Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Biography - Hardcover

Delsohn, Steve; Heisler, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074324348X ISBN 13: 9780743243483

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006

Synopsis

Brilliant, intimidating, charming, or profane, Coach Bob Knight is an enduring contradiction who has long fascinated and repelled basketball fans, for whom he has provided as much to dislike as to respect.

Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Biography is the first comprehensive biography of Knight, one of the most successful and controversial coaches in the history of American sports. Detailing the entire scope of Knight's playing and coaching career through extensive interviews -- including many with people who have never gone on record about him before -- authors Steve Delsohn and Mark Heisler give a candid yet balanced account of the man who will likely end up as the all-time winningest coach in college basketball.

In 1965, at age twenty-four, Bobby Knight became the head basketball coach at Army and began a career that would soon take him to Indiana University, where for the next twenty-nine years he would become the game's most famous and notorious coach. While there, he won three national championships (1976, '81, '87) and once compiled a perfect 32-0 record with an amazing 63-1 record over two seasons. Knight was NCAA Coach of the Year three times (1975, '76, '89) and coached U.S. teams to gold medals in both the Olympics and the Pan-Am Games. Yet he is equally, if not more, famous for some of his misbehaviors -- pulling his team off the court against the Soviets, making insensitive comments about rape to Connie Chung, putting a tampon in a player's locker to let him know that Knight thought he was a wimp -- and other alleged misbehaviors: kicking his own son Patrick during a game, stuffing an LSU fan into a trash can, assaulting a policeman in Puerto Rico -- and the list goes on. One of Knight's closest friends once said of him, "Bob Knight is an asshole. But he knows it and he tries like hell to make up for it." Unfortunately, over the years there has been more and more to make up for.

The story of Bob Knight has moved on to Texas Tech, where he continues his quest to become the winningest college basketball coach of all time. He already is the most fascinating. Love him or loathe him, Knight keeps winning and forces you to watch him and have an opinion. Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Biography is an extraordinary look at a legendary coach with a monumental temper and an appetite for confrontation.

About this title

About the Author:

Steve Delsohn is the author of The Fire Inside: Firefighters Talk About Their Lives and Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football. He has also coauthored numerous celebrity biographies, including books on John Wayne, Sam Kinison, and Jim Brown. Delsohn lives in California, where he is the father of three girls.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

BOBBY

Orrville and Columbus, 1940-62

Bobby has got so much....He doesn't cheat. He doesn't drink. He doesn't even chase women. But for some reason, he thinks he has been a bad boy and no matter how successful he becomes, he thinks he must be punished.

-- IU assistant Roy Bates to SI's Frank Deford

I can remember my mom saying time and frigging time again, "Just remember, somebody has to lose." And my rejoinder has always been, "Why should it be me?"

-- Bob Knight

Playboy, March 2001

From the beginning, he was different.

Robert Montgomery Knight, the only child of the local freight agent on the railroad line and the second-grade teacher at Walnut Street Elementary, was the best athlete in Orrville, Ohio, but every hamlet has its local stars who grow up to teach phys ed or sell real estate. Bobby was the one who would attain the greatness they had all dreamed about. Almost from the day he was born and the cry that became his first complaint, he went his own way.

His father, Pat, grew up on an Oklahoma farm and went to work on the Nickel Plate Railroad, which brought him to this little town of 5,000 in the northeast corner of the state. To Bobby, born when Pat was in his 40s, his father was a Gary Cooper figure, upright, low-key, principled, and determined, "the most honest man I have known," and "the most disciplined man I ever met."

The son took pride in his father's flinty virtues, and he told everyone the same stories, which became the standard starting point in published profiles of his life. Pat never earned more than $8,000, never had a credit card, owned three cars his whole life, and paid cash for them. He took out his only loan to buy their $22,000 house and paid it off in four years by giving up his hobbies. Knight said his dad never tipped, "because he always said, 'Nobody ever gave me a tip for doing anything.'"

However, there was a distance between father and son that was difficult to bridge. Pat was so hard of hearing, Bobby had to yell to be understood, and it was easier just to co-exist. Pat worked long hours and didn't go to Bobby's games. They shared a passion for fishing, but that was something a father and a son could do together in silence.

Pat was already 43 and Hazel 38 on October 25, 1940 when Bobby was born. Pauline Boop, their next-door neighbor, says both parents acted even older than their years. The one who seemed the youngest, Boop says, was Hazel's mother, Sarah Henthorne, who lived with them.

"There was always this terrible barrier between [Bob] and his dad because his dad's hearing was so bad that he was almost deaf," says Boop. "His mother did not drive a car and his father was mostly working. But his grandmother drove and she always took him places. And she was just the sweetest woman. She was a perfect gem."

John Flynn of the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of Knight's first press confidants, wrote that Knight used to call Mrs. Henthorne "mother." She doted on him, letting him win when they played board games because she couldn't bear to see how upset he got when he lost. Hazel Knight herself once noted, "I think he was closer to his grandmother than he ever was to me or his father."

Nevertheless, Bobby said his mother, whip-smart and inclined to speak her mind, was his biggest influence. Bruce Newman, who interviewed Hazel years later when he wrote for the Indiana Daily Student, remembers her as "sort of typically Midwestern, old school, a bit schoolmarmish and forbidding in ways. She was gracious enough to let a college kid come into her house and talk to her for an hour, so she wasn't mean or anything. But I don't remember her as being a particularly warm person."

"He gets that dry sense of humor from his mother," says Kathy Harmon, who was Kathy Halder when she dated Bob in high school. "His mother was -- you just had to know her, you know. She just had that real dry, talked kind of slow, sense of humor. And she was fun, but I don't know -- I mean, they built a new house when they were in high school. It was a two-bedroom house -- one for his grandmother, one for his mother and father, and he had a room off the kitchen. And later, it was turned into a laundry room. But, I mean, you would have thought that with having a son, they'd build a three-bedroom house, but they didn't....Like, it was at the end of the kitchen and there was a wooden folding door that folded across there, and his bed was actually a daybed.

"His father and mother, that I can remember, never, ever saw Bobby play a game of basketball....I took his grandmother to a couple of games and she saw a couple of games but that was it. It was just -- it was a different family. I mean, he loved his mother and his father, but I think his grandmother pretty much raised him."

Says Norman Douglas, then Knight's best friend: "His father probably did work 10 to 12 hours a day because any time we went to his house, his dad wasn't there. When he was there, I do remember his father was hard of hearing. In fact, that added to the humor on occasion. There were some things that happened that he was oblivious to and that would crack us up because he's just sitting there, staring off into space, not knowing anything happened. But I think Bob felt very close to his dad. And his father was very strong-willed, there's no doubt about that. I think Bob picked that up from him, where right is right and wrong is wrong, and gray isn't in this household."

As soon as Bobby could get the ball up to the hoop, he began shooting baskets with Pauline Boop's husband, Don, a dentist everyone called Doc. The Knights and Boops lived in such close proximity, Pauline says she used to cook bread in her kitchen just 20 feet from the room where Bobby slept. Before Doc Boop's death, he told John Flynn that Bobby's "grandmother and I came close to raising him," noting, "I guess I shouldn't say this, but I believe that them always letting him win had some effect on him. He was an average boy, very intelligent, mind you, but I didn't notice anything until he got into high school. Then his temper started showing up. It grew in college and I don't think it has abated yet."

Flynn often repeated the story about Mrs. Henthorne letting Bobby win to keep him from getting upset. To Flynn, like Doc Boop, it explained a lot.

The way Knight remembers it, his childhood was idyllic and Orrville a great place to grow up, filled with Norman Rockwell characters. Nevertheless, he wasn't an ordinary child. He liked to hang out with the grownups, who, in turn, liked to hang out with him.

"Bob had a lot of adult friends," says Norman Douglas. "Most of us didn't have that. We all knew each other's parents and their friends, but our friends were each other. Bob had this set of adult friends that he spent a lot of time with."

Almost all of them were his coaches, who had time for him and shared his love of sports. In Knight: My Story, he ticks off their names gratefully, thanking them in detail for everything they did, starting with Frank Mizer, who ran the local beauty parlor and started a baseball team Bobby played on when he was nine.

He was ambitious and industrious, even if he was the one who decided where his ambitions lay and what he would work at. He got good grades effortlessly and read voraciously. When the library would compile a list of its top readers, he wrote, it would always be nine girls and him. He devoured the Chip Hilton books, written by the famous basketball coach Clair Bee, the John R. Tunis baseball books, and the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Starry-eyed Bobby hung on every word of Jimmy Dudley's Cleveland Indians radio broadcasts and George Walsh doing Kentucky Wildcat basketball. Small-town kids once listened to the sound of trains at night; Bobby listened to the crackling voices doing play-by-play on radio and dreamed of brightly lit stadiums. As he wrote in his book, "My lifelong status as a hero worshipper started in those days."

As an eighth grader, he was a 6-1 forward who averaged 29 points with a line-drive shot he wasn't bashful about taking. At Orrville High, the varsity basketball coach, Jack Graham, jumped him to the varsity as a freshman.

"He got broken in pretty good by the upperclassmen," says teammate Warner Harper, a senior who stuck up for the 15-year-old Knight. "They gave him a very rough time. They kind of ganged up on him at practice. They would do little things like throw an elbow and he would get mad. A couple times it almost broke into a fight. Then he got past that. I talked to him one day and told him he had to dish something back out. And Knight started to do that. Then everything was all right."

Bobby handled the hazing without complaint. In his autobiography, he says only that starting as a freshman is "never easy." Kathy Harmon says she could tell it bothered him but he wouldn't talk about it. "He was one of those people that kept everything pretty much inside of him," says Harmon. "I would confide in him but he didn't confide in me. I don't think he confided in his parents either. Maybe his older cronies, the guys he hung out with, but I don't think so. I think he kept his problems to himself."

At Orrville, Bobby was an end on the football team and such a good hitter on the baseball team, he could even stand up to Dean Chance, the young fireballer from nearby Wayne County High who would pitch eleven seasons in the major leagues. Bobby lived for basketball, though, and everything else in his life, like girls, ran second or farther back.

"It was a weird kind of relationship until we were sophomores and juniors in high school because basketball was everything," says Kathy Harmon. "You never saw him anywhere that he didn't have a basketball in his hand. And it wasn't like every Saturday night you saw him. Because if there was a basketball game somewhere, he went. He was consumed by it."

Knight was as brash as he was intense. Kathy Harmon says he didn't lash out a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 074324348X
• ISBN 13: 9780743243483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352