Knight Says “Good ‘Knight’”
Bob Knight? A quitter?
Imagine, for a moment, that you are one of Bob Knight’s student-athletes at Texas Tech. And imagine, that one day, you just decided to call it quits.
How comfortable would you be strolling into your coach’s office to reveal the news?
Your answer suggests that Bob Knight is a nasty hypocrite, one that unfortunately is Division I’s all-time wins leader, and one that walked into A.D Gerald Myers’ office just because of a “loss of passion.”
Over the years, I have attempted to justify Knight’s behavior, over and over again. In fact, I tried as recently as Saturday, during Texas Tech’s win over Oklahoma State. During moments of screaming and awful body language, I came up with this: Knight is a man that preaches discipline before anything and a coach that would rather die than see his team not fight. He is a coach that preaches dedication, loyalty and passion. He teaches team basketball. He recruits players that could care less about individual statistics, honors or gasp, a recordbook (hmm…900 occurred coincidentally quite recently).
He was quoted as saying that his current Texas Tech team isn’t where he had hoped them to be (12-8, 3-3 in the Big 12). So ‘The General’ quit and abandoned his team.
We could easily dismiss Knight’s behavior by saying “that’s just his style on the bench,” but how can we dismiss this if he’s not even on the bench? Great coaches fight and claw until the finish, and we shouldn’t dismiss Knight simply because he happens to never have had a recruiting violation. Congratulations, Coach, you followed a rule that so many of your counterparts failed to.
February 10th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Knight did not quit on his team. For a change he did something nice for someone else. He gave his kid, Pat, a chance to acclimated as a head coach without his job being on the line. Pat can figure out what he wants to keep the same, what he wants to change, and what kind of personnel changes he wants to make before the administration starts to evaluate him as a coach. How can you rip one of the top five college coaches of all time for doing something for someone else (even if it is out of the ordinary for Knight)?