Good Knight and Good Luck

I am a basketball coach today because of Coach Bobby Knight. I became an Indiana Hoosier fan because of Coach Knight. I even became a Texas Tech basketball fan.

I have read multiple books on The General. I have punted basketballs during practice in his honor. I proudly wear a Red Raiders t-shirt these days because of Coach Knight.

Coach Knight knows the hundreds of players he has influenced over his remarkable career - guys like Mike Krzyzewski, Isiah Thomas, Quinn Buckner, Steve Alford, Damon Bailey, Uwe Blab, Calbert Cheaney, Kent Bentson, Randy Wittman, etc. etc. etc.

He does not know me. I saw Coach Knight speak at a coaching clinic last year, but that was as close to The General as I ever got. He never challenged my manhood or called me a "son of a bitch."

All Bobby Knight did for me was make me want to be a coach.

From a purely basketball sense, I wanted to be Bobby Knight. The motion offense thrilled me with its simplicity. There were not set calls or designed plays - just motion. Screen and cut. React to the defense and pass the ball. It favored nobody, but together it was impossible to guard. It worked against a zone or a man defense. It was what James Naismith must have envisioned when he hung the first peach basket.

I learned much about basketball from Steve Carpenter (no relation) at The McCallie School who ran a beautiful version of the motion offense and also studied Coach Knight. We used to score 80 points in high school games with regularity, sometimes even eclipsing 100. It was not complicated - just screens and passes.

By the time I started studying Indiana basketball, it was on the decline. I used to wonder if Knight no longer cared about winning championships, but simply wanted to coach great kids and see if he could still win with inferior players. People forget, however, that Knight put together the Hoosier squad that Mike Davis led to the Final Four. He was primed to make another run for the title if he could have only controlled his behavior.

I love Bobby Knight, but I doubt I would like him. He is a bully. He does not treat people the way he expects to be treated himself. His jokes often seem mean-spirited and condescending. I wish Knight could have found a way to control himself at Indiana so the story could have ended happily. He became one of his idols Woody Hayes when he put his hands on a kid in anger. He couldn't resist chewing out a student on campus whom he felt was disrespectful towards him.

The thing about Knight's behavior was that it almost always originated from an honorable place. I cannot excuse Knight's bullying, but many of his tirades stemmed from expecting better of his players than they expected of themselves. The man had deep core values that drove him to greatness. He was never bothered by criticism from journalists and critics who lacked these values.

As a coach, I wanted these types of values to be the core of my coaching and my program. If writers want to find fault in Coach Knight's arrogance and obnoxious behavior, let them. That won't be the legacy of Knight in my eyes. He will be the man who challenged the way I thought of the game, who inspired me to be a motivating force in young peoples' lives and who made me want to coach.