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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

sports men's basketball

Column: Bring Bob back

If you live in Indiana, you know about Bob Knight.

Love him or hate him, you’ve heard the legends. You’ve seen the banners hanging in Assembly Hall.

You’ve watched the highlights and the lowlights of a coach who was passionate enough about the game that he’d throw furniture on the court when things didn’t go his way.

Next to Larry Bird, he’s one of the most significant public figures in the history of this state and undoubtedly the most polarizing.

And despite a forgettable tenure at Texas Tech after his highly publicized and messy dismissal from IU in 2000, the man is Indiana basketball.

Most of us weren’t alive for the glory days of Scott May or Isiah Thomas, true.

But people my age all over Indiana grew up idolizing Knight and the legacy of winning that came with him — the legacy that brought the team more than 650 wins, three NCAA titles, an undefeated season and proof to the rest of the country that there really is more than corn in Indiana.

His dismissal was tough, to say the least. It felt like 30 years of history was severed from the school as Mike Davis and Kelvin Sampson failed to live up to the monumental precedent that Knight set after the Neil Reed incident.

Fourteen years later, not much has changed.

The team’s had success in small doses, losing in the National Championship game in 2002 and making the Sweet Sixteen a couple years in a row, but nothing close to the success it had under Knight.

So when former guard AJ Guyton, the team’s leading scorer during Knight’s final year in Bloomington as a head coach for the Hoosiers, learned he’d made IU Basketball Hall of Fame in June, he saw an opportunity to try and make things right.

He wrote an open letter to Knight, recalling his time at IU and how Knight himself made the experience for him and his teammates.

He explained how it wasn’t the same in Bloomington with the way the school distanced itself from the Knight era and the players who played during it.

He implored Knight to come back to Assembly Hall for his induction ceremony Nov. 4 and to put the past behind him, effectively ending the decade-and-a-half silent treatment both parties have been giving each other.

And Guyton’s right.

There’s been this ?awkward catch-22 where the school wants to acknowledge the success and legacy of the past, but at the same time won’t publicly give credit to the man who had a bigger part making it possible than anyone else.

And as Guyton points out, every other historically great school gives credit to its coaching legends.

John Wooden, Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith and Jim Calhoun all have facilities or awards named after them at their former schools.

IU hasn’t done that for Knight, but if the school can get him back here somehow, there’s a chance he could finally get that ?recognition he deserves.

Maybe it will put an end to this silly schism that has only managed to hurt the reputations of both parties and de-legitimize the past success that took so much hard work to achieve.

But until Nov. 4 we can only hope that he hears Guyton’s message and that it means as much to him as he does to this state, because things just don’t feel right without him.

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