Bruce Sutchar

Dear 30/30, I thoroughly enjoyed your piece on Bobby Knight. I entered Indiana in 1965 at the end of the Branch McCracken era. McCracken was a legend at Indiana and with Archie Dees and Walt Bellamy HAD WON A NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP IN 1954. His assistant Lou Watson took over with a very talented group of sophomores (Butch Joyner, Vernon Payne, etc). In 3 years they went from last to first to last again. It was obvious that Watson had no taste for defense and no ability to control the team. Then Indiana hired Bob Knight. All of a sudden Indiana started to play defense and started to win. I graduated in 1970, but returned to do graduate work two years later. In the interim I spent some time (1968) at UCLA and had a chance to watch a practice at Pauly Pavilion with a guy named Lew Alcindor playing for a coach from Purdue named John Wooden. During my years in graduate school Indiana built the new assembly hall to contain the now over 20,000 fans that came to watch every Indiana game. In 1975 & 1976 Indiana lost but one game, because their star player Scott May had broken his arm. With Isaiah Thomas, Steve Alford, Keith Smart and others Indiana would repeat this feat 2 more times to win 2 more National Championships. Indiana it seems either won or tied for the Big 10 Championship nearly every year (after all Gene Keady was at Purdue) Then in the 1990’s something happened. Indiana, while still winning wasn’t the team it used to be. Bob Knight threw a chair onto the court, some superstars opted to transfer out of Indiana and I saw Indiana lose at Northwestern for the very first time. What (and I am a psychologist) I feel is that by 1999 Bob Knight was now 29 years older. 18 year olds had a very different attitude and expectation then they had in the 1970s. In other words, I personally believe that Bob Knight was falling out of touch with his student athletes. Coach Knight was always known for the high graduation rate of his players, not just their athletic performances. He had gotten divorced and seemed to me to always be looking for a chance to add a four letter word to any sentence. And quite significantly, the people closest to him, the ones who brought him in and supported him through the years were mostly gone. When he says that he would never come back to Indiana and wishes that the administrators who fired him were all dead, he sounds like a little kid whose heart was broken and who felt totally betrayed. I am grateful that your story also talked about these points and his conversation with my parents’ Sarasota neighbor Dick Vitale. I am sorry that your story spent so much time on Neil Reed. That was not Coach Knights only mistake. But to say he choked him makes the listener think that he grabbed him and kept choking him until he was pulled off. As a former teacher, I know that you cannot even touch a student anymore (even patting him on the head and saying “good job”) let alone grabbing him anywhere. I am genuinely sorry that Neil Reed died so young and I am glad that he could get his life together to become a good husband, father and coach. But how many people would have watched 30/30 if it only about him? I would have liked to hear some positive comments from some of his former players, his sons and even from Coach K. Bruce Sutchar Chicago, IL IU Grad, 1970 & 76