Texas Tech was the ultimate basketball backwater.
On the windswept plains of west Texas it was the end of the basketball planet.
It was Pullman without the night life.
It was the 12th-best place in the Big 12.
It was sure to be Bob Knight’s Waterloo, an inglorious place for a Hall of Fame coach to finish his career.
It was the place basketball had forgotten.
It was . . .
“Perfect,” his son and associate head coach, Pat Knight, said Saturday. “We’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We only have one newspaper. You don’t hear much about him. He kind of likes that. Being here, I think, has prolonged his career.”
For Knight, there was a sweetness to the isolation of Lubbock. In the offseason he could fish and hunt, and during the season he could walk around town without the second-guessers asking, as they did at Indiana, why his team couldn’t defend Purdue’s backcuts.
Away from the spotlight that always followed him in Bloomington, he has coached four 20-win seasons and made three NCAA tournament appearances. And this at a school that, before he arrived in 2001, hadn’t had a winning record since the 1996-97 season and had won a total of 21 games the two previous seasons.
“I think if he had stayed at Indiana he was only going to coach two more years,” Pat Knight said. “All the stuff on the side. The administration. So he already would have been retired.
“But the people in Lubbock are great. It’s kind of like, well, not Mayberry, but the people are kind of like that. No one bothers you. They’ll come up and talk to you about the game, but they don’t want to know why you didn’t go into the post. Or why this and why that. They aren’t really Basketball Bennys. They’re just happy when you compete.”
Texas Tech should have been Tombstone, but Knight turned it into Mecca. And after Saturday’s 71-69 win over Gonzaga in the second round of the NCAA tournament, an excruciatingly good game, he is going to the Sweet 16 for the first time in 11 years.
“As well as we’ve done, they’ve kind of held it over our head that we haven’t been to the Sweet 16,” said Pat Knight. “We’ve been killing ourselves getting this program going, and so for us it’s kind of a monkey off our back.”
As much as he may hate admitting it, Knight is a different person than he was 11 years ago when his last team got this far.
“He won’t say it, but he’s a little more laid back,” his son said. “Back then he treated all the players pretty much the same. Now, with all the AAU ball and just the upbringing of kids, some kids you can’t yell at and some kids you can. He’s been really good handling that.”
Knight still grabs the occasional player, and the highlight tape we see of his games on “SportsCenter” never shows him with his arm around a player. But he’s softer around the edge.
“He doesn’t get enough credit for changing,” his son said, alluding to his father’s reputation for getting in players’ faces. “There’s only a few kids he can do that to and he does that to them. Kids like Ronald Ross.
“I think the best coach at handling players is Phil Jackson, how he does it in the pros. But I think my dad’s right up there, too. They play all the bad stuff on ESPN, and sometimes my dad is his own worst enemy. But they don’t give him enough credit. I think he’s matured over the years. He’s more mellow, in a sense, but it’s more that he knows the adjustment like, ‘I can’t treat this kid the way I treat that kid.’.”
For players, Knight always will be an acquired taste. While Ross stayed at Tech after walking on, his good friend and roommate Nate Doudney transferred to Gonzaga after two seasons in Lubbock, saying he believed the program was “too controlling.”
“As things go on, whether it’s a week, a month, a year, you’ve just got to be patient and continue to work. As the years when on I continued to learn what everything was about. It was a new program, and Coach has really got things going. And I’m having a lot of fun.”
Knight won two national championships at Indiana. He coached the nation’s last undefeated team – the 32-0 Hoosiers, the 1976 national championship team. In his 39 seasons, he has won 854 games as a head coach.
And the father speaks of this team with the same kind of affection he uses to speak of his undefeated team.
“If we had lost today and I was fishing next week, I’d think back over this season and I’d think about what a wonderful experience it was for me to be with these kids, this team,” Bob Knight said.
On the windswept plains of Lubbock, Bob Knight turned his Waterloo into Camelot and, equally incredible, found a way to have fun.
(c) 2005, The Seattle Times.
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