Bobby Knight essays

Bobby Knight essays Bobby Knight, arguably the best college basketball coach ever and definitely one of the most controversial coaches ever. With a record of 661 wins and 240 losses at Indiana University as head coach, he ended his career there with a .734 % winning percentage. As I will show you, Bobby may have been controversial but with a record like that, he must have been doing something right and the Indiana Basketball program will never be the same. As Newsweek writer Pete Axthelm puts it, Bobby Knight is a boiling blend of brilliance and loyalty, fanaticism and temper. Frank Deford, a writer for Sports Illustrated magazine, says that Bobby always wanted to be a coach, officially expressing this desire in an autobiography he wrote when he was a junior in high school. Deford describes the especially close relationship between the young Knight and his basketball coach, Bill Shunkwiler. When other kids were hanging out, chasing, Bobby would come by Shunkwilers house and the two of them would sit and have milk and cookies and talk coach talk. After graduating from Ohio State in 1962, Knight was offered two coaching jobs at high schools in Ohio. The most lucrative of these involved coaching both basketball and football. The other offered less salary but was exclusively basketball. Knight chose the latter because, as he later told SI, I thought, if Im going to be a basketball coach I cant be diverted. I wanted vertical concentration. This single-mindedness benefited Knight almost immediately. Within a year he became assistant basketball coach at the United States Military Academy, and two years later, at age 24 he was elevated to head coach; a promotion that, according to Deford, stunned everybody. The youthful coach proceeded to take army, hardly a basketball power according to Time, to 4 National Invitational Tournament playoffs in 6 years. Ending his tenure at ...