By Bob Markus

It is one of life's little ironies that Bob (don't call me Bobby) Knight has become a member of the media he once openly despised. True, you could make a distinction between the print and electronic media, but, as someone recently and famously observed, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig." Just so, you can put a microphone in front of a critic and he's still a critic. Many a sports writer has made the leap, most notably Brent Musburger, who was a sports columnist for Chicago's American before becoming rich and famous as a television play-by-play man. There are others, to be sure. But even more common is the transition from head coach to TV analyst.

One of the earliest, and still the best, to move from behind the bench to behind the microphone was the late Al McGuire, whose whimsical description of a game almost made up for the insufferable hubris of his usual partner, Billy Packer, also a former coach, albeit not a successful one. Notre Dame's Digger Phelps went from the shadow of the Golden Dome to the glare of the shiny dome, the latter belonging to the hyperkinetic Dick Vitale, who talks a better game than he coached. None of these coaches cum commentator was so openly contemptuous of the print media as Bob Knight.

Knight once used me as a horrible example of why he thought sports writers were
not worth the saliva it would take to spit on. I admit I gave him the ammunition he used to blow a hole in my ego. Always one to march to the thrum of his own bass fiddle, Knight was the only Big Ten coach to boycott the annual conference preseason press day. For years, despite the entreaties of Big Ten commissioner Wayne Duke, Knight refused to make the trip to Chicago for media day. Then one year--and I can tell you precisely what year it was--Knight unexpectedly appeared in the hotel ballroom where the event was being held.

When it became his turn to speak, Knight pulled a press clipping out of his pocket and began to read it aloud to the room packed with sports writers and broadcasters. Even before he spoke his first word I knew what he was going to say and started looking for the nearest bomb shelter. At the time, college sports was my beat at The Chicago Tribune, and each year, on the day after the 64-team NCAA basketball field was announced, I'd write a back page story consisting of--hopefully clever--little tidbits like: Top-seeded team most likely to lose in first round--Indiana. Or, a variation on the same theme like: Highest rated team to lose in first round--Syracuse. I can't remember exactly how I worded it, but that, in essence, is what I wrote before the start of the 1987 NCAA tournament. So it had to be sometime in November of 1988 when Bob Knight, whose Hoosiers had defeated Jim Boeheim's Syracuse Orangemen to win the 1987 championship, strolled to the podium, where other coaches had spent 10 or 15 minutes analyzing their teams' chances in the upcoming season, read aloud those two damning sentences and concluded "and that's why I never bother to come to these meetings."

Fast forward to the following March when Indiana is getting ready to play its first round game, as I recall, against Richmond. Bob Knight is answering media questions, when I raise my hand and ask something innocuous. Knight answers it and bestows that withering glare, the one that could freeze a lion in its tracks, on me and asks, "Are you doing your predictions this year?" When I tell him, yes, he asks to see a copy of it. I don't remember what I said of Indiana, but I remember giving a copy of it to Indiana's sports information director and asking him to deliver it to Knight. I'm pretty sure I had picked Indiana to win its opener, but had warned that the Spiders were dangerous and there could be an upset. I pencilled in a humorous little note wishing him luck. When I asked the SID what Knight's reaction had been, he replied: "I haven't given it to him yet." When the Hoosiers, indeed, were upset, I shuddered to think of Knight's reaction to my note if he didn't see it until after the game. The next time I saw him was on entering Kemper Arena in Kansas City two weeks later for a Final Four press conference. He was standing in the lobby, talking to a friend, and I said, "Hello, Bob." He didn't look at me, didn't answer me, and I prefer to think he didn't hear me. I haven't seen him since.

If you've read this far you probably think I was a Bob Knight basher. Not true. In fact, I often defended him. I thought he was a great coach, who didn't cheat, and tried to teach his players to do things the right way. But like football coach Woody Hayes at Ohio State, where Knight played basketball, Knight threw one temper tantrum too many. Now he's one of us. I wonder if he, too, thinks that ironic.

Note: I no longer follow college basketball closely enough to make any informed predictions. For what it's worth, I like Memphis to win the tournament and Pittsburgh to be the first No. 1 seed to lose (to Tennessee in the second round.) You can thank me later, after you've won the tournament, Pittsburgh fans.