BOBBY KNIGHT: FULL COURT GENIUS

By Frederick A. Hurst

Sometimes we think we know so much, which is sometimes why we are surprised to discover how little we know. After authoring POV’s Sports Heroes, Where Are They Now? for almost two years, I was finally forced to face the fact that I had a writer’s obligation to find out who basketball icon Bobby Knight was, since every single past basketball player that I interviewed glorified his name. And the compliments that each heaped upon him made my ignorance that much more disturbing.

It started with Bud Williams (POV March 2003), former All Western Mass champ, and the first to break the fifty-point mark in a pick up game at Springfield’s DeBerry School yard. He spoke of Bobby Knight as a mentor and as the greatest basketball player to come out of New England. And he described him “as the nicest person you would ever want to meet.”

Don “Walk Away” Martin (POV June 2003) and Jeffrey “Treetop” Brace (POV September 2003), giants in their own times, were also generous in their praise of Bobby Knight. After a superb high school basketball career, Don went on to play semi-pro basketball in Hartford with Bobby Knight, who, he explained, “played with the Harlem Globe Trotters and spent his time teaching and coaching young basketball players.” Brace, whose steady exploits on the court gained him significant recognition and who played post high school basketball in the semi-pro Industrial League with Knight, spoke admiringly of him as “one of Springfield’s greats.”

I was equally impressed by how many people knew Bobby Knight off the court. I was stunned when, talking out loud to myself, I expressed my growing curiosity about Bobby Knight in the presence of POV Layout Director, Marie Zanazanian, and she casually informed me that he lived just around the corner from her Eastern Avenue home in Springfield’s Old Hill neighborhood and could often be seen walking the streets, basketball tucked under his arm and talking to everyone he passed. She said everyone knows and loves Bobby Knight because he is kind and polite to everybody and he always helps people, especially the neighborhood kids.

My curiosity peaked at a meeting with Robert “Sub” Lewis at his home in East Windsor, Connecticut. Sub offered his insight into the greater Hartford market into which POV was planning to expand. Was I surprised when he told me that Bobby Knight is one of his best friends. They grew up together in Hartford and Knight remains a regular visitor to his home.

Sub described Knight as an unassuming hero, one of the nicest, most unimposing men that he had ever met and ever hoped to meet, an intelligent man and a wonderful conversationalist, a person so regular that you would not distinguish him from a less accomplished basketball player. Finally, Sub told me that if I wanted to write about an important connection between Hartford and Springfield that almost everyone could relate to, I should interview and write about Bobby Knight. But it would be a challenge, he told me, since Knight is notorious for his refusal to be interviewed by the press.

A challenge? I’ve always had a tough time resisting a challenge, and this was no exception. Besides, I had a secret weapon in Bud Williams, who offered to track his mentor down and prevail upon him to meet with me.

Tracking down Bobby Knight is no easy task. Ask about him in Springfield and you’ll be told to check in Hartford. Ask about him in Hartford and you’ll be told the check in Springfield. Visit him at the South End Community Center, where he was last known to hang out, and if you are lucky you might find him there in the middle of a basketball game. If you’re not so lucky, he’ll still be in the middle of a basketball game, but it could be in a game anywhere on this earth. Bobby Knight is not easy to locate, but, just as I had begun to lose faith in Bud Williams, he found Bobby and arranged for him to come and visit me at the POV office.

Bobby Knight came to the office as a courtesy to Bud, but he had no intention of submitting to an interview. In fact, he volunteered the names of other people for me to interview. He was genuinely opposed to publicity because, as I discovered in talking to him, he genuinely believes that basketball has been so rewarding to him that he shouldn’t receive any special recognition beyond being able to continue to play whenever and wherever he can, which he does by simply jumping in his car and going wherever it takes him. Often, as a H.P. Hood regional deliveryman, he simply remained at his last stop and joined the local pickup game. He simply loves the game of basketball and feels that his reward is that God blessed him with the ability to play it so well and so often.

So rather than interview Bobby Knight, I just started talking with him without taking notes or giving any indication that we were in an interview. Actually, I let him interview me in the hope that he would come to understand that I was not merely exploiting him for a news story. As I expected from what I had learned about him from others, we had much in common in our knowledge and sense of the history of the region. He soon opened up to me about his love of basketball and where it had taken him. But, his last words to me were, “Please don’t write a story that makes it appear that I was bragging about myself.” This genuinely modest man didn’t have to ask, but, honestly, after he left I wondered how it would be possible to describe the accomplishments of such a basketball giant while also conveying his humility, graciousness, generosity, and love of humanity and the game itself.

Bobby was raised in a close-knit family by “two great parents” who “made discipline a real part of life.” They raised him and his three brothers and sister on Belleview Street in Hartford, Connecticut. Money was scarce so their carefully tended family garden was critical to their diet. Everyone, his parents and he and his siblings, shared responsibility for its care. The dinner table was an important family gathering place and although he was allowed the freedom to go out and play in the neighborhood, when his father whistled, no matter how involved, Bobby knew to instantly drop what he was doing and rush home to dinner.

It was from his older brother, V.C., that he learned sportsmanship and the love of competition and how to be a gentleman in the game. Bobby credits him with being his early mentor and role model. “He was the greatest brother anybody ever had…the best athlete and a great person,” he said. V. C. married into the family of Leo Best, the subject of an earlier POV sport’s feature and the father of NBA star, Travis Best. After our interview, Bobby called to remind me not to forget to mention the important contribution that V. C. made to his life and to the lives of the entire family. When their parents passed, it was V. C. Knight who held the family together. “I like to let his kids know how I feel about their father.”

But it was Eddie Barlow, who, day after day, came and watched Knight play undisciplined pickup basketball at Saint Benedict’s in Belleview Square in Hartford, who provided the big push to basketball greatness. Barlow, who was 15 years Knight’s senior, recognized a raw genius when he saw it. One day he started teaching Bobby how to really master the sport, which included visits to all of the local semi-pro games. Barlow encouraged Bobby Knight to develop into that something special that propelled him from the streets to the pros.

From the time he started playing basketball at 7-8 years old, Knight’s appetite for the game was voracious. He played basketball every day. And when he went to high school and the White coach directed Black students to the track team and away from the basketball team, Bobby quit school at 17 years old and joined the army. He returned to play for the Hartford Hurricanes and halfway through his first season, the Hurricanes played the famous Harlem Globe Trotters, who were so impressed with Bobby Knight’s competitiveness that they eventually sent Jessie Owens to recruit him to the team.

Those were the days, of course, when the NBA banned Black players, who formed their own teams, of which the Globe Trotters became the most famous. Bobby played with the Globe Trotters off and on for five years. He was especially fond of the 1949 and 1950 teams that beat the Minnesota Lakers (now the Los Angeles Lakers) twice.

Bobby Knight was uncomfortable following someone else’s schedule and having to submit to the indignities of race discrimination and Jim Crow. He used to “count the days to Canada” after having traveled in the South and West, where the team members were forced into the worst hotels, rejected from restaurants, often forced to drive 80 to 100 miles out of the way before they could eat or sleep and were often sent around to the back door to get sandwiches. The West was worst, since in the South they were welcomed into the homes of Black families. Several times he left the Globe Trotters, but as many times as Bobby left, Jessie Owens would come looking for him and convince him to come back. But he enjoyed higher pay and the freedom of playing with teams of his choice all over New England and New York and after five years he left the Globe Trotters for good.

Another highlight of his career took place in 1954 at the East Hartford High John McGrath Gym where NBA’s New York Knicks played an exhibition game against Frankie’s Drive-In Semi Pro Basketball Team. Bobby, who had what today is called a “triple double,” played so well that he attracted the attention of the Knicks’ coach.

It was not the last time he attracted the attention of the pros. In February of 1955, playing on the semi-pro team Nassiff Arms in an exhibition game against the NBA Milwaukee Hawks, Bobby Knight again stole the show from the pros, but this time his team won a lopsided 91 to 79. As always, the news reports applauded the young Knight’s skills.

But the NBA was still not ready for a Black Bob Cousy. Knight worked out with the NBA’s Rochester Royals and was certain he had made the team. A Rochester newspaper reported, “To a man the holdovers on the Royals’ roster are praising the work of Knight…He can out jump some of the big men under the boards; he can shoot outside and he can drive in; he can pass from any and all positions; and—Number 1—he dribbles like Marquis Haynes.” Knight was so certain he had made the team that he picked out a house. When informed by the racist Rochester team representative that he did not make the team, “It felt as though my entire body fell out. I’ve never forgotten it. On the train ride home to Hartford, I cried all the way. I think that was the worst hurt in my life.” But the hurt had to have been eased when, a short while later, the New York Knicks signed a contract with him to play on his first NBA team.

Bobby was happy to finally be in the NBA but he regrets that the color barrier limited so many good Black players. In fact, at the time he tried out for the Rochester Royals, Earl Lloyd was trying out with Washington. Washington signed Lloyd, who became the first Black NBA player. Had the Royals signed Bobby Knight, he and Lloyd would have been the two first.

Describing Bobby Knight as a basketball player is like trying to describe the greatness of Albert Einstein by calling him a scientist. All who know Knight hail him as a basketball genius. And he is a genius, who was ahead of his time in a race-conscious world that stifled Black genius, but not the irrepressible Knight. He rose above adversity and became that rare and special kind of talent whose legacy craves preservation. He simply loved the competition and felt it was his duty to raise it to the highest level. Wherever he played he left his mark -- in the streets of Hartford, in the semi-pros and the NBA, in pickup games all over the country, Bobby Knight spread his joy of the game. “My life has been great and still is great. If I pass on tomorrow, I would want to come back as Bobby Knight,” he said. But even more, “If I wake up one day and there was no basketball, I would want to die.”

At 73, Bobby Knight can still be found running up and down the basketball courts playing against much younger competitors, whom he advises and guides at every opportunity. But, even as they marvel at his stamina, they know too little about the history of this humble man who out-played the best semi-professional and professional basketball players of his time. Because he is a humble man whose reward is his love of the game, he might fade into history as another lost legacy. But if we’re lucky, someone will convince him to let them record his entire life story, which is a biography begging to be written and a movie begging to be made. n