of doubters. Indiana University is now one of the schools that gets mentioned in the discussion of top basketball programs around the country. The Hoosiers won three National Championships (1976, 1981, 1987) under Bob Knight, and the 1976 team is still the last men’s team to finish the entire season undefeated!...a feat that would have been two years in a row had the Hoosiers top player not suffered an injury during the 1975 tournament.
Then after a several stormy years in the late ‘90s, Indiana fired Bob Knight. Unfortunately, it solidified Knight’s reputation in many circles, particularly in the media. Bob Knight had been caught on tape ‘choking’ a player, and then was let go after allegedly grabbing a student on the arm to reprimand him. Was it blown out of proportion and handled poorly by IU? You bet! Was Knight still responsible for his actions…actions that crossed the line of reasonable behavior even for a coach? You bet! My opinion is that parties on both sides acted unreasonably at times, but it’s time to get over it. Let’s just move on.
Now Knight is coaching at Texas Tech. For those who don’t know much about the school in Lubbock, Texas, Texas Tech games were the ones where Big XII Conference opponents chalked up a ‘W’ before tip-off and started looking ahead to the next game. Less than one full year with Knight on the job, not even the conference powerhouses counted it as a gimmee. This season the Red Raiders have been a fingertip (the clock operators’, that is) away from a couple huge ROAD upsets! He’s taken a nowhere program and made it a legitimate NCAA tournament team and gotten potential players and fans actually excited about coming to a city often described as ‘hell on earth.’
If it were anybody else, Knight would have been in the discussion about the recipient of Coach of the Year honors last season. But Knight is Knight, and the media is still the media. As he approaches Dean Smith’s all-time win record over the next few seasons, we’re bound to see and hear all about ‘Bad Boy’ Bobby and relive all of his antics. My hope is that while we don’t have to celebrate his wrongdoings, we acknowledge that the good he has done probably outweighs them. We should fully celebrate and honor the good he has done in the lives of many young gentlemen. I fully believe that the ‘victory’ of seeing former players succeed is the statistic about which he really cares. And isn’t that what being a great coach is all about?