Basketball's Tarnished Knight

By Bill Walton

The anger. Why is he so angry? It's a question that springs to mind when I look at an image of Bobby Knight in full fury. Apparently it's one that Indiana University's officials didn't bother to ask themselves before they allowed this dinosaur to remain as the school's basketball coach despite a well-documented history of abusing players, coaches, administrators and anyone else who just happened to be there. Oh, yeah, he's a successful coach. He deserves another chance, they say, based on his record and his promise to control his temper. But do we really expect Bob Knight to change? He is who he is: a coach whose success is based on bullying and intimidating people. His style is rooted in boorish behavior, with which he psychologically terrorizes his players for his own benefit.

We all need motivation. It's a particularly important aspect of sports because the tiniest of margins often separate the winners from the losers. Yet with Knight, we're not talking about a constructive approach to making people perform by challenging them on their positions or on their failures in life. Knight does it to denigrate. Doesn't Indiana know that universities are supposed to be about how you teach? Teaching is about building confidence, about making people feel better about what they do and who they are.

That's why the dichotomy between Bob Knight and my college coach, UCLA's legendary John Wooden, could not be greater. One thing that really stands out about Knight is that it's always about him. He's a lot like Dennis Rodman, with his calculated self-promotion. John Wooden was the antithesis of the anger, the scowl, the selfishness. With Coach Wooden, an Indiana native, life was always fun, always upbeat, always positive, always about the team, always about the greatness of the game. Sadly, you don't get any sense of that from Knight. There's no joy. Even worse, there's no happiness on the faces of his players.

Wooden was a teacher. He taught on a constant basis, from showing us how to put our shoes and socks on, to building a foundation based on the human values and personal characteristics embodied in what he called his Pyramid of Success. All of this was done in the subtlest of ways. While our practices were the most demanding endeavors, both physically and emotionally, that I've ever been a part of, there was always the sense of people having fun playing a simple game.

Compare that to Knight's psychological torture chamber. No wonder Indiana has stumbled so often in the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament. No wonder great players--Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, George McGinnis--don't last in Bloomington. Why would anyone even go there? Wooden inspired confidence, which he considered essential to achieving peak performance. He taught us that the journey to the top of the pyramid was the result of a lifetime of preparation. While Wooden fostered hope, Knight represents the death of hope, the stifling control freak. Look at his coaching style: "Get the ball, and look over here at me, and I'll tell you what to do. I'll put you in a position where you can win by one or two points, because it's my strategy in the end." Wooden gave you the freedom to perform. He was the conductor of a free-form symphony. He always said, "Don't look over here at the sideline. I've already done my job. When the game starts, it's about you guys having fun playing a game and doing your best."

Of course, we didn't understand or realize this while we were living it. We thought he was nuts, a walking antique. And why not? We won all of our games during my first 3 1/2 years at UCLA. It wasn't until we started to lose a couple of games at the end of my senior year, and I ran into the adversity that Coach Wooden had said would be in both the NBA and in life, that I realized just how special we had it at UCLA.

Indiana's complacency, and complicity, in the face of the injustice that has gone on is sad and embarrassing. And so Nixonesque, to the point that the apologists are being trotted out to proclaim Knight's integrity. How could anybody in a position of authority--say, whoever's running Indiana U.--tolerate this type of abusive behavior? They're not educators; they're enablers.

In the past, the sporting world has shown an ability to take a leadership role on such issues as racial integration, social tolerance and equal opportunity for minorities and women. But one aspect where it's been slow to change is in its blind obedience to authority, even when it becomes abusive. Is that what teaching is about? The foul language, the bullying, the violence, the endless list of incidents that should have cost Knight his job? It is at Indiana, where the bleak side of college sports has been revealed for all to see.

Academic All-American Bill Walton was part of two UCLA NCAA title teams. A basketball Hall of Famer, he is an NBC-TV analyst