| | Andy Katz, who is paid lots of that nutritious delicious Disney money to
know such things, said Sunday that Bob Knight intends to coach again --
maybe in the Ivy League, maybe in the Big Sky, maybe at a Division II
school.
|  | | Bob Knight says he will coach again. Indiana is sure it won't be in Bloomington. |
Dane Fife, who is paid nothing at all to play basketball at the
Indiana University, said Sunday that if neither of Knight's two assistants
are named to replace him, the players will quit en masse and "there
won't be a team at Indiana this year."
Clarence Doninger, the athletic director Knight snubbed before and after
the penultimate mess back in May, said the players won't be choosing the next
coach.
Trustee Stephen Backer said Knight was going to be fired
Thursday even if he hadn't tried to spin-dry the standup comedian at Assembly
Hall last week.
The thousands of people protesting in Bloomington on Sunday aren't
going away any time soon. In other words, children, that red you see is actually blood on the
moon, and there's going to be a lot more of it before this little pie fight
is over.
Which, frankly, is as it should be. The end of the Knight era should be
as unsightly and acrimonious as possible, with the agony serving as a shining beacon to every other school, every other professional
organization, every work environment that this is what happens when you cut too many deals
too many times at the expense of too much of your soul.
Of the school, much has already been said, and all of it bad. Backer's
claim that Knight was going to be fired Thursday anyway suggests that Knight
had been given three months' grace to ease into zero tolerance. Typical. The
IU brass wouldn't understand zero tolerance if it hired Stephen Hawking to
explain zero and the Dalai Lama to explain tolerance.
Now, they inherit the wind. May it blow them about for years to come,
so that they will remember how they spent 29 years propping up the man they
fired Sunday for doing pretty much what he's done for all those 29 years.
As for Knight, he now has to find a school that will take his
professional tonnage, and there is no reason to think he will have to look
hard to find one. It is unlikely the Ivy League will find an unrepentant
Knight to its liking, but there are plenty of second- and third-level schools
that will see Knight as Fresno State saw Jerry Tarkanian -- ready-to-spread legitimacy. The Big Sky meets that criterion, as well as
having plenty of trout and moose spoiling for an unfair fight.
|
“ |
Backer's
claim that Knight was going to be fired Thursday anyway suggests that Knight
had been given three months' grace to ease into zero tolerance. Typical. The
IU brass wouldn't understand zero tolerance if it hired Stephen Hawking to
explain zero and the Dalai Lama to explain tolerance. ” |
In finding a new place to break Dean Smith's victory record, though, he
will only face the demons again. Knight might claim to
be the world's most secure person, but he also knows he has been chased from
the place he once loved by his singular refusal to accept the governance of
others. Any president or athletic director hiring Knight hires a man built to
eclipse and ignore them, making him a short-fuse explosive for anyone who
dares cheat sense.
His assistants, John Treloar and Mike Davis, have been mentioned as
candidates for the interim coaching job, and the players, including Fife, are
stumping for Davis -- with threats. This puts Doninger in a box he has
no intention of staying in; Indiana hasn't had control of its basketball
program for 30 years, and it surely isn't going to start the next three
decades by renting it out to the players.
The players are then stuck by NCAA rules to either swallow and play, or
quit and wait a year to play somewhere else -- perhaps for Knight at Field
and Stream A&M.
And the fans who protested his firing and roared as he vowed to explain
his side to them within the next two days ... well, they will eventually be
left behind to figure out life without Knight. He's not coming back, and when
he goes, he will leave a barely controlled burn behind him. People who knew
only Knight at IU will be forced to choose between one of their true loves. And in such cases, cynicism is the usual result.
In all, nobody wins; everyone ends up feeling dirty. But therein lies the
most valuable lesson of all. Trying to have it both ways usually means losing
it all. Indiana, Bob Knight -- and everyone surrounding both -- now move
on, knowing that no matter what side they were on, they ended up on the wrong
side.
Losing isn't much more comprehensive than that.
Ray Ratto, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. | |
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