The End Of An Ugly Witch Hunt
The end of one of the most ridiculous investigations in recent memory came to an end yesterday when the president of Indiana University announced a zero-tolerance policy for Hoosiers basketball coach Bob Knight. What a joke! For the past two months university trustees have been investigating claims that Knight once choked a player during a 1997 practice. That player was Neil Reed - the same player who was voted off the team by his fellow teammates.
Let's get this straight. If you can find a couple of former players or coaches who were kicked off or fired from a team to say something bad about the coach, then they should be fired themselves? Let's put Indiana University president Myles Brand under the same microscope and see how long he lasts in his job. Or better yet. Let's dig twenty years into the past of all the so-called journalists who are calling for nothing short of Knight's head on a platter. Let's see how many skeletons they have in their closet. They would all say "That is none of your business and has nothing to do with my job as a journalist." Then tell me what does Knight having an argument with his own son during a family hunting trip have to do with his job? Why did the university trustees report about this so-called incident?
Let's start at the very beginning and the person who started this all, Neil Reed. Reed wasn't kicked off the team by coach Knight like some media outlets have reported. In fact he was voted off the team by his own teammates. One of his former teammates said that he'd "never seen a more selfish player in his life. Any mistake Neil made was never his fault, he was always looking to blame someone else for his own mistakes."
That's where we have come in this society - looking for someone else to blame for our mistakes. The fact is that Reed was selfish, lazy and not good enough to play for Indiana. Knight's biggest mistake was probably recruiting Reed in the first place. In Reed's world he wasn't to blame, it was coach Knight's fault. Poor, poor Neil Reed.
But wait, what about the video? It's right there in the videotape people say. Just like Reed described right? Wrong! In fact the tape doesn't show a single thing that Reed alleged. First he said that Knight put his hands around his throat and Reed had to grab his wrists before two coaches grabbed coach Knight and pulled him away. Wrong! That's not on the tape. Reed described it as a school yard fight. Wrong again. The entire incident lasted 2.3 seconds, certainly nothing like any school yard fight I've ever seen.
Knight has been coaching for thirty-five years, twenty-nine of them at Indiana. How can people judge a thirty-five year career by those 2.3 seconds? Knight is far from perfect, he admits that himself. His mistakes have been long documented. The difference between coach Knight and the rest of us is that Knight's mistakes become national news.
What Knight does for Indiana University and what he does for his layers (on and off the court) far outweigh any mistakes he's made. Knight's critics blast him for his mistakes but don't look at everything else he does for the state of Indiana and the NCAA. I'd love his critics to be put to such an investigation.
Critics say that Knight has never had to deal with authority before but they are wrong. Once again the media likes to skip over several facts of Knight's career. Knight has not gone unpunished throughout his career like many believe. Knight has been fined and suspended several times throughout his time at Indiana. Among his most famous incidents are as follows.
Why punish Knight further? All of the other alleged incidents that Reed spoke of, including the soiled toilet paper and the kicking of university president Dr. Myles Brand out of practice, were found by the university trustees to be unfounded. In other words - they didn't happen.
And back to the videotape. I haven't seen a piece of video shown this much or seen a piece of video that has been so closely examined since the Zapruder film. Let's do the country a favor, lets videotape every college athlete practice for one year. Or better yet, lets tape every college class for the next year. Then lets hire tens of thousands of investigators to go over the videotapes frame by frame. Guess what would happen - we wouldn't have a single coach, teacher or professor left in this country.
Sure I'm being a little extreme here but the truth is that if every coach were put under the microscope that Knight was put under, then ninety-nine percent of the college coaches in the country would be forced to resign. The very fact is that this happens every single day on some college campus across the country.
And you know what - good for them. Maybe if Reed hadn't missed his pick or made the right play in the first place, Knight wouldn't of needed to get his attention. I'd love to see the next ten seconds on that video. I bet anything that Reed corrected his mistake on the next play down the court. It's about time that we stop our whining and start taking responsibility for ourselves. Stop complaining about the coach not liking you or your boss giving you a hard time.
How many times do I have to hear or read a sports critic talking about the good old days. They talk or write about when the game was a game and the men were real men. Give me a break. Here you have a coach who truly coaches like the so-called good old days and these same so-calle real men are the very ones calling for Knight's firing.
Let's look at the positive that Knight brings to the school. He has one of the highest graduation rates of any college athletic program in the country. His scholarship kids, who stay all four years, graduate at a higher rate than the rest of the students at Indiana University. All but two or three of his four-year players have graduated, a staggering ninety-eight percent. How many other programs or schools can make that claim? Not many.
And that is off the court. On the court looks even better. Knight is the winningest coach in Big Ten history. Indiana has won three national championships and nineteen Big Ten titles since Knight's first season. And finally the coup de grace - during Knights reign Indiana has never had a single major NCAA violation. Let me repeat that. Indiana has never had a single major NCAA violation under Knight.
Doesn't seem possible does it. In this day and age for a coach to follow the rules yet still produce champions seems almost impossible but coach Knight does it year end and year out.
So let's put it to a vote. Would you want your kid playing for a coach who has won nineteen Big Ten titles and three national championships? Would you want your kid playing for a coach whose players have a better graduation rate than the rest of his university? Would you want your kid playing for a coach who demands as much from his players off the court than he does on the court? If you do, then you want your kid playing for one coach - Bob Knight. I know I would.
Written by James Hutton