Shining In The Shadow Of Knight

Though the 74-70 victory seems tainted in hindsight because the Jayhawks have been destroyed on a couple of occasions since, at the time it was an invigorating conquest for Indiana. The Hoosiers played haphazardly on the road against a highly regarded, emotionally charged team, and won. They won while being outrebounded and outshot 55%-42%. They won while their leader, Guard Quinn Buckner, went scoreless and missed vital free throws near the end. In short, they won on a bad night. "Our confidence shot right up after that," says Laskowski.

Indiana frequently is portrayed as a crew of personalities submerged, even "consumed by fright," under Knight, the rampaging martinet. But while Green says, "We're just a bunch of simple, homely faces," there is considerably more to them than that.

Knight demands silence and total obedience at practice, then smartly keeps his distance from his players off the court. His dressing quarters are on the opposite side of the Assembly Hall from the team's locker room, and he seldom invades the place Ahlfeld describes as "our little domain."

Knight has no curfew, no training table and hardly any rules. When he is not around, Indiana's faceless wonders will listen to a rock tune, laugh at a Cheech & Chong record and wear denim overalls and shell necklaces, just like any other college derelicts. They walk and even talk now and then, drink beers, eat quarter-pounders, date girls and read Rolling Stone on road trips. ("I've heard of that...I think," says Knight.) They even have something called a Zemi machine in the locker room to dispense sno-cones in four delicious flavors. "The first time they put the Zemi in here, 15 guys got sick with sticky red stuff all over their faces. It was awful," says Green.

On Knight's birthday, after he had whipped them through a few suicide drills, the Hoosiers presented the coach with a "Suicide Zemi," a combination of all four flavors. He reacted with customary gratitude. "This doesn't mean you sons of bleeps are clear of suicides next time," he said.

Sometimes Indiana also is depicted as a group of no-name gym rats molded into a team by an eccentric genius, but that obviously is a misrepresentation. Buckner and Benson were genuine high school legends in Illinois and Indiana, respectively. Fluid Bob Wilkerson, the 6'6" guard who jumps center, covers the opposition's toughest backcourt man and sports a stupendous gap in his teeth, was a prep star, too. Coming out of high school, he was a non-predictor under the NCAA's 1.6 rule. That undoubtedly kept some recruiters away and made Wilkerson seem like a real find when Knight first put him out on the court as a sophomore substitute.

May, the 6'7" scoring leader, was also a non-predictor whose growing pains as a child in Sandusky, Ohio were so severe that his mother says, "We had to hold him down on the bed."

When May's failure to meet the 1.6 requirement forced him to sit out his first year at Bloomington, he "ate his heart out and almost quit." But he stayed. Bucker calls May "Stonehands" because of the tendency he had to drop passes when he first joined the Hoosiers. May insists he has the finest pair of hands in the state of Ohio. Buckner says, "That's nice, but May happens to be playing in Indiana."

Native Hoosiers Green from Milan and Laskowski of South Bend are the only seniors among Indiana's first seven players. They have developed into shooters of exquisite touch. Laskowski's uncanny ability to come cold off the bench and put in bushels of points has provoked wagering on how many seconds will elapse between the moment he checks in and the scoring of his first point.

Early in the season Laskowski sat out four games with an injury, returning to play against Florida. He connected 27 seconds after entering that game, made seven of 10 shots and went on to hit 26 of 31 in subsequent appearances. "Shooting is concentration," he says. "Just routine."