The brilliance and the torment

(I wrote this for my old newspaper, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, and reprint it here with some revisions. Buy a copy today if you'd like to read it. Better yet, subscribe at subscribe.journalgazette.net. Because local media is more important than ever.)

They tell me now that Bob Knight is dead, and again my mind courses down the wilder channels. Forty years I was witness to the man, and yet it is never the obvious that surfaces first.

Not the three national titles, the undefeated season in 1976, the unparalleled basketball mind and the rage that came with it because so many people simply didn’t understand.

Not the Cop In Puerto Rico, or the Chair Game, or the cruel evisceration of a blameless NCAA functionary named Rance Pugmire. Not the Greek tragedy of his end at Indiana, or the petty smearing of players who left Knight’s program because basketball there could so often be a joyless gulag.

My mind doesn’t go to any of that, with Bob Knight gone at 83.

Instead it goes to this: The White Marathon Popper lure.

The White Marathon Popper lure is the wild channel down which Knight took us one night in the winter of 1986, after Indiana had beaten Purdue in an overtime classic. It had been unseasonably warm in Bloomington that day – 60 degrees or better – and Knight, a famously avid outdoorsman, had gone fishing.

Used a White Marathon Popper, a warm-water lure. Thought that was interesting, given that it was the dead of winter. Spent 10 minutes telling us about it.

Then he said he had so much fun he was going off to make plans to fish the next day, all but throwing up a peace sign as he left the room.

Without, of course, ever saying word one about the game.

This was Sir Bob of Knight at his most Knight-ly, impishly messing with the media he so often chose to make an enemy. We accepted it, mostly, because on some level at least some of us understood his enmity hurt him far more than it did us.  Like the night he fired a starter’s pistol at Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Russ Brown, only to have Brown come up with a quick-witted response.

“You missed,” he called out, from the other end of the corridor.

Score one for the media.

Score one, too, for those of us lucky enough to take in the whole Knight pageant -- the brilliance and the triumph and the thousand quiet kindnesses few ever knew about; the bitterness and the nastiness and the clinging to grudges like they were family heirlooms.

It’s a wasted exercise to wonder how universally beloved Bob Knight would have been had he not been disposed to the latter, because so much of who he was sprung from that impulse. It drove him to be the greatest basketball coach of his or perhaps any generation -- and also to his end at Indiana, when, with his job on the line, he signed his own walking papers by essentially telling the president of the university to go whiz up a rope.

Time was he could have gotten away with that. But that time, by the end, was long past.

And now, he is gone. Word is he was suffering from dementia at the end -- one more Greek tragedy, one more irony, atop all the others that framed his life.

Here’s one more: We are all the poorer for that absence.