Anybody covered Bob Knight?

I think at one point, we thought we'd try to take listener questions, except I'd take the question, type it on aim and send it to Don, then he'd ask Coach Knight. Didn't work out too well.

And of course, there were days when he wasn't home or wouldn't answer the phone until a good 15 minutes into the show which Don played off very well.

 

He's probably top 3 in the Play by Play guys I've worked with, and I've worked with a lot.

Johnny Holiday is by far number one.

 

I was in my early 20s, working at a small paper in Illinois. Indiana and UCLA played in St. Louis to start the 1975-76 (The Perfect) season. There were two kids on Indiana's roster with local ties.
I wound up with a court-side credential for this Saturday night game. Hoosiers kicked butt. After the game, I chase down the 2 local kids and talked to their parents.
In the back halls at the old Checkerdome, I see Knight walking alone, returning from his press conference. Most (high school) coaches I had dealt with, you just walked up, introduced yourself, shook hands and asked questions.
So, not knowing any better, I walk up to him ... he stops answers my questions, I live to tell about it.
Had several encounters with him since then. Agree that he's a fascinating individual.
Knight knows more about bkb than anybody. If he would take off on his tangents _ which can also be fascinating _ I could listen to him talk hoops for hours.

 

Knight's radio show was a must-listen when he was at Indiana, because he obviously didn't want to be there, and so he was usually at his most sarcastic.

I remember him doing it during dinner several times ... and I think I remember hearing a toilet flush more than once.

How Don Fischer ever held that thing together every week was incredible.

 

When he was at Indiana, the pressers were usually really odd ...

Bob Hammel of the Bloomington paper asked a lot of the questions, and most people deferred to him (because he usually asked most of the questions everyone else wanted, but Hammel would at least get something out of him).

He loved to go after student reporters, visiting reporters and anyone who asked a poorly-worded question. One of my colleagues at the IU student paper tried to ask him a question after a Big Ten Tournament game once, and seemed to get so flustered, it came out very incoherently. Amazingly, I remember Knight basically saying "I don't understand what the hell you're trying to ask" and giving her a second shot.

My favorite Knight presser story was after a rather sloppily-played win against Penn State in the mid-1990s, right after PSU had joined the conference.

Question (from a PA reporter, IIRC): "Coach, how did you get Lindeman to play so well tonight?"
Knight: "We grabbed his balls, stuck them in a vise, squeezed it real tight, shoved a red-hot poker up his @$$ and poured hot water down his throat. We told him if he played well, we wouldn't do it again."

I came home, and the TV people were all going off about the latest "Bob Knight incident." A local radio guy goes, "hey, that wasn't an incident. That's comedy."

I never covered him directly -- most of my encounters with him were going to pressers from the radio side -- but he was a really unique person to cover, because you had to be on your toes at all times. Players, BTW, were NEVER brought into the press conference room unless it was required by a Big Ten Tournament or NCAA regulation, so you had to stalk the stairway leading up from the locker room as they were leaving the arena for the night to get any player quotes, which was very difficult on deadline.

 

I've attended several Bob Knight pressers, mostly in postseason.

I was often one of the lurkers who didn't even need to be there. I had to have something to keep my sanity in the midst of all the "We just wanted it more" bland shit we hear every day.

Related to the Lindeman question, he was asked once how he got so-and-so to rebound better after a few bad games. His answer was something along the lines of "Well, we told him if he didn't get more rebounds, he would be shot. Fortunately he was able to get some more tonight so we didn't have to shoot him."

 

NO . . .it was bush league for Clark Francis to say he had the "Hoop Scoop" on Ivan Renko after Knight spun that little tale.

Knight's indictment of what bullcrap the recruiting dorks are was dead on.

Agree with the part about Lubbock.

Only did a couple of his press conferences, but I found them to be unpredictable and funny. You know, the things we say we want from coaches who just want to feed us boring sound bites.

 

I had a sit down with Knight about a year and a half ago. Being an Indiana guy I was sweating for weeks thinking about it. We talked in the newsroom about whether or not I should tell him that I went to IU. He was in town to fish, so I decided to keep the interview mostly about fishing.

After I exhausted my extremely limited knowledge of fishing I asked about the Red Raiders. He yelled at me only once, when I asked how his team looked for that upcoming season (this was in September). "How the hell should I know," he hollered.

So after the interview we just sat there in an awkward silence for a few minutes. Let me tell you, every possible question that could have been asked was running through my head. I wanted to ask him about his relationship with Mike Davis, what he really thinks of Miles Brand, would he go back to IU. You name it.

Then he asks how long I've been at the paper and where I'm from. I answer and he talks about where I'm from and how he likes to fish there.

Then he asks where I went to college. My jaw nearly dropped. I tell him IU, and he just says, "uh huh, ok, mm hmm...well I like fishing in Minnesota."

Turns out he saw my Indiana license plate holder.

Then I had a phone interview with him about a local coach he knew that retired. He was courteous, not demeaning, and gave a few good answers and a few smart ass answers. Nothing new.

 

Here's another good story, and I'm making it short because I want to go home and just put the paper to bed...

I was covering a softball game (yeah, softball) and they were playing Texas so it was supposed to be the game where everyone came out and it was their big rivalry game, or whatever.

So, in about the third inning, Knight and Gerald Myers (AD/best friend) come walking into the press box/suite/whatever else you want to call it. I give Knight a nod as he walks into the other room separated by plexi glass and grabs a drink to watch the game.

So there's a Tech "error" that allows a Texas baserunner to reach first and the homer SID scores it an error although it probably shouldn't have been.

That's when I hear, "[My name]! [My name]! Get in here!" So I walk in there and he starts going off on why the play should've been an error and I agreed.

It was pretty humorous to talk softball with the most legendary basketball coach there is with all apologies to Mr. Wooden.

 

Knight's an ass from the word go.

I remember the press conference after Indiana, a 4 seed, lost to Richmond, a 13, in the NCAA first round. Someone mentioned the word upset -- maybe asking if this was the biggest upset Knight had been the victim of -- and Knight went off. His face was almost purple as he screamed at this guy, as loud as he could. ``Upset?!!! How the hell can you call this an upset?!!!!'' He goes on for several expletive-filled minutes, saying there was no upset and asking how anyone could possibly call it that. He was abusive and nasty and ridiculous.

Oh, yeah, I seem to remember him pulling one of his walk-out-on-the-postgame-press-conference deals at the Big 12 tournament a couple years ago after Texas Tech lost.

Actually, the one that sticks in my head was him being a complete horse's rear to some reporter at the pep rally that passed for a press conference when he was hired at TT. My recollection is, they allowed fans in for the coronation but then the fans were supposed to be cleared to leave the media alone for the real Q&A session. Only Knight decided on his own that he wanted the fans to stay, so he declared from the podium that the fans were staying, which allowed them to boo and heckle any hard questions from the reporters. In fact, I believe actively encouraged them to do so.

My memory on this is a little fuzzy, especially since I wasn't there (I read reports and heard second-hand accounts). Is there anyone out there who was actually in attendance, and if so, can you tell me if my recall is correct or flawed?