The Long Dark Knight Of The Soul

A Con Games Column

My sophomore year in high school I wanted nothing more than to make the Canterbury School varsity basketball team.

I thought about basketball all the time, especially the stars I admired: Calvin Murphy and Pete Maravich and all the New York Knicks, especially Bill Bradley. I wanted to play the city game I loved but there was more to it than that, more than I realized as a teenager at the time.

I needed to get religion.

Any enthusiasm I had for actual religion evaporated after a brief flirtation in fifth grade with becoming an Irish Christian Brother at Iona Grammar School in New Rochelle, New York. (You can read all about it in my short story WAR BETWEEN THE STATES. At age 15, with my mother’s help, I was about to finagle my way out of mandatory Theology classes, an unheard of concession to agnosticism at Canterbury, a small Catholic boarding school in New Milford, Connecticut. I was never going to find religion in a place determined to confine you to a pew five times per week—four for Mass (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday) and a fifth brush with the ineffable late Sunday afternoon in Chapel, a somber coda to a week spent on our knees.

Basketball gave me purpose but not even that was enough. I needed a set of rules, a righteous path to follow, a cause greater than just me.

***

As our coach and team filed off the bus for a pre-season Saturday morning clinic at West Point in the fall of 1969, I was looking for something to make sense of the game I loved and my place in the world.

I needed something to believe in, and what I found was profound. I got religion in the guise of the Army head basketball coach, a burly 27-year-old in a crewcut. His name was Bobby Knight. Maybe you’ve heard of him or read his obituary when he died at 83 after winning three NCAA championships at Indiana University and an Olympic gold medal. When he retired, he was the winningest coach in college basketball history.

I never met the man but he gave me purpose by giving me something to believe in: Army defense.

Our team and coach, Mr. Jack Graney, sat high up in the bleachers at the United States Military Academy as Knight drilled the Army Knights who led the nation in defense (fewest points allowed) the year before. This was West Point, remember, so adherence to his orders was absolute for players who looked even smaller from so high up, with no one on the team taller than Knight at six-foot-five.

Even so I could not believe what I was seeing. Bobby Knight’s team practiced hustle. In one drill he put a ball on the floor at center court and one player had to keep the other player away from the rock by any means possible, legal or not. In another the players dove like kamikaze pilots for loose balls.

But it was the third drill that made my eyes pop out of my head. I still can’t believe what I saw.

To this day every team at every level of college basketball does a layup drill—with two lines on either side of the basket, one takes the layup and the other rebounds the ball and feeds the next person in line. At Bobby Knight’s West Point clinic, this drill worked exactly like a layup line except for one difference: when a player put up a layup, the other line knocked him flat.

This kind of thing is always referred to knowingly as toughness, the one true unknowable in sports. But Knight was also changing basketball right in front of our eyes. He showed us skip passes from one side of the court to the other, and his soon-to-be-famous motion offense with players free to improvise without set plays.

One of his commandments had to do with his players knowing what to do—and when not to even try. Knight pointed to Mike Gyovia, his one big man, and said: “He’s my rebounder.” Then to Jimmy Oxley: “Jimmy is my shooter.” And to the point guard, a smaller Mike without a last name: “Mike is my passer.”

The smaller Mike with the unpronounceable name was a Polish-American kid from Chicago. His name was Mike Krzyzewski and maybe you’ve heard of him, too. He would go on to become Coach K at Army and then Duke, retiring with 1,202 wins—the most wins in NCAA basketball history, surpassing even Bobby Knight—and six Olympic gold medals.

Add in Knight’s 902 career wins at Army, Indiana, and Texas Tech, and the point guard and his coach on the floor at West Point that day in 1969 finished with a total 2,104 wins, eight NCAA championships, and seven Olympic gold medals.

Most of that would come later, in a future no one could foresee. I had no way to know it as a sophomore at that clinic, but I was listening to two men—one 27, the other 22—who would change the course of basketball history. Even then Bobby Knight had a national championship in his pocket as a player coming off the bench at The Ohio State University in 1960.

No wonder I saw God. And all because of Army defense.

Knight’s half-court man-to-man was beyond smothering. He had deciphered the physics of basketball by deducing specific rules: stay even with the ball, not the dribbler; front your man by holding your arm outstretched and turning your hand outward; never turn your back to the ball; and—my favorite—draw a line from the ball to your man and stay a step off that line to be ready with help defense if a teammate got beat.

Army defense changed my life. I made the team as a sophomore managed to start three years of high school basketball with a mixture of Pete Maravich’s and Calvin Murphy’s fancy passes and an acolyte’s adherence to the rules of Army defense. For the record we were terrible and before my senior year I successfully lobbied as to get Coach Graney fired, an act of disloyalty I have not regretted for one minute.

Still we stunk for all three years, finishing 4-12 my senior year when I was captain and hence even more culpable. I loved basketball but it never loved me back. I was six-foot-one when I arrived at Canterbury with visions of growing to a dominant six-four or six-five in a low-wattage league. Instead I never grew an inch, so year after year I felt like I was shrinking, and the obsession with Army defense laid bare my genetic inability to score, especially at the free throw line. On a bad team for three years, I fouled out of game after game after game.

My consolation: nobody ever hustled more on the court.

I had my moment as an adult playing on the Ben & Jerry’s basketball team in Burlington, Vermont: we won three YMCA league titles, with Jerry Greenfield himself on the team and both of us coming off the bench. So in the end maybe basketball loved me after all.

Season On The Brink by John Feinstein shattered any illusion I once had for Bob Knight, as he was known by then at Indiana, as a human being. No one in sports ever self-destructed in so many self-defeating ways.

When he died I saw a clip of his return to Indiana for a final farewell from many of his former players. If he walked any more slowly onto the court, he would have been standing still. No one gave him a microphone to let him have his final say because he was horribly weak and barely able to speak. Even so, screaming against the cacophony of his own farewell, Bob Knight of the Army Knights had one thing only left to say.

“PLAY DEFENSE!” he shouted. “PLAY DEFENSE!”

Had you not known better—had you never grown up—you would have thought it was the most important thing in the world.