Bob Knight — the tempestuous winner of three NCAA national championships while the basketball coach at Indiana University but who was often his own worst enemy while warring with administrators, faculty members, security guards, the media, his own players and even a random student or two — died Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 83. No cause of death was given, but Knight suffered from dementia and had been in ill health for the last several years.
Knight, who began his coaching career at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, won titles with the Hoosiers in 1976, ’81 and ’87. He also won one with Ohio State in 1960 as a little-used reserve on a team fronted by future Hall of Fame players Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek.
Knight, who coached the Hoosiers from 1971 until he was fired in 2000 after an on-campus incident involving an Indiana student, spent the last 6 ¹/₂ seasons of his coaching career at Texas Tech and retired in 2008 with 902 victories. At the time it was the most wins in NCAA Division 1 history. Knight now sits fifth on the all-time list, having been surpassed by, among others, the now retired Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, who played for Knight at West Point and later was an assistant on his staff there.
Though he wasn’t easy to play for — ask Larry Bird who lasted only a few weeks before heading home and later resurfacing at Indiana State to become one of the game’s all-time greats — Knight’s Indiana teams never had a losing record while winning or sharing 11 Big Ten titles, reaching five Final Fours and his 1976 squad is the last team in NCAA history to go through an entire season unbeaten, finishing 32-0. In fact, his 1974-75 and 75-76 teams went a combined 63-1, the lone loss coming in the 1975 NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight.
Knight was 659-242 at Indiana where his players went to class and, if they stayed all four years, usually graduated. He was a stickler for following NCAA rules despite his distaste for the NCAA as an entity and his penchant for bucking authority.
“If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can,” he once said. “I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we’d beat everybody.”
Knight, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1991, also coached the U.S. men’s team to a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Robert Montgomery Knight was born on Oct. 25, 1940, in Massillon, Ohio, and raised in Orrville, Ohio. After starring at Orrville High School, Knight enrolled at Ohio State where he played — but not a lot — under legendary coach Fred Taylor. The Buckeyes went to three consecutive NCAA Championship games during Knight’s three years of eligibility. After defeating the University of California in the first, they lost the next two title games to Cincinnati and future Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson.
After a one-year stint as junior varsity coach at an Ohio high school, Knight enlisted in the Army and, three months later, found himself at West Point. He accepted an assistant coaching position there and, two years later at the age of 24, was named head coach. He would win 102 games in six seasons on the banks of the Hudson, where his reputation for having a volatile temper began to take shape.
Indiana hired Knight away in 1971, and he would never win fewer than 16 games in a season during his nearly three decades in Bloomington. But that didn’t mean things always went smoothly.
In 1979, while coaching the U.S. team at the Pan American Games in Puerto Rico, Knight was charged and later tried and convicted in absentia for striking a police officer before a practice. Extradition efforts were later dropped.
In 1981, en route to winning his second national championship, he got into a scuffle with an LSU fan at the Final Four. The fan claimed Knight stuffed him into a garbage can.
Four years later, during a game with Purdue, Knight threw a chair across the court after he was whistled for a technical foul. He was ejected and suspended for one game by the Big Ten.
In a 1988 interview with NBC’s Connie Chung, Knight was asked how he handles stress.
“I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it,” he replied. He added: “That’s just an old term that you’re going to use. The plane’s down, so you have no control over it. I’m not talking about that, about the act of rape. Don’t misinterpret me there. But what I’m talking about is, something happens to you, so you have to handle it — now.”
Understandably, Knight’s comments drew fire from all quarters. Knight, however, insisted his remarks were misinterpreted.
“Anybody who knows me would be quick to say I would be one of the last persons to adopt a careless attitude about rape …. or any form of crime,” he said in a subsequent interview.
In 1994, he head-butted player Sherron Wilkerson while screaming at him on the bench. Knight said the contact was unintentional.
Six years later, former IU player Neil Reid said Knight choked him during a practice in 1997. The university investigated and a videotape of the practice appeared to support Reed.
That spring Knight was warned about his boorish behavior and a “zero-tolerance” policy was instituted by university president Myles Brand. It only took a few months for Knight to find out how serious Brand was about the zero in that policy.
The following September, Knight had a run-in with an Indiana freshman named Kent Harvey who, seeing the coach on campus, asked, “What’s up, Knight?” Knight didn’t take kindly to what he considered a lack of respect and, while accounts differed then and still do, was said to have grabbed the teenager by the arm.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Son, my name isn’t Knight for you,’ ” the coach said at a press conference several days later. “It’s Mr. Knight or Coach Knight.’ ”
Harvey, the stepson of a former talk radio host who was a frequent critic of Knight, and his family quickly let the media know what had happened. Knight denied touching Harvey, and Mike Davis, his assistant coach at the time and who was standing next to Knight during the incident, called the idea that Knight had grabbed the student “the biggest lie I ever heard in my life.”
“I would have to be an absolute moron — an absolute moron — with the things that have been laid on me to grab a kid in public, or curse at a kid in public, as apparently it’s been said that I did,” Knight said at the time.
Brand wasn’t buying any of it. He fired Knight after the coach refused to resign, saying the Harvey incident was just one in a series of missteps by Knight since the zero-tolerance policy went into effect. The firing sent tremors through the university and through all of college basketball. That night IU students marched from Assembly Hall to Brand’s home and burned the university president in effigy.
Knight, who would be hired by Texas Tech the following summer and have a largely successful tenure (138-82) with the Red Raiders before retiring in the middle of the 2008 season so his son Pat could take over, vowed never to return to the IU campus.
“On my dying day, I will think about how great the fans at Indiana were,” Knight said. “And as far as the hierarchy at Indiana University at that time, I have absolutely no respect whatsoever for those people. With that in mind, I have no interest in ever going back to that university. … I hope they’re all dead.”
Though he moved back to Bloomington in 2019, he stayed away from the campus until Feb. 8, 2020, when after much cajoling he returned for an emotional reunion of the 1980 team, said to be one of his favorites. Walking haltingly, Knight had to be guided to the court where he was saluted by a teary-eyed sellout crowd.
More than 50 former players attended the ceremony, including Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas — who, along with several other players, cried as they watched their former coach slowly make his way on to the court. Knight, already in the throes of dementia, did not address the crowd but did gesture to fans several times, tears trickling down his face.
Following his retirement from coaching, Knight spent several seasons working as a studio analyst and color commentator for ESPN.
Knight is survived by his wife Karen Vieth Edgar and his sons, Pat and Tim, from his first marriage.
Knight left little doubt that he would leave this world with no regrets.
“When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed,” he once said. “I want them to bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass.”