HAVING HAD THE PLEASURE OF BOB KNIGHT AT HIS FINEST, WHAT HAPPENED?

Somehow, he couldn’t have been more personable in meeting us one evening in Bloomington, which makes me wonder for life about the biggest villain in sport’s long-disdained yesteryear

     He preferred darkness in Assembly Hall, demanding we sit in chairs and wait for him after practice. This was too long to wait for anyone, even him. Finally, by surprise, as if to startle me and another columnist from Cincinnati, he showed up from behind and said, “Hello, I’m Bob Knight. What can I do for you?”

     What he did was astound me. There was no hostility, no I’m-the-man-and-you’re-peons. For almost an hour, Knight gave us what he should have presented to the world forever: A pleasing look at what he had to offer college basketball and the kids who played. He wasn’t in a mood to punch a cop in Puerto Rico, didn’t care about throwing a chair across a court in a game, didn’t want to shove an enemy fan into a garbage can.

     Nor was he the lunatic who wrapped his hands around a player’s neck, which led to his career demise at Indiana, where locals celebrated him like a supreme being and allowed him to act as a fool despite horrific states of mind. Nor was he the tomfool who told interviewer Connie Chung, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” He seemed to know where he was headed during that year’s NCAA tournament, despite an incident days later in my town, where he argued with officials on press row and pounded a home telephone.

     “I think coach Knight is smart enough to know not to push it too far,” said James Brown, talking to Jim Nantz on the CBS broadcast.

     This was 1987. Weeks later, Knight and the Hoosiers won their third and final championship. He should have left then, I’d say. Waging a monstrous psyche designed to prove he knew more about coaching, more than anyone who ever lived, he wasted too many years — and ours — in a jaded journey to lost opportunities and a depraved reputation. Never in my career was I more revolted by a villain who couldn’t differentiate between teaching schemes and dominating sports with a twisted conscience. In 1999, after choking Neil Reed in practice, he somehow was suspended only three games by president Myles Brand, who let Hoosiers fans make the sad call. By the next year, when a 19-year-old student greeted him by saying, “What’s up, Knight?” — and was grabbed by the arm and cursed — Brand offered him the chance to resign.

     Robert Montgomery Knight, as Dick Vitale called him, made Indiana fire him.

     Never in the raging history of human competition has a call altered sports for the better. From that point on, 2000 until about a quarter-century later, no coach ever will choke or assault a player the way Knight routinely did. One of my better writing lines was saying his protege, Mike Krzyzewski, took the very best of his educator and left alone the absolute worst. “We lost one of the greatest coaches in the history of basketball today. Clearly, he was one of a kind,” Krzyzewski said Wednesday. To this hour, his players are stupefied by his volatility, such as when he squeezed his testicles, cracked a clipboard over his head and forced players to bark like dogs while running laps. He used racism. He used sexism, with constant “c—’’ abuse. He used whatever he could use.

     He was a rogue long after leaving the game at Texas Tech, going so far during the 2016 presidential campaign to say of Donald Trump, “That son of a bitch can play for me!” Trump would have tried to dog it. Knight would have run him off. Wrote Trump: “The World just lost an incredible person, the Great Bobby Knight. He was not just an award-winning and record-breaking Coach, he was loyal to his Players, to his State, and to our Country—Tough as nails, but a big heart. When he Endorsed me, it was like the whole Great World of Indiana opened up happy and wide.” The whole Great World, he said.

     “I’ve simply tried to do what I think is best," Knight said in 2007, as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played at a celebration. “Regrets? Sure. Just like the song. I have regrets. I wish I could have done things better at times. I wish I would have had a better answer, a better way, at times. But just like he said, I did it my way, and when I look back on it, I don't think my way was all that bad.”

     I’m not a fan of writing obituaries. Who ever could describe what’s in his head but Knight himself? He died at 83 and had been in bad health for years. What I know is that the man, in the backwater of the 1970s and 1980s, set a standard for how coaches wrongfully should treat kids. “One of the things he said to our 1976 team, which I was fortunate enough to be a part of, was that you may never see another team like this again,” said Quinn Buckner, now the chair of the school’s trustees and then a mainstay on the last undefeated NCAA men’s team. “Well, I don't know that we will ever see another coach like him again."

     Since then, Knight’s is a model we avoid in life.

     “It is with heavy hearts that we share that Coach Bob Knight passed away at his home in Bloomington surrounded by his family,” said a statement from his loved ones. “We are grateful for all the thoughts and prayers, and appreciate the continued respect for our privacy as Coach requested a private family gathering, which is being honored.”

     Let’s thank him for progress.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.