Hoop Dreams

A crimson Knight?

by Jason Vest

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA -- For the older, wiser Indiana University alumni who live in this normally tranquil town, Sunday marked the end of a long local Knightmare. But for the youngsters reared to believe that "The General" was invincible, news of Bob Knight's firing as IU's head football coach ignited an explosion of anger that made the coach's previous chair-throwing, curse-up-a-blue-streak outbursts seem tepid by comparison. Uprooting everything from signs to lampposts -- and even statuary -- thousands of IU students rampaged over the campus Sunday night, emulating their fallen idol with expletive-laced exhortations calling for the death of IU president Myles Brand.

Knight's cult of personality may have grown unmanageable, but as Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews sees it, IU's loss could be Harvard's gain. The day after Knight's termination, Mathews, a Harvard alum, sent an e- mail to his son Joe -- a Los Angeles Times reporter and, more important, a member of the Harvard Crimson executive board -- suggesting that the younger Mathews encourage the Crimson staff to mount a campaign for Harvard to hire Knight.

"All of his excesses, which apparently seem too awful at a place like IU, where people care about basketball, become mere eccentricities, even charming eccentricities, at a place like Harvard," explains the elder Mathews. "And not only would he provide a lot of copy for the Crimson staff, he might actually help the Harvard basketball team . . . We'd love Bob. He'd add verve and panache." A pause. "And we'll take his players, too."

The younger Mathews says that although he's heard Crimson-related suggestions from his father before, he rarely passes them on to Crimson editors. This one, however, made the cut. "It would seem to make a lot of sense," he says. "I'm virtually certain that the team has never won . . . in 90 years of basketball." No response yet from the Crimson editors, however.

If Harvard were successful in landing Knight (and there likely would be protests aplenty, though most students are probably too young to recall the coach's infamous 1984 quip "If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"), every reporter's dream would be to witness a run-in between the recently relocated coach and back-for-a-visit Celtics alum Larry Bird. Even old partisans of Knight haven't forgotten or forgiven how the General caused the young Bird to fly IU's coop.

"If Knight had been kind to Larry when he came into Ladyman's Diner instead of yelling at him to get out of his face, he could have had at least two more championships," one long-time Bloomington businessman says. "This anger stuff is nothing new. Harvard might be good for him. They teach culture and have good psychiatrists there, right?"