He was brilliant. He was a bully. He coached some of the most perfectly disciplined basketball ever played, and then acted undisciplined in his own life.
He was an American original and a cultural touchstone with oversized impact, in ways good and, yes, sometimes less so.
Knight won 902 games at Army , Indiana and Texas Tech . It was with the Hoosiers that he won those three NCAA men's championships, including coaching the sport’s most recent undefeated team in 1976. There was the right way to do things . The game would be played with discipline, fundamentals, toughness, smarts, preparation, respect and always featuring man-to-man defense. Everything else was just a distraction, or someone getting in the way. He cared little for criticism.,"I want them to bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass."He also choked a player. He threw a chair.
He once put a Purdue hat on a donkey — or an ass — and led it onto the set of his television program to mock the school’s athletic director. When Kentucky head coach Joe B. Hall took understandable exception to Knight slapping him on the back of his head during a sideline skirmish, an annoyed Knight noted “if it was meant to be malicious, I’d have blasted the mother****** into the seats.”
With Knight, winning was a byproduct of a team exceeding its individual talent, a collection of good to very good players giving up individual glory for group success. His guys, he proudly said, played for the name on the front of the jersey. Not that he would allow individual ones to be stitched into the back, of course.
Even student managers would be employed during practice — often to miss shots for rebounding drills. It’s no coincidence that even Knight's managers became coaches in their own right, including Lawrence Frank in the NBA and Dusty May, who just took Florida Atlantic to the Final Four. They join an astounding coaching tree that includes Mike Krzyzewski, Chris Beard and current IU head coach Mike Woodson.
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