Saturday, March 25, 2000
It's time Knight learned lesson
BY TIM SULLIVAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
This just in: No sacred cows at Indiana.
John D. Walda says so, and he ought to know. He's the President of the Board of Trustees at Indiana University and the point man in that institution's investigation of basketball coach Bobby Knight.
Walda should be able to say with some degree of certainty whether Knight is above the law, below the law or is the law at IU. Walda should be able to tell us what the school will condone and what it will condemn. He should have spoken up a long time ago, however.
After nearly three decades of malign neglect, IU's administration finally has found it necessary to examine Knight's conduct. Televised allegations of Knight's abusive behavior — most of them made by former Hoosier Neil Reed and substantiated by the testimony of former teammates — has raised such a stink even IU can't ignore it.
It's about time. It's time somebody in Bloomington decided the university's reputation is more precious than its basketball program; that the repeated excesses of the school's most famous employee deserve formal scrutiny, if not sanction; that Knight's unchecked behavior indicates a coach out of control and an administration out of touch.
Perhaps Knight is wrongly accused. Perhaps he never grabbed Reed by the throat or used soiled toilet paper as a motivational tool. Perhaps he is precisely the misunderstood martyr some of his sycophants would suggest. Yet even some of his staunchest advocates would have to admit The General has pretty much exhausted his benefit of the doubt by now. At some point, even Knight must be made to answer.
That point could have come when he threw a chair in the middle of a game with Purdue in 1985, or when he told Connie Chung in 1988, “If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” When Knight was charged with assaulting a Puerto Rican policeman in 1979, and later convicted in absentia, someone at IU might have recognized a problem to address.
But except for the occasional reprimand — for pulling his team off the court in protest against the Soviet Union; for various tirades against referees and, once, a misinformed media liaison; for cursing at fans who had dared boo him for kicking his own son — Knight's bosses have been remarkably tolerant. Indiana's administration has been so silent for so long in the face of such boorish behavior that its current posture of piety is laughable.
When the CNN/Sports Illustrated report was first aired on March 14, Indiana's reflexive response was to dismiss it as a ratings ploy designed to embarrass Knight at the outset of the NCAA Tournament. Though the timing of the broadcast was certainly suspicious, its contents could not easily be ignored. While Knight shifted into his customary damage control mode — mixing selective denials with deliberate evasions and peculiar lapses of memory — the Indianapolis Star called for an investigation on its editorial page. Whether Walda will be able to get to the truth three years after the alleged choking episode is uncertain. Whether he even wants to is unclear. One Indianapolis columnist wrote last week that Walda was “tucked so deeply into Knight's pocket that he comes equipped with a key chain and lint.”
Presumably, Walda has a larger stake in IU than he does in its basketball coach. Presumably, university president Myles Brand did not order this investigation simply for the sake of appearances. Presumably, even Knight should be expected to operate within certain behavioral boundaries.
Knight rates some slack because he represents so many of the right things: Scrupulous honesty, educational standards, athletic excellence. In the cesspool that is college basketball, he is one man who can't be compromised, and there aren't many.
Furthermore, Knight is correct when he says college basketball can not be conducted as if it were canasta. Certain allowances should be made for the physical nature of the game. Still, there is a distinction between the demanding and the demeaning, and another between indoctrination and hazing.
If Knight doesn't know this, it's time he was taught.
Tim Sullivan welcomes your email at tsullivan@enquirer.com.
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