Knight's moves not like Bennett's

Somehow, I wouldn't have guessed Bob Knight would go out this way. He wouldn't give in to fatigue any more than he would surrender to school administrators or sportswriters or players.

Then again, so much about college basketball's winningest coach was hard to fathom, mostly his crimes against humanity, from chairs thrown to tirades against NCAA interview moderators.

It's revealing to look at Knight, who resigned Monday at Texas Tech, through the lens of somebody who coached close to us. He and Dick Bennett were both reared in the Midwest, Knight in Ohio, Bennett in Wisconsin.

Knight was three years older, attending the behemoth school at Ohio State, where Bennett chose little Ripon in Wisconsin. When they were both young coaches, Bennett still in high school, Knight freshly at Indiana, Bennett eagerly soaked up the Knight playbook.

"My brother was heavily influenced by Bobby Knight's philosophy, about motion offense and the way Knight's teams used to play defense," Jack Bennett, himself a two-time champion coach at NCAA Division II Wisconsin-Stevens Point, said not long ago. "Knight had a profound impact on him."

While Knight built a dynasty at Indiana, Dick Bennett labored quietly, but well, in the Wisconsin backwaters. When he finally got a chance at the big state school, Wisconsin, he took the Badgers to the Final Four in 2000, playing man-to-man defense as Knight always would and grinding you to death with a motion offense.

There are a couple of striking parallels. Each bequeathed his last coaching job to a son, Dick to Tony Bennett at Washington State, Knight to Pat at Texas Tech.

And each of the coaching giants left a job during a season — Dick abruptly resigned a few games into 2000-01 at Wisconsin — as if to say the pursuit is too noble, too important to be compromised by fatigue or burnout.

Right about there, the similarities end. Off the floor, Dick was a gentleman with patience, able to suffer even media fools. (True, he flipped off Washington's "Dawg Pack" a few years ago, but everybody gets a mulligan.)

Knight was as much churl as he was genius.

You think of some of his terrible conduct, and it begins with a trickle, grows to a stream and gathers to a flood:

• The chair tossed across the floor against Purdue in 1985.

• Punching a policeman in Puerto Rico at the '79 Pan Am Games.

• Appearing at an NCAA news conference with a whip and posing one of his players, African American Calbert Cheaney, in 1992.

• Slamming down a telephone at courtside in front of an NCAA basketball committeeman in 1987.

• Stuffing an intrusive fan into a garbage can at a Final Four.

• Telling newswoman Connie Chung that if rape is inevitable, the victim should just "relax and enjoy it."

• Intimidating a secretary at Indiana.

• Grabbing the Hoosiers' Neil Reed by the throat in practice in 1997.

• Raging against a Texas Tech chancellor at a chance meeting at a Lubbock supermarket salad bar in 2004.

I was in Boise in 1995 just after Indiana had lost to Missouri in the NCAA first round. Knight came into the postgame news conference and had his famous, escalating joust with a panel moderator, a fellow named Rance Pugmire, over the timing of his appearance. However Pugmire might have mismanaged it, Knight's tirade was so over the top as to chill everybody in the room.

Bob Bender, the ex-Washington coach who played for Knight briefly at Indiana, once told the story of how the Hoosiers were getting on the bus on a cold March day to start a trip to an NCAA regional in 1976.

Inside, Knight spotted his first wife and their child — that would have been Pat — on the sidewalk.

Skrrrk — Knight, yanking the bus window open. "Nancy!" he bellowed. "Put a [expletive] coat on that kid!"

Several times in the '70s, I saw his teams and marveled at how wonderfully synchronized they looked — not militaristic, just expertly drilled. That included the last game the Hoosiers lost before their 32-game undefeated run in 1976, a sizzling 92-90 Mideast Regional final loss with an injured Scott May in '75 to border rival Kentucky that gets overlooked among the greatest games.

The company Knight kept was intriguing. Never a man who cheated, always one whose guys graduated, Knight took on as assistants people like Tates Locke and Norm Ellenberger. NCAA violations had cashiered Locke at Clemson, and New Mexico, under Ellenberger, pretty much wrote the book on rogue behavior.

One of Knight's mentors and close friends, of course, was the venerated ex-Cal coach Pete Newell, as convivial a man as you could meet. Somehow, with Knight, his arms were open to coaches, clean or tarnished, pleasant or grim. If you weren't a coach, you were not of his world.

So, the question: Wasn't the genius possible without the gracelessness? Or like John McEnroe raging at a linesman or Woody Hayes belting a Clemson linebacker, did the bad Bob somehow fuel the good?

We'll never know, and safe to say, Bob Knight will never care.

And What's More...

• Josh Akognon, who transferred out of Washington State to Cal State-Fullerton after the 2005-06 season, is fourth in the nation in foul shooting at 92.6 percent.

• Sonny Weems, a 6-6 forward from Arkansas, scored 10 points in 66 seconds against Mississippi State — including a nine-second stretch when he was pulled out.

• Grant Gibbs, Gonzaga's 6-5 point-guard recruit from Marion, Iowa, took a fall in a recent game that caused a broken wrist and nine stitches above an eye. Gibbs, 12-rated at his position nationally by Scout.com, didn't need surgery and could return late this season.

• It's not only the Michael Beasley-Bill Walker show at Kansas State. Blake Young, a guard Washington recruited hard out of junior college, has 19 assists and three turnovers in Big 12 games.

• So much for Chris Lofton's long slump at Tennessee. The sharpshooting guard has five straight games of 20 points or more.

• Nation's best shooting team? Boise State, at 51.6 percent.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com