A Season on the Brink Read online

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  Foreword by Al McGuire

  1. On the Brink

  2. Rise and Fall

  3. Square One

  4. October 15

  5. November

  6. Three Long Weeks

  7. The Season Begins

  8. Poster Boy

  9. No Reason to Lose to Anyone

  10. Déjà Vu

  11. Will We Ever Catch Another Fish?

  12. “If We Can Just Get Into Position to Get Into Position. . . .”

  13. You Can’t Go Home Again

  14. Seven-Game Season

  15. Twenty Minutes to the Promised Land

  16. For the Championship. . . .Thud

  17. Back to the Brink

  Epilogue

  Moby Dick

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  About the Author

  For Mom and Dad. . . .

  and that’s non-negotiable.

  Introduction

  Almost from the minute A Season on the Brink hit bookstores twenty-five years ago, I have been asked the same question repeatedly: Why did it strike such a chord? Why do people still come up to me years later and tell me they just reread the book for a second, fifth, or tenth time? Why did it start out with a first printing of 17,500 books and end up selling into the millions?

  There is no doubt that the access Bob Knight gave me in the winter of 1985–86 had a good deal to do with the book’s success. Back then it was unheard of for a reporter to be granted that sort of access to a basketball coach, much less a wildly controversial one who had won two national championships and an Olympic gold medal.

  Nowadays, you can turn on almost any basketball game on TV and hear what a coach is saying to his team in the locker room. Everything is about “inside access,” whether it is watching Olympic athletes sitting nervously with their headphones on just before they are called on to compete or getting information from an athlete’s website.

  Back then, when I told people I had complete access to Knight, including standing in the locker room with my tape recorder running before, during, and after games and listening in to what was said in the huddle during timeouts, few people actually believed me.

  I still remember the look on CBS analyst Billy Packer’s face when I walked onto the court at Michigan with Knight and took my seat on the end of the bench for the Big Ten–deciding game that season.

  “What are you doing there?” he asked me at halftime.

  “Researching my book,” I answered.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “Bob’s going to be sorry about this.”

  Of course we all know now that Knight was more angry than sorry when the book came out. He wrote in his autobiography that giving me access was the worst mistake he ever made because I turned out to be a bad guy and I violated our agreement by leaving (some of) his profanity in the book. Trust me, if I’d left it all in there I’d still be writing.

  There isn’t any doubt in my mind that Knight honestly believed we had some sort of agreement on profanity. When I told him the book had to include profanity in order to have credibility, he said he understood. But he didn’t. People who use a lot of profanity—I speak, unfortunately, from personal experience—rarely understand just how often they use it.

  Knight was stunned one night during my winter with him when he told a friend of his that he really thought he had done a good job cutting down on his profanity that season and the friend (in a rare moment for someone in Knight’s inner circle) told him he was wrong. For the record, the friend was Bob Murrey, who put on his clinics. Bob Hammel would have swallowed his tongue before he would have contradicted Knight.

  When Knight read chapter one, in which I described the locker room scene in which he completely went off on Daryl Thomas, he couldn’t believe how much profanity there was in his rant. What he didn’t know was that I had removed about 80 percent of the f—— in the speech and had completely removed his repeated use of a word that rhymes with bunt.

  So he called me a lot of names—many of them profane—after the book came out. There are still people who believe Knight’s name-calling made the book a bestseller, forgetting it was already #2 on The New York Times list before he said anything publicly. Others say I was lucky because Indiana won the national championship in 1987. A nice theory but the book takes place a year earlier when Indiana lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to Cleveland State. And there are many who believe the access I had was critical. I buy that theory—up to a point.

  What made A Season on the Brink so successful was the access I had to Knight. The book would not have sold as well if I had the same access to Dean Smith or John Thompson—the two highest profile coaches along with Knight back then—or even Jim Valvano, who had become a major figure in the college game after North Carolina State’s stunning national title run in 1983. If I had waited six years and had that same access to Mike Krzyzewski after his back-to-back national titles at Duke, the book still would not have become a publishing phenomenon.

  There just isn’t anyone like Knight—for better and worse. That’s why people are so fascinated by him even today when he’s little more than another retired coach still looking for a sliver of the spotlight by working on TV. The irony of Knight being a member of the media—in any form—is almost too funny for words. Of course, Knight would insist he’s different than anyone else working on TV, and he’s right. Most color commentators show up for pregame shootarounds, try to talk to coaches before a game about their team, and try to get a sense of who the players are before the game starts.

  Knight does none of that. He just shows up—in a sweater of course, which has created the reality TV–like comedy of ESPN putting play-by-play men in sweaters rather than telling Knight he has to wear a coat and tie like everyone else—and watches the game. Fortunately for him, his understanding of basketball is so keen that he can figure out what both teams are trying to do very quickly and explain it eloquently. If anyone else in TV tried to pull off Knight’s act, they’d be fired before they ever did a second game.

  At the end of A Season on the Brink, I wondered if Knight would ultimately self destruct. Sadly, even though he would vehemently deny it, he did. Can you imagine any coach with Knight’s on-court and off-court record at Indiana managing to get himself fired after twenty-eight years on the job? He won three national titles, an Olympics, an NIT, and dominated the Big Ten. Almost all his players graduated. There was never the smallest hint of any sort of NCAA rules violation—Steve Alford’s charity calendar appearance aside—from the first day he was in Bloomington until the day he walked out the door.

  Knight should have coached his last game at Indiana and on the night of his final game at Assembly Hall the school should have announced that the court would be forevermore known as Bob Knight Court. He should have broken Dean Smith’s all-time record for victories at Indiana, one of the basketball schools, not at Texas Tech, a basketball desert where the athletic department literally had to take out ads begging people to show up for Knight’s record-breaking games.

  Even now, because he can’t ever admit he might have made a mistake, he has refused to come back to be inducted into the Indiana Hall of Fame. He remains bitter and angry even though the president who fired him, Myles Brand, is dead and almost everyone involved in his banishment from IU is no longer at the school. />
  Of course, that’s why people can never get enough of Knight. His good qualities are so good, his bad ones so bad. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me a story about encountering Knight and finding him gracious and charming and funny, I would never have to work another day in my life. If I also had a dollar for every time I’ve been told a story about Knight being a bully or being rude and obnoxious, I’d be Bill Gates.

  People rarely encounter a Knight who is innocuous. They encounter a Knight who leaves them with their mouths agape—in awe or in agony. There’s no in-between.

  I’m often asked what my relationship with Knight is like today. It has—not surprisingly—ebbed and flowed through the years. Eight years after the book was published, Knight apparently decided to forgive me. We began exchanging hellos when we encountered each other, even occasionally engaging in small talk. In 2003, when I was writing my book on Red Auerbach, we talked about Red on the phone for almost two hours and—as is always the case with the good Knight—he was funny, insightful, and full of anecdotes that aided the book immeasurably.

  At the end of the conversation I said, “Bob, I know you did this for Red, but I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

  “No John, I really should thank you,” he answered. “It’s almost impossible to do anything for Red, and I’m really glad you gave me the chance to do this. I hope the book is great.”

  Can you ask for anything more than that?

  Six years later, I had to introduce Knight at the annual Army Sports Hall of Fame Banquet. Mike Krzyzewski was being inducted and Knight was giving his induction speech. I was the emcee.

  The end of my introduction went like this: “So please welcome college basketball’s all-time winningest coach, a member of the Army Sports Hall of Fame and the Basketball Hall of Fame—but most important, the man who built my house . . . Bob Knight.”

  Everyone in the room laughed—except for the one man there not dressed in a tuxedo.

  You can guess who that was. The sweater was blue.

  Maybe on the fiftieth anniversary of the book we can get together and toast each other. But I’m not counting on it.

  —John Feinstein

  June 2011

  Foreword

  By Al McGuire

  My first memory of Bob Knight is a vivid one. This was back in 1970, when my Marquette team was getting ready to play in the NIT semifinals against Louisiana State, which starred Pistol Pete Maravich. We were playing the second game of the semifinal doubleheader.

  The first game was between Army and St. John’s. It was one of those games that make coaches old, a one- or two-point game the whole way. Bob was coaching Army, and his teams were known for this type of game. They never had very much talent, but they were always very hard to play against because they were so aggressive and tenacious on defense. They were like a little dog that grabs hold of your leg and won’t let go.

  I was standing in the tunnel leading from the locker rooms to the floor when the game ended, waiting to go out for the second game. I don’t remember exactly what happened (I’m sure Bob does in detail) but Army lost the game at the buzzer and I think there may have been a touch call that went against them at the end to lose the game. Either way, a killer to lose. I’ve been through a few of those myself.

  As the teams came off the floor, I saw Bob. In a situation like that, maybe you shake a hand, offer a word of condolence. I didn’t say anything. The reason was because I had never seen anyone look so drained, so beaten, in my life. It was a look I’ll never forget because I can’t remember seeing another coach with that look. He had given the game everything he could and losing it just destroyed him. You could see it all over his face. Bob couldn’t have been more than thirty back then but when he came off the floor, he looked like an old man I’ve never forgotten that look.

  If Bob Knight retired today, he would be a lock for a place in the basketball Hall of Fame. On any list of the great coaches that the game has ever known, the name Bob Knight is going to be somewhere near the top. With luck, someday it might be at the very top. He’s that good a coach.

  Bob Knight knows so much basketball that I never talk about the game with him. I don’t know enough about it to do so. I feel the game more than I know it, that’s the way I’ve always been. I can talk one thing—winning. But don’t ask me how. My assistant, Hank Raymonds, was in charge of that. I never studied the game. Bob has studied it, dissected it, and in many ways changed it over the years. If he wants to talk basketball, I listen. But I never argue with him about the game. About people, maybe. About basketball, never.

  When I was at Marquette, we played some of his best Indiana teams. In 1976, in fact, we played his undefeated team in the Mideast regional final. That was one of my best teams, probably a more talented team than the one that won the national championship a year later. I was so uptight during the game that I got two technical fouls that certainly didn’t do my team any good. I doubt we would have won, though. Bob had a great team, and I put that word in italics because that’s what they were. None of the individuals on that team was a superstar—Quinn Buckner, Scott May, Bobby Wilkerson, Tom Abernethy, and Kent Benson—but as a group they were unbeatable. They had been coached to play a certain way and they never deviated. They also never lost.

  What Bob did then was to take you out of your game. If he had a week to prepare for you, he would find a way to take away the things you did best. If you had to play one of his teams in the NCAAs, you always wanted to play him on the second game of the weekend because that way he had less time to prepare. Give Bob time to prepare and most often he would figure out a way to beat you.

  I think that’s changed over the years. Bob is as good as he ever was, but other coaches have gotten better. They know how to prepare better and that makes it harder for Bob to dominate as a coach the way he once did. He still gets 100 percent out of his team at all times. The difference is that other coaches are coming closer and closer to doing that all the time. He hasn’t come down, but they have gone up.

  I’m not sure he understands that. His feeling has always been that if he knows his business, then if the kids listen to him, you get the job done. One of his great frustrations at West Point was not understanding that at West Point you couldn’t get the job done a lot of the time just because it was West Point. Bob always believed you could and that’s why losing tore him up so much. That’s why he looked the way he did that year at the NIT.

  Losing still tears him up. This is his greatest asset and his greatest albatross all at once. Bob thinks he can beat the game. Nobody can beat the game. If you could, there would be no game. But Bob keeps trying to beat it anyway and when he doesn’t he thinks of it as failure, his failure, and it tears him apart.

  I remember a few years ago I arrived in Bloomington early on a Friday morning to tape a spot we were doing for NBC with Bob. I picked up the morning paper and read that Indiana had lost the night before to Iowa by one in overtime. I thought, “Oh boy, is he going to be in a lousy mood.” When we got to Indiana, I went downstairs to his locker room and I knocked on the door.

  Bob asked who it was and I said, “It’s Al.” He said, “Hey, Al, can we do this another day, we’re real busy.” I couldn’t do that. We had the crew, we were all set, our schedule was too tight. I explained that. Finally, the door opened. There was the entire coaching staff. They looked like death. They had been sitting in that room all night looking at tape over and over and over again. I thought the assistant coaches were going to kiss me just for showing up and rescuing them. God knows how long they might have stayed in there wrestling with that tape if we hadn’t shown up. Bob just can’t let go of a loss. He has to have answers. The trouble is sometimes the answer is obvious: the other team was better.

  But that’s also what makes Bob great. I saw his team practice last November and I thought he was going to have serious problems. They had no size, little experience, and very little quickness. I was worried. I thought it was going to be a
nother very tough season for him. So, they go out and win twenty-one games. That was a great coaching job, maybe as good a job as Bob has ever done. He’s still a brilliant coach. Different from other coaches today, but brilliant.

  When I think of Bob Knight, I think of Vince Lombardi and I think of Red Auerbach. Personally, I don’t think either one of them could have coached the way he did in this day and age. Maybe they would have adjusted because the great ones can do that. Bob is a throwback, he’s from that school. He’s a complete disciplinarian. He demands complete loyalty and dedication and he gives it in return.

  I guess I’m like all of Bob’s friends in that I look at his dedication and his work ethic and I admire them but I also worry because of them. I wish he didn’t put so much of himself into the game. I wish he had more outside interests. I know he hunts and fishes and enjoys doing both. But if he’s going to fish on Tuesday, he has to be completely successful with basketball on the other six days to really enjoy Tuesday.

  I’ve told him that I honestly don’t see what’s left for him in college coaching. He has won every championship there is to win, including the Olympics; he’s proved his greatness over and over, including this last season. What’s left? Bob reminds me of Alexander the Great, who conquered the world and then sat down and cried because there was nothing left to conquer. I don’t think he has any true goals left in the college game.

  I would love to see him get into television. I know he’s flirted with it in the past and I think he would be terrific. He’s so bright, so articulate, and so good at stringing thoughts together when he wants to. I’ve been with him when he’s done TV on All-Star games during the off-season and he’s been terrific. I’d be happy to see him make the switch because I’m like everyone else, I don’t want to see someone with a $2 Saturday night special knock him off the coaching pedestal he deserves.

  What I mean by that is this: Suppose some referee decides that the way to make a name for himself is to draw Bob Knight into some kind of fight or battle. Or suppose some fan decides to pick a fight with him. Or suppose some administrator comes to Indiana and decides he’s the guy to prove once and for all that he’s Bob Knight’s boss. If anything like that happens, Bob is going to be judged wrong no matter what he does because of the past. He deserves better than that.