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 20^th 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.

That championship season reframed -- today I see the people, not the uniforms

Glove inventor Andre McCarter (45), teacher 
Dave Meyers (34) and house rehab person Richard
Washington (31) do in my Wildcats for the 1975
national title, but I like these guys today.

Picture a man in Oregon who, in tandem with his wife, rehabs houses for a living, with the couple doing the work themselves of tearing the floorboards and hammering the nails.

Then there’s a person near San Diego who teaches elementary school.

Now think of another person, this one in Indiana, who worked for a steel company and coached youth sports in his city, sometimes driving kids home from practice and driving the team bus to and from games.

And yet another, a man from Philadelphia, works part time as an inventor and comes up with a certain type of glove to improve athletes' dexterity.

These folks sometimes pause from their daily lives of civic and business devotions to recall their college years, when they used to get together and play some basketball.

And the former Indiana farm kid who grew up to coach them was paid a modest salary for job tasks that for a while included waxing a gymnasium floor.

Sounds like a group who only dreamed of the big time, but missed out on lives of fame and glory.

Well, in fact you’ve just read a description of the people who in 1975 won their school, UCLA, the NCAA basketball title -- the last of coaching legend John Wooden’s 10 basketball championships at UCLA.

Their lives of rehabing homes, teaching sixth graders and so forth were what they were doing 20 and 30 years after that night in March 1975, when Richard Washington, Dave Meyers, Pete Trgovich, and Andre McCarter led the UCLA Bruins to John Wooden’s 10^th title.

They allowed Wooden to cap off his dynasty in storybook fashion, beating favored Kentucky 92-85 in the title game in San Diego, ending Wooden’s 27-year tenure at UCLA.

During that stint, the Martinsville, Ind. native and former Purdue hoops star won those 10 national titles while maintaining a player graduation rate of 65 percent (comparable to the student body rate of around 75 percent). For all this, he earned a top salary of $40,000, and that includes all money from endorsements.

Late in his career Wooden also brought in about that much yearly in outside income from speaking engagements and basketball camps, but with that added in, his $80,000 figure was about one percent of what today’s highest paid coach makes.

Kentucky’s John Calipari, who is paid -- wait for it -- $8.1 million, has a player graduation rate of 28 percent (the UK student body rate is 66 percent).

Wooden emphasized to his players passing, footwork and body position, not the glamorous high scoring or fancy one-on-one moves many other coaches favored in the ‘70s to enhance their recruiting in an era of expanding TV coverage of college basketball games.

In fairness to Calipari, he also emphasizes those game fundamentals, but compared to Wooden’s strong emphasis on getting a genuine education, the Kentucky multi-millionaire coach’s program has that 28 percent graduation rate. Among Calipari’s top talent, it’s close to 0, because almost all of his Kentucky stars stay in school just one season, then go pro.

Almost all of Wooden’s greats played four seasons.

The best players leaving after their freshman year, a method called "one-and-done," is widespread in this era; UCLA itself has just a 20 percent player graduation rate today.

Whereas Washington and Meyers were the biggest contributors to the title win in ‘75, another player, Marques Johnson, did go on to great National Basketball Association stardom. But in 1975 Johnson was coming off a bout with hepatitis the previous summer and didn’t go on to become a star at UCLA until about a year after Wooden’s 1975 retirement.

He had a superb NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks, the team for which Dave Meyers also played a few years before deciding to change careers and earn a teaching certificate.

Meyers didn’t teach gym or do photo-ops in classrooms as a sports celebrity, mind you -- he genuinely taught elementary school for 30 years in Southern California. And Marques Johnson was a devoted family person; wealth and national acclaim did not distract either of these two Bruin products from the obligations and rewards of doing the essential duties of the lives all of us live.

Same for Richard Washington, whose career change came when he realized his pleasant temperament (Coach Wooden had described him as a “passive, easygoing, lovely person.”) just wasn’t ideal for the Type-A pro basketball world after Kansas City Kings teammates politely but firmly told him he needed to push himself harder.

Dave Meyers, after three decades teaching elementary school children, died from cancer in 2015 at age 62. After his death, former teammate Marques Johnson recalled Meyers as “a gentle, compassionate guy."

Sibling Ann Meyers Drysdale recalled that Dave’s decision to leave pro basketball in 1980 after six seasons, though partly because of a back injury, also was because her brother “wanted to be with his family and watch his children grow up.”

Even many of the more basketball-centered John Wooden products have lived notably full lives; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, also is a fine writer and commentator. He worked as a newspaper contributing reporter while a teenager in New York City.

Bill Walton attended law school after his basketball days and has long promoted environmentalism and his vegetarian diet. Both former UCLA centers were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War.

Still, the UCLA Bruin world wasn’t flawless; an L.A. Times investigation in the 1980s revealed that a wealthy UCLA booster named Sam Gilbert was co-signing for loans for some of Wooden’s players, in violation of NCAA rules.

Though the gifting was not used to recruit players, and a shocked Wooden ordered his team to have no contact with Gilbert when he found out, the co-signing continued and Wooden largely looked the other way, the coach acknowledged in interviews late in his life.

From raising title banners to raising his family,
the gentle Dave Meyers, 1953-2015.

Nonetheless, we can long for some lost priorities when contrasting the community minded lives of people like Meyers, Washington and other 1975 Bruins with most of the great NBA stars who won college championships in the years following Wooden’s retirement.

For instance Irving “Magic” Johnson of Michigan State and Michael Jordan of North Carolina have sports-centered identities wrapped in layers of massive PR machines. Neither graduated from college. The egotistical and sometimes brusque Jordan had more say over his Chicago Bulls team’s offense than his coach, and Magic Johnson actually ordered his Los Angeles Lakers team to replace its head coach over the young star’s differences with him.

And the 60-second TV ads Magic did for a fast food chain and Jordan did for Chevy cars earned them more money than Richard Washington or Dave Meyers made in a year of rehabing houses and teaching elementary students.

But for the vast majority of NBA players, having a real world job skill like those of Washington or Meyers would be more valuable than perfecting every great basketball move. Consider that Sports Illustrated reported in 2009 that 60 percent of former NBA players were broke within five years of leaving that supposedly paved-with-gold league. The magazine said the number for former National Football League players was 78 percent.

Those percentages mean John Wooden's $40,000 salary and his stressing of education and life skills more than basketball have never looked better. And "one-and-done" has never looked more dangerously exploitive.

In 1975 I scowled as I watched UCLA win Wooden’s 10^th title by beating Louisville and Kentucky, two of my three favorite teams. This was just after my other favorite, unbeaten Indiana, lost its top scorer to an injury, knocking the Hoosiers out of what looked like a sure title.

My adolescent anguish didn’t last too long; Indiana, Kentucky and Louisville won three of the next five college championships.

Although those titles were redemption, I have since placed more importance on the good character of our champion teams’ stars, such as Louisville’s Darrell Griffith and Scooter McCray, who following their playing years started restaurants and alcohol-free youth recreation centers in our city.

Whereas their Louisville college uniforms and UCLA’s bore opposing school names, I now see that the people who were wearing both are teammates in the contest between good citizenship and “I’ve got mine, you get yours” selfishness. And that is a game in which this nation badly needs a come-from-behind win.

So Richard, Dave, Pete, Andre, Marques -- as much as I could not have imagined 45 years ago that I’d ever feel this way about any Bruin -- I’m now a fan of each of you.

                                                    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brian Arbenz has been a news and sports reporter in Indiana and Kentucky, states whose college basketball success can cloud people's judgment.

The Short Life, Tall Obstacles and Good Cheer of John Hollinden, the Nation's Tallest Basketball Player

As a junior in high school in Southern Indiana in 1975, I was baffled over how a

The United States' tallest

  basketball player, 7-foor-7

John Hollinden in 1981.

visiting basketball player who was 7 feet, 2 inches tall could have left our New Albany High School gym one night with only two points to his name.

John Hollinden of Central High School in Evansville was described in a newspaper story as “frail” at only 198 pounds – that’s about 40 pounds below the ideal weight for 7-foot-2. A friend of mine who helped broadcast the game on our high school radio station said the towering 16-year-old looked uncoordinated and lost on the court.

That seemed to me out of synch with an era when 7-foot-2 meant awesome dominators like Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain or Artis Gilmore, who would shortly power the Kentucky Colonels to the ABA championship across the river in Louisville.

Moreover, this was Indiana – where even being 6-foot-5 or so generates expectations that you will be savvy at hoops.

A Hoosier over seven feet tall not being good at basketball? That’s like a member of the Cousteau family being afraid of the water!

So, I put thoughts of John Hollinden and his sorry predicament out of my mind, until a year later when, as a senior, I picked up the newspaper to read about that year’s Central-New Albany game.

There was the name Hollinden in the box score – well what do you know, the frail can’t-do toothpick-shaped klutz didn’t go away. Then I looked at his point total – 26, whoa!

Welcome to Hoosierdom, John Hollinden. And my apologies for writing you off early. It was a lesson to my 17-year-old self not to be dismissive or belittling toward an endeavoring person just because their obstacles at first appear immense.

For John Hollinden, his pitiful performance the previous year contrasted with 26 points as a senior was to be a lifelong pattern of extraordinary height alternately being a curse and a blessing.

By graduation time he was 7-foor-4, and was offered a scholarship at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Ok. There, though still an underweight 220 pounds, he impressed coaches with his stamina and coordination, which bespoke that John Hollinden was forever past his days of struggling to adjust to growth spurts. And that was fortunate, because he wasn’t finished growing: John was 7-foot-5 when his freshman season at ORU started in late 1976 and he reached 7-foot-6 by the spring.

And that caused more problems. John, not yet suitably strong for the physical college game, didn’t get much playing time his first season, and fans who packed opponents’ arenas to see a person now billed as the tallest college basketball player in the nation sometimes booed and shouted insults at the giant they felt should have made their cost of admission pay off with a superhuman performance to tell their grandchildren about someday.

Long used to people – like me back in 1975 -- being initially unimpressed with him, John was undeterred. Still, it was becoming taxing for him just to leave campus, as every single person he would encounter would stop in their tracks and ask the inevitable questions about his height and avocation.

For such occasions, John printed up a t-shirt bearing the words: “My name is John Hollinden. I’m 7 foot 5. I do play basketball.”

Such resourcefulness is typical of giants, who must custom order their clothes, beds and shower stalls. The sense of humor displayed by his informational shirt, however, showed that unlike many 7-foot-plus basketballers who dislike constantly drawing notice when they are away from the court, John was comfortable being a spectacle.

“I enjoy meeting people, especially when we’re visiting different cities,” he told his hometown paper the Evansville Press in 1979. “The attention doesn’t bother me.”

Making light of his height by posing with the team dentist

 was all in fun for the good natured John Hollinden.

After two years of less than abundant playing time at Oral Roberts, John decided in 1978 to transfer to Indiana State University at Evansville, delighting fans in his hometown still reeling from the deaths of the entire basketball team of the crosstown University of Evansville in a plane crash en route to a game months earlier.

In a city where the name John Hollinden had been a household word since he was a 9th grader, he could put away the t-shirt explaining himself, but had he needed it, the height the shirt listed would require updating. John, after taking the year off from playing sports the NCAA requires of a transfer student, was 7-foot-7 as he joined the ISUE Eagles roster in the fall of 1979.

His constant weight training and protein diets had been adding needed bulk, but his body’s refusal to stop growing kept John’s weight at about 25 pounds under where the sport demanded it be.

“He’s not an NBA-type dominant center,” cautioned Wayne Boultinghouse, coach at ISUE (today called the University of Southern Indiana). “We don’t want to be overly optimistic…. It’s difficult to measure what John will mean to our team, but I’m sure he’ll be a plus.”

Evansville Press staffer Mark Tomasik wrote: “Wayne Boultinghouse believes the attention Hollinden attracts will help promote the Eagles program. And he’s certain Hollinden can handle the demands on his time.”

Indeed, John happily accepted ISUE public relations as an extra duty.

“If reporters want to talk with me or photographers want to take my picture, it’s all right,” he told the press. “I just put myself in their position. I’d want to do the same.”

In fact, it was more than drawing cameras that John Hollinden soon excelled at; he finished the 1979-80 season the 2nd best shooter (56 percent) and the fourth best rebounder (8.3 per game) in the Great Lakes Valley Conference. John’s towering defensive presence, Boultinghouse said, was a major reason ISUE gave up the least points per game of any GLV team.

“When I talk to other coaches, they always mention the influence of Hollinden,” Boultinghouse said. “His intimidation can’t be measured by statistics.”

Back home again on the banks of the Ohio River, the once frail high schooler and target of insults as a collegian now had hit his long-awaited stride. John Hollinden made the All Great Lakes Valley Conference team.

As his senior season ended in 1981, though John was primarily interested in playing in the European basketball league, he put his name in the draft of the NBA, that league for which coach Boultinghouse had figured his 7-foot-7 star was not dominant enough. The Dallas Mavericks drafted John in the 11th round, but he signed a contract with a Swedish team in the European league.

Days before his scheduled departure for Sweden, John Hollinden looked the picture of a man comfortable with himself, an accomplishment that was as towering as his physical stature, considering his awkward beginnings as a Hoosier hoopster. (Evansville Press columnist Tom Tuley recalled a stiff and jittery 14-year-old Holliden giving one word answers while doing his first interview with media as a 6-foot-9 freshman at Central High.)

Now, gymnasiums full of sarcastic doubters were behind him and life in Europe’s great cities was ahead for the musically talented, athletically gifted and bright young man from Evansville.

It never happened.

The day before he was to leave for Sweden, John was driving alone for pleasure on a road outside the city when his car crashed. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Days later, doctors said the 23-year-old would never regain movement or feeling in his legs.

The 7-foot-7 John Hollinden, listed among the 20 documented tallest people in history, would permanently be at eye level with the rest of us, from his wheelchair.

Don’t think for an instant that bitterness or anguish entered John’s life, even though he went from a guy who was about to become the marvel of Europe’s fast spreading fascination with basketball to a person who couldn’t walk. And all in an instant, after his bags were packed and his transcontinental airline seats reserved. No, in the years to come John Hollinden wouldn’t be dunking, blocking and passing to cheers in Stockholm, Barcelona and Brussels, nor politely posing for 10 times as many press pictures, nor cheerily telling inquiring passersby in seven languages how tall he was.

John Hollinden’s unmatched ability at overcoming the roadblocks that seem always to come with his extraordinary endowments would now go into overtime.

He became a speaker at schools in the Evansville area. He helped out with the Tri-State Food Bank and the United Way. An accomplished musician who played several instruments, John joined the Mid-America Singers at his renamed University of Southern Indiana.

His friends and former coaches described John as a good Christian, in the sense of Christian as caring about others and seeking a peaceful outlook.

He was still the center of attention, with his niceness, glibness and busy civic involvement drawing raves. Before, fans felt dwarfed by John Hollinden's constantly expanding 7-foot-plus frame; now it was his giant resilience in the face of such terrible misfortune that left Southwestern Indiana people in awe.

Despite his undaunted resolve and good cheer, John’s condition was straining him. Leg infections, common among paraplegics because of their inability to position their legs properly to avoid physical stress and bedsores, began plaguing him in 1985, four years after the car crash.

By early 1990, “he knew his time was coming,” John’s former high school coach John Wessel recalled in an Evansville Courier interview.

The infections worsened and John had both legs amputated in January 1991. “I went to see him in the hospital after that operation, and he had more grit and determination than the law allows,” Wessel said.

In October 1992, however, John died of cardiac arrest brought on by complications from infections. He was 34.

______________________________________________

LINK: John and other Hoosier hoopsters who left us too soon

______________________________________________

In the obituary story, Wessel recalled the days when John Hollinden’s greatest struggles were for points and rebounds under the basket, and for respect from some of us in the stands who dismissed the uncoordinated rail-thin young Central High player as a sideshow.

“There was a game during his sophomore year when he got ridiculed pretty good,” the coach said. “I tried to console him afterwards, but he said, ‘It’s OK, coach. Someday, they won’t.’ "

University of Southern Indiana students 

fondly recall their school's gentle giant.  

Southern Indiana folks watched as a young man given the greatest reach ever in our near-religion of a game more than once found himself in that age-old fix of his reach exceeding his grasp. While the more cynical among us kept giving up on him as a failed star, John Hollinden -- when towering above us and then confined below -- just kept figuring out how to reach in new directions.

Brian Arbenz covered Hoosier hysteria as a journalist after growing up a Hoosier loving the sport.