The Sports Curmudgeon®

The Sports Curmudgeon has been online for just over a year now, but it existed in a much more limited venue for a while prior to hitting the web. Long time readers will certainly be shocked at the title here; I have always been a supporter of Bob Knight and in the eyes of some, an apologist. I know some of them are looking forward to my eating crow in the next few paragraphs. Sorry to disappoint those who think they will be able to send me a note with “gotcha” somewhere in the text; I still think Bob Knight is a good coach and a good person; nonetheless, it is time for him to retire.

There are precious few people on the planet who are “neutral” towards Robert Montgomery Knight. Everyone thinks he is either a saint or the world’s only sinner who is ineligible for redemption. On balance, I lean toward the former and maybe just a part of that is because his acerbic tongue makes him far more of a curmudgeon that I could ever aspire to be. Call it professional jealousy or role model adoration if you wish. Here is a man who said that he wanted to be buried face down to make it easy for his critics to kiss his ass. On the “curmudgeon-ness scale” that deserves a 9.9 score.

For the record, I have two sons neither of whom have the physical ability or the interest to have played college basketball. Had either or both of them been players of that caliber, I would gladly have sent them to play for coach Knight at IU if that is where they wanted to go. That was then; this is now.

I admire Bob Knight for the same reasons that I admire Joe Paterno and Mike Krzyzewski and John Chaney. These are the same reasons that I admired Jack Ramsey and Dean Smith and John Thompson when they coached college basketball. They all put quality teams that win lots of games on the court/field each and every year; they manage not to violate any of the 5 million arcane and irrational rules that the NCAA promulgates and enforces whimsically; they graduate players - many with real degrees in real majors - at a rate at least double what the “factory coaches” do.

Knight’s critics - to be very polite about what some of them really are - say that he is arrogant and bullying and so egotistical that he cannot relate with anyone in the world outside those sycophants that cling to him. Maybe they are right but just maybe they use arrogant here to mean that he knows so much more about basketball than they do that he embarrasses them publicly when that “understanding gap” becomes evident. Just maybe they don’t understand that part of coaching is communicating to the “coachees” that they have to do something in a very particular way, dammit. Just maybe, they have to hang a label on people who support Knight and so they call them sycophants to make themselves look “independent”. I don’t know; I don’t read minds - as the critics obviously do on a routine basis.

But I believe that the times and the society have moved to a point where Bob Knight is always going to be at least 90 degrees out of phase with the world. He is a man who believes that there is a right way to do certain things - like play basketball - and that his way is the right way. Critics will jump on this and call it megalomania or an ego running amok; I will only say that he gives every indication that he believes this for whatever reasons that he does. And since his profession is basketball coach, he is in a position to demand that his players do things his way; that is what the business is all about.

The world around us has moved to a “touchy-feely” status wherein all human interactions are deconstructed in a way to be sure that all participants in these interactions leave the interaction feeling good about themselves and the interaction and the other person involved and all the endangered species in the galaxy. Bob Knight does not fit into that “paradigm”. He does not care if someone leaves an interaction with him feeling like a dumb loser; in fact, he might say that it was the closest that this imaginary person ever came to seeing his/her true self. And that will continue to get him in trouble.

Today, the preservation of self-esteem for everyone is of paramount importance. We worry about bruising delicate egos and the way we do that is to make up words that don’t sound critical when what we need to say is that someone just screwed up royally. We worry about the processes that lead to outcomes and look for flaws when the outcomes are not what were sought. We never look at processes that have been examined and refined over and over again and wonder how the hell processes so perfect could possibly have produced such a ridiculous outcome. Bob Knight is not a “process person”; he knows there is one desirable outcome; he knows that it is an achievable outcome on most game days; he is angry when the outcome is not what was desired. How 1980s of him!!

Speaking of outcomes, the impending classes of players that he will get at Texas Tech will have come from an education system that accepts correct outcomes no matter how they come about. If one of these budding geniuses takes ten tries to figure out that 2 + 5 = 7 as opposed to 10 or 3 or negative-9, then the education system says that the kid is a success and moves him on. In life - and even in the microcosm of college basketball - you don’t get do-overs very often. And Coach Knight’s critics who are addicted to self-esteem issues would never be able to understand the possibility that the fragile and beautiful self-esteem of a young player might actually be enhanced if he got something right the first time he tried it as opposed to the umpty-teenth.

So when these kids reach college, they will likely have problems with class work and will definitely find the accountability of practices with Coach Knight to be difficult. If I were convinced that many of these budding geniuses really had IQs in the triple digit range, I’d say they would be experiencing cognitive dissonance. But that would require them to have two things in mind at the same time and I’m not ready to stipulate that in the generic case.

Compounding Knight’s potential problems is his new employer. Texas Tech does not have a reputation for holding the “scholar-athlete ideal” as paramount in their thinking. Most if not all of the old Southwest Conference schools have been known to take a shortcut or two with the admission and the eligibility retention issues that attach to top athletes. In fact, I believe that Texas Tech running back, Byron Hanspard, had a GPA of 0.00 in his final semester at the school. There is only one way to achieve that GPA; another person who achieved this GPA was Mr. Blutarsky in Animal House. Bob Knight recruits players who also go to class and do well in class. Like I said, he’ll be about 90 degrees out of phase with the prevalent thinking once again.

And so, I think that it is the right time for Bob Knight to retire and to join other curmudgeons in that state of retirement. This is not their time and there is no reason to flick scabs off healing wounds. In case you think I’m exaggerating that curmudgeon coaches won’t work today, consider some of these cases:

Imagine Ted Williams as a hitting coach or a manager today. Next imagine him in a press conference after losing both ends of a double header in the bottom of the 9th inning and being asked how it feels.

Anyone want to hire Steve Carleton as your pitching coach? If you are Carleton’s agent, your phone will ring about as often as the Maytag repairman’s.

Vince Lombardi spends an entire practice session on a single play and then hears from some agent that his client was bored and wants to be traded. So Vince would need to convene a mediation session with a counselor and promise to take sensitivity and communications classes. Yeah, right!

Magic Johnson had the audacity to take away and destroy a cell phone from Laker player who took a call during practice. So now he would stop practice so that the practice noises would not interfere with the conversation. I doubt it.

John Thompson confronted an “associate” of one of his players and told him to stay away just because the “associate” was a drug kingpin who eventually got sent to prison for minor details like murder. So today he should consider all the ramifications of interfering in the “relationship web” of his young player, right?

The world does not want authoritarianism anymore - even in people who occupy positions where they are authority figures. Yes, like all social trends, this is a giant pendulum, which will eventually swing back, but at age 60, Bob Knight will likely be staring up at grass roots when the pendulum gets back to where his personality is “acceptable” and “desirable” in a public figure. And so, on that basis, I think it is time for Bob Knight to retire.