With more than 900 career victories, three NCAA Championships and an Olympic gold medal on his resume, Bobby Knight has never been one to question his approach to the game of basketball. The Akron Civic Theatre plays host to the current ESPN college basketball analyst for An Evening with Coach Bob Knight on Oct. 5, as one of the sport's greatest winners shares his stories and lessons learned from a lifetime on the hardwood.
The "evening with" engagements are more of an entertaining thing to give people a little bit of my insight into some parts of the game that they might not otherwise get.
If there's a response when I'm done that indicates that they have enjoyed what I've talked about and how I've gone about it, then that's a really good feeling of having done something worthwhile. It's somewhat similar to walking off when you've just won a game, but the exception is, you don't have to worry about the next game.
I have been written about or talked about by people that I have never met over the last 50 years. So it's hard for me to even give any thought to what somebody has said who I don't know or who doesn't know me.
We get into so many clichés. A popular saying is, "The sun will shine brighter tomorrow." Well then it's just going to be a hell of a lot hotter. What's that going to do? If things are going to be better tomorrow, it's going to take more than the sun to get it done.
I've always had what people might consider a negative approach to things. That's what I based my coaching on. Let's prevent the things that are going to get us beat. Let's not rely on positive clichés.
I think all of those individual records are kind of irrelevant.
The last time I checked, my IQ was relatively high. Had it gone way down, at that point, I might have been dumb enough to think about going back into coaching.
What I do now is infinitely easier than coaching. When you're coaching, you're thinking about what's going to happen. The broadcast business is just relating what has happened from my standpoint.
I think if I'd have known how easy this was, I would have never coached.
