Bob Hammel: Images of Bob Knight's early days send the mind to wandering

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

I read somewhere, “Anyone who ever said cleaning an attic can be done quickly can’t read.”

That’s a quotation spelled nostalgia, a dreamy state of transformation triggered by discovery of a photo album, letters or anything that reminds us of why we think of them as the good ol’ days.

So when The Herald-Times partnered with the Monroe County History Center to digitize pictures from more than 50 years ago — pictures taken by the late — and, hang the cliché, I’ll say it and mean it — great chief photographer Larry Crewell and his excellent staff, it took me down memory lane.

More: Bob Knight hiredFifty years ago, news broke about Bob Knight's hire at IU

The sports pictures were of the new guy in town at the new gym in town, just-turned-31 Bob Knight working in practice with players he was just getting to know, on a court that seemed tiny in an arena so gigantic most of its seats hadn’t been sat in yet. It was beneath a scoreboard clock that hadn’t registered its first official second and was heading toward a future that couldn’t at that time have been dreamed.

The striped warmup pants that were to launch a tradition probably were in the building, in boxes, unknown even then by the first who were to wear them.

Bob Knight talks to guard Frank Wilson while assistant Dave Bliss works with others in one of Knight's first IU practices in October 1971.
Bob Knight talks to guard Frank Wilson while assistant Dave Bliss works with others in one of Knight's first IU practices in October 1971.

This was fall 1971, when Assembly Hall was still getting assembled, dressed and polished up for its introduction, just as that first Bob Knight IU team was.

Its first guards were juniors Frank Wilson, on his way to being a career doctor, and Cornelius White, already by then IU’s first and only Bootsie. There hadn’t and hasn’t been another Joby, either – this one named Wright, a Georgian who had a year in when Wilson, White, John Ritter and two longtime buddies who had created still-hallowed legends together at Indianapolis Washington, George McGinnis and Steve Downing, filled things out. The group came in to end a bottoming-out IU basketball stretch that included four last-place Big Ten finishes in five years.

McGinnis’s one season may still be IU’s all-time best: 29.9 scoring average, 14.7 rebounds, two games in the 40s, 10 in the 30s — massive stuff for a collegiate introduction.

And departure.

The day before IU announced the hiring of the 30-year-old coach at Army, McGinnis announced he was entering the pros’ “hardship” draft, genuine in his case because two summers before his father had been killed in a workplace accident and his mother needed support.

Oh, boy, Knight and his basketball program also needed what McGinnis could have offered, but theirs was a whole different kind of need. And McGinnis’s choice was ratified in the best of ways, by his grateful mother and his own ultimate induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

More: IU scoring leadersHere are IU basketball's career scoring leaders

The buddy George left behind was to be Knight’s building block. One of those pictures shows Knight banging his butt into Downing’s to show one dimension of how he wanted the first real big man he had coached to play in the post. Downing was to do some showing of his own providing the Knight years with propulsion in their first two years of take-off.

Bob Knight demonstrates post positioning with Steve Downing during practice in Knight's first IU season, 1971-72.
Bob Knight demonstrates post positioning with Steve Downing during practice in Knight's first IU season, 1971-72.

Five nights later, Downing did some more persuasive selling. In the only IU-Kentucky game involving Knight and Adolph Rupp, played at packed Freedom Hall in Louisville, Downing — limping visibly on a sore knee — played all 50 minutes of a 90-89 double-overtime game that IU won because of the most spectacular double-double in Hoosier history: 48 points, 25 rebounds.

In Assembly Hall’s first game, with 14,853 in the stands, Downing had 31 points and 26 rebounds in an 84-77 win over Ball State. With 51 seasons and nearly 800 games played there now, Downing’s first-night 26 still is the Assembly Hall rebounds record.

Hammel: Recalling IU's 1st triple doubleDowning burst into spotlight with IU's 1st triple double

But there was still the matter of selling Bob Knight basketball: the idea of defense-first, of putting the highest offensive priority not on getting downcourt fast — Hoosier-fast — but on getting a “good” shot every possession, however long, however many passes it took.

Bob Knight during the post game press conference after his 500th win in 1989.
Bob Knight during the post game press conference after his 500th win in 1989.

In the 1930s, IU coach Everett Dean had written one of the first books on fast-break basketball. He coached and then was succeeded by Branch McCracken, nationally associated with firewagon basketball and two NCAA-championship banners on the wall to tout it. “Hurryin’ Hoosiers” they called his teams, and Indiana fans loved the style.

They weren’t all that sure they were ready to go to 51-50 games, to support a philosophy already attached to this new coach: four passes, every possession before putting up a shot. And when ahead late in the game: don’t even look at the basketball, stall and draw fouls.

During the 59-56 win over Kansas, the first recognized national power to come into The Hall, there was a classic late-game moment when Knight ordered his team into a late-game stall, and fans didn’t welcome it, with isolated shouts of “Shoot! Shoot!” piercing the quiet air. Bootsie, the only player of Knight’s entire IU era who didn’t address him with Coach, dribbled his way close enough to the sideline to yell, “Don’t worry, Chief, I don’t hear them.”

Indiana coach Bob Knight talks to his team in their locker room during the 1976 NCAA Final Four in Baton Rouge, LA.
Indiana coach Bob Knight talks to his team in their locker room during the 1976 NCAA Final Four in Baton Rouge, LA.

Beating Rupp, in Kentucky — the new guy was home free. And the era was launched.

None of that was in those pictures, which advanced from pre-season practice shots to first-year in-game photos, with some focused on that black-haired guy in ties and New York-tailored sports coats giving the word, exhorting whole new dimensions.

What was in those pictures was what prompted that person to say that thing about cleaning attics. It doesn’t take much to send a mind to roaming.

Bob Hammel covered sports and wrote columns for The Herald-Times for 40 years.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bob Hammel recalls Bob Knight's early days at Indiana University