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Thursday, February 7, 2008
Don’t let controversy take away from Knight’s legacy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
This retirement from coaching is only temporary for Bob Knight. Even at 67 and counting, he’ll resurrect his motion offense and man-to-man defense with somebody else’s college basketball team, and we’ll all be the better for it.
The tossing of that chair across the Assembly Hall court. The punching of that policeman in Puerto Rico. The controversy over his rape remark during that Connie Chung interview. The headbutting, the cursing, the kicking, the grabbing and even the allegation of choking his own players. In general, the slew of things that tarnished Knight’s legacy after 42 years of coaching were self-inflicted. It’s just that they also were overrated when compared to the big picture of somebody who was much more than his three NCAA titles, an NIT championship, an Olympic gold medal and a record 902 victories.
I mostly saw another Bob Knight before, during and after I covered his Indiana teams of the late 1970s for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Those Hoosiers featured Hawks coach Mike Woodson as their star and leader. Not only did Woodson join me in seeing that other Knight more often than not through the years, but so did my youngest brother, Darrell, a superlative baseball player for the University of Wisconsin during that same decade.
With emotion in his voice, Darrell said on Thursday over the phone from his home in Cincinnati, “To me, Coach Knight is one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met, and everything that I heard about him before I met him was absolutely false. I still remember that encounter like it just happened a few minutes ago.”
Here’s what happened: With Indiana preparing for a basketball game at Wisconsin, Darrell strolled by the Hoosiers’ team bus while leaving one of his baseball practices. Everybody was aboard, except for Knight, clad in his famous red plaid jacket of those days. Knight began to take his first step on the bus to join the rest of them, when Darrell said, “Hi, Coach Knight,” as Darrell continued walking.
Knight turned and signaled for Darrell to come closer. “I didn’t know if he was going to chew me out for something or what,” said Darrell, laughing, who spent the next 20 minutes back then listening more than speaking. No doubt, Knight knew Darrell was a Wisconsin player of some kind by his letterman’s jacket, but the conversation never involved baseball, basketball or anything with athletics.
First question from Knight: What year are you in school? Then came how are you doing academically? That’s great, but are you taking advantage of all the learning opportunities you have at such a wonderful academic institution, and what are you planning to do with your degree after graduating? “He was like a guidance counselor with a bunch of great insight,” Darrell said. “I mean, here he was taking all of this time with me, and he didn’t even know me from Adam.”
Now Darrell is a national sales manager for a provider of products and services that specializes in packaging, supply chain and marketing solutions.
That sage disguised as a coach would be proud. In other words, so much for horror stories of old that could be entitled Knight Of The Living Dead. Not that those horror stories didn’t exist, particularly at Indiana during Knight’s most notorious stretch, for some, as head coach — between his Army start and his Texas Tech finish.
They just didn’t happen to me.
Once, during the early 1990s, I got a phone call at my Atlanta home in the middle of the summer from the Indiana University basketball office. “Could you hold the line for Coach Knight?” a woman said, as I snapped to attention.
“Thanks for the column on the whip,” Knight said, referring to one of his controversies that really wasn’t. During a practice at an NCAA regional that spring, Knight created a national furor with a mock whipping of Calbert Chaney, one of his black players. I wrote that you can accuse Knight of many things, but you can’t accuse him of being a racist. “You had the wisdom to get it right, and if you ever need anything from me in the future, give me a call,” Knight said, before hanging up.
I never told Knight that Darrell was my brother, by the way. Knight didn’t need to know, because he couldn’t care less.
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Hawks have what it takes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Full credit to the Hawks: They stared down a really good team in the fourth quarter and won a really big game. Watching, it seemed clear to me that I hadn’t overrated the Hawks’ talent. If you can beat the Lakers, you should be able to beat anybody. And you shouldn’t be under .500 at this late date.
We can whine forever about the absence of Chris Paul/Deron Williams, and here’s my latest installment: Did you see what Paul (42 points, nine assists) and Williams (29 points, 11 assists) did for their respective teams in overtime road wins Wednesday night? That said, the hand-wringing over the lack of a point guard obscures the greater truth: The Hawks might not have drafted the right players, but they’ve drafted enough good players. (Shelden Williams notwithstanding.)
Joe Johnson scored 28 points and had five assists against the Lakers. Josh Smith nearly had a triple double. Al Horford, who’s already the third-best player on this squad (meaning: better than Marvin Williams), had 15 points and 20 rebounds. Big-time performances in a big-time game against an opponent Mike Woodson called “the deepest team in the West.”
No, Billy Knight didn’t hand Woodson a perfect roster. There are no perfect rosters. That’s why there’s a coach. It’s his job to maximize what he has, and Woodson has enough to be competitive. I had no problem with his tactics Wednesday — he had the right guys on the floor at the right time, and his men defended beautifully, holding the Lakers to eight points over the final six minutes — but a game like that made the skeptic in me wonder why there haven’t been more games like that.
“We’ve beaten the Lakers and Phoenix and Dallas,” Woodson said. “We’re capable of beating anybody.”
And that’s the point: Through 46 games (counting the suspended one against Miami) and occasional great successes, the Hawks still don’t appear to know how good they can and should be. They pulled together at the end against Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, but too many times they’ve come apart.
Other NBA teams see the Hawks’ potential and say, “I hope those guys never figure things out.” I say there can be no more excuses for failing to figure things out. This team needs to climb back above .500 and stay there. This should be a winning team.
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