What about it, Bob? Knight's a few decades late with rant

Bob Knight's speech to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame was going to throw shrapnel in all directions, you just knew it. But you were wrong.

The wrong part is that he didn't aim his explosion more directly at his enemies at Indiana. He chose to be gracious through omission, even acknowledging that he might share blame for staying longer than he should have, and credit to him for that.

Bob Knight's points are valid. They're just not exactly revelatory. (AP)

But his latest broadside at the college basketball system that not only undermined many of his own more noble sentiments but sold itself to the first and highest bidders comes far too late to ever matter, except as a period piece.

In fact, the system had already deteriorated before Knight ever started at Indiana, and though his own contributions to that deterioration were not systemic but individual (a temper that too often smeared the line between tough love and tough), the train had already left the station at the beginning of Knight's tenure, not its end. The only thing that really happened since then was that it picked up size and speed to the point where (a) nobody could change it and (b) nobody wants to.

Knight railed for a simpler time, one when he was a player. He asked questions about the John Calipari syndrome, where wins and losses and revenue generated are the only measuring sticks, when in fact Calipari is only the latest beneficiary of a system that already had whored its soul for decades. Knight raised issues that had been adjudicated long ago.

And in truth, his salary and importance grew like everyone else's through the expansion of the business of college basketball. He may have kept the "student" in "student-athlete" in his shop, but he knew the uselessness of that windmill-tilt when he started.

Bob Knight chose to play on a more principled yet patently uneven playing field, and the key word there is "chose." He gets points for holding the line on the greater outrages of the system (while, in fairness, indirectly benefiting from the financial benefits of that system), but he knew the greater corruptions of the system when he started. College basketball didn't lose its way after he got there, he was already an exception that screamed the rule.

Does this invalidate his points at the Hall of Fame? No, of course not. His principles speech is always on point. It is, however, a lot like going to a meeting of a mob family and complaining about rampant lawbreaking. You're speaking about people who long ago figured out the price of a soul and use that number when amortizing its costs, and wondering aloud why they aren't nicer people. They're not, and in many cases they never were. They just crossed more lines with less care for the punishment, because there is none and never has been.

And no, this is not to blame Knight for the sins of the industry he helped grow. A man is guilty by commission or omission but not by failure to change minds, and Knight's failure is largely that he persuaded nobody else in the basketball business to see things his way.

Still, his stump speech about the evils of the sport he helped advance into a national game requires tweaking to more accurately reality, as in:

"I made academics important to my players because I believed in that method. I acted alone, with no accomplices, and I am solely responsible for the results of those decisions.

"I worked for decades in an industry that did not, does not and will not regard those things are worthy of notice. That industry is solely and completely a money-making organization interested in no way about the educational component in college athletes, save that which they mention when someone questions the way it makes its money.

"But the money's good, no question about it. I'm still getting paid by that system, so it's not like I didn't get mine too. So when I go on about the system, I'm mostly yelling at concrete to reform itself and become more like pudding. Mine is a largely pointless exercise in complaining for a world that never was and never will be. I did what I did because I wanted to, not because I had any illusions that anyone else would, or that the people for whom we worked gave a damn either way.

"So when I tell you about this stuff, I'm telling you a very old story about something we all know was a myth anyway. I should tell you this while dandling you on my lap, and I would if there weren't so many of you."

But that change won't happen, either. Bob Knight is playing his role in the system, that of the scold on the morally high ground. If this was truly a battle he'd want to engage, he'd be more the courtside provocateur, dropping the hammer at games he works as a broadcaster, and less the rubber-chicken-circuit ethicist.

Bob Knight, though, is nobody's dunce. He knows what happens to the crusader who doesn't know his place, and he knows that his powers of persuasion at the sign of the first $100 bill. He is no Erin Brockovich. Then again, Erin Brockovich only had to pick a fight with Pacific Gas & Electric. College sports is way bigger and more vindictive than that.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.