Doing unexpected nothing new for Knight

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It will take a while for affection to catch up to Bob Knight's achievements, a sad circumstance for the winningest coach in college basketball history.The tributes will come if he allows them. Old indignities will fade. He will go from lout and boor to scoundrel and curmudgeon.Inevitably, Knight will be better liked at rest than ever he was at full roar. Knight leaves to a shrug, defying a long held belief that he would go out as did Woody Hayes, or maybe Tonya Harding, committing some outrageous and unforgivable act, leaving a lasting stain.No, as of now, Knight leaves by memo, the job he signed to do unfinished, quitting because he is tired. Quitting so his son whose credentials to coach are no greater than his last name, will get a chance.This may not be a kindness as much as just another manipulation, another case of Knight doing what he wants because that is what he wants.So in that way it is typical of Knight, to do the unexpected, except that concern has long since vanished for anything Knight has done. Every disgraceful part of his resume is from a time when he mattered.No need to list them all again because they too will fade. It is hard to remain a tyrant without anyone to tyrannize.The bully's final act is a yawn, and this might be suitable were it not Knight. Worn out by basketball? Not by critics or bosses or enemies but by the game itself? How sad is that?But what did we expect? Certainly something beyond irrelevance, parked out in West Texas as he has been since his rupture with Indiana. Out of sight, out of meaning, like an old teamster playing with toy trucks.Examples of Knight's charm are much more rare than of his temper, but I have seen him as human as the rest of us, actually addressing his image, something he said he did not care about.Just before he won his final national title, the one in 1987 when Keith Smart hit the game-winner, Knight waxed on about where he fit in college basketball, pleased at the time that everything else fit below him.His defense for his outbursts was that he was no different from others facing on-the-job pressures, but when he lost his cool, he lost it in front of 18,000 people.Sympathy was hard to apply to his self-centered view of things because there are so many other examples of successful and competent coaches who do not work on the edge of rage.I did not detect any real appreciation for how much damage could be done by so notable a figure so lacking in self-control.Knight was like a stampede and had to be taken seriously, if only to get out of its way. Knight was from the school of thought that feels it is possible to get more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word.He said that most of the influences in his life were caustic and sarcastic, as if that allowed him to be even more so."I'm not interested in people thinking of me as the greatest coach who ever lived," he said then. "I would like them to say there goes a guy who got the most out of what he had."Winning to me has never been as important as figuring out how to win. I'm a doer of puzzles. When one puzzle is completed, I go on to the next puzzle. I am very comfortable with myself. And I am the only guy who has to be."My thought at the time I heard this was that only hermits and corpses can get away with believing that.Yet, when Knight was not elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., he demanded that he not be re-nominated. Voters ignored him and voted him in anyhow.The man must care about his legacy, the three national titles, the undefeated team at Indiana in 1976, the 32 NCAA Tournament teams, the Olympic gold medal, the purity of his programs, the thousands of players and coaches whom he touched, sometimes literally, who took the morality of Knight and ignored the abusiveness.This will all now become the measure of what he was, rather than the skirmishes and bad behavior. Unless Knight does something yet to mess it up. And he still might.(Contact Bernie Lincicome at lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com)(Bernie Lincicome writes for the Rocky Mountain News at www.rockymountainnews.com.)