The Mouse That Roared (pt 2)

The bubble tightened a little bit for a number of BCS teams with Cleveland State's win over Butler in the Horizon League final.

Cleveland State heads back to the NCAA for the first time since 1986. You may remember that team. Bob Knight sure does.

And so does John Feinstein.

Halberstam. and Updike. Williams. and Knight.

On the somber occasion of John Updike's passing, much has been made of his "lyric little" essay, 'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."

An interesting sidelight, where Updike plays an 'off-screen' role, is David Halberstam's account of trying to obtain an appointment with Ted Williams in 1990:

My appointment with Mr. Theodore Williams of the Islamorda, Fla., Williams family had been agreed on well in advance, though we had not yet talked to each other. That is normal in matters of this gravity, and our earlier arrangements had been conducted through intermediaries.

My representative was Mr. Robert M. Knight of Bloomington, Ind., who in addition to being my occasional appointments secretary, is coach to the Indiana University basketball team. Mr. Knight, on occasion, has had troubles with members of the press himself, and was almost as celebrated as Mr. Williams in this regard.

It had taken no small amount of time to win over Mr. Knight's good opinion, for somewhat early in our relationship I had failed him on a serious literary point. Mr. Knight, unbeknown to many, is a literary man and I would not be amiss if I referred to him as a kind of literary executor for Mr. Williams. On that earlier occasion, he had quizzed me on my qualifications to write about Mr. Williams.

I had done reasonably well until the final question. Mr. Knight had asked to quote the best-known sentence of John Updike's famous New Yorker piece on Mr. Williams. I had not known, and Mr. Knight had, with no small measure of disdain, pointed out that it said, "Gods do not answer letters."

from Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures.

Knight-errant

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." -Bob Knight

Strap in, ladies and gentlemen. For the next 3 1/2 weeks, we will be exposed to General Bob Knight's analysis and commentary on ESPN's college basketball coverage. The bigwigs in Bristol are lauding their big catch, but early returns indicate that they may get more than they bargained for.

First off, Bob Knight as a member of the media is akin to Idi Amin joining Amnesty International or at the very least Coach K donning Carolina Blue. His rants against the Fourth Estate are legendary, and given his lack of respect for FCC regulations, it is a good thing ESPN is a cable network.

In his debut last night during Big East tournament coverage, there was palpable unease on the set from Rece Davis and Digger Phelps. When Digger playfully diagrammed a zone defense for Coach Knight, whose teams were famous for only playing man-to-man defense, the nervous laughter seems out of place on the usually cool, smooth and hip ESPN set.

Clearly Knight will bring honesty and an encyclopedia's worth of basketball knowledge to the programming. But what if he also brings this.....