Free pressed

Watched a clip of our raving lunatic in chief bullying a Reuters reporter yesterday -- even dragging the poor president of Finland into his tantrum -- and, lord, did it take me back. Suddenly I was again wedged into one of those tiny school desks in the bowels of Assembly Hall, and a certain bear of a basketball coach was lumbering into the room, and ...

And, well, stuff happened.

Guy would ask a question.

The lumbering bear, name of Bob Knight, would sneer and say something like "Well, if you understood anything about basketball ..."

Another guy would ask another question.

The lumbering bear would sneer again and say something like, "You saw the play. Why are you asking me to describe it? Aren't you capable of describing it?"

Sometimes the lumbering bear would get pissed off by all these dumb reporters asking dumb questions and just stalk off. Sometimes he wouldn't show up at all. One particularly memorable time, after a stirring overtime win against arch-rival Purdue, he showed up, launched into a soliloquy about fishing, then floated serenely out of the room.

Never said a word about the game. Obviously was trying to make a point, I guess, but none of us could figure out what it was, which of course made us just as dumb as Knight always said we were.

Understand, these aren't complaints, or even whining, a skill sportswriters master early on. None of us expected anything more nor less from our interactions with the lumbering bear. He was what he was: An endlessly fascinating, deeply flawed, deeply intelligent man. And, like the Raving Lunatic, a bully.

He's gone into eclipse now, amid rumors of failing health. And that's a shame, if true. Bully or not, he was frequently right about certain things, and his voice in those matters is missed.

Plus, he was never boring. I can't speak for any of my sportswriting contemporaries, but for me that was always a bigger plus than you'd think.

In any event, watching the Raving Lunatic savage that reporter for doing his job -- he was respectfully asking a followup question, which is standard news conference procedure -- got me to thinking not only about Bob Knight, but about how often powerful people who aren't used to being questioned fail to understand the role of the press in a free society.

Which is, it's our job to question them. It's our job, particularly where the President of the United States is concerned, to hold them accountable, no matter how loathe they are to be held accountable. That is especially crucial when you have a president who is as unfamiliar with accountability as this one.

In the end, Supreme Court justice Hugo Black saw it most clearly. In an opinion written after the Supremes ruled newspapers in America indeed had the right to print the Pentagon Papers, he said this: "The free press was to serve the governed, not the governors."

Just so.