Bob Knight, during a 2001 game coaching Texas Tech University.PAT SULLIVAN (AP)
Robert Montgomery Knight, known as Bob Knight in the United States and as Bobby Knight in Spain, the legendary American college basketball coach, has died at the age of 83 at his home in Bloomington (Indiana), as announced by his family through from a statement on its website. Teacher of former Spanish coach Antonio Díaz Miguel, whom he considered the best non-American coach, he beat him in the final of the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984, winning the gold medal with a team in which Michael Jordan and Pat Ewing stood out. . But where he left his greatest mark was as a basketball coach at Indiana University, whose team he led from 1971 to 2000 and with which he achieved three national titles, until he was fired for his volcanic and sometimes violent nature with Players.
Born on October 25, 1940 in Osillon (Ohio), he won a university title as a player, but he was a substitute and soon made the leap to coach at the West Point military academy. After being an assistant, he began his career as a head coach in college basketball leading the academy team, where he earned the nickname The General, which he coached from 1965 to 1971.
In the Indiana Hoosiers he cemented his glory. In 1975 he fell short of the title by losing in the final by two points and in 1976 he reached the university’s first national championship in 23 years after a year in which he achieved 32 victories without any defeats. It remains the last time a major men’s college team finished with a perfect season. That team was voted the best in college basketball history by the Basketball Writers Association of America in 2013.
Despite the reasons for his dismissal at Indiana, he was hired by Texas Tech, which he directed from 2001 to 2008. In total, he won 902 games in 42 seasons of the NCAA’s first division, the university championship, which was a record in the time to retire and even today it is the fifth best mark of all time. He repeated the title in 1981 and 1987.
Between the last two titles, he led the team in the 1984 Olympic Games. His team was far superior to the rest, even though he decided not to call up players like Charles Barkley or John Stockton, which also generated controversy.
His successes meant that he was forgiven for a long time for his excesses, such as the constant scolding of his players, the angry protests and insults to the referees, throwing chairs onto the court, attacking a police officer in Puerto Rico at the 1979 Pan American Games, throwing a fan into a trash can or kicking his own son off the bench during a timeout. The cameras immortalized his most famous outburst, when Steve Reid, a player for Purdue, the opposing team, was about to take a free throw in a game in February 1985. A furious Knight grabbed a red plastic chair and threw it at the other side of the court, where he landed behind the basket. The fans began to throw coins onto the field. Reid missed three of the next six free throws.
Bobby Knight, throwing a chair onto the court in a game on February 23, 1985.AP
His luck began to change in May 2000 when a video from three years earlier was released showing him squeezing the neck of one of his players, an incident that he had denied. That earned him a sanction and a zero tolerance warning. Another altercation with a student a few months later, which some believed was a provocation he fell for, cost him his job. Knight’s dismissal was met with outrage by students. That night, thousands of Indiana students marched from the university pavilion to the rector’s house, of whom they burned an effigy.
In an interview in March 2017, he said he had no interest in returning to Indiana. When the host told him that most of the management who had fired him were no longer there, Knight replied: “I hope they’re all dead.” Knight returned to Assembly Hall, the team’s headquarters, at halftime of an Indiana game against Purdue in February 2020 to a rousing ovation.
A perfectionist and born winner to the point of being a fanatic, he used motivation and discipline as the main arguments of his script to demand that players perform at 100% of their potential and leave everything on the court. He saw himself as a teacher who taught lessons to his students and boasted of the large number of university graduates who came out of his teams. 80% of his players (compared to a national average of 42%) graduated. And of those who spent four years on the team, 98% made it, all but four.
At the same time, he was an innovator with his dynamic attacking systems, precision in passing and blocking. In defense he opted for man-to-man marking with constant help, although later he also opened up to zone defense. “He changed basketball in this state, the way we compete, the way we win,” Steve Alford, the leader of Knight’s last national championship team, which won the title in 1987, once said, according to a statement reported by the AP. “It started in Indiana, but it really changed college basketball. You look at the offensive movement and people used it everywhere,” he added.
He had a very special relationship with Antonio Díaz Miguel: “We were great friends since the late 60s. It was incredible that Spain played such good basketball in Los Angeles with non-North American players,” he said in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2009.
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2023-11-02 01:58:09
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