Saturday, December 23, 2006

Will Wonders Never Cease

Ran across this article on MSNBC, that talks about the fact that Texas Tech men's basketball coach Bob Knight can tie the all-time record for wins by a head coach if his team beats Bucknell today. One more win after that, and he becomes the winningest coach in the history of men's college basketball. So it's no longer a question of whether Knight will break the record that has been held by North Carolina legend Dean Smith since 1997 - it's only a question of when.

The wondrous part? That would be that the article did not demonize Kinight for the bad behavior that has colored his career. Most of the people who write about Bob Knight do that - they point to the mistakes he has made in the past and seem to say that those mistakes cancel out all the good he has done, both in coaching and in other ways at the schools where he has worked. To be sure, he has had his share of missteps - most of which have been blown out of proportion, and nearly all of which are at least as attributable to the fact that the administration at Indiana never made him understand what was acceptable and what was not as they are to Knight himself - but he has also won 878 games.

I just thought that it was interesting - if a bit unusual, a pleasant surprise - to see that there were still people out there who were willing to write about Knight without making him seem like such an evil despot. Go Red Raiders!

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