So slyly do the sounds insinuate themselves that you hear them, yes, but you don’t really know you’re hearing them: the squeaks from 10 pairs of sneakers interacting fiercely, repeatedly, with the hardwood floor of a basketball court.
One you’re made aware of them, though, you can’t hear anything else.
Even amid the acoustical stew of more than 17,000 screaming fans in Assembly Hall at Indiana University, a place where basketball seems to matter more than anyplace else, you hear them: little knife-flicks of noise that cut your attention span to ribbons.
There are other reasons, too, why it’s tough to keep your mind strictly on the game here. A lot has happened recently — for one thing, the firing of coach Bobby Knight on Sept. 10, 2000, after 29 years and three national championships. For another, the hiring of his three-year assistant, Mike Davis, first African-American head coach in school history.
On the night of Feb. 20, though, as IU squared off against Ohio State, Davis’ chief concern wasn’t the making of history. It was the making of jump shots. His team was ice cold from the perimeter. The kids looked distracted. The sellout crowd was restless and, as always, highly verbal.
“What’re you thinking out there?” a husky-voiced man in the front row hollered at Tom Coverdale, the pugnacious IU junior who had just missed his third three-point shot. To their credit, Indiana fans heckle in complete sentences.
Davis was worried, but not panicked. He doesn’t panic easily. “We weren’t hitting shots,” he would say the next day, analyzing the first half of the game, “but they weren’t setting the world on fire, either.”
Indeed, Ohio State looked just as woeful as Indiana — slow of foot, muddled of mind. It was a lousy time for either team to lose focus: On the line was sole possession of first place in the Big Ten conference.
They eventually pulled this one out, his Hoosiers did. And even though they dropped the next two games and lost in the semifinals of last weekend’s Big Ten tournament, Indiana still ended up as Big Ten co-champion with a record of 20-11, its first conference crown in almost a decade.
On Thursday, Indiana meets Utah in the first round of the NCAA tournament in Sacramento. The Hoosiers lost in the first round last year and fans are hungry for a better showing — especially since Knight, now coach at Texas Tech University, is taking his kids to the tournament, too. The Red Raiders play Southern Illinois University Friday in Chicago at the United Center.
The Hoosiers have done better under Davis than they did in Knight’s last few years — a fact that would, you might think, instantly endear Davis to all IU fans, a fact that would matter to folks who claim it’s all about winning.
And yet Davis’ biggest obstacle is a fact he can’t do a thing in the world about:
He’s not Bobby Knight.
“People that loved Knight,” said IU senior Danielle Raub, “are always going to love Knight.” End of story.
But it’s the beginning of the story for Davis.
The day after the game Davis would chalk up the mistakes in the OSU game to nerves. “The shots we missed, I would bet my house our guys could make those shots.”
He was relaxed and contemplative, sunk back on the dark brown couch in a triangle-shaped room with white cinder-block walls in the basement of Assembly Hall. Today, it’s called “coach’s locker room” but was dubbed “the cave” when Knight was in charge. Davis’ feet, jammed into red-and-white size 14 Nikes, were slung on a coffee table in front of him.
There was no time to savor the win over OSU; Michigan State loomed three days later. Stacked atop a big-screen TV set were videotapes of every game the Spartans had played this season.
Davis, 41, had watched each one multiple times. That’s a lesson he learned from Knight, he said in his soft, low drawl, so low that you have to lean forward to hear him: “Preparation. He never left a stone unturned. Once a game starts, you got to make adjustments. Only way you can make adjustments is to be well-prepared. You can’t make adjustments the next day.”
More Top Picks Why People With Adhd Struggle With Mornings
He doesn’t call Knight “Knight.” He calls him “Coach”: “Coach was good.” He corrected himself. “Coach is good. He’s a great, great basketball coach.”
Knight hired Davis as an assistant coach in 1997, after Davis had worked as an assistant for three years at the University of Alabama and, before that, as a player and assistant coach in the Continental Basketball Association. Davis and Knight hit it off, which is odd when you think about it: Davis is as genial and shy as Knight is rude and flamboyant.
But during a game, Davis often demonstrates more than a touch of Knight’s fire. The mellowness disappears, supplanted by a fierce intensity. He studies the floor with narrowed eyes that flit back and forth, missing little. His forehead is bisected by a scowling “V” of fierce concentration. More than likely, he’ll be holding his chin in the cupped palm of his left hand, body hunched forward, in a courtside version of Rodin’s “The Thinker.”
And he has had a lot to think about.
Replacing a taskmaster
The man he replaced is easily the most notorious figure in the game, the glowering taskmaster forever branded as the coach who choked a player. The old-school disciplinarian who drove his Indiana players to graduate in record numbers but couldn’t keep his own temper in check.
The chair-flinger. The walking magnet for technical fouls.
Subject of a best-selling book, John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink” (1986), which was made into an ESPN movie starring Brian Dennehy that premiered Sunday, Knight is the glaring, swearing, sweater-wearing symbol of everything that’s wrong with college basketball — or is it everything that’s right?
The arguments still rage. They rage even though Knight — much to the bitter chagrin of his enemies, much to the I-told-you-so satisfaction of his fans — led Texas Tech to a 23-8 record in the regular season (compared with last year’s 9-19).
“At IU, it’s very divided,” Feinstein said. “There are those who say that what was done to Knight [the firing] was wrong. Others will say Davis is doing a great job.”
So that’s what Mike Davis has had to think about this year: He’s had to think about race, since he’s now a symbol of racial progress in a state still tainted by its historical association with the Ku Klux Klan, and since he’s now one of four black coaches of Indiana’s top college and pro teams: Tyrone Willingham (Notre Dame); Tony Dungy (Indianapolis Colts) and Isiah Thomas (Indiana Pacers).
And he has had to think about his own career, an unlikely rise from the dusty nowhere of Fayette, Ala., up through a series of coaching jobs at middling places, enduring the death of a young daughter and wrestling with a severe stuttering problem, finally ending up courtside at Assembly Hall.
Because, oh yeah, he’s also a basketball coach. He also has to get a bunch of guys to play quality basketball. No matter what else is going on, no matter what the distractions, there’s always the game: the one that comes down to sneakers on hardwood.
Bobby Knight has nothing to say about Mike Davis. “He plays in the Big Ten and we play in the Big 12,” Knight said through a Texas Tech spokesman. “I haven’t seen them play.”
Knight may have nothing to say about Davis, but a lot of other people do. They say Davis is a decent, diligent and God-fearing man; a man who calls his mother back home in Alabama almost every day; a man who brings his 3-year-old son, Antoine, to every practice; a man who listens obsessively to tapes of his favorite preacher’s sermons in his car.
A calm spirit
“Calmness of spirit,” is what Rod Barnes says initially impressed him about Davis. “The first time we sat down to talk, we shared about our families. We talked about our relationship with God.”
Barnes, head coach of the University of Mississippi Rebels, met Davis when the latter was an assistant coach at the University of Alabama in the mid-1990s. “It’s not one of those things where we talk and then it’s a month later and all we’re talking about is basketball,” Barnes said. “We talk so much that we get to talk about everything.”
During the tense time after Knight’s abrupt sacking when Davis was dubbed “interim coach,” when IU administrators were trying to decide whether they could trust one of the best spots in college basketball to a guy who had never held a head coaching job, when Davis was receiving what he interpreted as racist e-mails, Barnes was there.
On an especially dark day, a day when Davis’ voice sounded wearier and more downcast than usual on the phone, Barnes slid into his Chevy Suburban and drove the almost 400 miles from Oxford, Miss., to Bloomington, Ind. “I just thought, `I’ve got to go.'” Davis seemed to perk up in his friend’s company. But Barnes didn’t realize the trip would require eight hours. “Next time,” he said with a wince in his voice, “I’ll be flying.”
Thad Fitzpatrick, boys’ basketball coach at Hillcrest High School in Tuscaloosa, Ala., has known Davis for almost 25 years.
“He’s a good person. Even today, with the status Mike has, he’s as down to earth as he’s ever been. It’s not, `Hey, I’m a big-time coach at Indiana.’ We talk every day.”
Like Barnes, Fitzpatrick has seen Davis when he wasn’t on top of the world. In 1990, Davis’ 2-year-old daughter, Nicole, was killed in a car accident that also seriously injured his son, Michael Jr., and Davis’ first wife, Thelma.
Fitzpatrick flew from Laramie, Wyo., where he was on the coaching staff at the University of Wyoming, back to Alabama. “That,” Fitzpatrick says quietly, “was the first time I saw Mike cry.”
IU President Myles Brand, who made the ultimate decision to drop the “interim” label from Davis’ title on March 21, 2001, said, “I think Mike Davis is doing a terrific job. He’s a coach that respects the academic mission of the university. He is very competitive and has the will to win.”
But then again, so did Knight.
Racist past
To understand the central paradox of the state of Indiana, the one that makes Davis’ saga significant to more than just basketball fans, you have to know about the work of James H. Madison.
Madison, an IU history professor, recently wrote “A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America” (2001), a study of the state’s racist past. In 1930, he recounts, two black men were yanked from a jail in Marion, Ind., by a wild-eyed mob and hanged in the courthouse square.
“We folks here want to assume that all the lynchings were Southern,” Madison said. “But it happened here too. There’s no question the Klan was very powerful in Indiana.”
In the 1920s and ’30s Indiana was a hotbed of Klan activity, so much so that when Thomas Hart Benton painted a mural of the state’s history for the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, he included a scene of white-hooded Klansmen flanked by a burning cross.
In 1941, the mural was donated to IU, where it hangs today in a 420-seat auditorium in Woodburn Hall. It’s too fragile to be moved, Madison said, even though students over the years have argued that it should go.
So this state of soft green hills and golden cornfields and white farmhouses, this state of foursquare limestone courthouses that seem to radiate a sense of justice and fair play from the center of every county seat, has been home to some of the most virulent, unrepentant racists in the nation’s history.
The image engendered by their noxious ideas — still poisoning some parts of the state, as publications such as The New Yorker have recently reported — seems a world away from the Other Indiana.
The Other Indiana is absolutely, positively, googly-eyed, crazy-mad in love with basketball.
Knight or no Knight, they’re nuts about the game. “Basketball,” Feinstein said, with the same indisputable certitude he might employ to announce that two plus two equals four, “will be an important part of Indiana life forever. When most people think of Indiana, they think `basketball.'”
From the kids’ novels of John R. Tunis in the 1940s and ’50s, which presented Indiana as a kind of corn-fed heaven of character-building sports teams and their avuncular coaches, to the 1986 movie “Hoosiers,” state and sport have been linked.
A perfect fit
“Basketball fit Indiana because of the number of small towns with small high schools,” said Bob Hammel, retired sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times. Basketball was cheaper than football, requiring fewer players and less equipment. “It became that town’s symbol. It was a proud thing. It’s been a real object of love in the state for a century. It’s got a real grip here.”
Hammel, who collapsed last week during a Texas Tech game but appears to be well now, covered the Hoosiers for more than 30 years and became best friends with Knight along the way. He’s co-author of Knight’s autobiography, “Knight: My Story,” scheduled for publication later this month.
While Hammel still lives in Bloomington, he hasn’t been to a game that Davis has coached. “Been too busy with the book.”
The mood of the city, post-Knight? “It’s hard to adjust to change. But it’s hard to quarrel with success.”
Bobby Knight left Bloomington, but Bloomington can’t leave Bobby Knight. His name, spoken out loud or not, echoes in this town of approximately 61,000 like an exhaled breath after a wind sprint: bobbybyknightbobbybyknightbobbyby . .
“Everybody in Bloomington loved Bobby Knight,” said Dave Kress, an Indianapolis lawyer who lived and died with IU basketball during Knight’s tenure. “It’ll never be the same — the excitement, the way it was with Bobby Knight.”
And Coach Davis? What about him?
More Top Picks Best Shower Heads With Good Pressure
“There’s still some skepticism,” Kress said. “I like him a lot, but — well, you can’t compare anybody to Bobby Knight.”
Susan Wolfla said, “Davis? I don’t have much of an opinion yet.” The 1992 IU grad never missed a home game back then and still won’t miss one now. These days, though, she watches not from the sardines-in-a-can seats in Assembly Hall but from the living room couch of her home in Columbus, Ohio.
Another fan who keeps up with the Hoosiers on his TV set is Chicagoan Chuck Hilbrich, an IU grad. “The comparisons to Knight are unfair,” he said. “Knight won three national championships.” You can’t blame Davis, Hilbrich added, for grabbing the main chance. “If this hadn’t happened, he’d be spending the next 10 years working his way up through the Bradleys and the Sienas” — small colleges that serve as proving grounds for ambitious coaches.
They’re slow to fall in love, these Hoosier fans. You can sense it in Bloomington when you ask people about Davis: Nobody says anything negative, but the positives don’t exactly flow like one of the beer taps in Nick’s English Hut, a campus-area hangout, where Texas Tech games — imagine that — are picked up by satellite and shown to Knight fans who jam the place.
“There are still lots of loyal Knight followers,” declared Wendy Clendining, who waits tables there while getting her degree at IU. “In this town, it’s not basketball. It’s `Coach Knight basketball.'”
The place is festooned with the usual sports-bar decor: a moosehead with an understandably glum expression; a forest of tarnished trophies; a leather football helmet in a wooden frame; and endless photographs — including one of Knight, distinctively clad in the plaid jacket that was his trademark until his last several years at IU, when he switched to bright red sweaters.
“I thought Davis was going to be awful,” admitted Clendining, a third-generation Bloomington native who still has a soft spot for Knight. “I just never thought he had a chance to begin with. But he’s done well.”
Nothing will make Bloomington forget Knight faster, argued Tom McGlasson, who tends bar at Nick’s, than a flurry of wins in the NCAA.
“There are still people here who wish that Knight was coaching — but it’s hard to complain about the best record in 10 years,” McGlasson said ruefully.
IU English professor Murray Sperber, perhaps Knight’s greatest foe over the years, was even more succinct: “Winning solves everything in America. It’s crucial.”
Two years ago, Sperber wrote “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education,” a book harshly critical of major sports schools such as Indiana. His was one of the loudest voices demanding Knight’s removal after the coach assaulted a player in practice, an incident recorded on videotape.
“Davis has a very different approach. He’s much more open,” Sperber said. “But for some fans, he can’t win enough. He can’t be Bobby Knight.”
He doesn’t want to be. But sometimes being himself is a pretty tall order, too.
Keeping the faith
For one thing, there’s the stutter. “For me,” Davis said from his favorite spot on the couch in the coach’s locker room, “speaking is like running a marathon. I hate the sound of my voice. If I’m watching TV and one of my interviews comes on, I turn it down. I can always hear my stutter.”
Yet it used to be far worse, he said. He managed to control it with practice and prayer. “I pray. And prayer takes away doubt.”
Davis, a Baptist, talks about prayer in the easy, casual, unembarrassed way of someone who made it part of his life at an early age. “I’m not a saint,” he added quickly, “but I grew up listening to stories that said: If you stay faithful, good things will happen.”
His grandfather, who lived next door to Davis’ family in minuscule Fayette (population: 5,000), was a preacher. Davis almost followed him into the pulpit.
“He always said he would,” recalled Davis’ mother, Vandella, from her home in Fayette, “but then he found out about sports.” She laughed. “Then he never mentioned it again.”
She raised Davis and his three siblings alone and money was tight, Vandella said, as she raced between several jobs. Today she works as a clerk for the county’s solid waste authority, although Davis is trying to persuade her to move to Bloomington.
Davis’ childhood memories are of love and lack. “We lived in a house about the size of this room,” he said. “But I didn’t know I was poor until they integrated the schools and I started playing ball with white kids and going to their houses. It was, `Look at that, no roaches, no bugs.’ The smell was different.”
A standout basketball player in high school, Davis garnered a scholarship to the University of Alabama. “I loved playing the game. Loved it. I couldn’t go 10 minutes without thinking about basketball.” After college he was drafted by the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks — only to be cut before the season began.
“I thought my world was over,” Davis said. He played a couple of seasons of pro ball in Italy and Switzerland.
Then he turned to coaching, moving from Birmingham to Witchita Falls, Texas, to Chicago, where he coached the CBA’s now-defunct Chicago Rockers, to Alabama. Along the way, he married Tamilya Floyd.Michael Jr. lives with them and attends Bloomington North High School, where he plays basketball. Davis also has a 19-year-old daughter, Lateesha, from a high school relationship.
When Davis replaced Knight, he knew he’d be branded as a traitor to his mentor. He also knew he had little time to prove himself. A slew of big-time coaches such as Rick Pitino was rumored to be in the running for the IU job.
“I tried not to listen to what people were saying, but at the same time, you can’t help but hear,” Davis said. “I know people were saying, `Well, he’s not going to keep that job. Who is this guy? Where’s he from?’
“The thing was, I knew I could get the job done.”
Davis had the best first season of any coach in IU history, compiling a 21-13 record. (Knight chalked up a 17-8 record in his first season in 1971.) And this year, a share of the Big Ten championship. Now it’s on to the NCAAs. In Bloomington, they’ll be watching Davis — and they’ll be watching Knight, too.
The whole thing could have come straight out of a scene in Tunis’ “Go, Team, Go!” (1954), the classic Indiana sports story, in which an embattled coach makes good: “He believed that what counted was the test of character. Somebody had to lose and somebody had to win. The important thing was meeting fate head on.”
Has Davis spoken to Knight since Davis took over at IU?
“Haven’t tried. I give Coach his space. He’s got a job to do. I appreciate what he taught me — but I’m my own guy. I’m still me.”