Written by Tiane Davis
As someone who grew up in the Hoosier State, my pride and ownership over Indiana as the state with the best basketball culture is strong. Basketball would not be what it is today without Indiana, and I will gladly die on that hill. I am proud to be a Hoosier.
My hometown is just a 40-minute drive from the Indiana University (IU) campus in Bloomington, so it makes sense that Bobby Knight was a name I heard regularly growing up. I heard his name just as much as I heard Larry Bird’s.
When I heard about Knight’s passing Nov. 1, I asked my dad what he knew about him.
“Tremendous coach and won national titles at IU,” my dad responded. “But he was a big jerk.”
Knight was the head basketball coach at IU for 29 years. In his nearly three decades of coaching in Indiana, he led the Hoosiers to 662 games out of 901 — a 0.735 winning percentage. The team he coached 1975-76 remains the only undefeated men’s Division I basketball team in history. Without a doubt, Knight left a huge legacy behind him when he was asked to leave in 2000.
It is nearly impossible to have a discussion about “The General,” as he was nicknamed, without hitting the topic of his temper. Yes, he is known for his tremendous coaching streak, but also for throwing a plastic chair across the court during a game against Purdue University in 1985. He also is claimed to have choked a player during practice one year. If you look up “Bob Knight” on Google Images, most of the pictures you find will be of him yelling. No matter how many victories he led the Hoosiers to, his anger often matched the red-collared shirt he consistently wore.
“People loved him or hated him,” my dad told me next. “But he was a winner.”
I don’t have any personal stories about Knight’s time as IU head coach because he was fired two years before I was born. The fact that he is still a household name in Indiana nearly 24 years after he left speaks volumes about his legacy. He was definitely a winner.
Before he coached at Indiana, Knight coached the Army Black Knights at West Point 1965-71. For three of those years, from 1966 to 1969, Mike Krzyzewski was a player on Knight’s team. After Knight left West Point to coach at Indiana, Krzyzewski worked as his assistant coach for a year. Krzyzewski — better known as “Coach K” — broke Knight’s NCAA record for most wins and is now considered one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time. I wouldn’t say Knight could necessarily be credited with Coach K’s accomplishments, but the fact that he coached Krzyzewski and worked alongside him as a coach is an important detail to remember.
One thing Knight said during his time as a coach is, “Your biggest opponent isn’t the other guy. It’s human nature.”
Knight was a man with a temper, and he knew it. Often, his biggest opponent was himself. It makes me wonder how many of his outbursts were just a result of internal conflict.
All things said and done, people either hated him or loved him. If you watch the video of him throwing a chair across a basketball court, you’ll see people in the crowd applauding. Even when he let his temper take over, people backed him up. As for me, I will wear red and white for Indiana until I die, and I know Bobby Knight is a person who contributed to my pride for IU basketball.
