Bob Knight The Unauthorized Biography

Chapter One BOBBYOrrville and Columbus, 1940-62 Bobby has got so much....He doesn't cheat. He doesn't drink. He doesn't even chase women. But for some reason, he thinks he has been a bad boy and no matter how successful he becomes, he thinks he must be punished. -- IU assistant Roy Bates toSI's Frank Deford I can remember my mom saying time and frigging time again, "Just remember, somebody has to lose." And my rejoinder has always been, "Why should it be me?" -- Bob KnightPlayboy, March 2001 From the beginning, he was different. Robert Montgomery Knight, the only child of the local freight agent on the railroad line and the second-grade teacher at Walnut Street Elementary, was the best athlete in Orrville, Ohio, but every hamlet has its local stars who grow up to teach phys ed or sell real estate. Bobby was the one who would attain the greatness they had all dreamed about. Almost from the day he was born and the cry that became his first complaint, he went his own way. His father, Pat, grew up on an Oklahoma farm and went to work on the Nickel Plate Railroad, which brought him to this little town of 5,000 in the northeast corner of the state. To Bobby, born when Pat was in his 40s, his father was a Gary Cooper figure, upright, low-key, principled, and determined, "the most honest man I have known," and "the most disciplined man I ever met." The son took pride in his father's flinty virtues, and he told everyone the same stories, which became the standard starting point in published profiles of his life. Pat never earned more than $8,000, never had a credit card, owned three cars his whole life, and paid cash for them. He took out his only loan to buy their $22,000 house and paid it off in four years by giving up his hobbies. Knight said his dad never tipped, "because he always said, 'Nobody ever gave me a tip for doing anything.'" However, there was a distance between father and son that was difficult to bridge. Pat was so hard of hearing, Bobby had to yell to be understood, and it was easier just to co-exist. Pat worked long hours and didn't go to Bobby's games. They shared a passion for fishing, but that was something a father and a son could do together in silence. Pat was already 43 and Hazel 38 on October 25, 1940 when Bobby was born. Pauline Boop, their next-door neighbor, says both parents acted even older than their years. The one who seemed the youngest, Boop says, was Hazel's mother, Sarah Henthorne, who lived with them. "There was always this terrible barrier between [Bob] and his dad because his dad's hearing was so bad that he was almost deaf," says Boop. "His mother did not drive a car and his father was mostly working. But his grandmother drove and she always took him places. And she was just the sweetest woman. She was a perfect gem." John Flynn of theLouisville Courier-Journal, one of Knight's first press confidants, wrote that Knight used to call Mrs. Henthorne "mother." She doted on him, letting him win when they played board games because she couldn't bear to see how upset he got when he lost. Hazel Knight herself once noted, "I think he was closer to his grandmother than he ever was to me or his father." Nevertheless, Bobby said his mother, whip-smart and inclined to speak her mind, was his biggest influence. Bruce Newman, who interviewed Hazel years later when he wrote for the Indiana Daily Student, remembers her as "sort of typically Midwestern, old school, a bit schoolmarmish and forbidding in ways. She was gracious enough to let a college kid come into her house and talk to her for an hour, so she wasn't mean or anything. But I don't remember her as being a particularly warm person." "He gets that dry sense of humor from his mother," says Kathy Harmon, who was Kathy Halder when sheDelsohn, Steve is the author of 'Bob Knight The Unauthorized Biography', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743243483 and ISBN 074324348X.