A Season on the Brink Read online

  Later, the three of them would laugh about that phase of the trip, but it hardly seemed funny at the time. Wright’s description of Knight during that period was simple: “You ever been in a five-by-five cage with a wounded tiger, who has just had salt poured on the wound and is very hungry, too? Think about that and then think about someone rollin’ a live grenade in there and that’s what it was like.”

  Hearing this description, Waltman would shake his head, laugh, and say, “If you were smart, you jumped right on top of that grenade, because it was an easier way to die.”

  At night, the players often sat around telling each other where they would have gone if they hadn’t been foolish enough to choose Indiana. Everyone was miserable. When Tim Garl, as trainer the one person on the trip who could get a true reading every day of the feelings of both the players and the coaches, suggested to Knight that he might be riding the players too hard, Knight suggested he find another job.

  The coaches assumed this was just another late-night Knight firing. Over the years he had fired everyone, including himself, several times. The next day on a train trip Knight called Garl over for a talk. The coaches figured peace was being made.

  “Everything all right now?” Waltman asked Garl when he returned a few minutes later.

  “Yeah,” Garl answered. “Now I’m fired for sure.”

  But he didn’t stay fired and neither did the coaches. The team got out of Japan alive and won the last ten games on the trip to finish 12-6. There was noticeable improvement, especially in Thomas, who was adjusting to playing with his back to the basket, and Morgan, who had also been on the verge of being fired in Japan. They even had some fun during the last three weeks. Knight is a superb tour guide because he has read so many history books, and he made certain the players saw all the sights.

  Nonetheless, when the team returned home to the U.S., Stew Robinson jumped off the plane when it landed and kissed the ground.

  During the trip, Knight made some decisions about the upcoming season. He didn’t think he could ask the players to learn an entirely new offense and defense all at once. He had toyed with some zone defense in practice on the trip, but decided to put off teaching it for at least another year. But he did want a push-it-up offense, and he would emphasize that when practice began on October 15.

  Knight also thought that two of the new players would have to be starters. Knight thought one of the junior college players was the best athlete he had ever recruited. That was Andre Harris, a slender 6-6 jumping jack. Harris was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, but had spent two years at Barton County Junior College in Kansas because he had failed to meet the NCAA’s required 2.0 grade-point average. He graduated from Barton County and could now enroll at Indiana as a junior.

  The other potential starter was Rick Calloway. Calloway wasn’t slender, he was skinny, a rail-thin 6-5, 180 pounds. He was from Cincinnati, a gifted, instinctive player who had almost gone to Georgetown but changed his mind after Knight’s visit to his home the previous fall. Knight didn’t know it at the time, but Calloway was a better jumper than Harris and a precocious, rarely intimidated freshman.

  There would be two other new players. One was Todd Jadlow, a teammate of Harris’s at Barton County. Jadlow was 6-9 and 215 pounds with a mean streak in him that Knight liked. He could also shoot. He was a good student who had opted for junior college for a year because he was only 6-6 and 185 pounds when he left high school and his only major scholarship offer, from Kansas State, had been withdrawn.

  The fourth recruit was perhaps the most intriguing. Jeff Oliphant was 6-6 and 180 pounds, from a small town in southern Indiana. He had played for his father at tiny L&M High School, about an hour from Bloomington, and was one of those players that others saw simply as a slow white kid. But Knight saw him as a potential star. Oliphant could shoot, his vision of the game was perhaps the best on the team, and he was a natural guard who was already 6-6 and perhaps still growing. He would be redshirted as a freshman—a redshirt is a player who participates in no games for a season and thereby gains a fifth year of eligibility—so that he could mature physically. At times during the season when Oliphant made passes that no one else on the team had the vision to see, Knight would compare him to Larry Bird.

  Oliphant was in fact a potential star, but Bird is a once-in-a-lifetime player. The three-time NBA Most Valuable Player had also come out of a small Indiana high school and had signed with Indiana, but the “big-city” atmosphere in Bloomington had been too much for the kid from French Lick, and Bird left within four weeks of enrolling. He later enrolled at Indiana State, became a superstar, and left people wondering what might have happened if he had ever played for Knight. The best coach and the best player. The smartest coach and the smartest player. The combination might have been mind-boggling.

  It was very unlikely that Oliphant would become Bird, though they did have a lot in common: Both were 6-6 kids from small Indiana towns who could shoot and had a natural flair for passing. Like Bird, Oliphant was almost painfully quiet. But Oliphant did not have Bird’s drive, his passion for the game. He worked hard and was intelligent, but he wasn’t Bird.

  Comparing an Oliphant to a Bird was another common Knight syndrome. Knight’s players often joke about how good they were in high school, how terrible they were in college, and how wonderful they became again as soon as they were out of college. When Knight recruits a player he is almost always convinced he will become a great player. Often, when an Indiana player is struggling, Knight will reminisce about previous players who have played that position, or he will begin to project how good the next player at that spot will be.

  When Knight’s former players gather, they all tell war stories. One night during the fall, Steve Green, who had been part of Knight’s first recruiting class at Indiana and a captain on the 31-1 1975 team, told about a game in which he made a huge mistake. “I came out of the game for a rest and I sat down next to Coach,” he said. “Very bad move. The next thing I know, the guys playing screw up a couple times and he starts yelling at me, ‘Green, how can you let those sonsofbitches play like that? What the hell kind of example are you setting? What kind of leader are you anyway?’”

  Hearing Green tell this story, Dakich began to laugh. “Last year when I was the captain, whenever we started playing badly he would turn to me and say, ‘Goddammit Dakich, what kind of leader are you? Do you think Steve Green would ever allow his team to play that way? He’d have kicked somebody’s ass by now!’”

  Players learn to accept the fact that for four years, they will be terrible basketball players most of the time. Ted Kitchel, who graduated in 1983, sums that up best. “I played on [imitating Knight’s voice] ‘the four worst f——teams in the history of Indiana basketball. The worst.’ We won three Big Ten championships and the national championship in 1981. But believe me, we were, ‘the worst.’”

  Knight picks out targets on each team. Usually, it is a player he knows can handle the abuse, and it is almost always a very good player. Kitchel had been a major target, with Randy Wittman not far behind. During 1985-86, Alford would be Public Enemy Number 1. More than one tape session became “The Steve Alford Show.” And, when Knight wanted to tell Alford what a terrible leader he was, he used Kitchel and Wittman as examples of the kind of leader he wanted.

  The coaches would giggle whenever Knight brought up Wittman, as he often did. At the end of 1982, Knight had told Wittman, who had a fifth year of eligibility because of an injury, that he should skip that year, turn pro, and leave Indiana. He had not, of course, meant it. And with each passing year, Kitchel and Wittman became, retroactively, better and tougher.

  But even they couldn’t reach the plateau of the players on the 1975 and 1976 teams. The 1975 senior class—Green, John Laskowski, and Steve Ahlfeld—were all still close to Knight. All three lived in Indianapolis. Laskowski did the color commentary on Indiana’s telecasts, and when he wasn’t available Green did it. Ahlfeld was one of the team’s doctors. The 1976 c
lass consisted of Crews, who became an assistant for eight years after graduating, Quinn Buckner, Scott May, Bobby Wilkerson, and Tom Abernethy. Only Wilkerson was no longer a close member of the extended Knight/I.U. family. Of all his players, Knight talked about Buckner more than any other. Buckner was smart, savvy, tough: a coach on the court.

  When Buckner was a senior, Knight benched him for two games. Buckner was so distraught that when he went into one of those games he had trouble breathing; he was so upset about the benching that he was hyperventilating. But Buckner ended his career jumping into Knight’s arms in Philadelphia after capping a 32-0 season with the national championship. Knight is his second father; Buckner is Knight’s oldest son.

  The players who came later heard about those two teams so much they had the speeches memorized. Laskowski remembers walking into the locker room once and having Kitchel and Wittman come over and begin examining his head. “They were checking for my halo.”

  Alford is bright enough to understand his coach. Yet their relationship is tempestuous to say the least. One reason for that is Alford’s unique standing among Indiana basketball fans. He is the perfect boy next door. He is small by basketball standards, and he is baby-faced. He is neatly dressed, always polite, and a resolute churchgoer. He is also white; in most parts of the state, that alone makes him special.

  He is a coach’s son. “I learned to count on a basketball scoreboard,” he says. He is as pure a shooter as you can imagine, having worked for hours and hours and hours on his shot. He almost never misses a free throw—he was once twenty-five for twenty-five in a high school playoff game—and any opening for his jump shot is almost always a basket. As a senior in high school he averaged thirty-eight points a game and won the coveted Mr. Basketball Award as the best player in the state. Then he went to Indiana and became a starter and the leading scorer as a freshman. Then he made the Olympic team and starred again. In short, before he began his sophomore year in college, Alford had lived the American dream and, even more than that, the Indiana dream: Mr. Basketball; starter at I.U.; Olympic hero.

  Knight knew all that and knew how hard it would be for any kid, even one as levelheaded as Alford, to deal with all the adulation. And adulation it is: People stop at Alford’s house in New Castle to take pictures of their son standing under the hoop where Alford shot baskets as a boy. Girls squeal when he is introduced as if he were a rock star. Dan Dakich calls him the Shaun Cassidy of college basketball.

  Alford didn’t have a great sophomore year. He was better than the team, but not as good as he could be. Knight harped constantly on his poor defense, and told him again and again that he wasn’t working hard enough. Alford thought he was working hard. Knight told him he wasn’t. Knight understood what Alford was going through. “Hell, the kid’s eighteen years old and he’s got an Olympic gold medal. Julius Erving doesn’t have an Olympic gold medal. He’s everyone’s hero in an entire state. That’s not easy.” But he also felt the need to push Alford as much as he could get away with if only for his own good. “He just doesn’t understand how hard it is for someone like him to play well,” Knight told the coaches repeatedly that season.

  For Alford to get better as a player, Knight believed, he had to do everything Knight told him to do without hesitation. Alford hadn’t done that as a sophomore. He had questioned the coach; not openly, but by his actions. Knight is not a coach who accepts questioning from his players on any level. Knight didn’t want Alford to take anything for granted as a junior. He knew that for Indiana to be good, Alford had to be his best player and the team’s leader. But that’s not what he told Alford. As the plane flew home from Europe in late July, Knight took Alford aside and told him in no uncertain terms that this year the five best defensive players would start, period. “And you, Steve, are not one of those five players right now.”

  Did Alford think Knight was serious, or just playing a mind game? “I was convinced,” Alford said, “that he had never been more serious in his life.”

  4.

  October 15

  In college basketball, no date means more than October 15. On that day, basketball teams all around the country begin formal preparations for the upcoming season. The players have probably played against each other every afternoon from the day school opened, but October 15 is the real thing. The coaches no longer sit high in the stands to observe—though even doing that is a violation of a universally ignored NCAA rule—but are down on the floor, teaching, coaching, and yelling.

  October 15 fell on a Tuesday, and it also fell right in the middle of a week when Indiana was staging a major fundraising event in Assembly Hall. That meant that the first four days of practice would take place away from Assembly Hall, in the Indiana Middle School Building. The players dressed in the Assembly Hall locker room, then drove to practice.

  When they arrived, they were greeted by a total of eight coaches: Knight, Kohn Smith, Royce Waltman, and Joby Wright were the holdovers from the previous season. Crews was gone to Evansville, replaced by Ron Felling. There were also three graduate assistants: Dan Dakich; Murry Bartow, son of Knight’s close friend Gene Bartow, the coach at Alabama-Birmingham; and Julio Salazar, a Colombian who had worked Knight’s summer camp for several years after meeting him in San Juan during the Pan-American Games.

  The status of the graduate assistants was quite different from that of the four full-time coaches. They didn’t dress in the comfortable coaches’ locker room, but in a tiny office a few feet down the hall from the players’ locker room. They didn’t look at tape with the other coaches; their job was to gather the tape and help prepare it to be used. They only occasionally went on the road with the team. They were coaches training to be coaches, paying their dues by doing scut work for the older coaches. One of Dakich’s assignments each morning during the fall semester was to pick up Andre Harris, who lived off campus, to make sure he got to his first class or to a study hall.

  Felling turned out to be a delight for the players. He was forty-five, a curly-haired ex-high school coach who loved to talk about two things: basketball and women. Felling had won four state championships in Illinois at tiny Lawrenceville High School, but had retired in 1983. He had coached, among others, Marty Simmons, who had come to Indiana as a future star only to move on to Evansville with Crews after his weight problems the previous season. Over the years, Felling and Knight had become friends through clinics and camps, and when Crews got the Evansville job, Knight called Felling at 2 A.M.

  Sound asleep, Felling picked up the phone and heard a voice say, “Well, are you gonna come work for me or not?” It was Knight, and that was the job offer. Felling took it.

  Knight had been serious about Alford; he began the first practice in a white uniform. At Indiana, the starting team wears red uniforms in practice, and the subs wear white. During the course of the season, every player will spend some time in red and some time in white; there are days when the entire starting five finds itself in white.

  But putting Alford in white was a clear signal from coach to player. The talk on the airplane coming home from Europe wasn’t just talk. Knight was going to make the preseason difficult for Alford. Everyone on the team understood what was going on; they also understood that if anyone on the team was tough enough to handle the situation, it was Alford.

  Alford, with his baby face and short-cropped, always neat brown hair, doesn’t look very tough, but he is. He takes a physical pounding in every game he plays because he is small and his great shooting ability makes him the target of a lot of tough defense. Beyond that, though, Alford had earned the respect of his teammates because he didn’t let Knight get to him. Every time Knight told Alford how bad he was, Alford just shrugged and played a little better. Which was exactly what Knight wanted.

  “When I first came here, with his reputation and everything he had won, I figured Steve would be spoiled and not too tough at all,” said Daryl Thomas. “But he proved himself to me. In fact, I think he proved himself to everybody.”

>   Ironically, Thomas was the one whose toughness Knight questioned. Like Alford, Thomas was exceptionally bright, but he wasn’t nearly as driven as Alford. He liked basketball, but wasn’t obsessed with it. He wanted to be good, but he didn’t live to be good. Where Alford would just set his jaw and think, “You’re crazy,” when Knight told him how bad he was, Thomas tended to believe it.

  Even before the late November blowup when Knight brought Thomas to tears, he had called Thomas every name there was. Knight knew this wasn’t always good strategy with Thomas. “The problem with calling Daryl Thomas a pussy,” he said one night, “is that he believes you.”

  Much had been made over the years of Knight’s use of profanity with the players. It is no exaggeration. Knight uses profanity when he is angry, when he is happy, and whenever he feels like it. He once taped an outtake for a TV show explaining why he used the word fuck so much. “I just think,” he said, “that fuck is the most expressive word in the English language. It can be used to express surprise as in, ‘Well I’ll be fucked!’ Or, it can be used to express anger, as in ‘Fuck you!’ Or, it can express dismay as in, ‘Oh, fuck!’”

  Knight used it to express all these things and more. Some of his friends had talked to him over the years about trying to curb that language, and he had gone through periods of trying to do so. But when things went bad in practice, Knight would backslide, occasionally reeling off seven or eight of them in one sentence. Once, in a fit of temper, Knight decided he wanted the floor cleared of everyone except his players and coaches. This was a typical Indiana practice: several professors, Knight hunting cronies, and other assorted friends were present. So was Ed Williams.

  “I want all these cocksuckers out of here right now,” Knight yelled.