Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [244]
And so the interview ended. The guys in the truck were very happy with it. I’m emotionally drained, and I’m still sitting in the chair. Bob bolts out of his chair, walks right up to me. I put out my hand. He refuses to shake it and says, “You’ve got a lot to learn, you’ve got a lot to learn,” and he walks out. Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. The whole time I felt this weird sensation about what was going on behind me, but I was told that his wife, Karen, was crying throughout the interview. I assume she saw what was going on and felt bad that Bob had squandered an opportunity here to really explain himself and instead had displayed a side of himself that was unappealing. He was in a way interviewing for his next job but showed no capacity for self-examination or awareness. He wasn’t willing to concede anything.
It never occurred to me that it would be the firestorm that it was in terms of the coverage. It turned out to be the biggest thing I’ve ever done. At ESPN everybody called me to say “good job,” including George Bodenheimer. It was on the front page of all the newspapers. The interview itself, not what Knight said, was the subject of much of the coverage the next day. On the back page of the New York Post, there was a headline: “ESPN’s Schaap Stands Up to Bully Knight.”
The best thing to come out of the interview for me was the parting shot my father delivered.
MIKE LUPICA, Columnist:
Dick Schaap and Bob Knight had been extremely close. Knight always had a core group of media guys, but they were constantly shifting because you got kicked out of the club the second you wrote something he didn’t like. I used to get along fine with him until he started calling me up and yelling at me, because I’d feel like, you can’t do that to me when I’m having dinner. And Knight had gone after Jeremy at the end of their interview. So on our Sports Reporters show, Dick did an amazing parting shot. Dick just lit into him. We always rehearse before the taping, so I knew it was coming, and I just sat back and listened to Dick deliver this wonderful, forty-five-second, basically newspaper column where he took Knight to the woodshed. I was thinking, “Wow.” It was a tightrope for him to walk because he was talking about his kid, but it was just awesome. That to me was Dick Schaap at his best. He went after Bob Knight that day and hit him right between the eyes.
JEREMY SCHAAP:
When Knight started doing college basketball on ESPN, they called me up to get my reaction after he had started on the air, and I just said, “He has a long way to go before he’s as good as Digger Phelps.” And I mean that 100 percent.
BOB KNIGHT:
They gave me three people to choose from who would do that interview, and I picked Schaap because of his dad. I didn’t even know the kid. I had Digger tell Schaap that there was a question that I’d like for him to ask, and he refused to ask it. He told Digger, “I can’t do that. I can’t ask something that he wants asked.” I didn’t enjoy the interview at all. I thought the guy was a chickenshit little cocksucker. Forget that guy. I have no interest in talking about that. Jesus Christ, enough of this bullshit.
6
The Garden of Forking Paths: 2001–2004
“What an excellent horse do they lose, for want of address and boldness to manage him.”
—Alexander the Great
Over the years, certain prescribed guidelines had been developed by ESPN management for a death in the sports world, foremost among them: “We don’t have to be first.” It was a rule born of chagrin and regret: on July 3, 1993, in an effort to beat the competition, ESPN Radio rushed onto the air with the sad news that Hall of Famer Don Drysdale had died. The only major problem with the reporting was that Drysdale’s wife, former basketball star Ann Meyers