For several weeks, a swarm of sportswriters and broadcasters have been Borking the legendary basketball coach of Indiana University, Robert Montgomery Knight. It all started a couple of days before the first round of the NCAA tournament, when a former player accused Knight of having choked him during a practice session. He said Knight had to be dragged off by coaches and fellow players. He also claimed Knight physically abused a former Indiana star player, Steve Alford, who now coaches Iowa, and that Knight expelled the university president from a practice. Both denied the stories.
Two other former players came forward with similar stories of physical and verbal abuse, one claiming that Knight had slugged players, the other accusing Knight of using the N-word to blacks on the IU team.
All the claims were vigorously disputed by teammates of the accusers, who pointed out that two of the three anti-Knight players failed to complete their four years at the university (and Neil Reed, the guy who said he'd been strangled, had been voted off the team by his teammates, not by Knight). The third, Butch Carter, had been chewed out by Knight when the coach discovered that Carter had made over $1,000 in long-distance calls on athletic department phones. Reed's supporters produced a video tape of the "choking" incident, which shows some kind of extremely brief physical contact between the two, followed by animated discussion. No one had to separate them.
As you might expect, the university has appointed some lawyers to look into the allegations and report back early this summer, but the journalists are in high dudgeon, calling for Knight's resignation, running polls on their websites, and interviewing anyone who claims to know anything. In short, a classic Borking, using the same methods, for the same reasons, as were used to pillory Robert Bork during his nomination hearings.
Just as Bork was a legend in the legal community, and had fundamentally reshaped American legal thought, so Knight's strategic thinking has influenced every successful basketball coach for the past quarter century. And for good reason: He currently holds fourth place among all-time winning coaches in the history of college basketball. He has won three national championships, numerous Big Ten championships, a seemingly endless streak of participation in the NCAA tournament and years of winning at least 20 games. His proteges coach at top schools from Duke and Iowa to Butler and Bowling Green. His star players include Hall of Fame players like Isiah Thomas and Quinn Buckner.
Like those who savaged Bork, Knight's attackers hate him because he is uncompromisingly conservative in his methods, and makes no secret of his contempt for the popular press and their fashionable slogans. Worse yet, he wins without the sleaze now rampant in big-time college sports. His program has never had the slightest taint of scandal, and Indiana players tend to stay four full years and graduate (as compared with, say, Cincinnati, where there have been only two four-year graduates in the past decade). Moreover, Knight does not give free rein to individual players. His superstars have to play tough man-to-man defense, or sit on the bench. These virtues are off-putting to many contemporary high-school stars, who view college merely as a short-term springboard to a professional basketball career, although this year's recruiting class is among the best in America.
Like Bork's accusers, the Knight critics ignore his many personal virtues. Knight is an exemplary member of the university community, personally contributes a lot of money to academic programs (he has long been one of the leading supporters of the school's outstanding Russian Studies Program), and contributes his significant wisdom to conferences and seminars on modern and military history. I had the pleasure of listening to him introduce David Halberstam a year and a half ago, when Knight explained in great detail why Halberstam was worth studying.
Like Bork, Knight has a quick tongue for fools and, like most successful coaches, lets his players know in no uncertain terms when he is dissatisfied with their efforts, and occasionally loses his self-control. He's a big personality, and his rampages are memorable. Like all of us, he regrets his moments of excess, which are then used by his enemies to call for his head.
But distinguished leaders like Bork and Knight are singled out for special punishment because they are politically incorrect, not because they are human.
We should celebrate them and support them precisely because they dare to be different, because they stand firm for traditional values, and because we must always fight the mob, whenever it rears its ugly head.
Michael Ledeen is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
