Bobby Knight will never really understand

By Carl Heintze

I have mixed feelings of scorn and pity for Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight, you'll recall, is the legendary coach of the Indiana Hoosier basketball team, the subject of a book or two, many stories and many basketball victories--too many, as it has turned out.

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 Bobby could do no wrong.

Bobby Knight was the kind of coach who fits the mold made famous by Woody Hayes and Vince Lombardi.

Woody Hayes got fired, too, after he punched a player from the opposing football team. Vince Lombardi is another legendary coach (there are a lot of legendary coaches in sports) 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."

Bobby Knight, who likes to talk to the media about his problem, is unrepentant, principally, it seems to me, because like Lombardi and Hayes winning for a successful coach of their caliber is more than being good at a sport, it becomes an obsession.

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 win and keep on winning. Losing isn't really acceptable.

A coach thus becomes more and more driven by the desire to have one winning season after another. I'm not sure how much all coaches want to win. Presumably they wouldn't be coaching long if they didn't.

But as they pass from being just coaches to becoming supercoaches, it seems to me 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.

Bobby 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 him 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 making the same mistakes. Just as Woody Hayes couldn't get away with punching an opposing player because he interfered with one of his team's running backs, so Bobby Knight eventually was done in by his fatal inability to see there is something more to sport--and life--than victory.

His victories had become victories at any price ("Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.") and if you believe that, then eventually you have to pay the price.

It seems to me that it also is a part of the American psyche that no one loses. 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.

Let us hope that same may not be true for the United States as a whole.

Victory isn't everything. Neither is defeat. But you can't have one without the other.

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Carl Heintze: Bobby Knight will never really understand

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