But he found fame, glory and notoriety at Indiana University, where he was head coach for 29 years. An animated courtside stalker in a Hoosier-red sweater who became a statewide celebrity in a basketball-mad state, he raised the Indiana program to the national top tier while upholding academic standards — most of his players graduated — and avoiding the pay-for-play recruitment scandals that bedeviled many other schools.
Over two consecutive seasons, 1974-75 and 1975-76, his teams won 63 of 64 games. In March 1976, when Indiana won the N.C.A.A. tournament, finishing the season at 32-0, it became the seventh, and last, national champion with a perfect record. From 1971-72, his first season at Indiana, through 1999-2000, Knight’s Hoosier teams averaged almost 23 wins a season, winning 11 Big Ten titles and, in 1981 and 1987, two more national championships, before he was fired by a university administration exasperated by his displays of incorrigibility.
The sportswriter Frank Deford wrote that Knight was “a prodigy in search of proportion.” Bob Costas, the veteran broadcaster, once referred to him as “college basketball’s raging bull.” Indeed, the Indiana coach made a trademark of iconoclasm and defiance of decorum, deriding officials at top volume and hounding his players to the brink of abuse.
He cooperated with many an interviewer but clashed frequently with members of the news media, scorning especially beat reporters whose basketball knowledge he found wanting. Though he was a voracious reader, especially of military history, and often encouraged students to focus on “the book” rather than “the ball,” he was not above disparaging the whole print enterprise. “All of us learn to write in the second grade,” he once said. “Most of us go on to greater things.”
His foul mouth was renowned. Deford wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1981: “In the course of a day, he describes an incredible number of things being done to the derrière: It’s burned, chewed out, kicked, frosted, blistered, chipped at, etc.”
