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I.
We might as well start with the chair:
There are a couple of things you notice when you watch that clip, nearly 40 years after the fact. The first is the way the chair, after being tossed, seems to glide along the floor like a meandering hawk. It’s so strangely beautiful that it feels entirely incongruous with the rage that prompted it to fly in the first place. The second, of course, is that this is the petulant act of either a child or a madman. Who gets so megawatt angry five minutes into an otherwise routine February basketball game that they even think to pick up a chair and hurl it halfway across the court?
There is no ignoring the chair, and there is no ignoring what the chair says about Bob Knight. The chair is an integral part of Bob Knight’s legacy; there is a reason why, on the occasion of Knight’s death this week at the age of 83, the Associated Press published a remembrance of the chair. In it, the AP quoted Knight from a press conference some 15 years later, in which he said, “There are times in my passion for basketball that led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better,” which is the closest Knight would ever come to something even resembling an apology.
II.
The obituaries of Bob Knight inevitably refer to his complications, and there are number of great ones that explore his duality, including this by my friend Dave Jones of Penn Live. It is easy to be skeptical of that word—complicated—in this case, because, as professional curmudgeon Ray Ratto wrote on Twitter, it could serve as cover for eulogizing a “spectacular asshole who pretended he was more virtuous than he actually was.” We do not tolerate unapologetic bullies like Bob Knight in our culture anymore; if any coach spewed the same racist and misogynist bile that Knight did to Frank Deford in Deford’s absolutely brilliant 1981 Sports Illustrated profile, they would be summarily fired the next day.
But that profile also proved there was something more to Knight, as did John Feinstein’s classic book-length study of Knight, A Season on the Brink.1 Maybe you don’t want to call Knight complicated, but he was a compelling subject, in part because so loathed the very writers who kept endeavoring to understand him. He was compelling, too, because he was a man who fought his demons in public for decades; he was compelling in the way a barroom brawl is compelling.
Deford’s profile of Knight is headlined “The Rabbit Hunter” because of an extended metaphor Knight used with his players, urging them to focus on the important things and to stop chasing rabbits. Knight was, of course, really talking about himself. He chased rabbits his entire career; he blew up petty grudges and minor conflicts until they became reason to hurl furniture across a hardwood floor. “Instead of fighting the elephants,” he told Deford, “I just keep going after the rabbits.”
III.
It is overwhelming to recall how many times Bob Knight raged against rabbits. There was that time he got arrested in Puerto Rico for assaulting a policeman, or that time he told NBC’s Connie Chung, “If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” There were the numerous allegations of abuse and mistreatment from his own players, and there was, of course, the majestic, soaring chair, which served as the totem of his own relentless inability to keep from chasing rabbits, and the way it obscured his own virtues.
Some of this was because Knight himself was unable to cope with the generational changes that eventually led to his firing from his job at Indiana. But that’s not an excuse, and the fact that Knight won games and changed the way basketball players moved and flowed on the court, and the fact that he graduated generations of athletes and ran an otherwise clean program are not excuses, either. I suppose those are the elements that make him compelling—he was not a cartoon villain, and those who graduated into his inner circle always mention how charming he could be, and there is little doubt that a number of his players improved their lives by playing for Knight.
My own career circled around Knight’s—I covered a few of his games as a young sportswriter in college, and covered basketball games in his hometown of Orrville, Ohio, in my first newspaper job, and later wrote a story about the noble actions of his mentor, Clair Bee, leading up to the 1936 Olympics2—and you would hear these stories, about how thoughtful and kind Knight could be, about how, as Deford wrote, he was “a clever man and delightful company when he chooses to be.”
But Knight’s legacy will be that of a coach imprisoned by his own ego, a coach who could not resist enforcing his own moral rectitude on a society that no longer believed the things he did. Which is the funny thing—it’s not Knight’s world at all anymore, but in a way, it kind of is, because we are locked into an online world where chasing rabbits has almost become the point, where everyone is screaming and throwing chairs and insisting on their own moral rectitude, and not recognizing just how pathetic and sad they look to the rest of us. Bob Knight was a great basketball coach; he may well have been some percentage of a great man, too, but in the end, most of us will only remember the rabbits.
Ironically, Season on the Brink, that Deford profile, and Knight’s very presence made a generation of people like me want to become writers and journalists, which was the very profession that Knight publicly declaimed as so odious.
As The Athletic’s Seth Davis writes, Knight came of age reading Bee’s children’s books about a basketball player named Chip Hilton, “a tall, handsome, deeply principled athlete whose moral code was often challenged but never unmoored.” I imagine Knight hoped that adhering to that code in the big picture excused his rabbit-chasing.
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"spectacular asshole" sums him up. "Complicated" does not excuse.