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Chapter 1
On the Brink
November 24, 1985....The day was no different from any other that fall. A cold rain had been falling steadily all morning and all afternoon, and the wind cut holes in their faces as they raced from their cars to the warmth of the lobby, and then into the locker room a moment later. This was Sunday. In six days, Indiana would begin its basketball season, and no one connected with the team had any idea what the season would hold. The only thing everyone knew for certain was that no one could live through another season like the last one.
Bob Knight knew this better than any of them. The 1984-85 season had been the most painful he had lived through in twenty years as a coach. Nine months after what might have been his most glorious night in coaching, he had suffered through his most ignominious. He had gone from Olympic hero to national buffoon, from being canonized in editorials to being lampooned in cartoons.
In the summer of 1984, Knight had coached perhaps the best amateur team in the history of basketball. His U.S. Olympic team had destroyed every opponent it faced on the way to the Olympic gold medal. And yet, because of the Soviet boycott, Knight could not feel, even in his greatest moment, complete satisfaction.
He had returned to coach at Indiana and had experienced his worst season. He benched starters, threw his leading rebounder off the team, and generally acted like a man who was burned out -- scorched out might be a better term. Some friends urged him to quit, or at least take a year off. But Knight couldn't quit; he had to prove himself -- again.
At age forty-five, Knight was starting over. Not from scratch, but not that farfrom it. He knew by the end of the previous season that he had to change. He knew he could not lash out at his team every time it failed. He surely knew that he could never again throw a chair during a game as he had done in February during a loss to Purdue. He had to work harder than he had worked in recent years. He had to be certain that he still wanted to coach and act that way. He had to get his team playing the way it had played during his six years at West Point and during his first thirteen years at Indiana. Above all, he had to be more patient.
For Knight, the last was the most difficult. Bob Knight was many things: brilliant, driven, compassionate -- but not patient. His explosions at players and officials on the bench during games were legendary. To those who knew him, his eruptions in practice and the locker room were frightening. Friends worried after he threw the chair that he was destined to end up like Woody Hayes, the Ohio State football coach whose career had ended when he slugged an opposing player in frustration at the end of a bowl game.
Knight had come to practice on October 15, eager to begin again. Players and assistant coaches noticed right away that he was teaching more, that he spent less time talking to buddies on the sidelines and more time caught up in the work. He was more patient. He seemed to understand that this was a young team, an inexperienced team, a fragile team. It was a team that had to be nurtured, not bullied.
Now, though, the season was just six days away. When Knight looked onto the floor he saw a team that in no way resembled the great teams he had coached in the mid 1970s or, for that matter, the team he had coached in 1981, when he won his second national championship. They couldn't attack defensively the way Knight liked to attack. They couldn't intimidate. Worse than that, he thought, they could be intimidated. Every day he came to practice wanting to see them get better, looking for hope. Some days he found it: Steve Alford was a brilliant shooter, a gritty player who could score against almost any defense. Daryl Thomas, the 6-foot-7-inch center, and Andre Harris, the 6-6 forward recruited out of a junior college, were superb athletes, blessed with great quickness around the basket. Rick Calloway, the rail-thin freshman, was going to be a wonderful player some day.
But all of them had up days and down days. And the rest of the team was too young or too slow or too small. The vulnerability preyed on Knight's mind. The last thing in the world Bob Knight ever wanted to be was vulnerable. He had felt vulnerable, beatable, mortal the previous season when his team had finished under .500 in Big Ten play (7-11) for the first time in fourteen years. The NCAA had invited sixty-four teams to its postseason tournament, more than at any time in history. Indiana wasn't one of them.
Knight was incapable of accepting failure. Every defeat was personal; his team lost, a team he had selected and coached. None of the victories or milestones of the past mattered. The fact that he could quit right then and know that his place in history was secure didn't matter. Failure on any level all but destroyed him, especially failure in coaching because it was coaching that gave him his identity, made him special, set him apart.
And so on this rainy, ugly Sunday, beginning the final week of preparation for another season, Knight was angry. He was angry because as his team scrimmaged he could see its flaws. Even playing perfectly, following every instruction he gave, this team would be beatable. How could that be? Knight believed -- and his record seemed to back him up -- that the system he had devised over the years was the best way there was to play basketball. He always told his players that. "Follow our rules, do exactly what we tell you and you will not lose," he would say. "But boys, you have to listen to me."
The boys listened. Always, they listened. But they didn't always assimilate, and sometimes, even when they did, they could not execute what they had been told. That was what frightened Knight -- yes, frightened him -- about this team. It might do everything it was told and still not be very good. He liked these players; there wasn't, in his view, a bad kid on the team. But he wondered about their potential as basketball players.
Today the player bothering him most was Daryl Thomas. In Thomas, Knight saw a player of huge potential. Thomas has what coaches call a "million dollar body." He was strong and wide, yet quick. He could shoot the basketball with both hands, and when he went past bigger men to the basket, they had little choice but to foul him.
But Thomas was not one of those basketball players who like to get up on game day and eat nails for breakfast to get ready. He was a middle-class kid from Chicago, extremely bright and sensitive. Knight's angry words often hurt him. Other Indiana players, Alford for one, knew that Knight would say almost anything when he was angry and that the only way to deal with that was to ignore the words of anger and listen to the words of wisdom. Dan Dakich, who had graduated the previous spring to become a graduate assistant coach, had told the freshman Calloway, "When he's calling you an asshole, don't listen. But when he starts telling you why you're an asshole, listen. That way you'll get better."
Thomas couldn't shut off some words and hear others. He heard them all, and they hurt.
Knight didn't want to hurt Thomas. He wanted to make him a better player, but he honestly believed that some days Thomas had to be hurt if he was going to get better. He had used this tactic on Landon Turner, another sensitive black youngster with immense ability. Turner, 6-10 and 250 pounds, had emerged from a shell of mediocrity as a junior to play a key role in Indiana's 1981 run to the national championship. That summer he was crippled in an automobile accident. Knight, who had once put Tampax in Turner's locker, who had cursed him and called him names for three years, spent the next six months raising money to pay Landon Turner's medical bills.
Now, he was hoping that Thomas would bloom as a ju
