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Knight dictates his own terms
Posted: Saturday March 18, 2000 05:46 PM
By Grant Wahl, Sports Illustrated BUFFALO -- In Cuba, 73-year-old dictator Fidel Castro has a mind-numbing ability to give speeches for hours at a time, never stopping for so much as a trip to the restroom -- or for questions from the local "media." Why, only two years ago Castro presided over a captive audience (note that I didn't say "captivated") for an astonishing seven hours and 30 minutes, touching on such topics as AIDS, the divorce rate, sexual discrimination, natural disasters, Japanese banks, brothels and his own health. On Thursday night Bob Knight, the 59-year-old dictator from Indiana, stepped up to the lectern here and delivered a similarly mind-numbing defense of his program, filibustering for more than 25 minutes of a scheduled 15-minute press conference and addressing subjects ranging from Neil Reed's accusations that Knight choked him to the Hoosiers' charity work to the media having sex with sheep. Surely he could have given El Presidente a run for his seven-and-a-half hours, but then again, Castro never has to worry about ceding the floor to the players from Pepperdine. I don't know whether Knight would be flattered or insulted to be compared to Castro, but the two men are strikingly similar. Both are wedded to old-school ideologies that are hopelessly outdated in today's world. Both enjoy an inexplicably large and unquestioning devotion from their constituencies. Both, it appears, will have to die to relinquish their iron grip on power. Wouldn't it be great to see them trade places for a day? Can't you imagine Knight puffing on a Cohiba in the presidential villa? Or Castro stalking the sidelines in an ugly sweater (red, of course)? In any case, it would have been nice if Knight's press conference had been an actual conference -- with actual questions -- instead of a monologue, but the NCAA-appointed moderator, Jay Williams, never once interrupted Knight to tell him that it was time to cut it off. Castro, after all, must never face difficult questions. When Knight finally stopped talking, he refused to allow any queries not related to the NCAA tournament, an edict blindly followed by his Havana-quality toadies in the IU "media." Nor did it help when the moderator intoned "one more question" ... after only one lame question had been asked. Exasperated, I raised my hand. "Do you have a single regret about the way you've treated your players over the years?" To be honest, I thought he might say no. Only minutes earlier, Knight had said he felt no need to apologize for anything. "Sure, I have a regret about how I treat my wife once in a while," Knight said. "I'm a long way from being perfect. Are you?" No, of course not, but that isn't the point. After all, nobody is accusing me of choking a co-worker. My follow-up was going to be simple: Have you ever done anything to your players that would have gotten an ordinary Indiana professor fired? But before anybody could ask another question, Knight was gone, headed back to the presidential villa. Grant Wahl is a Sports Illustrated staff writer. The opinions expressed here
are solely those of the writer.
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