As you might imagine, riots followed Bob Knight’s firing. Students stormed all over campus, from Assembly Hall to the president’s office to the stadium (where they tore down the goal posts). As police readied themselves to fight back with force and start making arrests, Knight requested to address the crowd. He sent the crowd home on the promise that he’d speak again later, which he did. Why? Because Robert Montgomery Knight is a class act.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of listening to Dick Vitale commentate an IU or a Texas Tech game, you’ve heard it before: Robert Montgomery Knight Assembly Hall. Perhaps the only intelligent thing to come out of Dicky V’s loud mouth, honoring Bob Knight seems only fair. After all, three of the five red banners hanging at the end of Assembly Hall belong to him.
Forget about the chair throw, the Neil Reid “choking” and everything else the media shoves down your throat, and look at everything he’s accomplished. Three NCAA championships, 11 Big Ten conference championships, a four-time National Coach of the Year, 891 career wins. He took Texas Tech, a team with a losing record the prior season, to the NCAA tournament in his first year. He can coach (and his players graduate).
As Indiana’s coaching dilemma has come to a close with savior Kelvin Sampson, and Knight’s career nears an end, it seems like an appropriate time to honor the legend and everything he’s done for our program. Other schools haven’t hesitated to honor their coaches. Duke’s court is named “Coach K Court” in honor of Coach Krzyzewski (who, I might add, played under Knight), and he hasn’t even retired yet.
Whether you agree with Knight’s methods or not, he wins games. In fact, he’s the winningest coach in the history of men’s college basketball. It’s sad that he wasn’t able to accomplish that feat here at Indiana, where he collected 661 wins (to just 240 losses), but it’s not too late. We still have an opportunity to honor him by renaming Assembly Hall or, at the very least, the court.
Don Ueber
Sophomore
