That we'll remember Knight for everything except victories?
There's this great story these two college kids told me, a story I'll never forget that shaped my opinion of Knight. The kids are named Andrew Hemminger and Dave Bensch. They spent 17 months bouncing around the country spending time with coaches for a book they eventually published.
They went to meet John Wooden and Rick Pitino and Bill Self and Thad Matta and Billy Donovan and Dean Smith and Jay Wright ... roughly 30 guys in all. They said everybody was thoughtful and welcoming. And when I asked whether they had any bad experiences they both answered with the same name at the same time.
Bob Knight
Big surprise, right?
As the story goes, Hemminger and Bensch arranged a meeting with Knight. Everything was set. So they hopped in the car in Bowling Green, Ohio and drove 1,400 miles to Texas Tech. They attended a game one night and prepared to meet Knight the next morning as planned. Then they woke up early, went to the Texas Tech basketball office and ... sat there all day long.
Knight never emerged.
They were told he no longer had time to meet them.
They asked for just 10 minutes, said 10 minutes would be great.
They were told to run along, that this simply wasn't going to happen.
"That one hurt," Hemminger told me with a smile. "We drove 22 hours for nothing."
So yeah, that's just one story.
But there are a lot of stories like that story.
And when you combine them all it's hard to shake that image.
Which is why when I'm 80 and somebody asks about Knight that's the first thing I'll remember, how he treated Hemminger and Bensch and many others. And that's the real tragedy here because when you've won 902 games and three national titles, you should be remembered for your accomplishments, not your incidents.
But Knight's success will never be more than a sidebar in his story, terrible as that sounds. And so I suppose it's fitting that his career ends like this because when a man leaves the public confused by his actions for four decades it's appropriate that he would ultimately exit in a similar manner, in a way that keeps people wondering why he couldn't have handled things just a little bit differently.
