Bob Knight wasn't complicated

The late Indiana coach was a wildly successful and abusive tyrant who touched the lives of countless others. It was a defining trait of his career

If you pore over any of the dozens, if not hundreds, of obituaries, remembrances and think pieces that ran in the aftermath of Bob Knight’s death last week, there’s one word you’ll inevitably see.

There’s “controversial” and “polarizing,” sure, both of which accurately describe the former Indiana, Army and Texas Tech men’s basketball coach. There are more flattering ones, as well, like “brilliant,” “sharp” and “dedicated.”

More than those, however, is this – complicated.

Knight, as he has been repeatedly labeled following his death last Wednesday at 83, was a man of many traits, someone who didn’t fit neatly into a proverbial box. And even if he did, he’d prefer to be in there upside down so…well, you probably know the rest.

It’s a word, though, that’s carrying an onerous amount of weight. Whether it’s out of a journalistic commitment to brevity or the simple, understandable impulse of not wanting to speak ill of the dead, “complicated” is a more concise and ambiguous way of saying “This guy was an unapologetic asshole who happened to be one of the greatest coaches in the history of team sports.”

But it’s a choice that buries a fundamental truth. For everything he was and everything he represented, Bob Knight wasn’t all that complicated.

He was a transformative figure in American basketball

Much of the grappling the past week over Knight’s legacy and standing in broader American life comes from the fact that those interpretations are the only uncharted terrain when it comes to Knight. Like so many who were public figures for a half-century, virtually everything was known about him.

He won three NCAA championships at Indiana and guided the Hoosiers to five Final Fours. His 902 career wins at the time of his retirement in 2008 were the most ever by a Division I coach. In the process, became the patriarch of a sport in a state that was obsessed with it long before he first stepped foot in Bloomington.

He didn’t invent the motion offense, but he perfected it. At a time when zone defenses were predominant throughout much of college basketball, he preached intense, hounding man-to-man principles. Both philosophies not only built the Hoosiers into a winner, but they spread across the sport and reshaped it, with others eager to try to mimic his achievements (almost all of whom failed to do so).

He had a keen eye for talent, noting in 1984 that a 21-year-old Michael Jordan, who he had been coaching during that year’s Summer Olympics, was the best basketball player he had ever seen, an opinion that wasn’t orthodoxy as it is today. Remember, Jordan wasn’t even one of the top two picks in the NBA Draft that year.

Whether driven by ego or his devout adherence to NCAA regulations, Knight’s teams were seldom the most talented. In his 42 years at the helm of a Division I program, Knight coached just one future NBA all-star, Isiah Thomas. Knight’s most notable coaching protege, Mike Krzyzewski, had three of his former Duke players in the 2021 NBA all-star game alone.

All of this is to say what is plainly obvious – Knight is one of the shrewdest, most brilliant tacticians to ever coach basketball.

He did all of that on an accelerated timeline. He was 30 when he was hired at Indiana. Five years later, at 35 years old, he won his first NCAA championship. At 40, he added another. By the time he was 43, he had an Olympic gold medal, becoming the last coach to lead a team of American college players to that coveted place on the podium.

At a relatively young age, particularly in the high-stakes world of coaching, a major university, a state and an entire country had called upon Knight for his latent genius and been rewarded for it. From that, an unavoidable problem arose – with so much of his life and career ahead of him, who was in a position to tell him no?

He was a glaringly flawed and contemptible man

It was a combination of factors that shaped and fostered one of the most combustible and virulent men to ever roam a sideline in any sport anywhere in the world.

Even more than a winner or champion, Knight was a bully, a domineering figure with a raging and often poorly controlled temper who lorded that over others as an omnipresent threat.

He kicked his own son, Pat, on the sideline of a game in 1993. A year later, he headbutted freshman Sherron Wilkerson, though Knight claimed it was accidental. A former Knight player said he saw his coach punch Steve Alford and slap Daryl Thomas. Most famously, video evidence showed him grabbing the throat of player Neil Reed, which miraculously didn’t get him fired, but subjected him to a zero-tolerance policy that he violated four months later for, of all things, grabbing the arm of an Indiana student who said “Hey Knight, what’s up?” as he walked by the coach on campus.

His violent, ever-burning wrath wasn’t limited to his players. He reportedly made physical threats against his boss, Indiana athletic director Clarence Doninger, in a perfect encapsulation of the power dynamics at the university for much of his time there. In the 1980s, he hurled a ceramic flowerpot at a picture frame behind the desk of a secretary in the athletic director’s office, causing her to be hit with flying glass. He once threw the Hoosiers’ sports information director to the ground because he was angry about a press release. He even broke the nose and dislocated the shoulder of his other son, Tim, in a fit of rage during a hunting trip in Argentina in 1994.

Despite becoming rich on the backs of young Black men, Knight held views that were, if not explicitly racist, something akin to the way the New York Times describes a Trump voter at a rural Pennsylvania diner.

Butch Carter, one of Knight’s former players, said the coach used a racial slur in the early 1980s. In “The Rabbit Hunter,” Frank Deford’s famed 1981 profile of Knight in Sports Illustrated, there’s an anecdote in which Knight talks to a former player, who was Black, to try to get through to one of his current Hoosiers.

“If you don't start to shape him up, I'll have to get some white guys working on him,” Knight said. “You guys don't show any leadership, you don't show any incentive since you started getting too much welfare."

At a press conference at the 1992 NCAA Tournament in Albuquerque, N.M., Knight pulled out a whip gag-gifted to him by his players and used it on the backside of star Calbert Cheaney, who is Black. What Knight viewed as a joke was interpreted much differently by the Albuquerque NAACP, which chided him for his use of slave imagery. Black state legislators back in Indiana urged Indiana to take disciplinary action against Knight.

What’s less open to debate or interpretation were his views about women.