Bill Reynolds: In coaching twilight, Bob Knight's become a parody of himself

It's been more than a decade since <I>Season on the Brink </I>first took people inside Bob Knight's world, the Indiana basketball bunker that Knight had created and still flourishes in Bloomington,

Tuesday, March 21st 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

It's been more than a decade since Season on the Brink first took people inside Bob Knight's world, the Indiana basketball bunker that Knight had created and still flourishes in Bloomington, Ind.

That was the book that showed just how narrow and mean-spirited Knight's world had become, how much he used fear and intimidation as a motivational tool; how even back then it was close to imploding, too much a product of Knight's demons and his inability to live up to his own mystique.

Now it's even more so.

Now it seems as if a season can't go by without Knight being in the middle of some firestorm. If it's not a player transferring, it's players leaving the inner sanctum and then telling all, the mystique chipping away, piece by piece. Early this year, there was the obvious coldness between Knight and his former star, Steve Alford, now the coach at Iowa. The inference was that if you don't genuflect to Knight, you become the outsider, even if you're an ex-player.

The latest broke last week, the assertion by former player Neil Reed that Knight once tried to choke him. This coincided with reports that Knight once tried to motivate his team by using a bathroom routine that would make a caveman blush, never mind a so-called leader of young men.

It also comes in the midst of a bootleg halftime speech that's been circling around the Internet for a couple years now, a classic Knight profanity-spewed tirade that could get someone institutionalized, never mind censured.

But the truly amazing part?

None of this is a surprise. Knight has been a caricature for a long time now. His is an act that hasn't aged well. If once upon a time his volatility might have been written off to youthful excess, now it just seems sad. Portrait of a boy genius in his coaching twilight.

For that's what Knight once was considered. The boy genius. Go back 30 years ago or so, and Knight was going to be the next great coach, one whose career seemed destined for the ages. He had the Ohio State resum
. He paid appropriate homage to the greats of the past. He was was young and fiery, yet also taught basketball in a time-honored fundamental way.

But I suspect it's more than that, too.

We love coaches perceived to be macho. All those coaching Pattons, one part Marine, one part Vince Lombardi, one part genius, one part bluster. Put those pampered athletes in their place, take charge. All those guys who spin their own myths.

It's the reason we are so fascinated with Bill Parcells, the reason why Bear Bryant is a mythic figure and Lombardi has become a cultural icon, his life the fodder for Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers. We love coaches who seem to be dictators with a clipboard, for they tend to conjure up a lost world where order and authority ruled; a clean, well-lighted place where everyone knew the rules and played by them. Before everything turned gray and more complicated.

That was Knight.

He won two national titles before he was 40, and when he won his third in 1987, it seemed as if were going to evolve into a coaching icon.

So what happened?

Knight seems so much like a dinosaur now, his disdain for everything all but etched into his face, as if he suddenly woke up one day and found himself in the wrong decade.

I have long had a theory that too often coaching brings out a person's worst instincts. Certainly, that seems to be the case with Knight. He always had a boorish side to him, as if he had been standing there alongside James Naismith when the game was invented and had no tolerance for anyone who hadn't been. You could see evidence of that the way he often browbeat reporters who dared to question him.

But in the beginning that was all part of his charm, Bobby just being Bobby, ha ha ha.

It stopped being charming a long time ago.

Interestingly, what comes through in the bootlegged halftime speech is Knight's mean-spiritedness, his vowing to make the players pay if they don't win for
him.
As if all that matters anymore is him. His record. His view of the the world. His view of how the game should be played. To listen to that tape is to hear a man in torment, locked in the prison he's created for himself.

It's interesting to see how the basketball establishment has rallied around Knight. In their view of the world, Knight is misunderstood, his teaching so pure that some of his players simply can't comprehend it. Almost as if they're somehow not worthy of Knight's exalted message.

Sorry.

It simply doesn't wash anymore.

Season on the Brink
showed us the dirty laundry over a decade ago, showed us that beneath the emperor's clothes was a basketball bully, someone whose leadership style always exacted its pound of flesh. That was the beginning, the telling of the palace secrets. Since then, there have been too many ex-players all saying similar things for them to be dismissed.

And I suspect that it's not going to end well for Bobby Knight. Very few coaches go out on their own terms anymore, go out with anything approaching grace. Coaching is no country club for old men, and Knight now seems very old. Not chronologically. Pyschologically.

For old coaches don't just fade away.

They become parodies of themselves.