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Knight won't understand
By Carl Heintze
I have mixed feelings of scorn and pity for Bobby Knight.
Bobby was fired recently by the president of his university for verbally and physically manhandling basketball players and others once too often. He'd already been on probation for previous similar incidents. The last one was the last straw, as far as the university was concerned.
They canned him, much to the chagrin of a lot of Indiana students who seem to think Knight could do no wrong.
Knight, who likes to talk to the media about his problem, is unrepentant.
Bobby Knight was the kind of coach who fits the mold made famous by Woody Hayes and Vince Lombardi.
Hayes was fired after he punched a player from the opposing football team. Lombardi is another legendary coach who led the Green Bay Packers to Superbowls and inspired a whole generation of players.
The players were never quite sure how he did it, but he did. He's the one who coined the (legendary) slogan: "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."
Coaching is an odd kind of occupation, anyway. You're not physically playing the game yourself, you're trying to motivate your players to win.
It's psychologically demanding. The worst of it is that, after a certain point in your career, when you pass beyond ordinary coaches and become a legend, everyone expects you to keep on winning. Losing isn't really acceptable.
A coach thus becomes driven by the desire to have one winning season after another. But as coaches become supercoaches, they suffer. Some, such as Lou Holtz, who was the Notre Dame football coach for awhile, look more and more desperate as they start to lose and can't figure out why.
Holtz, who paced the sidelines during a game like a caged lion, looked more and more frantic and walked faster and faster as Notre Dame sank farther and farther.
Knight, on the other hand, coached first with dark hair and then gradually his hair turned white as time and victories, or lack of them, came and went. A physically and verbally violent man anyway, he got more and more angry and more and more abusive, as the Hoosiers lost.
That's where my pity for Knight turns to scorn. He didn't know when to quit, when to moderate his behavior or when to treat his players as something more than instruments of his will.
It doesn't do any good to tell the media you know you've made mistakes (as surely he did) if you keep on repeating them. Bobby Knight eventually was done in by his fatal inability to see there is something more to sport--and life--than victory.
His victories became victories at any price. ButKnight eventually you had to pay the price.
Part of the American psyche is that we never lose. We sustained this legend up to Vietnam, a war which we lost, for whatever reason. There are those, although they are not many now, who still don't believe we lost Vietnam or that, if we did lose, it was because we didn't try hard enough.
We need to get this out of our system. Losing is no fun, but it has its purposes. One of them is to find out what one did wrong. If one never countenances defeat, eventually one is defeated.
And that's why I have both pity and scorn for Bobby Knight, pity that he had to be fired and scorn because he apparently will never really know why.
Victory isn't everything. Neither is defeat. But you can't have one without the other.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
