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Tuesday, September 19
View from Sydney clears things up
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
SYDNEY, Australia -- Say one thing for flying halfway across the world and then not being able to sleep for two days: It sure puts things in perspective. You look at the Bob Knight final resolution in Bloomington from the vantage point of Sydney, Australia, and any number of previously unrelated thoughts spring to mind:
|  | | Olympic beach volleyball will be played at a scenic venue at Bondi Beach. |
(1) This is a scandal, Knight finally leaving a program that even he admits he should have parted from years ago? Heck, the Olympics have had a hatful of scandals already, and they haven't even hit the first full day of competition.
Here in Australia, nearly 30 Chinese athletes suddenly developed really bad cases of the flu the moment it was announced that a certain kind of doping test would be in place for the Games. IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, meanwhile, is fending off reports that he was attempting to sneak a bunch of disgraced former IOC officials into Sydney to watch the Games despite their complicity in the raging bribery scandal.
Over at the boxing venue, where you haven't had an Olympics if somebody isn't ordering the arrest of somebody else, the Aussie team has been infighting so ferociously that its own captain, Atlanta Olympian Richie Rowles, concedes he can't really offer any kind of leadership. And John Chaplain, the American men's track and field coach, is already pissing and moaning about the wind factor on the track at the Olympic stadium, which undoubtedly will affect sprint times.
It isn't that the Bob Knight story doesn't resonate, it's just that it looks so small from far away (they all do, don't they?). And if there's one sentient thought to be produced here, it is that the "zero-tolerance" policy that doomed Knight is as bad a fit on a college basketball coach as it is anywhere else in the world of rational thought. Hideous look all around.
(2) We thought Knight was having some bad style days. Then we got a gander at what the Sydney Olympic volunteer crew will be wearing for the next two weeks. Suddenly those red sweaters are looking just tremendously stylish.
(3) Logging on to the Internet to catch up with the Knight story, which rated exactly one paragraph in the Sydney Morning Herald, we kept stumbling over the same phrase: "Knight, whose Hoosier teams have not advanced past the second round of the NCAA tournament since 1994 ..."
It's an interesting phrase, because it implies a failure to meet the standards for performance at Indiana that Knight himself set with his great successes in the 1970s and '80s. And it prompts the thought that, had someone else been coaching the Hoosiers since 1994 and logged the same record, that person would have been canned long before Knight finally was let go this week.
In terms of job results, at least, Knight actually might have been given some slack over the past few unhappy seasons, an absolutely understandable residue of the goodwill he spent so many years building at Indiana before he began dissipating it himself. But it does not follow that Mike Davis or anyone else will be similarly tolerated in the go-go, win-win new millennium in college hoops. All dry spells are relative, and Knight's "bad years" were still generally better than most universities can realistically hope to get in a clean program, but six years of no excitement in a hoops town like Bloomington spells disaster no matter who is stalking the sideline.
(4) Isiah Thomas doesn't need the kind of attention he'd receive for putting Knight on the Pacers' payroll; and
(5) You get right down to it, most coaches are either basically nuts or at least partially so. Looking around at the Olympic cast of thousands in Sydney, we see coaches who exhort, coaches who freeze out, coaches who back-slap, coaches who butt-kick, screamers, huggers, philosophers, rednecks, poets and freaks -- and that's just the U.S. roster. The one thing they share in common is that if you leave them alone in a room, they'll have bitten their fingernails down to the quicks inside of five minutes.
Put it this way: Rudy Tomjanovich, the Rockets coach who has, in the U.S. men's basketball team, the single most mortal lock to win a gold medal in these Olympics, says flatly, "Every team we play is going to make me nervous." 'Nuff said.
Coaches are often talented, usually hyper-motivated and almost always driven to win in ways that most of us barely understand; and they have tried just about everything, over the years, to either contain or capitalize on that essential hint of madness that spurs them on. Bob Knight capitalized longer than 99 percent of the people around him; it's just that his explosion sounded like a bigger thing, too. We heard it all the way Down Under.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a Web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.
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