Bob Knight was the ‘villain’ who pushed Kentucky basketball to greater heights

Before Rick Pitino “turned heel” by taking the Louisville job, Bob Knight reigned supreme as the ultimate Kentucky men’s basketball coaching “villain.”

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, the battles between the long-time Indiana coach (1971-2000) and UK crackled with a fervor that made Wildcats-Hoosiers the most-compelling rivalry in college hoops.

Knight, who died Wednesday at age 83, coached against Kentucky 33 times — once as head man at Army, 32 times while leading Indiana. The 15 victories Knight achieved vs. UK are tied for the third most by any opposing coach ever against Kentucky.

After taking the Indiana job in 1971, Knight won his first five games and six of his first seven against the Wildcats. Yet the defining moments of Knight’s history with Kentucky came in a two-part melodrama during the 1974-75 season.

On Dec. 7, 1974, in the last minute of what was a 98-74 dismantling of Joe B. Hall’s Wildcats by Knight’s Hoosiers in Bloomington, the two head coaches exchanged words in front of the Kentucky bench.

At the end of that exchange, Hall turned to walk away. As he did, Knight reached up and cuffed him on the back of the head.

Knight long maintained the act was playful.

On a seething Kentucky bench, however, the action was perceived as “Bobby Knight acting like a bully,” ex-UK star Kevin Grevey once told me.

“The slap” forever altered the relationship between Hall and Knight. Until that day, they were fishing buddies and considered each other friends.

After the slap, it was war.

In his 2002 book “Knight: My Story,” the former Indiana head man wrote of Hall “From that moment on, I had no respect for the guy.”

During a 2003 interview, Hall used the same, exact phrase in reverse. “I had no respect for the guy,” the ex-UK coach said of his feelings toward Knight after the head slap.

Of course, the 1974-75 drama between Knight and Hall, Indiana and Kentucky, had a second act.

On March 22, 1975, in Dayton, Ohio, UK guards Mike Flynn and Jimmy Dan Conner — freed because Hall and his coaching staff had found a systemic flaw that could be exploited on the weak side of Knight’s sagging man-to-man defense — led the Cats to an epic 92-90 NCAA Tournament upset of the previously-unbeaten Hoosiers that sent Kentucky to the Final Four.

It was the only loss Knight’s signature Indiana team suffered over the 1974-75 and 1975-76 seasons.

To this day, some of us consider it the greatest win in Kentucky’s regal men’s basketball history.

From that day forward, UK went 17-10 against Knight, including winning seven of the final nine games against Hoosiers teams led by “The General.”

The other point of contention that festered between Kentucky and Knight involved off-the-court matters. Knight long boasted about his program’s adherence to NCAA amateurism strictures. The IU head man was not bashful in suggesting that UK was less rigid in its dedication to those ideals.

Yet as Knight’s volatile personality generated increasing incidents of erratic personal comportment, Kentucky backers would claim the occasional $100 handshake among booster and player was less an ethical transgression than choking a player, tossing a chair or throwing a vase over the head of a secretary.

In a sense, the states of Kentucky and Indiana have never really stopped having that debate.

Over Knight’s first 22 years as Indiana head man, he won 75.9 percent of his games and led the Hoosiers to 11 Big Ten regular-season titles, five NCAA Tournament Final Fours and three national championships — 1976, 1981 and 1987.

“He was one of the greatest teachers of basketball I’ve ever been around,” says Don Rutledge, the longtime, former college basketball referee.

However, in Knight’s final seven seasons on the IU bench, before one too many of his off-the-court behavioral issues finally cost him the Hoosiers head coaching job in 2000, he won only 65.9 percent of his games with no conference titles and no Final Fours.

Those final seven years for Knight at IU launched what has now been a nearly-three decade stretch of mostly mediocrity by the Indiana program. The Hoosiers have now endured double-digit losses in 24 of the past 29 seasons.

After his acrimonious parting with Indiana, Knight coached Texas Tech from 2001 into 2008, leading the Red Raiders to four NCAA Tournament appearances.

A little more than a year after his run in Lubbock ended, Knight’s complicated relationship with Kentucky had one more stunning twist.

In their book “Kentucky Basketball: Two Decades Behind the Scenes,” Tom Leach and Mike Pratt share a story from the 2009 UK coaching search that followed the ouster of Billy Gillispie.

“When we were doing the book, Mike said ‘I’ve got to tell you this story about Bobby Knight,’” Leach, the radio play-by-play announcer for UK football and men’s basketball, said Thursday morning.

Pratt, a former UK player and former color analyst on the UK basketball radio network, was helping then-University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd and athletics director Mitch Barnhart with the post-Gillispie search.

An intermediary, the veteran Kentucky sportswriter Billy Reed, reached out to Pratt and asked to go to lunch. At the lunch, Reed — a longtime friend of Bob Knight’s — told Pratt that “Coach Knight wants to put his hat in the ring” for the Kentucky job.

Reed, Pratt and now Knight have all subsequently passed away.

Says Leach: “When Mike told me that story, that one was a shocker. Threw me for a loop, I can tell you that.”

Coaches vs. Kentucky

The 13 opposing coaches who have achieved double-digit wins in games against the Kentucky men’s basketball program in descending order based on total victories vs. the Cats:

Dale Brown 18-33

Billy Donovan 17-29

Ray Mears 15-15

Bob Knight 15-18

Roy Skinner 14-18

Dean Smith 13-3

Kevin Stallings 12-23

Rick Barnes 11-11

Don DeVoe 11-14

Wimp Sanderson 11-18

Roy Williams 10-10

Bruce Pearl 10-17

C.M. Newton 10-32