Bob Knight is, then, a kind of performance artist. And the various arenas, gyms, and field houses are the sites of the theater of Bob Knight. So often we can see the results of his art, the stunning residue of basketball genius performed within the painted lines that frame the varnished wood floors. But at other times we miss or he neglects to transmit the signal that he is performing. Often the frames he creates, if in fact he creates them, are less clear. There is a kind of slippage in the viewers' perception that results in the registering of real horror, not its simulated aesthetic twin.
Look, here is another piece of tape. Coach Knight throttling a player's neck. Here is another. A player head-butted by the coach on the bench during a time-out. And here is another. A scene before Assembly Hall in Bloomington, a student drawn up verbally and physically after exchanging a few words with the coach. In all these instances the frame Coach Knight asserts for these confrontations is that he was in the midst of a performance, a performance of instruction. What we are being asked to witness is a teacher, teaching. There's the frame. Can we see it that way? We are compelled to watch these moments over and over again to try to assess the shadowy context. This confusion itself is interesting. Is the actor out of control or is the actor acting out of control?
Not Oedipus as much as Hamlet here. Early in the play Hamlet tells us he will feign madness in order to attain his ends. Later Hamlet apologizes for his part in the deaths of Ophelia and her father. He reminds anyone who'll listen that he was mad.
There is drama on the basketball court but it is drama you can see because of the frame of "game." The chair, a light plastic floating shell of a chair, tossed onto the court that day shattered the illusion that it was a game. It was no longer play or a play.
Niceness and Nuts
In the seats behind Coach Knight on the bench are four men who have paid $750 a piece to sit there. One of them holds up a hand-lettered sign occasionally. From where I sit, it is hard to read, but I see the words "Hoosiers" and "Knight." Hoosiers for Knight perhaps. They have come from Indiana not only for the game but for proximity to the man. They've attended a practice and the Texas Tech training table and later, after the game, will sit by me at the news conference. They bid for their places today some months ago at a Tech fund raiser in Floyd's Knobs, Indiana, hosted by Coach Knight that, until recently, had raised money for Indiana University.
It is a weird coincidence that the United Spirit Arena in Lubbock is on Indiana Avenue, that it is made of bricks made in Indiana, that its inaugural game three years ago was won by a Bob Knight-coached Indiana team. The landscape of Lubbock itself is like a Bizarro Indiana. It is flatter than the flattest part of my home state. Its surrounding farms seem more farmy, the fields measured in sections, not just acres. And the township grid, a signature of the quilted Indiana countryside, is even more pronounced here. Lubbock has out Indiana-ed Indiana.
Bob Knight, from Orrville, Ohio, spent twenty-nine years in Indiana, a state identified, if it has any identity at all, with the game of basketball. The ESPN movie features documentary interludes where real Hoosiers speak adoringly of their coach and their game. My mother reports from Fort Wayne that now the malls not only stock IU and Purdue licensed merchandise but Texas Tech stuff as well. Bob Knight's story has always been and continues to be a story also about Indiana.
Believe me, it is a burden being nice. When you inhabit The Heartland in this country, which this country also calls The Flyover, you begin to live this crazy contradiction. You believe, on the one hand, that you are the center of all that is good, true, and valuable. You are, you believe, the embodiment of American values and traditions, whatever they are. But simultaneously you know, in your heart of hearts, you are also in the middle of Nowheresville. So you keep up appearances. You're honest, optimistic, innocent, polite, respectful, and most of all nice. Nice is us. We are nice to the nth degree. And yet, it wears on you, keeping alive the flame of civility you believe is the flame of civilization.
In my favorite episode of Law and Order, a New York City woman who has murdered her sister to assume her identity is finally cornered by the DA. You took your sister's life, he accuses. And she answers, "My sister lived in Terre Haute, Indiana. She had no life."
Hoosiers, being nice, won't talk about this: Bob Knight is a monster. But he is our monster.
Because he won, because his program was clean, because his players graduated, because he played by the rules, especially because he played by the rules, because, finally, all of that was, well, nice, we allowed him to be something more. Because he was so very nice he could also become, for Hoosiers, the antiHoosier as well. He became for us, who constitutionally can't act out, our designated hitter, our surrogate rage against those stupid rules, our projection of the best-suppressed id on any forbidden planet. He is the thing in us all spoiling to be not nice.
You, who are Not Nice by nature, cannot begin to imagine how thrilling it is for the Nice to witness such public displays of emotion, any emotion, that Bob Knight could concoct. How the pent-up grudges, the slights, the nagging doubts, the inferiority, the martyrdom, the secret vanity, the righteousness even, and all those virtues that we must maintain and nurture, all of it gets bled off by the maniac in the bright red shirt. All heck, as we say, breaks loose.
I look at the four Hoosiers hovering behind Coach Knight. I wonder if the change of venue to this Bizarro Indiana will still work its empathetic catharsis. I can't imagine Texans plugging into this dynamic. Where is the understatement to foil the flamboyance? It's not quite the same. Bob Knight sits quietly on the Texas Tech bench. All around me Texans are going nuts as their team takes a commanding lead. But all the Hoosiers in the house wait on the Coach and on what he will do next.
My Father Has Been Turned into a Monstrous Vermin
My Father Turned into a Monstrous Vermin
I was in Fort Wayne for the millennium's New Year's celebration. My mother was on the municipal committee that had planned the year's events that culminated with the fireworks launched from the top of the Summit Bank Building downtown. Freezing, the crowd below watched the display from the new park built with the proceeds derived from another recent celebration, the bicentennial of the city's founding in 1774. The park was a wonderful legacy. It had been built on an often-flooded floodplain with a design that recognized that fact. The flowerbeds were planted with ornamental grasses, yellow flag iris, and bull rushes and reeds that thrived in swampy conditions. The fountains produced a fine primordial mist, subtly lit, that floated over the marshy fields. In the cold of that night, the misting fountains created a crystalline landscape both old and new as the citizens of Fort Wayne greeted the turning of the age.
My mother had been on the bicentennial committee as well, and, in both cases, she had been instrumental in the development of the mascots. The bicentennial wasn't hard to figure out. Someone dressed up as General Anthony Wayne and made the appearances at the parades, beer tents, plaque dedications, and battle reenactments. Johnny Appleseed was a close second-he's buried in Fort Wayne-but the general looked better in uniform and lacked the cooking pot on the head. And besides, General Wayne came equipped with a horse. The millennium required more brainstorming. My mother, always the poet, finally rested on the notion the millennium would best be represented by a millipede, a millipede she named, for no other reason than the alliterative, Millie.