Bob Knight revealed his good side and dark side in his unique relationship with a Philly hoops legend

Bob Knight was a full-time genius and a frequent jerk, and not necessarily in that order. When he wasn’t chucking chairs across a basketball court, screaming at and bullying those whose power and prestige could never match his, or putting his hands on his players’ necks in anger, he could coach a glorious game of basketball. He won 902 games and three national championships — two of them at the Spectrum — won an Olympic gold medal, and revolutionized the sport with the introduction and mainstreaming of his motion offense. He was a complex man, to be anodyne about it, and nowhere was that complexity captured better than in the circumstances and nature of his relationship with one of the greatest players in Philadelphia college basketball history.

Knight, who died Tuesday night at 83, was the head coach of the U.S. men’s basketball team at the 1979 Pan American Games in Puerto Rico. A star player on that team, maybe the star player at the time, was a 6-foot-7 forward from West Philadelphia who had just finished his junior year at La Salle: Michael Brooks. But it was an episode before the tournament began that led Knight, in a 2017 interview, to say: “Michael Brooks was one of the best players I ever coached.”

Knight was coaching at Indiana University at the time, of course, and he brought the Pan Am team — its roster included Isiah Thomas, Kevin McHale, and Ralph Sampson — to Bloomington for training camp. While there, he arranged two scrimmages, one against IU alumni, another against Kentucky alumni. After one of those games, Knight was displeased, in the customary Bob Knight way, with the way Brooks had played.

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“I really chewed him out,” Knight told me. “I told him, ‘You just go out there without any thought and just play, and whatever seems available, that’s how you play. You don’t give any thought to how to play. You don’t give any thought to how the game’s going.’ That went on for maybe 15 to 20 minutes. A little time later, we were shooting free throws — that was all we did at the end of the day — and I was at the scorer’s table, going over some stuff, and all of a sudden there’s a shadow there, and I looked up.”

It was Brooks.

“I’m thinking, ‘What’s he going to be complaining about relative to what I said?’ And I said, ‘What is it, Brooksie?’ And he said, ‘Coach, nobody has ever talked to me like that, and I just want to thank you for taking the time to do so.’ And that’s one of the most enjoyable moments I had in coaching.

“I was pretty tough on him, and I’ve thought about that ever since, particularly the first line: ‘Coach, nobody has ever talked to me like that.’ From that point on, he was as good a kid as I ever coached, and he was as good a player as I ever coached. If I picked the top five kids, Brooks would be one of them.”

That tournament should have been Brooks’s coming-out party to the basketball world; he averaged 17.4 points over nine games, leading the Americans to a gold medal. Knight, though, obscured both the U.S.’s victory and Brooks’ terrific performance by getting ejected from the team’s first game for berating the officials and, later, by punching a police officer. The latter incident got him arrested, handcuffed, locked up for a short time in a San Juan hoosegow, and caused something of a scandal. Following the tournament’s final game, as his players received their medals and the crowd inside the arena booed and jeered him, as several reporters stood within earshot, Knight said, “[Bleep] ‘em. [Bleep] ‘em all. I’ll tell you what — their basketball is a hell of a lot easier to beat than their court system. The only [bleeping] thing they know how to do is grow bananas.”

So much of Knight, the duality of his brilliance and his darkness, revealed itself in those weeks and in the months to follow: the credit he gave Brooks for acquiescing to him, the credit he gave himself for helping Brooks see the light, the mastery of X’s and O’s and motivational mind games, the boorish language and behavior, the loyalty he could show to those he perceived to be loyal to him. He spent much of the 1979-80 college basketball season talking up Brooks, urging people around the sport to take notice of him. Brooks was named Kodak’s national player of the year as a senior — he scored 24.1 points and grabbed 11.5 rebounds a game as the Explorers went 22-9 — and Bill Bradshaw, La Salle’s athletic director then, said that Knight’s lobbying helped Brooks gain the exposure he needed to win the award.

“Knight was championing this kid who maybe not a lot of people saw,” Bradshaw told me. “Michael was the player of the year because of Knight.”

After a knee injury cut his NBA career short, Brooks moved to Europe, playing and coaching pro ball and living there for nearly three decades before he died, at 58, from a blood disorder in August 2016. In an interview a few weeks before his death, I asked him about Knight.

“Best coach I ever played for,” he said, “and I only played for him for a short period of time. Because of him, I really learned the discipline of basketball, how to prepare mentally and physically.”

So many could say the same thing about Bob Knight. Can you understand them? So many would have never made the choice, once or again, to stomach him. Can you blame them?