Dazzleflage
Coach Knight, inert in his chair on the sidelines, wears a black pullover. Black is one half of Tech's colors. The other is scarlet, the shade of the collar of the golf shirt he has on beneath the black sweater.
There are a couple of things odd about this black. For one, it's not red, or more exactly, crimson, a color of Indiana University, where Coach Knight coached famously for twenty-nine seasons. The scarlet at his throat today is a tease, sharing some of the same frequency of that other red, but it is eclipsed by that ex pause of smothering black. This black, the black of his sweater, is matte, flat, a color drained of color, and it could stand for all that will not be spoken about the history of his years in Indiana and his departure from the university where he was, until recently, so closely identified. The media guide I got along with my souvenir basketball scrupulously records his statistics of victory, the irresistible climb to 800 wins, the three national championships, the Olympic gold medal, the histories and careers of the scholar-athletes he nurtured during those years. It also scrupulously deletes the acrimony of his firing from IU, the legacy of controversy, the public displays of anger, the accusations of bullying, the actual acts of violence. There is, then, this absence. The black is a hole at the core of the excitement about the commencement of this new winning tradition at Tech.
The color of the sweater itself not what I want it to symbolize, its black does seem to absorb light, to flatten the figure who wears it. It is a kind of camouflage. It is a countershading that is goofing with my ability to read, in folds of cloth and the way light falls on fabric, the distance and depth of an object. The object I'm looking at, Coach Knight, is collapsing, collapsing in on himself. As I stare at him, from my perch on the mezzanine, he is beginning to, well, disappear.
It's funny I should be thinking of camouflage, as this is the game where students, on their own initiative, have created a new T-shirt on sale for the first time in the arena's Double T shop. Rising behind the bench and Coach Knight, the stands emit the traditional broad swatches of black-and-scarlet-clad boosters arrayed in bands of color into which the coach is beginning to blend. Here and there among the solid blocks of color are veins of these new camouflage shirts. The usual smattering of forest camo browns and greens, the woodland splotches and smears, have been replaced on these tees by shades of scarlet, white, pink, and black. The shirts' jumpy patterns disrupt the ironed-on message. "The General's Army," it says, invoking Coach Knight's nickname. As the game goes on, the camouflage pattern extends deeper into the crowd, marbling through the monochromatic black and red sections as more and more fans snap up the shirts and put them on.
There is another style of camouflage used in nature and war. Dazzle. Zebras, for instance, or referees for that matter, running in packs, are visually obvious to the predators that stalk them; they aren't blending into a background. But the high contrast of their striping creates another type of illusion, not blending, but that of an explosion right in front of our eyes, a scattering of the whole into many odd parts. For a while there at IU, Coach Knight had a liking for loud plaids and patterns of crimson and cream, the harlequin design of dazzleflage warships so obviously there in the sights of the submarine but so hard to get a bead on.
Bob Knight has always hidden himself in plain sight. His world-class temper could be either the real thing or a stunning act of diversion. The discipline he brings to bear on his players might be sadistic meanness or a calculated performance deployed to motivate and inspire. Or they could be both. They could be both real and a simulation of what is real. When he explodes, he could explode or simply seem to explode. It might depend on what we who are watching desire to see.
The Coach Knight I see on the bench is like a duplicate, a replica of the real Coach Knight. This Coach Knight, in the black sweater, is a quotation of the former red-sweatered Coach Knight. Getting down the sartorial look, the mane of silver hair, the beady stare, is relatively easy. It will be more difficult to duplicate the career at Indiana, its heights of success and its spectacular crashes. In a column introducing Coach Knight to Texas quoted in the media guide, Cynthia and Randy Farley liken him to one of Hemingway's heroes, but they neglect to connect both the coach and author to the danger of their powerful creations, the trap of self-parody. Playing one's larger-than-life self becomes a monumental task. Perhaps reconstituted in Texas, this Coach Knight's only remaining real disguise is a satire of a former self.
Pas de Deux with Chair
To advertise A Season on the Brink, ESPN's first made-fortelevision movie, the network features a reenactment of the moment during Indiana's game against Purdue in the '84-'85 season when Coach Knight launched a plastic bench chair on to the court while a Purdue player was shooting a technical foul shot. The verb is important. "Launched." "Threw." "Hurled." The coach in his new book, Knight: A Coach's Life, deploys "toss," transforming the verb into a noun to title the incident "The Chair Toss," and says only that he "sent it scooting" while devoting a mere page or so to it all. He professes he is baffled by the notoriety and the longevity of the scene. Its power, however, is undeniable.
It may have been the impetus for John Feinstein, author of A Season on the Brink, the book from which ESPN's movie is adapted, to approach Coach Knight in the first place for access to cover the '85-'86 season. Feinstein views it as the nadir of a Knight decline bracketing the previous year with the pinnacle of the summer's Olympic victory in Los Angeles. Coach Knight, the student of history, discounts the chair toss in comparison to the other sideline antics of other coaches. "I consider my link to infamy," he writes, "a pretty tame one." The critical turning point that afternoon represents to him has to do with what he was wearing. He writes that it had been the first time, in a fit of frustration, he had not worn a coat and tie for a game. Had he, he says now, the jacket would have been out on the floor, not the chair. Ever since then, however, he has worn those golf shirts and the sweaters.
Not only did ESPN feature the pas de deux with chair in the commercial, it was, in each commercial, repeated several times. There it goes again and again in a kind of action stutter, cut like the multiple renditions of tables tipped in a music video's cliche of rage or a Wild Bunch ballet of blood where the same wounded cowboys fall over and over to the ground. The image of the chair sailing out over the floor is indelible, and the gesture does seem inexhaustible in its ability to deliver a kind of aesthetic delight to its witnesses. Let's see that again!
Why should the legs on the graphic images of the event surprise Coach Knight? For him it was only an act. It was staged. The coach admits as much in his memoir when arguing its trivial nature by pointing out that no one was hit.
"I made sure," he writes, "it didn't come close to anyone." It looks, to everyone but the coach, like a spontaneous authentic eruption of extreme emotion, a kind of inarticulate expression of feeling, but we are told that it was, in fact, under control, scripted even, choreographed. He would have us believe that what we are seeing is theater, but what we believe we are actually seeing is real life.
Coach Knight is toeing a line here as delicately as he toed the sideline when he threw the chair. He didn't actually go himself out on to the floor. That would have been a real transgression. In order for theater to work its Aristotelian magic the audience must recognize that what they are seeing is within the context, the frame, of a theater. There, in the confines of art, we can exercise those emotions that if expressed outside of the theater in the real world would be truly dangerous. We watch in horror and pity as Oedipus blinds himself at the same time we know that the man before us acting as Oedipus has not really been blinded. Art is framed deviance. The artist doesn't simply create the picture but also creates the means for the audience to see it.