Saturday, November 11, 2023

Bobby and Me - What I Learned About My Area's Shortcomings From Its Hero Worship of a Coach

The Bobby Knight face fans saw
hinted at the strains
he inflicted.
 
Religion is so popular in Indiana, it’s almost basketball.

Of course it’s the converse of that statement that is often used to describe Hoosiers’ love and grasp of the sport. And thinking of basketball in theological terms would make Bobby Knight something of an Old Testament god.

Knight, who died Nov. 1, coached his Indiana University players and publicly conducted himself in a volatile and unpredictable fashion.

“A player has to fear him on sight for his coaching methods to work for them,” Jim Morris, basketball coach and faculty member at the New Albany branch campus of IU which I attended, said in a class in 1977.

Knight’s highly public misdeeds are well versed – they involve throwing things, grabbing necks, trivializing the horror of rape.

Behind closed locker room doors, he denigrated players, subjecting some to long torrents of obscenities, crude sexual slang, and sacrilegious profanities screamed into their faces. And for this, he was popular with Central and Southern Indiana’s Middle Americans – those people who go to church. And who are glad Indiana is an “at will” state, allowing them instantly to fire a worker from their business who, say, throws a chair in the office.

My image of his quintessential
fans, who loved faith, family and
a screaming blasphemous madman
.

I grew up in Southern Indiana and for a while I thought the world of Knight’s on-court strategies of motion offense and pressure defense that brought IU an undefeated 1976 national title. I understood and accepted that the coach was regimented and demanding, but one year later, when a dismal 14-13 season concluded, my affinity with the coach ended as I saw that “demanding” was not the word for his ways.

Sophomore Rich Valavicius, upon quitting the team, said in an interview that Knight heaped abuse on the whole squad, yelling and yelling in the locker room after every loss. The power forward from Hammond, Ind. transferred to Auburn University, becoming the third IU player to leave during or just after the 1976-77 season. Freshmen Mike Miday and Bill Cunningham quit early on, Midday saying he was demeaned by the coach.

The contrast between my rejection of Knight’s tactics and the “que sera sera” attitude among other fans underscored a wider cultural split. I realized just how few people in my area understood a crucial distinction between discipline and abuse. And how few were willing to hold those they admire to basic accountability.

Most of his players had nothing 
but praise. Others felt differently. 

I heard non-witnesses to Knight’s treatment of Miday, Cunningham and Valavicius second guessing them for quitting, calling them “softies” instead of respecting the trio’s experiences with a coach they themselves had never met.

A great university may be about developing critical thinking skills, but the adoration of Bobby Knight among small town folks is a depressing reminder that the bulk of the populace mistakes badass behavior for strength. And thinks that a strongman figure is way to shake up an establishment that doesn’t care about them.

“I would hope that black eye never healed!” a woman who was a co-worker at a small business in Southern Indiana in the early ‘80s zealously responded when I interrupted her lauding of Knight to ask, “How would you feel if he gave you a black eye?”

Much as I liked her and her peers as individuals, when it comes to cultural identity issues, it’s usually futile to use reason with rural Hoosiers, the power base of D.C. Stephenson and Donald Trump as well as the fanbase of Knight.

Sports Illustrated columnist Pat Forde, a one time Indiana beat colleague at the Louisville Courier-Journal, wrote just after Knight’s death about this regional identification with the coach.

“He came to stand for an unwavering commitment to ideals that were perceived to be under siege in some parts of Middle America. He was viewed in some locales as a last vestige of something slipping away,” Forde wrote. “But here was the counterfeit part of idolizing Knight as an exemplar of discipline and toughness: he rarely demanded discipline of himself the way he did his players, and toughness is never exemplified by punching down.”

Others in our area who upon Knight's passing expressed measured criticism of his legacy included coaches.

"He refused to change," Nelson Jackson, a Louisville high school football coach who as a teen had hoped to play basketball for Knight, wrote in the C-J. "He forgot that it was never about him and that he was never supposed to be the story. His boys were."

Though Knight’s endorsement of Trump in the 2016 election is what history will recall as his political foray, few remember the coach’s first public backing of a political candidate. Sit down first -- it’s a shocker that illustrates the unpredictability of Knight.

Birch Bayh, the most impactful liberal U.S. Senator of the 20th century, was running hard for a fourth term in 1980 when Bobby Knight appeared in a TV ad warmly praising Bayh for his integrity. Though he didn’t mention policy specifics, a typically straight up Knight called for Hoosiers to re-elect the man who was the sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and the creator of Title IX giving full equality to women’s education and sports.

Yes, Bobby Knight did chart his own course and sometimes went counter intuitively. But his sudden turns involved mood more often than politics.

I heard a former Louisville bookstore worker read at an open mic event of his recollection of Knight blowing his cool while preparing for a signing of his own book defending himself in light of his 2000 firing by IU. The coach shouted, and shoved books off a shelf, as related by this person’s reading (which he actually made in a lighthearted tone).

IU athletic staffers told of Knight throwing a clock against the office wall, and of impulsively telling an assistant coach he was fired after overhearing him on the phone saying that morale had sunk during the later Knight years.

Of course Knight was never corrupt, insisted on his players graduating, and gave money to the college’s library, his backers constantly say. That belief in his players’ education was laudable, but being non-corrupt should be the norm, and giving to the library is not a get-out-of-trouble card.

Moreover, l ought to be able to like someone’s motion offense without having to hear Middle Americans overjoyed at the idea of getting a black eye.

                                     ___________________________________________________

Brian Arbenz worked as a sports stringer from 1986 to 1999 covering basketball in Indiana and Kentucky for newspapers and Associated Press.

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