I’ve been sitting here for the past two hours, trying to sort out my thoughts on the surprise announcement that Bob Knight was resigning immediately as head coach of Texas Tech. I still haven’t managed to do so, but I’ll try to put those thoughts into words anyway.

First things first - if you’re scanning around the blog world, looking for pithy chair-throwing jokes or idiotic, half-assed Top Ten lists about why Knight might be leaving Texas Tech — sorry, there’s none of that here. Other parts of the blog world have you covered though…and I’m sure Gregg Doyel will regurgitate his anti-Knight cud one more time for some cheap web hits, so you’ve got that option too.

Anyway, so that’s out the way…and what are we left with? Well, from my perspective, and from the prospective of  thousands of other kids who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s as Indiana basketball fans, we’re left with a vaguely empty feeling.

Bob Knight was truly a phenomenon in college basketball. He didn’t win as many championships as Wooden. He wasn’t placed on a pedestal like Dean Smith. The BASKETBALL things he was best known for - punishing man-to-man help defense and  crisp motion offense - were decidedly unsexy compared to other styles of play, and the players he had were often just as unsexy when compared to their more glamorous contemporaries. Yet Knight loomed larger than everyone else in college basketball from 1976 until the present. He wasn’t always front and center, particularly in the later years, but all it took was one Bob Knight story and the media attention materialized immediately.

Why, exactly? What made the man so important to his supporters AND his detractors?

For his supporters, Knight was an embodiment of something that went beyond basketball - a take-no-bullshit authoritarian who didn’t cheat, and who expected people to do their jobs, be disciplined, and excel in life. His teams were hard-working, wildly successful, and embodied the hopes and dreams of an entire generation of fans from that region. Under Knight, Indiana basketball was an EVENT — there was nothing else in sports that even remotely compared to it. In an era when cable television wasn’t even in a majority of homes, Indiana basketball was the prime source of entertainment, the bridge between fall and spring.

For his detractors, Knight represented a variety of ills. Some writers tried to use Knight as an example of the excesses of college sports in general. Some viewed him as hypocritical, a disciplinarian who himself lacked discipline. Some just hated his guts because he held the media in general contempt. Opposing fans often just hated him because he beat their teams fairly regularly, or because he was highly demonstrative on the sidelines.

The funny thing to me about the Bob Knight phenomenon is that both sides - his most rabid supporters and his most vitrolic critics - were always guilty of the exact same thing with Knight: Their constant attempts to impose their own personal thoughts or feelings or desires onto Knight, expecting him to attain them. I can recall Al McGuire, a big Knight supporter, telling Knight that he needed to change this or change that in terms of his personality. I’ve read numerous articles by Knight’s critics that read something like “If Knight would only do X, Y, and Z, then everyone would love him, blah blah blah”.

Not surprisingly, the few career epitaths that I’ve read so far have gone at things in this manner, with both Pat Forde and Gary Parrish opining that Knight’s decision to walk away was yet another hypocritical act in Knight’s (in their eyes) hypocritical career.

I find this line of thought to be rather fascinating. According to Forde and Parrish, it’s hypocritical to walk away from a job that you feel you can’t do anymore, rather than fake it just so you can keep up appearances? That’s some real sound logic right there, Vern. Actually, come to think of it, that might explain some of the columns that these two yahoos have written over the years.

How someone like Pat Forde, who’s a pretty observant and insightful guy most of the time, could miss the central point of this whole exercise is a bit surprising. Knight behaved the way that he did for a variety of reasons, and some of that behavior was shockingly wrongheaded. Gary Parrish even went far enough to give us some silly tearjerker of a story about how bad a man Knight could be…(I won’t ruin the surprise for you. Go ahead and read it. Bring Kleenex.) But anyway, yes. Knight made lots of mistakes. He had bad run-ins with some people. I’m certain that every person who’s commented on Knight has had bad run-ins with people during their career. I’m also certain that Knight’s GOOD run-ins with people, which we only hear about from certain sources, were just as numerous as his bad run-ins, if not moreso.

(By the way, for the exact opposite of the Parrish story, check out this Deadspin anecdote. This was a man that was far more complex than people give him credit for.)

So Knight had his reasons for behavior. The behaviour was neither all bad nor all good. But I sincerely doubt that Knight’s reasons for doing anything were rooted in a desire to have the media (or the public) perceive him in a certain manner. Forde and Parrish both spill a lot of ink trying to sound wistful about “what might have been”, and how Knight’s retirement should’ve been celebrated more, if only he hadn’t been such an asshole. But who’s dream is that? Does Knight even want to be celebrated in that way? Did he ever?

Why must people, particularly media people, continue using this bizarre philosophy that everybody wants the same thing?

I don’t think Knight wanted a victory lap. I don’t think he wanted a parade “from East Chicago to Vevay”, as Forde put it. At 67 years of age and 902 victories, I think he was just worn out. Sure, he’ll say he resigned to help ease the transition to his son as a head coach, but in reality, Knight was out of gas. It was obvious when he had to leave the Centenary game earlier this year that there was nothing left in the tank. Rather than go through the motions, he walked away. Many people can respect that…and if a few self-righteous pricks in the media can’t, then so what?