[NCAA insert] A road trip with Texas Tech’s Bob Knight

Special to the Bruin

When it was announced on Sunday that UCLA would play Texas Tech
on Thursday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, I
couldn’t help thinking of Star Wars. To those who have
followed coach Bob Knight’s volatile career, and who have
heard him dismiss UCLA’s iconic coach John Wooden, it seemed
like Darth Vader and the dark side were about to clash with the
descendants of Wooden (Yoda) and those who believe that the Force
is with them.

How do I know that Knight never cared much for Wooden? Because
in the fall of 2000, less than two months after he had been fired
after coaching 29 years at the University of Indiana, I flew to
Bloomington, Ind., to interview Bob Knight for Playboy. My time
with Knight turned into the most terrifying weekend of my
professional life, and the result, published in March 2001, brought
me nearly as much unexpected press attention as anything I had ever
done.

I met Knight at his home, after he had spent the day hunting
birds. He is a big, gruff man, 6-foot-5, with a legendary
reputation for volatility. I had researched his past temper
tantrums and was prepared to ask him about the time he head-butted
his own son, or when he picked up a heckler at a restaurant and
stuffed him into a garbage can, or when he fired a starter’s
pistol at a reporter, or when he took his team off the floor for
the second half of a game against the Russians, or when he grabbed
a player by his neck during practice or threw a chair across the
gym floor during a game. What I wasn’t prepared for was
Knight asking me to accompany him to watch his son assisting the
coach at the University of Ohio in Akron ““ a six-hour car
ride, which he wanted to do as a one-day round-trip excursion. That
meant 12 hours in the car with the man columnist Bill Conlin of the
Philadelphia Daily News called “America’s angriest
man.”

During the ride to Akron, I managed to ask Knight some
basketball questions before he exploded when I brought up the
incident which got him fired (when he supposedly intimidated a
19-year-old student who disrespectfully called him by his last
name). I asked him what he thought of Bill Walton, who often
bad-mouthed Knight on TV or in print. “Walton is a guy I
would never want to think well of me,” Knight said of the
former UCLA center, who has been ranked as the second greatest
college player, “because then I would know I had something I
should really be bothered about. One time he did an interview with
me during the NCAA Tournament and Walton made some imperious
statement: “˜Tell me who Bob Knight really is.’ And I
said, “˜What you see is what you get, which is a hell of a lot
different than the guy you played for.'”

The guy Walton played for was John Wooden, considered by most
basketball aficionados as the greatest college basketball coach of
all time. So of course I had to ask Knight what he meant. “I
don’t know Wooden’s history well enough,” Knight
answered, “but it seems to me that Sam Gilbert was
intricately involved with basketball at UCLA and it’s pretty
obvious that Sam Gilbert didn’t do very much by the book,
whatever that entails.”

Gilbert was an ardent UCLA supporter and Knight was blackening
Wooden’s reputation by associating Gilbert with him. As far
as Knight was concerned, if UCLA had Gilbert’s help
recruiting or aiding certain players, then Wooden’s hands
couldn’t be clean.

But Knight didn’t want to go any further. It was obvious
he didn’t care for the soft-spoken Wooden and his style of
coaching. Knight was a screamer when he coached, he was often a
bully and he even had one of his best former players, Isiah Thomas,
say “There were times when if I had a gun, I think I would
have shot him.” I doubt Bill Walton or Lew Alcindor ever felt
that way about John Wooden.

But it was after I brought up the incident that got him fired
when I experienced first-hand Knight’s legendary temper. He
slammed his fist into the steering wheel of his Lincoln and started
to curse at me. His head ballooned to twice its size, he screamed
that I shouldn’t say another word and he went into a rampage
over what had happened to him. He threatened to throw me out of the
car and let me hitchhike back to Bloomington. He drove 70 miles
past the exit and had to turn back. I had never seen a man so angry
before … until, 12 hours later, when we’re returning from
Akron and I asked him to set the record straight about some of his
earlier public incidents. He exploded for a second time, asking for
my tape recorders, and when I refused to give them to him, he
grabbed for my bag and wanted, once again, to throw me out onto the
highway.

I somehow managed to weather both storms and after long periods
of silence, when he calmed down enough to reason with, I got him to
talk about his pain.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “you
can’t understand. How would you like to have had your whole
world taken from you for no good reason? Today was the first time
in 38 years where I attended a practice without having a team. For
29 years I did things for Indiana, I raised $5 million for the
library, I established two professorial chairs and when I left
there was no thanks. Not a word. I’m selling my house, I
don’t know if I’ll ever get another coaching job
again.”

Did he really want to coach, after all the trouble he had in the
past? “Yeah,” he told me, “I would like to wind
up my coaching career working for people that I really like and
respect and who feel the same way about me. I want better final
memories than I have right now.”

Knight got his chance when Texas Tech offered him a job.
He’s managed to take that team to the NCAA Tournament three
out of the four years he’s been there. On Thursday he brings
that team to Tucson to face the Bruins and the ghosts of John
Wooden and Bill Walton. It should be quite a game.

Lawrence Grobel is a lecturer in the English department and
former Daily Bruin columnist. His interview with Bob Knight appears
in full in his book: The Art of the Interview.