Bob Knight's legacy is complex. But he made Hoosiers proud, and they never forgot it.
BLOOMINGTON – In the foreword to John Feinstein’s seminal work “A Season On The Brink,” former Marquette coach Al McGuire declared Bob Knight “near the top” of any list of basketball’s greatest coaches.
“With luck,” McGuire wrote, “someday, it might be at the very top. He’s that good of a coach.”
McGuire detailed Knight’s relentless preparation, his ability to draw the absolute most out of his teams. He was also honest about Knight’s foibles — his inability to grapple with failure, to let go of losing. Knight, McGuire wrote, thought “he could beat the game,” his refusal to accept the impossibility of such a task in McGuire’s estimation both Knight’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
They were the traits that made Knight a great coach, and also at times a deeply controversial one. They were not, though, why the people who loved him most, loved him like they did.
Knight, who died this week after spending his final years in quiet retirement living on Bloomington’s east side, came to Indiana University in 1971. He joined an athletic department entering a halcyon era.
Two years later, Jerry Yeagley’s club soccer team would become varsity sponsored. Sam Bell, hired a year before Knight, was beginning a tenure that would include 22 Big Ten track and field titles in 29 years. In the decade to come, IU’s swimming and diving stars would rise to the top of their sport.
As a state, Indiana was riding the tail end of a post-war boom. After suffering through The Great Depression, the state’s factories played a key role in manufacturing American armaments during World War II.
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That prosperity continued into the 1950s and 60s. So did the success of the state’s farming industry, and trade unions flourished.
But the 1970s would mark the beginning of a decline in opportunity in both sectors. The steel crisis hit the state hard in the 70s and 80s, and the 1980s farm crisis did the same. A worldwide market and a shrinking global economy rolled back jobs, and two of the state’s crucial industries suffered.
Farmers who had borrowed against the value of their land to buy more in the 1970s suddenly saw that value crater the following decade. Families lost farms, and communities built around them shrank as people were forced to move to bigger cities for work.
But Indiana still had IU basketball. Knight’s teams tapped into the same cultural identity that made single-class basketball so popular, and steeped Angelo Pizzo’s “Hoosiers” in such nostalgia.
People in this state hold tightly to those communities, places they’re proud of, institutions they feel ownership of, because they helped build them.
Factories closed. Small towns began to disappear. John Mellencamp sang about bank foreclosures and highways cleaving through family farmland.
As a way of life more than a century in the making began to unravel at the edges, Knight gave Hoosiers something to be proud of. Something to stand on. A team that played the sport they loved like they loved their land and their family and their God. A team that won on the principles they believed underpinned their own lives — hard work, toughness, togetherness, selflessness.
America was changing too rapidly for Indiana to keep up, but every Tuesday and Saturday from November to March, Bob Knight gave people in this state something they could recognize and hold onto. Something they could wear proudly. And they never stopped loving him for it.
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His firing in 2000 spoke volumes about Knight’s capacity for dividing opinion so forcefully. Some saw it as the last straw, something that should have happened years earlier. To others — to many of his most ardent supporters — Knight’s dismissal was just one last shred of proof the world had moved on from what they held most dear.
Some took years to forgive the university. Others probably never did.
Knight’s will always be a deeply complex legacy. Not just as a coach but as a man. His arrogance and his temper courted controversy. And it’s wrong to say he was universally loved within a fan base far more conflicted about his public personality than history tells you. Numerous major donors — people with names on the sides of buildings on one or more of Indiana’s eight campuses — wanted nothing to do with the man.
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Yet Knight was also unflinchingly loyal. He could be generous to the point of uncompromising kindness, though by all accounts he was uncomfortable when such acts became public knowledge.
But the nature of our mythmaking in sports will always require a level of black and white that cannot capture such a multilayered and anachronistic character. The fans who loved him did so for what he represented, for an idea as much as a man. Bob Knight made them proud, and they never forgot it.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.