One on One Read online

  “There’s one thing I don’t think people understand about the way I coach,” he said. “I coach like I’m still at West Point, like the other team is always going to be more talented. When I get my players to think that way, we’re good. When I don’t, we’re not as good. But I’m always thinking that way.”

  I covered Indiana in the regional that year when the Hoosiers pulled the monumental upset over North Carolina before the disappointing loss to Virginia. Then I covered the Olympic trials, which were in Bloomington, and the Olympics in Los Angeles. Knight was alternately hot and cold with me as with everyone. At times he would pull me aside, put an arm around me, and explain something to me about a certain player. At other times he would walk right by me as if not seeing me. Kindred explained that was just Knight being Knight, always letting you know that he controlled the relationship. My attitude was simple: as long as I could get in touch with him when I needed to, he was welcome to feel in control.

  When George Solomon suggested I go out and talk to Knight not long after the Illinois benchings and the Giomi expulsion from the team, I decided not to call Knight. I called Klingelhoffer and asked for a credential for the following Thursday when Illinois was coming to Bloomington for a rematch.

  “You going to try to talk to him?” Kit asked, knowing I probably wasn’t coming to write a game story.

  “Going to play it by ear,” I said. “See what his mood is like.”

  “Probably smart,” he said. “It hasn’t been good very often this winter though, I should warn you about that.”

  I hardly needed warning.

  I caught the exact same flight to Indianapolis I had taken in the past en route to Bloomington and drove—again in the rain—down State Road 37 into town. It was mid-afternoon on game day. Since I had gotten to know Knight’s assistants a little during the Olympics experience, I figured it couldn’t hurt to stop at Assembly Hall before checking into my hotel to see if anyone was around. My best hope was that Indiana would win the game and Knight would be in a good enough mood that he would talk to me afterward.

  I knocked on the door of the coaches’ locker room, which sits a few yards from the floor. Within seconds the door was opened—by Knight. He looked at me for a second and then waved me into the room.

  “John,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  He was alone. He sat down in his armchair, where he had been watching tape. I gingerly sat on the arm of another chair, not sure just how welcome I was, showing up unannounced.

  “You show up unannounced to see Dean [Smith] and Mike [Krzyzewski] a lot?” he said, as if reading my mind.

  “Only on game days,” I said, going for humor.

  If he was amused he didn’t show it.

  “We’re a bad basketball team right now, John,” he said. With that he launched into an explanation of everything that had gone wrong that winter. I waited a while before I took out a notebook. When I did, he kept on talking. And talking. The coaches began showing up as game time approached. I waited to be dismissed. I hadn’t even picked up my credential yet.

  “Come on, walk me over to the locker room,” Knight said about thirty minutes before game time.

  We walked the back hallways of the building to the far side where the players dressed. I could hear the band playing out on the court. Knight nodded to the various security people as we walked down the hall. I followed him into the locker room and found a place in a corner to stand. Knight went through the matchups and explained to his players how sick and tired he was of losing to Illinois. “I don’t care how many f—ing All-Americans he [Henson] has out there,” he said. “You boys play Indiana basketball tonight the way we coach you to play and we’ll win the game.”

  There was a lot more, but I didn’t have my tape recorder with me. It was a miracle I had brought my notebook inside. I trailed Knight when he walked out onto the court, an exercise that would become the norm for me the following season. No one stopped me since I was clearly with him. When Knight went to the bench I went to press row and found Klingelhoffer.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming.”

  “I’ve been with Knight since three thirty this afternoon,” I said.

  Klingelhoffer shook his head as he handed me my credential. “He really does like you, I guess,” he said.

  Illinois won the game easily. Knight got a technical foul and put his foot through a chair before it was over. He refused to shake Henson’s hand at the end and didn’t come in to talk to the media. I wondered if I should take what I had—which was plenty—or push the envelope a little bit further. I had told Knight that I was hoping to talk to some of the players the following day, and he had said that would be fine. I wondered if it was still fine.

  So I went and knocked on the door again to the room I would eventually come to call “the Cave.”

  Knight was sitting in his chair when assistant coach Kohn Smith opened the door and looked at me as if to say, “Are you nuts?”

  “Sorry you flew all the way out here to see that, John,” Knight said. “We’re ordering food. You hungry?”

  I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since getting off the airplane about nine hours earlier. I sat and listened to Knight talk to the coaches about how they needed to recruit junior college players in order to compete with teams as athletic as Illinois. I listened to him rail some more against Henson. I ate some chicken wings and watched some tape. Klingelhoffer came in and Knight told him to arrange for me to talk to the two captains, Dakich and Blab, the next day. It was 2 a.m. when I called it a night.

  I almost felt as if I could fly home the next morning. I had plenty for my story. I stayed and talked to Dakich and Blab, who were brutally honest about how poorly the team had played. Dakich expressed concern. “We’re so bad we might drive Coach out of the game,” he said. “I’ve seen him mad, but never like this.”

  Knight was mad at practice that afternoon. I continued to have complete access: pre-practice talk in the locker room (which wasn’t pretty), practice, postpractice talk. Then it was back to the Chinese restaurant for dinner, where Knight talked calmly and philosophically about getting through a season like this one and regrouping to come back next year.

  I was on an early morning flight the next day thinking I had enough to write three stories. Indiana was playing Purdue that afternoon. I figured sticking around would be redundant, since I’d seen everything there was to see in the past forty-eight hours. Of course I was completely wrong.

  I WAS ACTUALLY SITTING in George Solomon’s office writing the Knight story a few hours after I’d left Indiana—it was a quiet place to work on a Saturday afternoon—when someone came in and said, “Your guy Knight just threw a chair.”

  I walked out into the newsroom just in time to see a replay. I hadn’t even bothered to watch the start of the game, figuring I’d wait to see how the first half went and then watch the second. Purdue had jumped to an 11–2 lead, and Knight had gotten into it with referee London Bradley—one of many Big Ten refs he insisted shouldn’t be reffing in the Big Ten.

  Bradley had teed Knight up. As Purdue’s Steve Ross walked to the free-throw line, Knight turned and picked up the orange plastic chair where he had been sitting and sidearmed it across the court. It skittered directly in front of Ross and lost steam just as it reached the far side of the court. What’s funny to me all these years later is that if you watch the tape, no one on the Indiana bench moves or shows any kind of emotion—except for a manager who, without missing a beat, grabs another chair and puts it in the spot where the one Knight had thrown had been.

  Everyone at IU had seen Knight throw chairs and all sorts of other things, so the sight of him tossing this chair was pretty ho-hum. Not to the rest of the world. Knight was ejected on the spot, and Indiana president John Ryan was in the Cave a few minutes later. Knight did something at that moment I’m guessing he probably hasn’t done five times in his life: he apologized.

  Needless
to say the lead and the tone of my story had to be changed after the chair throw. There was certainly no defending what Knight had done, and I didn’t defend him. In fact, the opening line of the story said this: “Maybe if he had counted to ten he wouldn’t have done it.”

  But of course he didn’t count to ten and he did do it. I ended up writing close to three thousand words—many of them coming directly from Knight—about his lost season and the dichotomy of the calm, measured man I’d had dinner with on Friday night and the crazed coach who had tossed a chair about sixteen hours later. The day after the story, my phone rang. It was Knight. I braced myself. About nine times out of ten when the subject of a story calls, it is to complain about something in the piece.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Knight said as I readied myself to play defense, “how much it means to me that you went out of your way to tell both sides in that story you wrote. You could have taken me apart after what happened Saturday, like most people are doing, and you didn’t do it.”

  I told Knight that being able to talk to him and to his players and to watch him prepare for the Purdue game—regardless of what had happened—allowed me to write the story that way. I thanked him for the time and the access.

  “Anytime,” Knight said. “I hope you know that. You’re welcome here anytime. Speaking of which, I always go out to dinner on Saturday night at the Final Four with a bunch of my coaches and friends. I don’t know what your schedule is, but I’d really like it if you joined us.”

  I told him if I could get there once I was finished writing, I would. He said he would get me the information on the restaurant they were going to, thanked me again, and we hung up.

  It was at that moment the thought first crossed my mind: What if he meant it about me being welcome out there anytime? What if I could have the access I’d had for two days for an entire season? Was I nuts or was there a pretty good book in something like that?

  I asked four people what they thought of the idea: Bob Woodward, Tony Kornheiser, David Maraniss, and Lesley Visser. They all thought it had a lot of potential if Knight was actually willing to give me the kind of access I’d had during those two days. The only person who had any doubts was Visser, but it had nothing to do with the book’s potential. “Do you really want to spend a winter in Bloomington, Indiana?” she asked.

  I was single and had just broken up with someone, so I had no reason not to spend a winter in Bloomington. I decided the place to broach the idea to Knight was face-to-face—at the Final Four. I figured I had nothing to lose.

  AS I WALKED TO the restaurant that night, I was nervous. Even though Knight saying no wouldn’t change my life—in fact, him saying yes would potentially change my life far more—I didn’t want him to turn me down. I had really come to believe in the idea and I had always wanted to write a book.

  In fact, the idea to do a book tracking a college basketball team from the inside dated to my college days. Even though Duke wasn’t any good when I was an undergraduate, I had gotten to know both the players and the coaches well by covering the basketball team for the student newspaper, The Chronicle. I believed there was a story to be told about what really went on inside locker rooms and practices and huddles.

  The idea stayed with me during my early days at the Post, but I was convinced you had to have a truly big name coach give you access to his program in order to write a book that a publisher would buy and that the public would want to read.

  To me there were only three coaches who fit that profile: Knight, Dean Smith, and Georgetown’s John Thompson, who in 1984 had become the first African-American coach to win a national championship. Thompson was brilliant, he was intense, and he was perhaps the most secretive and paranoid person I’d ever met in a business filled with men who were secretive and paranoid. He literally chained the doors to McDonough Gym closed when his team practiced, and he had a bell attached to the door of the reception area leading to the basketball offices so that even when he was in his office, he knew when someone was coming in or going out.

  Thompson’s desire for secrecy and my desire for storytelling led us to clash early and often. We battled frequently, often screaming at one another outside locker rooms and in hotel lobbies. Once, when I made the mistake of snapping at his academic coordinator / alter ego / best friend, Mary Fenlon, who had more authority than anyone in the program with the possible exception of Thompson, he went off on me completely.

  On this particular night, I had waited in the hallway for Thompson and Fenlon to make the short walk from the back door of the Capital Centre’s home locker room to the interview room. As they came out, I said to Thompson, “John, when you’re done in there, I need a minute to ask you a couple of quick follow-ups for the Ewing piece.” I’d been working on a feature on Patrick Ewing.

  Before Thompson could answer, Fenlon looked at me and said, “He doesn’t have time for any of your questions.” I never liked Fenlon. I thought she fed Thompson’s paranoia and went out of her way to be unpleasant to people. So, when she answered for Thompson, I answered instinctively: “Mary, I don’t think I was talking to you. I think I was talking to John.”

  Now Thompson did answer me. Standing up to his full height of 6 foot 10, he loomed over me and screamed, “If you’re talking to Mary, you’re talking to me. And if you’re f—ing with Mary, you’re f—ing with me. You want to f— with me?”

  Clearly, I didn’t want to f— with him. Just as clearly, I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me, no matter how intimidated I felt at that moment. He had me by ten inches and probably 150 pounds (I was a lot thinner then than now).

  I stood up as straight as I could and remembered something Wil Jones, who had played against Thompson in high school, had once told me: “John loves to intimidate. But he’s not so tough. When we played I always told him he was nothing but a pussy jump shooter.”

  So I looked up at Thompson and said, “Fine, John, you wanna go out back? You want the first swing? From what Wil Jones says I’ll have a pretty good shot. And if not, what the hell, you can knock me out and make me a millionaire.” (I’d stolen that line from my pal Ken Denlinger, who had once had a similar conversation with Lefty Driesell.)

  Thompson’s mouth dropped open for a second. Then he started to laugh. He put his arm around me and said, “You know something, motherf—er [that was John’s catchall word for everything; it was often a term of endearment], I have to admit something. I respect you. I don’t like you, but I respect you. I’ll give you five minutes when I’m done.”

  Which he did.

  Our relationship got worse before it got better. I used the term “Hoya Paranoia” in a story about Georgetown that I wrote for The Sporting News in the spring of 1984, and at the Final Four in Seattle that year, Thompson accused the media of having a “herd mentality” when it came to his team because the “Hoya Paranoia” reference had picked up quite a bit of steam.

  Clearly, Thompson was not going to be the guy who gave me complete access to his team for a season. I was lucky to be allowed in the building when Georgetown played.

  THAT WASN’T THE CASE with Dean Smith. In spite of my educational background (Duke), I’d always had a good relationship with him. In fact, in 1981 I had written a lengthy two-part series on Smith in the Post for which he had given me a lot of interview time and allowed a lot of his close friends to talk with me. For Dean, this was very rare. He hated publicity.

  “Write about the players,” he would always say when someone asked him for extended interview time. He had even done that when approached by the great Frank Deford for a profile in Sports Illustrated. Deford was so good he could write around not having sit-down time with Dean and still be brilliant. I wasn’t that good. So in January of 1981, absolutely determined to get Dean to give me some serious time, I drove down to Charlottesville on a Friday afternoon to see him at his hotel—the Boar’s Head Inn. North Carolina was playing Virginia the next afternoon.

  Rick Brewer—who had been the sports information
director at North Carolina since 1975, but had worked in the athletic department since his days as a student in the mid-’60s—had convinced Dean to speak to me that evening and allow me to make my case. So I made the drive from D.C. even though I had to turn around and go right back to cover a game at Maryland the next day.

  Dean was trying unsuccessfully to light a fire in the fireplace in his room when Rick and I walked in. Through the years, one thing he and I have shared is a complete inability to figure out anything mechanical or technical. Once, when I was trying to track him down by phone for a story I was working on one Sunday afternoon, I asked Keith Drum, who worked at the Durham Morning Herald at the time, if he would give Dean the 800 number at the Post and ask him to call me. When Keith handed Dean the number, Dean looked at it and said, “I’m not sure I know how to dial an eight-hundred number.” He was serious.

  Now he had put out a call for someone on the hotel staff to come to the room to light a fire for him. I would have offered to help, only I probably couldn’t have done any better.

  “So what do you need?” Dean asked, sitting down.

  “You,” I answered as he started shaking his head.

  I told him I had written stories about his players, including one earlier that season on Sam Perkins. I had even driven down to Wilmington to see one of his future players, a kid named Michael Jordan, play that winter. I told him if he didn’t talk to me, I was going to write the story anyway, but I also said I knew it would be a lot better if he did talk to me.

  He sighed and looked at Rick. “What do you think, Rick?” he asked.

  Rick shrugged. “I think if John’s going to write the story it will be better if you talk to him,” he said.

  Dean looked at me and shook his head. “I still wish you’d just write about the players,” he said.

  “I know you do, Dean,” I answered.

  “Okay. Let me think about it overnight. I’ll let you know after the game tomorrow.”