Bob Knight slaps player ...

Knight given "a pass" from the sports world? Hardly. He's in Lubbock, Texas. It's not exactly the Mecca of the sports world.

 

I'm sorry, casty, I respect you, admire you, and value you opinions here, but people don't get to act however they choose simply because a certain number of people approve of it. I could make any number of forced historical analogies here, but it's probably best to let this die.

 

I agree with your last statement. Let it die.

 

Bob Knight was good at first until he went too far.

 

And he hasn't been a great coach for a while.

 

He hasn't? Tech won eight games the year before he arrived, yet won 23 games in his first season. He was national coach-of-the-year. Tech made the Sweet 16 two years ago. He's won over 100 games in the last five seasons...at Texas Tech. That's pretty darn impressive.

 

Pretty darn impressive, with his sub.500 last year, and his one-and-out NCAA record there at the end at Indiana. Not great, though.

 

In case we've forgot, this is Texas Tech we're talking about here. Texas freakin' Tech, not UCLA or Indiana. Knight can't turn them into national champions over night, and don't expect that to happen at all.

If Myers didn't bring The General down to Lubbock, Mike Leach would have played mad scientist on the basketball team. The Red Raiders traditionally is an average to below average hoop program, even when Dickey was in charge. Dickey at least got them to the Dance a few times.

 

casty,

FWIW, I can't stand Knight, and I totally understand your argument.

And back in the day I imagine a classroom full of budding journalists would much rather hear Howard Cosell than anyone else, too.

He's magnetic. He's smart, he's funny and sometimes he makes a pretty good point about life or basketball. He's also a bully and a brat who hurts people, knows it, and expects them to deal with it. His act relies on the gentility and decency of others. Too many people have allowed him to be exactly who he is to gain his approval, and, as far as I know, nobody has beaten the living shit out of him - which is what he deserves.

If that day comes, and Bad Bad Montgomery Knight insults the wrong, if you will, wife of a jealous man, maybe he'll change.

 

IRT to Knight's work at Texas Tech...

Just remember that, each year, Knight had the opportunity, until last season, to feast on the fetid corpses of Baylor, Texas A&M, Nebraska and Kansas State six times a year. Now that Baylor's improved, A&M is top 20, K-State has Huggins...we'll see.

 

might be repeating here (don't care), and might not actually be making a point (still don't care), but if Krzyzewski or Bill Self or Rick Barnes or Jay Wright does this, it's a non-starter at best, and goes to bed fast at worst. Now, it's Knight, who has a reputation for being abusive, so should he know better than to tread that line? Perhaps. But I've seen the video as most here have, and his action didn't strike me as anything more than a coach trying to wake a player up. I'm no Knight apologist, either. When there were rumors of him coming to coach my alma mater a few years ago, I was angry at the idea of him walking the sideline. But on an intrinsic level, what he did to the kid just shouldn't be that big a deal. The school, the kid, and even the kid's mom are coming to his defense. How much of this is just the media and the sporting public assuming that it's time for another round of "Bobby Knight is a Jackass" without really looking at it?

 

Obviously a lot of it is about the media needing to fill hours and hours of airtime. A majority of it, maybe. But again, for some of us, this is about Knight not knowing, or caring, where the line is. If we have a SportsJournalists.com retreat, and I walk up and slap Fenian in the face, and it turns out I have a history of this kind of behavior, it doesn't matter afterward if Fenian says it's ok and that he thinks my heart is in the right place. (Privately, he might be terrified to say anything different. I'm a large fella.) It doesn't matter if I was only being playful, and thought he'd think it was a big joke. I still have a history of doing this kind of shit, and I no longer understand the difference between flicking his ear and choking him to get my point across. By having a history of doing much worse, I've forfeited the right to have these minor incidents examined individually.

It's sort of like being on parole for armed robbery. Even if all that shit happened in another state, and it feels like a long time ago, and all I did was flunk a drug test, or miss a parole hearing, I'm still probably going to jail. Why? The past matters. If Bill Self, Ben Howland or Jay Wright flunks a drug test (stay with me on the parole analogy here; this is not literal), of course it's not as big of an issue. That's because they didn't rob someone with a gun -- or throw a chair, or punch a cop, or smash a vase against the wall right above a secretary's head.

So yes, it was minor.

Yes, it was overblown by a network with little shame and virtually no ethics.

And yes, it still matters.