Bored and thought i'd share if anyone wants a blast from the past. Sorry it's all in the body.
By Dan Wetzel
SportsLine.com Senior Writer
EL PASO, Texas -- I was told to remember to tote the tequila. Coach would grab the guns.
When you are dealing with Don Haskins, when you are getting an order from a 72-year-old Hall of Famer, a walking, talking John Wayne and a West Texas icon, you do as you are told. So the El Senor tequila was packed for the trip (in case of thirst), right next to the guns (in case of hunt). This was about going to Lubbock, going to Bob Knight, going back in time.
Bob Knight is feeling very much at home since moving on to Texas Tech.(Getty Images)
It was a trip about stepping into a Merle Haggard song, stepping into a different generation of basketball coaches (Knight being one of the last of the breed) and stepping into the desert, around the mountain, across the south plains and back through the years eventually uniting two Hall of Famers, who possess 1,522 career victories and damn near a million stories.
Want to hear one?
"Abe Lemons comes to town last year, before our first game here," says Bob Knight in front of a crowd of friends after dinner last Friday in Lubbock. "He gets up and tells stories for an hour. He says there was this one time he was getting killed by the refs."
Knight begins imitating Lemons, the colorful ex-coach who passed away this year.
"I called the ref over and said, 'Billy, next time you come to town I want you to bring your wife.' He says, 'Why Abe?' I said, 'Because then while you are here, you'll have someone to (expletive) other than me.'"
This is Bob Knight doing Abe Lemons in a Chinese restaurant in West Texas.
This is the good stuff. No one would have been more honored at the imitation or laughed harder than Abe.
The game, today's game, continues to get taken over by the hucksters, the phonies, the vanilla personalities. As much as it is Championship Week, this is scandal week in college hoops. The Harricks. The Bonnies. The Bulldogs at Fresno State.
But this trip is not about them. No phonies allowed here. This is about a dying breed of basketball coach who got into the game never dreaming it might make you wealthy. Who weren't afraid to be rough around the edges, to maybe gamble in golf or hustle pool, to maybe drink a little El Senor. Who never dreamed of taking a test for a player because there was still honor in the business and, well, let's face it ...
"I would have flunked," laughs Haskins. "I used to teach history as a high school coach, and I was one page ahead of the kids."
The kind of coach who is aptly described as a "man's man" could cuss like a sailor and spent his life completely focused on perfecting the young game of basketball. And not a whole lot else. History included.
"I hate to be stupid," says Haskins, staring at a story in the paper about the death of a children's television personality, "but who the hell is Mr. Rogers?"
Haskins became a high school coach because he wasn't sure he knew how to do anything else. He only got to the college level at Texas Western (now UTEP) because the athletic director figured he was a big guy and might be able to crack heads and keep the football dorm under control. Five years later, he won a national championship. Thirty later, he was in the Hall of Fame.
His buddy Knight wanted so desperately to be a college coach he enlisted in the Army -- went through boot camp and everything -- just so he could be an assistant at West Point. He, too, is in the Hall of Fame, after winning three NCAA titles and becoming an international celebrity.
Here is what guys like these are good at: coaching defense, putting together game plans, telling stories. Here is what they aren't good at: dealing with administrators, newspapermen, officials and players who won't get back on defense.
A lot of people figure Knight is the most volatile, unreasonable coach ever. That's funny. More accurately, he just happened to work at a high profile job. There used to be a bunch of guys just like him, Haskins, an old cowboy nicknamed The Bear, perhaps the most similar. There just aren't many left. They are dead, retired or named John Chaney. So the few remaining get labeled and talk-radioed into infinity.
Of a younger generation, there are still a few -- a Bob Huggins, a Jeff Ruland -- but not many.
Today it is about media relations, Armani suits and getting a contract extension. Be boring. Be nice. Wire a player 300 bucks. What are you going to do? It's the day and the age. National television at nearly every game, million dollar contracts up for grabs, a business that used to be about basketball and now is about getting rich, getting famous.
So we take a trip. It is a sunny Friday morning in downtown El Paso. Tequila? Check. Guns? Check. A trusty driver in El Paso's Glenn Keller? Check. Come with us, back in time.
Only one way: his way
"One day, I almost got fired," says Haskins, as we sit in a roadside diner/trinket shop in "downtown" Corundas, Texas, 100-miles east of El Paso. He's talking about his first job as a high school coach, in the then-248 person (now 253) town of Benjamin, Texas.
Haskins was 25, his playing career in the old industrial league was over and with a wife and a son, he became a coach to make a living.
Hall of Famer Don Haskins led UTEP to 17 20-plus win seasons.(Getty Images)
There were drawbacks, such as the time he pulled up in front of the humble home in Benjamin for the first time. His wife, Mary, understandably frowned at the dilapidated frame and weeds in the yard. Haskins convinced her to give it a try only to have her get rattled by a rattlesnake on the front steps. Haskins killed it with a rake.
To pay the bills, he also drove a school bus, coached both the boys and girls hoops teams and in the fall took over the six-man football team, even though the first game he ever saw was also the first he ever coached.
Instead of treating this like a small town pursuit, he went at it with the same intensity his college coach, iron-fisted Henry Iba, did at Oklahoma A&M. Four-hour practices. Intense teaching. No water breaks. It was the only way he knew how.
Which meant he almost got fired.
"We were on the road, and my boys got beat by Noodle, Texas, by one point, 31-30," Haskins says. "And Paint Creek beat the girls in a one-pointer. I was upset. I mean, I take this serious. I wanted to commit hara-kiri. So I'm driving the bus home and I got the girls on one side, the boys on the other and there is no talking. They don't talk on my time.
"We get to Benjamin and instead of taking them home, we practice. We go until 3 in the morning. I got the girls on one side of the gym, the boys on the other, and I am giving them hell. God I was hard on those kids," he chuckles in half embarrassment.
"Well, the next day, here come the parents. 'What is my daughter doing practicing until 3?' And all that. Hell, I don't blame them now. So there is a school board meeting called, and they are going to give me hell, reprimand me, maybe fire me. But then all the players came, every damn one of them, and they supported me. The school board did nothing."
If this sounds like something out of Hoosiers, well, art imitates life all the time. Back in the 1950s, coaching hoops in the small panhandle towns of Texas wasn't that much different than small town Indiana, except the people didn't really care that much about basketball.
But Haskins did. Maybe too much. Guys such as Haskins and Knight have no idea how to turn off the intensity. It's what shocks fans today. They take losses almost like a death in the family. They can't tolerate mistakes. Right or wrong, it's how they are wired.
Take the time Haskins set the unofficial single-game record for most technical fouls in state history.
"I get out on the court to arguing a call and the ref says, 'Haskins, get back to the bench. You are getting one technical for every step.' So I start back and by the time I hear 13, 14, 15, I am taking big steps."
How intense of a coach was this? That was a girls game. In the first minute no less.
"The ole girl hits about 14 of the 16 technical foul shots," he says as we round the Guadalupe Mountains -- where the Road Runner cartoons must have been filmed -- and head into the flat land of southeast New Mexico. "We're down 14-2 to start the game. Hell of a coaching job that night, huh?"
The funny thing is he always did a hell of a coaching job. You can't win 719 games at UTEP any other way.
Knight isn't much different. His first year as a head coach, 1965-66 at West Point, ended in the NIT in New York. Army lost to Brigham Young. There was a tough call at the end. Just 25 years old, Knight followed the refs into their locker room to continue the "debate," then went to the press conference and ripped them. The next day, the New York media wound up hammering him, this brash rookie coach.
A dispute with the refs? A beating in the papers?
"That portended things to come, didn't it?" laughs one of Knight's players on that team, Dick Murray.
Only because these guys never change.
Haskins was so hardheaded and competitive it hardly comes as a surprise that in 1966, the same year Knight was in the NIT, he led Texas Western College to the NCAA championship. The game is famous because he started five black players for the first time in a title game and beat an all-white Kentucky team.
This was dangerous. The old coaching axiom back then was you played two blacks at home, three on the road and four if you were losing. But never five. Alumni didn't like five.
"I was just playing my best players," said Haskins, as simply as you'd expect, as we roll through Hobbs, N.M., and into the south plains of Texas.
By doing so he created what has been referred to as college basketball's Brown vs. the Board of Education. Within two years the previous all-white Southwest, Southeast and Atlantic Coast Conferences integrated.
"He literally got thousands and thousands of black kids scholarships," said one of his former players, Nolan Richardson. For his effort, Haskins got 40,000 pieces of hate mail and an FBI detail the next season. But he never flinched. He never backed down.
A corner at the Taste of China
Knight, a small-town kid from Ohio, played for Fred Taylor at Ohio State. Haskins, a small-town kid from Oklahoma, played for Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M. Different states. Same situation. Both coaches won national titles. Both coached a game based on fundamentals. Both are in the Hall of Fame, just like their former players.
Back then players and coaches didn't have a real conversation until after graduation. Then they became best friends. But during your playing days, there was no tough love, just tough coaches.
These guys were out of the Bear Bryant/Junction Boys era. Taylor's attention to detail is a thing of legend. Iba, who practically invented defense, used to stage three-a-day practices, three hours each session during school break.
"We hated Christmas," said Haskins. "You go 9 to 12, 2 to 5 and 7 to 10. And no water. Each day he'd pick on one player and you'd never leave the floor. It was hell. Well, I got in the barrel one day and during the last session I am out there and I can feel the ball of my foot moving. And we are scrimmaging full speed.
"Well, the thing ends and I am walking off the court on the sides of my feet. I can't walk on the ball of my foot. And the school president is there, he's friends with Mr. Iba, and he says, 'Son, are you OK?' I try to straighten up and said, 'Yes sir, I'm fine.' And he says, 'Well you should be, you didn't do a goddamn thing all day.'"
And Neil Reed thought he had it bad?
"I get in the training room and the ball of my foot falls off," says Haskins. "They had to tape it back on."
"The ball of your foot?" laughs Knight, who is sitting next to Haskins at dinner.
"Hurt like hell," Haskins deadpans.
Knight laughs some more. Everyone laughs. There are 23 people in one corner of the Taste of China buffet on the south side of Lubbock, and Haskins and Knight are telling stories, which means everyone else is listening up and listening up good.
"You guys always had the fear of God in you when it came to Henry," said Knight.
"You would too if your foot ever fell off," said Haskins.
This is a great night, but not an unusual one for Knight. This is what he does. This is who he is. For all the controversy, all the negativity, all the drama he creates, this is Knight at his personable, loyal best. This is where his base of power comes from.
When we first arrive at the United Spirit Arena in Lubbock, about 40 people are already in the stands to watch Knight's Texas Tech Red Raiders run through a final practice before the next day's game with Texas. It is like this before just about every home game, a This Is Your Life, Bob Knight descending on campus.
There were people he knew growing up. His junior high coach. West Point guys. Indiana guys. Former players and former assistants. A retired one-star general was there. Hunting buddies, fishing buddies, old coaches, old friends.
Knight's loyalty is legend, and this is to see it in action. This is why Knight will always have supporters and always have kids wanting to play for him. If you can make it through, you gain entry into a unique and tight-knit clique. If you are a Knight guy, you are always a Knight guy. And you always take care of other Knight guys. No questions asked.
When he won his 800th game, the letters of congratulations rolled in from the power set of the nation, a veritable who's who of business, politics, entertainment and sport. The most impressive was a personalized handwritten note from none other than George W. Bush, president of the United States of America.
That doesn't happen for many college basketball coaches. But then again, neither does this scene.
The night before a critical game, the last thing most coaches want to do is entertain. But Knight does it with a smile on his face. He spends time with each and every visitor at practice. Then he invites them all to dinner.
Most come, if only to hear the stories that go on and on. Tonight it is two old friends, two old basketball coaching legends, two products of a long-ago value system. One of them still trying to deal with the reality of the present, where for some reason you are more accepted if you wear a fake smile, speak in sound bites, cheat and have an assistant do someone's course work.
But that's today. This is about yesterday, such as the summer of 1971, when Mr. Iba was running the USA Basketball team. Haskins was an assistant. Knight was still a fairly anonymous young coach and had just taken the Indiana job. Haskins got him to Colorado Springs, Colo., to help out and learn.
One of Knight's jobs was, get this, serving as a referee in team scrimmages. Knight figured it would be a good idea to don a striped referee shirt, make it look good and all. This wasn't such a good idea. If you think Knight was tough on officials, you never saw Iba. Just by wearing the shirt of the enemy, Knight risked alienation.
"I go over to (Knight)," says Haskins, "and say, 'Hey, the old man is going to like you. But don't wear that thing ever again.'"
Knight laughs.
"OK, Wetzel, write this down. We are in a bar in Colorado Springs that week. Don, myself and few other coaches. There is guy who comes over and tries to get us to play pool. No one wants to play. And he kind of gets on our asses a bit more, so finally Haskins says, 'OK, I'll try.'
"I think they are playing 9-ball, and it is $1 dollar a game. Don loses the first two and says, 'OK, let's do this. Let's play for $5, then you have a chance to win $3 and I have a chance to win my money back.' The guy agrees.
"The next 50 minutes they play and Don takes him for $130. Which is a lot of money back then. The guy finally quits. Never says a word. Don comes back over and nudges me and says, 'I could have beaten that son of a
left-handed.'"
This is the good stuff.
"No, no, no don't write that," laughs Haskins, "I have an image."
"An image?" says Knight. "Write that."
By Dan Wetzel
SportsLine.com Senior Writer
EL PASO, Texas -- I was told to remember to tote the tequila. Coach would grab the guns.
When you are dealing with Don Haskins, when you are getting an order from a 72-year-old Hall of Famer, a walking, talking John Wayne and a West Texas icon, you do as you are told. So the El Senor tequila was packed for the trip (in case of thirst), right next to the guns (in case of hunt). This was about going to Lubbock, going to Bob Knight, going back in time.
Bob Knight is feeling very much at home since moving on to Texas Tech.(Getty Images)
It was a trip about stepping into a Merle Haggard song, stepping into a different generation of basketball coaches (Knight being one of the last of the breed) and stepping into the desert, around the mountain, across the south plains and back through the years eventually uniting two Hall of Famers, who possess 1,522 career victories and damn near a million stories.
Want to hear one?
"Abe Lemons comes to town last year, before our first game here," says Bob Knight in front of a crowd of friends after dinner last Friday in Lubbock. "He gets up and tells stories for an hour. He says there was this one time he was getting killed by the refs."
Knight begins imitating Lemons, the colorful ex-coach who passed away this year.
"I called the ref over and said, 'Billy, next time you come to town I want you to bring your wife.' He says, 'Why Abe?' I said, 'Because then while you are here, you'll have someone to (expletive) other than me.'"
This is Bob Knight doing Abe Lemons in a Chinese restaurant in West Texas.
This is the good stuff. No one would have been more honored at the imitation or laughed harder than Abe.
The game, today's game, continues to get taken over by the hucksters, the phonies, the vanilla personalities. As much as it is Championship Week, this is scandal week in college hoops. The Harricks. The Bonnies. The Bulldogs at Fresno State.
But this trip is not about them. No phonies allowed here. This is about a dying breed of basketball coach who got into the game never dreaming it might make you wealthy. Who weren't afraid to be rough around the edges, to maybe gamble in golf or hustle pool, to maybe drink a little El Senor. Who never dreamed of taking a test for a player because there was still honor in the business and, well, let's face it ...
"I would have flunked," laughs Haskins. "I used to teach history as a high school coach, and I was one page ahead of the kids."
The kind of coach who is aptly described as a "man's man" could cuss like a sailor and spent his life completely focused on perfecting the young game of basketball. And not a whole lot else. History included.
"I hate to be stupid," says Haskins, staring at a story in the paper about the death of a children's television personality, "but who the hell is Mr. Rogers?"
Haskins became a high school coach because he wasn't sure he knew how to do anything else. He only got to the college level at Texas Western (now UTEP) because the athletic director figured he was a big guy and might be able to crack heads and keep the football dorm under control. Five years later, he won a national championship. Thirty later, he was in the Hall of Fame.
His buddy Knight wanted so desperately to be a college coach he enlisted in the Army -- went through boot camp and everything -- just so he could be an assistant at West Point. He, too, is in the Hall of Fame, after winning three NCAA titles and becoming an international celebrity.
Here is what guys like these are good at: coaching defense, putting together game plans, telling stories. Here is what they aren't good at: dealing with administrators, newspapermen, officials and players who won't get back on defense.
A lot of people figure Knight is the most volatile, unreasonable coach ever. That's funny. More accurately, he just happened to work at a high profile job. There used to be a bunch of guys just like him, Haskins, an old cowboy nicknamed The Bear, perhaps the most similar. There just aren't many left. They are dead, retired or named John Chaney. So the few remaining get labeled and talk-radioed into infinity.
Of a younger generation, there are still a few -- a Bob Huggins, a Jeff Ruland -- but not many.
Today it is about media relations, Armani suits and getting a contract extension. Be boring. Be nice. Wire a player 300 bucks. What are you going to do? It's the day and the age. National television at nearly every game, million dollar contracts up for grabs, a business that used to be about basketball and now is about getting rich, getting famous.
So we take a trip. It is a sunny Friday morning in downtown El Paso. Tequila? Check. Guns? Check. A trusty driver in El Paso's Glenn Keller? Check. Come with us, back in time.
Only one way: his way
"One day, I almost got fired," says Haskins, as we sit in a roadside diner/trinket shop in "downtown" Corundas, Texas, 100-miles east of El Paso. He's talking about his first job as a high school coach, in the then-248 person (now 253) town of Benjamin, Texas.
Haskins was 25, his playing career in the old industrial league was over and with a wife and a son, he became a coach to make a living.
Hall of Famer Don Haskins led UTEP to 17 20-plus win seasons.(Getty Images)
There were drawbacks, such as the time he pulled up in front of the humble home in Benjamin for the first time. His wife, Mary, understandably frowned at the dilapidated frame and weeds in the yard. Haskins convinced her to give it a try only to have her get rattled by a rattlesnake on the front steps. Haskins killed it with a rake.
To pay the bills, he also drove a school bus, coached both the boys and girls hoops teams and in the fall took over the six-man football team, even though the first game he ever saw was also the first he ever coached.
Instead of treating this like a small town pursuit, he went at it with the same intensity his college coach, iron-fisted Henry Iba, did at Oklahoma A&M. Four-hour practices. Intense teaching. No water breaks. It was the only way he knew how.
Which meant he almost got fired.
"We were on the road, and my boys got beat by Noodle, Texas, by one point, 31-30," Haskins says. "And Paint Creek beat the girls in a one-pointer. I was upset. I mean, I take this serious. I wanted to commit hara-kiri. So I'm driving the bus home and I got the girls on one side, the boys on the other and there is no talking. They don't talk on my time.
"We get to Benjamin and instead of taking them home, we practice. We go until 3 in the morning. I got the girls on one side of the gym, the boys on the other, and I am giving them hell. God I was hard on those kids," he chuckles in half embarrassment.
"Well, the next day, here come the parents. 'What is my daughter doing practicing until 3?' And all that. Hell, I don't blame them now. So there is a school board meeting called, and they are going to give me hell, reprimand me, maybe fire me. But then all the players came, every damn one of them, and they supported me. The school board did nothing."
If this sounds like something out of Hoosiers, well, art imitates life all the time. Back in the 1950s, coaching hoops in the small panhandle towns of Texas wasn't that much different than small town Indiana, except the people didn't really care that much about basketball.
But Haskins did. Maybe too much. Guys such as Haskins and Knight have no idea how to turn off the intensity. It's what shocks fans today. They take losses almost like a death in the family. They can't tolerate mistakes. Right or wrong, it's how they are wired.
Take the time Haskins set the unofficial single-game record for most technical fouls in state history.
"I get out on the court to arguing a call and the ref says, 'Haskins, get back to the bench. You are getting one technical for every step.' So I start back and by the time I hear 13, 14, 15, I am taking big steps."
How intense of a coach was this? That was a girls game. In the first minute no less.
"The ole girl hits about 14 of the 16 technical foul shots," he says as we round the Guadalupe Mountains -- where the Road Runner cartoons must have been filmed -- and head into the flat land of southeast New Mexico. "We're down 14-2 to start the game. Hell of a coaching job that night, huh?"
The funny thing is he always did a hell of a coaching job. You can't win 719 games at UTEP any other way.
Knight isn't much different. His first year as a head coach, 1965-66 at West Point, ended in the NIT in New York. Army lost to Brigham Young. There was a tough call at the end. Just 25 years old, Knight followed the refs into their locker room to continue the "debate," then went to the press conference and ripped them. The next day, the New York media wound up hammering him, this brash rookie coach.
A dispute with the refs? A beating in the papers?
"That portended things to come, didn't it?" laughs one of Knight's players on that team, Dick Murray.
Only because these guys never change.
Haskins was so hardheaded and competitive it hardly comes as a surprise that in 1966, the same year Knight was in the NIT, he led Texas Western College to the NCAA championship. The game is famous because he started five black players for the first time in a title game and beat an all-white Kentucky team.
This was dangerous. The old coaching axiom back then was you played two blacks at home, three on the road and four if you were losing. But never five. Alumni didn't like five.
"I was just playing my best players," said Haskins, as simply as you'd expect, as we roll through Hobbs, N.M., and into the south plains of Texas.
By doing so he created what has been referred to as college basketball's Brown vs. the Board of Education. Within two years the previous all-white Southwest, Southeast and Atlantic Coast Conferences integrated.
"He literally got thousands and thousands of black kids scholarships," said one of his former players, Nolan Richardson. For his effort, Haskins got 40,000 pieces of hate mail and an FBI detail the next season. But he never flinched. He never backed down.
A corner at the Taste of China
Knight, a small-town kid from Ohio, played for Fred Taylor at Ohio State. Haskins, a small-town kid from Oklahoma, played for Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M. Different states. Same situation. Both coaches won national titles. Both coached a game based on fundamentals. Both are in the Hall of Fame, just like their former players.
Back then players and coaches didn't have a real conversation until after graduation. Then they became best friends. But during your playing days, there was no tough love, just tough coaches.
These guys were out of the Bear Bryant/Junction Boys era. Taylor's attention to detail is a thing of legend. Iba, who practically invented defense, used to stage three-a-day practices, three hours each session during school break.
"We hated Christmas," said Haskins. "You go 9 to 12, 2 to 5 and 7 to 10. And no water. Each day he'd pick on one player and you'd never leave the floor. It was hell. Well, I got in the barrel one day and during the last session I am out there and I can feel the ball of my foot moving. And we are scrimmaging full speed.
"Well, the thing ends and I am walking off the court on the sides of my feet. I can't walk on the ball of my foot. And the school president is there, he's friends with Mr. Iba, and he says, 'Son, are you OK?' I try to straighten up and said, 'Yes sir, I'm fine.' And he says, 'Well you should be, you didn't do a goddamn thing all day.'"
And Neil Reed thought he had it bad?
"I get in the training room and the ball of my foot falls off," says Haskins. "They had to tape it back on."
"The ball of your foot?" laughs Knight, who is sitting next to Haskins at dinner.
"Hurt like hell," Haskins deadpans.
Knight laughs some more. Everyone laughs. There are 23 people in one corner of the Taste of China buffet on the south side of Lubbock, and Haskins and Knight are telling stories, which means everyone else is listening up and listening up good.
"You guys always had the fear of God in you when it came to Henry," said Knight.
"You would too if your foot ever fell off," said Haskins.
This is a great night, but not an unusual one for Knight. This is what he does. This is who he is. For all the controversy, all the negativity, all the drama he creates, this is Knight at his personable, loyal best. This is where his base of power comes from.
When we first arrive at the United Spirit Arena in Lubbock, about 40 people are already in the stands to watch Knight's Texas Tech Red Raiders run through a final practice before the next day's game with Texas. It is like this before just about every home game, a This Is Your Life, Bob Knight descending on campus.
There were people he knew growing up. His junior high coach. West Point guys. Indiana guys. Former players and former assistants. A retired one-star general was there. Hunting buddies, fishing buddies, old coaches, old friends.
Knight's loyalty is legend, and this is to see it in action. This is why Knight will always have supporters and always have kids wanting to play for him. If you can make it through, you gain entry into a unique and tight-knit clique. If you are a Knight guy, you are always a Knight guy. And you always take care of other Knight guys. No questions asked.
When he won his 800th game, the letters of congratulations rolled in from the power set of the nation, a veritable who's who of business, politics, entertainment and sport. The most impressive was a personalized handwritten note from none other than George W. Bush, president of the United States of America.
That doesn't happen for many college basketball coaches. But then again, neither does this scene.
The night before a critical game, the last thing most coaches want to do is entertain. But Knight does it with a smile on his face. He spends time with each and every visitor at practice. Then he invites them all to dinner.
Most come, if only to hear the stories that go on and on. Tonight it is two old friends, two old basketball coaching legends, two products of a long-ago value system. One of them still trying to deal with the reality of the present, where for some reason you are more accepted if you wear a fake smile, speak in sound bites, cheat and have an assistant do someone's course work.
But that's today. This is about yesterday, such as the summer of 1971, when Mr. Iba was running the USA Basketball team. Haskins was an assistant. Knight was still a fairly anonymous young coach and had just taken the Indiana job. Haskins got him to Colorado Springs, Colo., to help out and learn.
One of Knight's jobs was, get this, serving as a referee in team scrimmages. Knight figured it would be a good idea to don a striped referee shirt, make it look good and all. This wasn't such a good idea. If you think Knight was tough on officials, you never saw Iba. Just by wearing the shirt of the enemy, Knight risked alienation.
"I go over to (Knight)," says Haskins, "and say, 'Hey, the old man is going to like you. But don't wear that thing ever again.'"
Knight laughs.
"OK, Wetzel, write this down. We are in a bar in Colorado Springs that week. Don, myself and few other coaches. There is guy who comes over and tries to get us to play pool. No one wants to play. And he kind of gets on our asses a bit more, so finally Haskins says, 'OK, I'll try.'
"I think they are playing 9-ball, and it is $1 dollar a game. Don loses the first two and says, 'OK, let's do this. Let's play for $5, then you have a chance to win $3 and I have a chance to win my money back.' The guy agrees.
"The next 50 minutes they play and Don takes him for $130. Which is a lot of money back then. The guy finally quits. Never says a word. Don comes back over and nudges me and says, 'I could have beaten that son of a
left-handed.'" This is the good stuff.
"No, no, no don't write that," laughs Haskins, "I have an image."
"An image?" says Knight. "Write that."
