2023-24 USBWA Best Writing Contest Winner: Column

Bob Knight was my dad: On the death of an American archetype

By Eamonn Brennan, Buzzer

When I was 11, the Davenport (Iowa) Northwest Little League banned my father for life. I only vaguely remember the incident. I remember how totally he lost his head. An opposing coach said something rude, something my dad was incapable of ignoring. He screamed. He called names. He swore in front of kids. I remember standing at shortstop, silently pleading for it to stop. The shame was physical. I wanted the dirt to swallow me whole.

This was not the first time something like this had happened. It would not be the last. Soccer games were worse. I was good at soccer, was the thing, and so the competitive neurons fired harder, the demands for effort and performance even more direct and bruising. (My dad didn’t know a thing about soccer and would, in his calmer moments, admit as much.) The wrath, that split-atom temper, lurked around every corner.

Once, in high school, playing for our highly ranked varsity team, I ran over to him in the middle of a game and said that if he didn’t stop yelling I would walk off the field and never play again. I said it so the whole sideline could hear. He never yelled at me after that. Our relationship was never the same, either.

I think the thing my dad loved the most about Bob Knight was that Bob Knight could get away with being like this, whereas normal people couldn’t.

That was what came to mind this week, when news of Knight’s passing first broke, and over the past couple of days, reading so many thoughtful obituaries. Knight was, above all, a character: a flawed antihero so brilliantly skilled he could get away with anything, at least for a while. To a certain kind of American man, Bob Knight loomed larger than sports – not just because he was a genius, not just because of what he did for the state of Indiana or the game of basketball, but most of all because he was a charismatic avatar for a bygone American way.

Bob Knight, to my dad, was the arch embodiment of the way men were supposed to be. They were born four years apart in different poor rural parts of the Midwest. They both spent time in the military; they both believed in boot camp discipline. They were both hard-working, exacting, tough. My dad lost a finger and the integrity of his spinal column to the aluminum plant where he was employed for 30 years. He watched the History Channel constantly. His favorite movie was “Patton.” He was the kind of person who thought the R. Lee Ermey stuff in “Full Metal Jacket” was good, actually. He even sort of looked like Knight: tall, heavy, splotchy, with big eyes and a full head of white hair.

Stubbornness was part of the bargain. If you were wronged, you didn’t back down – you doubled down. You stood on pride. You held a grudge forever. You proved you were right, whatever it took. Even if it undid you.

Of course he loved Bob Knight. Knight commanded a religious zeal from Indiana basketball fans, all of which was extremely understandable, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s. He was an incredible coach. He revolutionized basketball, damn near perfected it, and he did it with a sense of moral rectitude and wry savvy humor that made him far more than just an effective teacher of a child’s recreational activity. It is important to say this, and all of the obits have: The guy was one of the greatest basketball coaches to ever walk the face of the Earth, an immense totemic figure. He became an icon. He loomed as large in the state of Indiana as any person of the late 20th Century. He took a state already obsessed with basketball at an organic grassroots level and projected that power outward.

This outsize appeal extended far beyond the borders of the state. Knight was a hero in my childhood, too. To me, as a kid becoming obsessed with the game, it was the sheer acumen that attracted. He was obviously dripping with ideas. I would order Knight’s coaching clinic VHS tapes and play them on my basement TV. (Later, when Knight was calling games for ESPN, you couldn’t help but hear his knowledge come through; he wouldn’t know the name of a player but he would absolutely know what that player needed to do differently.) And the style he invented and perfected – continuous motion offense and aggressive man to man defense – was the only school of tactical thought at the time. I didn’t even realize it until later, how ubiquitous he was among coaches at all levels, how thoroughly his systems had taken hold. His ideas totally dominated the game. His style was the water in which we swam.

My dad was happy to support my sports obsession, but his love of Knight was much less about ball. It was the crazy things he did at press conferences, even the stuff that earned him widespread criticism – that was the core charm. I remember watching ESPN and some “Top 10 craziest Bob Knight moments” piece coming on, and him cackling at everything Knight said, no matter whether it verged into meanness or cringe, no matter how many times he had heard it before. Knight was usually very funny. Even when he wasn’t, you could admire that he was the only guy still like this.

This was how my father, and many like him, saw themselves in the world: against softness and spoiled modernity, practitioners of an older way. They were Tony Soprano in Dr. Melfi’s office, lamenting the supposed loss of a world they never knew.

Knight’s players seemed to love him. His methods were usually vindicated. And he was loving, too, in his own way – and not just in the quiet, when Knight went about raising money for charity, or taking care of Landon Turner, or all of those stories that you’ve also heard, that have been rightfully highlighted this week, too, that complicate the duality of the man as merely brilliant or a bully.

Rather, in the daily sense, love was expressed in a way that Midwestern men of my father’s generation were comfortable with. You were hard with those you loved. You sought to buttress them against the cruel world that awaited. One day, after they’d graduated, or won you a national title, or grown up and gone off to college, you could give them some hint of the depth of your feeling. You could hug Steve Alford on the court in New Orleans. You could cry on the ninth floor of the Briscoe dorm on drop off day. But in the meantime, your love was an obstacle course, a test that had to be passed, obscure to all but yourself.

All of which would be OK, were it not for the temper. This was the fatal flaw. For all of Knight’s brilliance, for all of his social intelligence and tactical sharpness, he couldn’t prevent himself from boiling over. Seth Davis’s obituary for The Athletic recounts these incidents in remarkable detail, all of the times over so many years Knight knew he succumbed to a silly rush of blood to the head. He wouldn’t apologize, he would double down, and he would rarely be punished, especially early in his career, when he was torridly reinventing a whole sport. But he knew when he messed up.

This was the inherent contradiction: Knight demanded idealized discipline from everyone around him, but couldn’t live up to that standard himself. This is how I grew up.

Later in his career at IU, as the deep NCAA Tournament runs became less frequent and the frustrated outbursts more so, people around the country came to wonder why Indiana fans tolerated this out of touch boor. How could a person who’d kicked his son in the shin during a timeout be given such free rein? How could such a short fuse hold sway? How could someone who saw himself as an educator, a molder of young men, speak to people like this? It was hard for outsiders to understand.

But I got it, long before I decided I wanted to go to Indiana: When your father makes a mistake, or loses his shit, or embarrasses you, it hurts – but you don’t stop loving him for it. Not all the way. And Indiana fans never truly stopped loving Bob Knight.

That’s what made his departure and subsequent self-exile so hard. Knight held an edgy rally in Dunn Meadow just after he was fired, which lives long in Indiana Daily Student lore. (The night before the rally, one of his people called the longtime IDS publisher, Dave Adams, to ask the paper to sponsor the event, so Knight would be legally allowed to use the designated free speech campus space. Knight had been feuding with and mistreating the student paper for years by that point, but Adams – seeing not only the newsworthiness of the event but the larger importance for the campus community – agreed anyway. Adams was a fierce advocate for student journalists, but he was also a gentle man. He didn’t keep grudges, and he tried to do what was best for everyone. I think about that a lot.)

When Knight left, he was gone for good. Indiana fans fiercely debated his departure, were held in thrall to it, pleaded with him to come back, and then grew cold. With every new honorary event Knight ignored – with every Purdue fish fry he attended instead – he drove even the people who loved him most toward ambivalence and frustration. At a certain point, they assumed he would never return, and most fans came to blame him for the divide, if they cared at all.

Knight maintained his grudge toward an entire university and its people until it was almost too late. His return in 2020, soft-eyed and ailing, offered catharsis, but you could be both happy it happened and curious why it didn’t come sooner.

And that is the downside of temper, of stubbornness, of grudge-holding. These are the lessons explored by the past two decades of Golden Age antihero TV, what “The Sopranos” and then “Mad Men” would hammer home at great artistic length not long after Knight was pulled from his throne in Bloomington: It’s not good to be this way. It is poison. It catches up with you. It costs.

It cost Knight a chance to end his iconic career where he belonged, on his terms. It cost my dad his closeness with his kids.

Later in his life, Knight would tell a reporter that he would add a “P.S.” to his epitaph: that, yes, sometimes he realized he was in the wrong. On the tape, you can see how hard this is for him to say. My dad softened in his older age. He got easier to talk to. After he passed, his wife told me he often lamented how he had created distance between us, how he knew that if he had just learned to “keep his damn mouth shut” then I might have listened to him more. He was right. It took him too long to realize it.

I still loved him, in ways that are hard to explain. I was reminded this week of how much he and so many others loved Knight, for so many different reasons. Basketball, yes. But all of the other stuff too. Not despite it; because of it. For a while, Knight wielded the most famous temper in America, and he was so toweringly smart and good and funny everyone loved him anyway. Some people still do. I get it.