When Bob Knight was fired at Indiana in 2000, nobody expected him to go gently into the good night. That is not The General’s way. But even some of his friends didn’t expect him to implement a scorched-earth policy designed to reduce the program he had built into rubble.
However, that’s just what happened. For 15 years, with only a couple of exceptions, Indiana basketball has been a virtual wasteland, haunted by the curse of Knight. He never mentioned the Hoosiers during his career as an ESPN analyst. He made it clear that he wished them only the worst.
If he felt he was bigger than the university, it was because few, if any, coaches have ever dominated a university – and a state – as Knight did during his 29 years on the IU bench.
In rural Indiana, especially, Knight was virtually a god in the small towns where old-fashioned conservative values thrive to this day. To them, he stood for all that was right and good about America. He loved the military, loved to hunt and fish, and embraced a blue-collar work ethic. In some outposts, there still is a yearning for Knight.
But now, finally, flowers are sprouting out of the scorched earth. The Hoosiers knocked off former archrival Kentucky to advance to the NCAA tournament’s “Sweet Sixteen.” They are an upset over favored North Carolina away from making only their second trip to the Elite Eight since Knight left the bench. The teams meet in a late game on Friday.
The bulk of the credit goes to coach Tom Crean, who persevered during the dark times when Hoosier nation was calling for his head, and athletics director Fred Glass, who never lost his faith in Crean’s ability to built winning teams without compromising the reputation built under Knight, who graduated the vast majority of his players and never was investigated by the NCAA.
The grudge Knight continues to harbor against IU is a mystery, even to his former players. The president who fired him, Myles Brand, is dead. Every member of the administration is gone. Yet Knight remains so bitter that he didn’t even return to campus last season to join in the ceremony to honor his 1976 NCAA champions, the last unbeaten team in NCAA Division I history.
His successor, Mike Davis, was promoted from Knight’s staff. Any young coach in his right mind would take a job as prestigious as IU, but Knight saw it as an act of betrayal. He even booted longtime friend C.M. Newton out of his inner circle when Newton tried to help Davis, whom he had recruited and coached at Alabama.
Although Davis rode the talented Jared Jeffries to the NCAA title game in 2002, he was gone after six seasons. His successor, Kelvin Sampson, proved to be about as good a fit at IU as Billy Clyde Gillispie was at the University of Kentucky. He was fired after two seasons for violating NCAA rules about contacts with players.
Then came Crean, who had done an excellent job in nine years at Marquette. Although his values were much like Knight’s, his personality was decidedly different. He’s more of an upbeat, rah-rah guy who built great expectations when he came to IU. But life turned sour for him in 2012, when a team that had spent 10 weeks ranked No. 1 during the regular season, a team that 7-0 Cody Zeller led to a No. 1 seed, got whipped by Syracuse in the regional semifinals.
From the first day he took the job, Crean has done nothing but praise Knight. He has said if the Hoosier icon changes his mind and would like to attend a game, he has an open invitation. He has maintained most of Knight’s traditions, including the candy-striped warmup pants and the jerseys without names on the back. In other words, he has done everything he can possible do to mend fences.
But Knight won’t budge, even though his blessing would definitely have given Crean a boost with the IU fans who still love Knight.
In more ways than one, it’s too bad Knight has nothing to do with IU because this is a team he could easily embrace. Senior Kevin “Yogi” Ferrell may be the Hoosiers’ best point guard since Isiah Thomas led the 1981 Hoosiers to the NCAA title, and 6-10 freshman center Thomas Bryant provides a dominant presence. In the latter part of the season, another freshman, 6-8 O.G. Anunoby, has added monster dunks and fierce rebounding to IU’s arsenal.
All the Hoosiers can shoot well from the outside and they don’t lose much when they go to the bench. Against Kentucky, 6-3 sophomore guard Robert Johnson was IU’s best player in the first half. But he couldn’t play in the second half due to an injury and the Hoosiers didn’t miss a beat.
The Hoosiers got off to a slow start this season, and were shocked when star shooting guard James Blackman Jr. was lost for the year due to an injury. The critics sharpened their knives after a 20-point loss to Duke left the Hoosiers at 5-3. But then Crean began doing what is arguably the best work of his career.
By the time Big Ten play began, the Hoosiers were ready for an improbable run that ended with the conference championship. The pieces fell together. The competition built the team’s mental toughness. Nevertheless, the Hoosiers got only a No. 5 seed after losing to Michigan on a last-second three-pointer in the conference tournament.
Stung by that loss, the Hoosiers regrouped and decimated Chattanooga, 99-74, in their first NCAA game. Nevertheless, the oddsmakers made them underdogs to UK, which was equally impressive in a romp against Stony Brook. Big mistake there. The Hoosiers took the lead early and used their hustling defense to take the Wildcats out of their comfort zone.
Both before and after the game, Crean and UK Coach John Calipari said nice things about each other, and the media began lobbying both for a renewal of the series that was canceled after IU’s Christian Watford hit a jumper from the wing in the final seconds to give the Hoosiers and upset win over the Cats in 2012.
The reason given for the cancellation was that Crean and Calipari couldn’t agree on the format. Calipari wanted the games played in larger arenas at neutral sites, while Crean wanted a home-and-home arrangement. The real reason, however, was that Calipari didn’t like the way IU students insulted UK during the game, and the way they rushed the floor after Watford’s game-winning shot.
Well, on at least one score, Calipari has a point. It’s unseemly at schools with great tradition for students to rush the floor after any regular-season victory. But the thing is, so much time had passed since the glory days of Knight that the IU students didn’t know how they were supposed to act.
But maybe that’s about to change. Maybe now Indiana is on the brink of a new era of success and prosperity All we know for sure is that it’s springtime again in Bloomington and flowers are growing out of the scorched earth.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby