Bob Knight Was a Misogynistic Bully

Bob Knight, the famed Indiana basketball coach who died Wednesday, once told a crowd of supporters, “When my time on Earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass!”

There is a valuable norm against speaking ill of the recently deceased. But Knight was expressing his hope that his death would not bring about a cessation of hostility, that the things that divided him from those who hated him would not be set aside. And so, in accordance with those wishes, let me say that Knight was a dreadful human, a grotesque model of twisted masculinity, and he should be remembered as a symbol of wickedness.

I have detested Bob Knight by entire life, and the years that have passed have only validated that contempt. I grew up in a household of partisan Michigan fans. We had season tickets for football and basketball, and the annual visits from Knight and his Hoosiers were special events. My dad would prepare signs mocking Knight, usually in reference to whatever notorious behavior he had engaged in over the past year. He would position himself over the tunnel and tell Knight he was a dirtbag when he passed through. Sometimes Knight would make eye contact and return a menacing glare. It was gratifying.

The reasons we hated Knight went well beyond sports rivalry. He was a notorious bully and misogynist. His heyday was a different era, when coaches had total authority and control over the lives of their players and operated with little accountability. But even by the standards of the time, Knight stood out as a notorious reactionary bully.

He was probably most famous for yelling at officials and once hurling a chair onto the court, but working the officials is part of the sport. What made him noxious was the abuse he meted out to those who had no power over him.

Knight was a towering man who abused his players verbally and physically. He would (allegedly) smack them in practice and call them “pussies.” Those allegations were borne out in evidence. He once berated and kicked his son Pat, a player, on the sidelines of a game. That year, my father brought a sign to the stadium reading “Bobby, Kick Your Son.” The stadium ushers made him take it down. I was a student at the time, and I came and smuggled the sign into the student section. When Knight began one of his tirades, I held it up, and the whole student section began chanting, “Kick your son! Kick your son!” I consider that moment a personal highlight. Knight was ultimately fired shortly after video evidence showed him choking his undersized guard, Neil Reed, at practice.

In the 1980s, he told Connie Chung, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” He once placed a tampon in the locker of one of his players as a way of calling him weak and soft. It was not uncommon for coaches of that era to equate weakness with womanhood, but Knight’s misogyny stood out.

Knight was one of the first major figures to endorse and legitimize Donald Trump in 2016, holding a rally with the Republican nominee. It was a perfectly fitting capstone to Knight’s career. The two men shared a misogynistic, authoritarian sensibility, casting the world as a chaotic place that had to be ordered by strong men who could not be questioned.

Obituaries have described Knight as “complicated.” Well, viewed up close, almost everybody is complicated. Stalin was complicated. (An exception is Trump, who in person seems to be merely a grosser version of his public self.) Taken as a whole, he was a very simple and horrible man who stood for things that were clear and wrong. If there is an afterlife, right now Bob Knight is being bullied by Satan.