It was a chance meeting. Jim Calhoun, a young high school coach in Dedham, Massachusetts, loaded his players into an old station wagon and drove them across the state and over to West Point, N.Y., for a tournament.
There they bumped into the Army’s basketball coach, Bob Knight.
“Where you from,” Knight barked. “Massachusetts? How’d you get here?”
Calhoun remembers, “he liked the idea of me, a high school coach, throwing guys into a car and bringing them up there.”
Bob Knight, Indiana’s combustible coaching giant, dies at age 83
About 15 years later, after Knight had moved on to Indiana, and won his first two national championships, and Calhoun had distinguished himself in 14 years at Northeastern, they were more familiar with one another and crossed paths in Dallas during the Final Four in 1986. UConn was looking for for a head coach, and so was Northwestern of the Big Ten.
“He said, ‘I hear you’re thinking about Northwestern,’” Calhoun said. “‘Great coaches have gone there and failed, and I think you can be a great coach, but you’ll fail, too. Don’t do it.”
Knight was with Pete Newell, Hall of Fame coach from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Calhoun, a lifelong New Englander, was leaning toward UConn, but this reinforcement meant something.
“(Knight) told some story about someone he knew at UConn,” Calhoun said. “He said, ‘they’re not ready yet, but you can get them there.’ And he said, ‘you’ve got to remember, the school you go to, they’ve got to want to be good, too.’ I thought that was a great line. I was still trying to make my mind up to some degree and the one thing about Bobby, he wasn’t going to hold back his opinion.”
They weren’t best friends, but Calhoun, who won three championships at UConn, and Knight, who won three at Indiana, were friendly colleagues and giants of college basketball in roughly parallel Hall of Fame careers. Knight, after a life filled with triumphs and controversies, died Wednesday at 83.
“Maybe he saw some hardscrabble in me, toughness in me that he appreciated,” Calhoun said. “Honesty. He would say, ‘you’re an honest SOB.’ He couldn’t necessarily give you a compliment without putting that SOB on the end. … He could be really endearing to people he cared about.”
The morning after Knight died, Calhoun, viewing some of the photos his grandson, Sam, had found, tried to put the complexity and legacy of the man into words and it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of words, a lot of turns, because Knight left a mark on college basketball, indeed, on American sports, that defies the simple epitaph.
“He was amazing, incredibly complex,” Calhoun said. “And, I always thought, brilliant. Incredibly funny. He was a lot of things. And very caring about his guys.”
RIP Bob Knight, one of the legends of our game. Our thoughts are with the @IndianaMBB family pic.twitter.com/m3y9HhIhHZ
— UConn Men's Basketball (@UConnMBB) November 1, 2023
Knight played on Ohio State’s 1960 national championship team, then coached at Army from 1965-71 and developed the ways of the martinet that followed him, for better or worse, throughout his career. At Indiana, he won championships in 1976 (which remains the last undefeated men’s team in NCAA Division I), 1981 and 1987.
By then, the long list of eruptions in temper, controversial actions and statements, for example throwing a chair across the court, began to overshadow his coaching brilliance. Neither players, referees, fans nor reporters ever knew what might set Knight off. He was dismissed from Indiana in 2000, and finished his career at Texas Tech. He won 902 games, with a winning percentage of .706.
“He was a brilliant, brilliant coach,” Calhoun said. “When the game was very simple, Knight put the motion offense in. Knight’s defense was something you hadn’t seen. That Quinn Buckner (1976) team, they were almost in a trance the way they played. They didn’t make any mistakes. He was so captivating at time, bullish at times, complex is the word.”
Knight’s teams were known for uncomplicated, but tenacious man-to-man defense.
Calhoun, 81, and Knight went up against each other three times. UConn, with Ray Allen and Doron Sheffer, beat Indiana 86-52 in the consolation game of the Great Alaska Shootout in Anchorage in November 1995. The next year, at Indiana, Knight and the Hoosiers beat UConn 68-61. In the NCAA Tournament second round in Washington, D.C. in 1998, Calhoun won what would become the rubber match, 78-68.
“One thing I always tried to do is never pay attention to the other coach,” Calhoun said. “But Knight was one of those guys, in his heyday, people felt would always have the answers. He was captivating, he really was. You didn’t leave a conversation without thinking. There was nothing simple about the man. ”
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Nothing simple. Though Calhoun, and many others, is certain Knight loved and cared about his players, many of his controversies involved harsh treatment of them, especially in his later years when the ways he learned at Army in the 1960s were no longer considered acceptable.
“He was a presence,” Calhoun said. “Dean Smith was incredible as a coach, John Wooden, to me, was a perfectionist in the game and an eloquent spokesperson. But Knight was a truly complex human being, man, to everybody. At times, because of demons, or whatever you want to call them, caused him to pick fights he didn’t have to. But he could be a funny SOB, really funny. He was a friend’s friend, but even with his friends he could have a dark moment or two, and I don’t know why. I never tried to figure him out, I just took him for what he was, always friendly to me, always incredibly respectful to me.
“Very few people you meet cause reaction. He was a lot of different things wrapped into one. He was a force of nature. If you did a search of names, his name might have been mentioned more than any other. You know that expression, ‘bigger than life?’ He was. He walked into a room, you know Bob Knight was there.”
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