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Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Review

This article is more than 13 years old.

When I spoke with Steve Delsohn and Mark Heisler, they maintained that they'd never intended to write Coach Bob Knight a valentine, and wouldn't have done so even if their biography had been authorized.

No danger there. Delshon and Heisler acknowledge that Knight has been an exceptionally successful basketball coach. Anybody who can read a win-loss column knows that. But by chronicling Bob Knight's collection of vulgar displays, physical attacks, and foul outbursts, they present a convincing case for Knight as sociopath.

It would be bad enough if Bob Knight were a singular, volatile freak tolerated on campus because his teams won and he raised money for the institutions employing him. But Delsohn and Heisler make it clear that the story of Bob Knight is more representative than people who aren't crazy about D-1 basketball and football might like to think. He has been and is a coach who is more powerful than the president of the university where his team plays. But he is not the only coach who can make such a claim. To some extent, Knight's story is as much the tale of the upside down priorities of a culture as it is of the self-destructive misadventures of a particularly grotesque bully.

This program aired on February 18, 2006. The audio for this program is not available.

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