Indiana University Athletics
Days of Knight: Tennessee Knight Game Part 2
4/28/2020 12:30:00 PM | Men's Basketball, History
Note: IU Athletics is partnering with IU Press to share chapters from some of their recently-published books on IU Sports. The following is the second half of a chapter from Kirk Haston's book, Days of Knight, published by IU Press in 2017. The first half of the chapter can be read here. Additional details about this book can be found here.
As I arrived at school on the morning of January 28, 1997, my feelings ranged somewhere between (A) wanting to shadowbox around the gym to the theme music from Rocky IV and (B) wanting to lie down in the fetal position at half-court. All this was because of the road game we would be playing later that night at Clifton High School. Sure, it was a district game and our undefeated 21–0 record would be on the line, but neither of these reasons had to do with my eagerness. The Clifton Lions were a team we had beaten fairly easily earlier in the season, and if our team played anywhere near our capabilities, we would win again. My excitement was because Coach Knight himself was planning to fly from Indiana that night to watch me play. It had been a big deal to me that he had sent an assistant down to watch me practice, but a visit from Coach Knight himself was at a different level all together. Basketball players have a pretty common basketball pregame ritual that has been passed down from generation to generation. I believe it may have been my Hoosier teammate Tom Coverdale that gave this ritual an inelegant but apt title: "A nap and a crap." Well, let's just say that on this particular game day my body didn't really want to cooperate on either one of these fronts.
I had known for a couple of days that Coach Knight had planned to see our game at Clifton, but I had barely told anyone about it—just my family and, on the night of the game, two teammates, my best friend, Chad Marrs, and our team's point guard, Cory Brown. Coach Slatten said it would be best for us to keep Coach Knight's recruiting visit quiet in case he had to cancel his trip at the last minute (a distinct possibility for someone as busy as Coach Knight in the middle of the Big Ten basketball season). Sitting on this kind of basketball news in a place like Perry County was brutal. His visit would make this game a huge event in our basketball-crazed area. Coach Knight, the 1984 U.S. Olympic coach, would be the first head coach to personally come to one of our games that season. This was overwhelming to me. Coach Knight was personally coming to Tennessee to watch me play so he could decide for himself if I was a player he wanted to recruit to IU.
It was hard to believe. This was someone who, not long before, had coached his team to a victory in the preseason NIT finals versus Duke at Madison Square Garden in New York. Now, he was supposed to be in little Clifton, Tennessee, to watch a high school game in the smallest and oldest gym in our district.
We normally had a good traveling fan base for road games, especially with our undefeated record. For this game, however, there were two factors that would considerably reduce the number of our fans coming to see us play: it was a weeknight game and it was against an opponent we had already beaten by double digits earlier in the season. So here was a road game many of them wouldn't attend that could end up being the one road game none of them would have wanted to miss.
In Tennessee, the girls' basketball games precede the boys' games. I was usually the first guy on our team who went to the locker room, usually near the end of the first quarter of the girls' game. I would get dressed, stretch, and maybe listen to some Hootie and the Blowfish on my portable CD player. On this night, though, I stayed seated in Clifton's old-school, wood bleachers just a little longer than normal so I could keep an eye on the gym's one main entrance: underneath the goal nearest the end of the court where the Clifton Lions' bench was located.
I was still there in the second quarter, giving myself some extra time to spot Coach Knight's arrival, but I never did see him. So I headed down to our locker room with a growing feeling of disappointment welling up in the pit of my stomach. I didn't see Coach Knight anywhere, but I did notice something else in the bleachers: a lack of people sitting in them.
The rest of my teammates came down to get dressed at halftime or a couple of minutes into the third quarter of the girls' game. As Chad and Cory entered the locker room I looked up at them from where I was stretching, hoping that a look on one of their faces might indicate they had just seen Coach Knight arrive in the gymnasium. But as they and the rest of the team filed into the small locker room, no one gave any indication that they had seen anything out of the ordinary. I remembered that when I woke up that morning, I thought it could be one of the most important days of my life, but as we lined up to take the court for warm-ups, it felt much closer to one of the most disappointing days instead.
The scoreboard clock began to tick down from 15:00. We ran out and started two layup lines on the end of the court nearest the gym's main entrance. Our layup line was proceeding as it always did at the start of warm-ups when suddenly the entire atmosphere of the Clifton High School gymnasium changed.
The normal sounds of balls bouncing and shoes squeaking were suddenly drowned out by a chattering buzz of conversations in the bleachers and lobby. I knew exactly what this meant before any of my teammates could figure it out. Coach Knight was in the building! I hadn't seen him yet (oddly enough, I didn't seem him the whole night). The first sighting confirmation that I got during warm-ups came from a good friend of mine, Blake. Now I was full of nervous energy and doing my best to stay focused on the important audition I was going to have as soon as warmups concluded. However, these circumstances didn't stop my bud Blake from enjoying himself. Every time he passed by me in our layup lines, he would utter, "Ohhhhh, Bobby Knight is here to watch you tonight—no pressure!" or "Knight is gonna be watchin', so you better not suck tonight!" I knew this was all said in good fun, but if it wouldn't have given Coach Knight such a bad first impression, I might have beaned Blake in the back of the head with a basketball.
Never before had I felt equally relieved and anxious at the same time. I was thrilled that Coach Knight had made it to our game, but my heart was racing as we neared tipoff. As both teams continued with warm-ups, I noticed people were constantly speed walking, some even jogging, in and out of the main lobby of the Tennessee Knight Game 31 gym. This was a little confusing. I knew they couldn't be going out to the lobby to see or try to meet Coach Knight because we were close enough to tip-off that he had surely found his way to a seat somewhere by now. What I found out later was that Perry County and Clifton folks alike—at a time when having a cell phone was a rarity—were lining up to use the payphones, or any other phone that the school would let them use, to call friends and family and inform them what was going on at the gym at Clifton High School and that they should get out there ASAP! After what felt like an extremely long warm-up time, the game was finally set to begin (I think the scoreboard operator may have tacked a couple of extra minutes onto the warm-up time to give people who had just found out about Coach Knight's presence some extra time to get to the game). Coach Slatten called a set lob play called "Gold 2" on our first offensive possession. It worked perfectly. I caught a textbook lob pass from Cory along the right baseline and finished the play, opening the game with a two-handed dunk that brought a nice reaction from the fans in the stands—which by now were almost completely filled.
The first half went well. We got out to a nice 15-point lead in the first quarter and pushed it to 23 by halftime. I knocked down some 10–15 foot jumpers, got a couple of jump hooks to go down, and grabbed more than a few rebounds, but since we weren't playing the strongest of competition I just didn't know if I was playing in a way that would impress a man of Coach Knight's stature. Right after the game I was eager to meet and talk with him for the first time and maybe get a sense of whether he was still interested in recruiting me. These thoughts were quickly dashed in the locker room, however, when Coach Slatten informed me that Coach Knight had left the game at halftime and headed back to the airport. My heart sank. Coach Slatten didn't have any other information, so that's all I had to go on for the rest of the night and into the next day.
As I arrived at school on the morning of January 28, 1997, my feelings ranged somewhere between (A) wanting to shadowbox around the gym to the theme music from Rocky IV and (B) wanting to lie down in the fetal position at half-court. All this was because of the road game we would be playing later that night at Clifton High School. Sure, it was a district game and our undefeated 21–0 record would be on the line, but neither of these reasons had to do with my eagerness. The Clifton Lions were a team we had beaten fairly easily earlier in the season, and if our team played anywhere near our capabilities, we would win again. My excitement was because Coach Knight himself was planning to fly from Indiana that night to watch me play. It had been a big deal to me that he had sent an assistant down to watch me practice, but a visit from Coach Knight himself was at a different level all together. Basketball players have a pretty common basketball pregame ritual that has been passed down from generation to generation. I believe it may have been my Hoosier teammate Tom Coverdale that gave this ritual an inelegant but apt title: "A nap and a crap." Well, let's just say that on this particular game day my body didn't really want to cooperate on either one of these fronts.
I had known for a couple of days that Coach Knight had planned to see our game at Clifton, but I had barely told anyone about it—just my family and, on the night of the game, two teammates, my best friend, Chad Marrs, and our team's point guard, Cory Brown. Coach Slatten said it would be best for us to keep Coach Knight's recruiting visit quiet in case he had to cancel his trip at the last minute (a distinct possibility for someone as busy as Coach Knight in the middle of the Big Ten basketball season). Sitting on this kind of basketball news in a place like Perry County was brutal. His visit would make this game a huge event in our basketball-crazed area. Coach Knight, the 1984 U.S. Olympic coach, would be the first head coach to personally come to one of our games that season. This was overwhelming to me. Coach Knight was personally coming to Tennessee to watch me play so he could decide for himself if I was a player he wanted to recruit to IU.It was hard to believe. This was someone who, not long before, had coached his team to a victory in the preseason NIT finals versus Duke at Madison Square Garden in New York. Now, he was supposed to be in little Clifton, Tennessee, to watch a high school game in the smallest and oldest gym in our district.
We normally had a good traveling fan base for road games, especially with our undefeated record. For this game, however, there were two factors that would considerably reduce the number of our fans coming to see us play: it was a weeknight game and it was against an opponent we had already beaten by double digits earlier in the season. So here was a road game many of them wouldn't attend that could end up being the one road game none of them would have wanted to miss.
In Tennessee, the girls' basketball games precede the boys' games. I was usually the first guy on our team who went to the locker room, usually near the end of the first quarter of the girls' game. I would get dressed, stretch, and maybe listen to some Hootie and the Blowfish on my portable CD player. On this night, though, I stayed seated in Clifton's old-school, wood bleachers just a little longer than normal so I could keep an eye on the gym's one main entrance: underneath the goal nearest the end of the court where the Clifton Lions' bench was located.
I was still there in the second quarter, giving myself some extra time to spot Coach Knight's arrival, but I never did see him. So I headed down to our locker room with a growing feeling of disappointment welling up in the pit of my stomach. I didn't see Coach Knight anywhere, but I did notice something else in the bleachers: a lack of people sitting in them.
The rest of my teammates came down to get dressed at halftime or a couple of minutes into the third quarter of the girls' game. As Chad and Cory entered the locker room I looked up at them from where I was stretching, hoping that a look on one of their faces might indicate they had just seen Coach Knight arrive in the gymnasium. But as they and the rest of the team filed into the small locker room, no one gave any indication that they had seen anything out of the ordinary. I remembered that when I woke up that morning, I thought it could be one of the most important days of my life, but as we lined up to take the court for warm-ups, it felt much closer to one of the most disappointing days instead.
The scoreboard clock began to tick down from 15:00. We ran out and started two layup lines on the end of the court nearest the gym's main entrance. Our layup line was proceeding as it always did at the start of warm-ups when suddenly the entire atmosphere of the Clifton High School gymnasium changed.
The normal sounds of balls bouncing and shoes squeaking were suddenly drowned out by a chattering buzz of conversations in the bleachers and lobby. I knew exactly what this meant before any of my teammates could figure it out. Coach Knight was in the building! I hadn't seen him yet (oddly enough, I didn't seem him the whole night). The first sighting confirmation that I got during warm-ups came from a good friend of mine, Blake. Now I was full of nervous energy and doing my best to stay focused on the important audition I was going to have as soon as warmups concluded. However, these circumstances didn't stop my bud Blake from enjoying himself. Every time he passed by me in our layup lines, he would utter, "Ohhhhh, Bobby Knight is here to watch you tonight—no pressure!" or "Knight is gonna be watchin', so you better not suck tonight!" I knew this was all said in good fun, but if it wouldn't have given Coach Knight such a bad first impression, I might have beaned Blake in the back of the head with a basketball.
Never before had I felt equally relieved and anxious at the same time. I was thrilled that Coach Knight had made it to our game, but my heart was racing as we neared tipoff. As both teams continued with warm-ups, I noticed people were constantly speed walking, some even jogging, in and out of the main lobby of the Tennessee Knight Game 31 gym. This was a little confusing. I knew they couldn't be going out to the lobby to see or try to meet Coach Knight because we were close enough to tip-off that he had surely found his way to a seat somewhere by now. What I found out later was that Perry County and Clifton folks alike—at a time when having a cell phone was a rarity—were lining up to use the payphones, or any other phone that the school would let them use, to call friends and family and inform them what was going on at the gym at Clifton High School and that they should get out there ASAP! After what felt like an extremely long warm-up time, the game was finally set to begin (I think the scoreboard operator may have tacked a couple of extra minutes onto the warm-up time to give people who had just found out about Coach Knight's presence some extra time to get to the game). Coach Slatten called a set lob play called "Gold 2" on our first offensive possession. It worked perfectly. I caught a textbook lob pass from Cory along the right baseline and finished the play, opening the game with a two-handed dunk that brought a nice reaction from the fans in the stands—which by now were almost completely filled.
The first half went well. We got out to a nice 15-point lead in the first quarter and pushed it to 23 by halftime. I knocked down some 10–15 foot jumpers, got a couple of jump hooks to go down, and grabbed more than a few rebounds, but since we weren't playing the strongest of competition I just didn't know if I was playing in a way that would impress a man of Coach Knight's stature. Right after the game I was eager to meet and talk with him for the first time and maybe get a sense of whether he was still interested in recruiting me. These thoughts were quickly dashed in the locker room, however, when Coach Slatten informed me that Coach Knight had left the game at halftime and headed back to the airport. My heart sank. Coach Slatten didn't have any other information, so that's all I had to go on for the rest of the night and into the next day.
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