Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Biography

by Steve Delsohn, Mark Heisler

Brilliant, intimidating, charming, or profane, Coach Bob Knight is an enduring contradiction who has long fascinated and repelled basketball fans, for whom he has provided as much to dislike as to respect. Bob The Unauthorized Biography is the first comprehensive biography of Knight, one of the most successful and controversial coaches in the history of American sports. Detailing the entire scope of Knight's playing and coaching career through extensive interviews -- including many with people who have never gone on record about him before -- authors Steve Delsohn and Mark Heisler give a candid yet balanced account of the man who will likely end up as the all-time winningest coach in college basketball. In 1965, at age twenty-four, Bobby Knight became the head basketball coach at Army and began a career that would soon take him to Indiana University, where for the next twenty-nine years he would become the game's most famous and notorious coach. While there, he won three national championships (1976, '81, '87) and once compiled a perfect 32-0 record with an amazing 63-1 record over two seasons. Knight was NCAA Coach of the Year three times (1975, '76, '89) and coached U.S. teams to gold medals in both the Olympics and the Pan-Am Games. Yet he is equally, if not more, famous for some of his misbehaviors -- pulling his team off the court against the Soviets, making insensitive comments about rape to Connie Chung, putting a tampon in a player's locker to let him know that Knight thought he was a wimp -- and other alleged kicking his own son Patrick during a game, stuffing an LSU fan into a trash can, assaulting a policeman in Puerto Rico -- and the list goes on. One of Knight's closest friends once said of him, "Bob Knight is an asshole. But he knows it and he tries like hell to make up for it." Unfortunately, over the years there has been more and more to make up for. The story of Bob Knight has moved on to Texas Tech, where he continues his quest to become the winningest college basketball coach of all time. He already is the most fascinating. Love him or loathe him, Knight keeps winning and forces you to watch him and have an opinion. Bob The Unauthorized Biography is an extraordinary look at a legendary coach with a monumental temper and an appetite for confrontation.

Genres: Sports, Basketball, Biography

Hardcover

First published February 1, 2006

About the author

STEVE DELSOHN is the author or co-author of more than half a dozen books, including Da Bears! and Jim Brown's autobiography, Out of Bounds. He also wrote Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football as well as several other oral histories. He is currently a reporter for ESPN's Outside the Lines, for which he recently won a Peabody Award.

Reviews

[Karl Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someday the definitive psychobiography of Bobby Knight will be written. It can't be done now, of course, unless the author has a phalanx of good lawyers and knows how to fend off flying folding chairs or outraged Hoosiers. Perhaps a fictionalized account? Chuck Pahlaniuk, where are you?

Until then, this book will do nicely. Those not terribly interested in basketball will nonetheless find much in this account to be equally enlightening and appalling, not least of its exposure of just how nasty a place Indiana University -- administration as well as students -- could be. Not that Indiana is all that much of an outlier, of course.

[Mickey Mantle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knight hated losing more than he appreciated or enjoyed winning. The idea of bringing players in, breaking them down, and building them back up "his way" was out of touch with reality the day he left the Army job for Indiana. A perfectionist who played "VICTIM" while engaging in egregious anti-social conduct. Perfectionism with a short temper is a bad hand to be dealt.

[Elly Pirman · Rating 4 out of 5]

TBH it’s hard to believe Bob Knight is a real person. Unhinged human in mostly bad ways…what a wild ride.

[Mike Dargan · Rating 4 out of 5]

After 35 years of following Bob Knight's career, I've discovered that while he's a bully, liar, and, according Zang Auerbach, "an asshole," his friends and supervisors are worse. Craven cowards, sycophants, spineless, etc. How can a University president allow himself to intimidated by a coach? Anyway, time to move on.

My barber gave me this book the last time I was in for a haircut. I have to return it in the morning and he'll probably have his own assessment for me.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book I've read on Knight, so I learned a lot. I agree with one of the reviews I read that this book does a good job of compiling from previous bios and articles, and updating the story through his first few years at Texas Tech. But the writing's not "great," and if I was more motivated I'd read Feinstein to get more of the story and more analysis.

[Maximus Gonzales · Rating 4 out of 5]

its da bomb

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

read SOMETIME in 2008