Class, or the lack thereof, Part II

My buddy Paul will freak becuase I have posted twice in a 24 hour period, but this second one provides me the chance to speak out for someone, and surely ALOT of people will disagree with me.

Coach Robert Knight, I will miss you. Although I have not always agreed with everything you did, I really enjoyed watching you coach. Three events come to mind, of which two were you directly.
The first was a game your Hoosiers were playing, in South Bend, against the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. From an early age I have always been an Irish fan. Don't ask me why a boy raised Southern Baptist would root for the Irish, but I was from the days of Ara Parsegian. There are three basketball games the Irish played that I watched and remember vividly. I watched when they took down UCLA to end an 88-game winning streak. I watched them lose to Virginia Tech in the NIT finals (coached by Don DeVoe, whom was one out of the stable of coaches that was an assistant under you). But this story surrounds a game between Indiana and Notre Dame. It was early in the first half, and Bobby Knight was upset at the refs for bad calls on one end of the floor, and Digger Phelps, then the Irish coach, was upset at calls at the other end of the court. The two of them casually walked toward each other and started a conversation while the game went up and down the court, standing in front of the scorers table. This started some crazy fan reaction, and after one REALLY bad call, some trash was thrown onto the court by Irish fans. Coach Phelps got on the loudspeaker and demanded this behvior quit. I remember to this day thinking, "Wow, I wonder what those refs feel like right now."
The second was actually two events, one each of the summers of 1980 and 1981, in which I spent a week on campus of Indiana U, in Bloomington. I fell in love with the campus, and ultimately in love with the basketball team.
The third was watching a game one night in which you pulled a player off the court and chewed him out royally, on national television, and then sent him to the bench. After the game, when some reporter started harping on this player, you (in your usual press conference way) lit into this reporter saying what went on with you and the player was between you and him, and the team, and that was all that was said.

Granted, I have seen you do some things that even I questioned, the Jeremy Schaap interview actually being the worst, but they were few in my mind. I was very upset when you were let go in Indiana, and was happy to see you get hired by Texas Tech. I just wish you had gotten more of a chance to take that team to prominence, but I bet you laid some groundwork that will lead them to better times. If your son does not fare as well as you have, please remember the Schaap interview, although somewhere in my mind, I would bet that you have tried to discuss that one with Mr Schaap and put it behind the two of you.

Although most all of my friends have disagreed with me through the years, I think you were a class act, and I thank you for the great teams and games I got watch you coach. And for those friends who say "he wasn't class. Coach K, now thats class". Where do you think the Duke coach got his start?