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Knight falls A Winning PersonalityBy Rick Horowitz
"Everybody's
thrown furniture." Indiana University basketball player This thing with Coach is just totally bogus -- I couldn't believe it when I heard the news. The whole team, we were in complete shock, and I'm not even exaggerating, especially after all the years Coach has been here. You think basketball, you think Coach Hoop -- it's that simple. They're saying he crossed some kind of line or something, like his behavior was bad for the program. That's completely ridiculous. The guys on the team, we don't feel that way at all. We know Coach was just trying to motivate us, which he definitely did. Like the time he rearranged all the chairs and all the tables in the athletic department -- that was just to show us how we shouldn't be stuck in patterns, how we should always be looking for new ways to do things. Some people like to redecorate a house a little at a time, but Coach is always thinking large -- big deal! Didn't he offer to pay for half the damage? Or the time he grabbed one of the guys around the neck. People think he was trying to hurt somebody, but they're clueless. He was just trying to show us how terrible it would feel to choke during a big game. It's like he was preparing us to deal with the pressure, so we'd be able to handle it when the time came. There weren't any hard feelings, and even the guy whose neck it was, he never said a word the whole time, so what does that tell you? The thing about Coach is he's constantly finding ways to pass along little lessons, like he's not just a coach but a teacher. But how many teachers would have the guts to dangle one of his own players off the clock tower the way Coach did? Most teachers, they'd probably just go, "Now pay attention, class -- we're putting in a new offense today." Not Coach Hoop -- he made sure we were listening -- and if the guy he was dangling hadn't panicked and been so slippery from all the sweat, nobody outside the team would ever have heard about it. Coach was also the first one to apologize to the family, which tells you exactly the kind of man he is. That's the other thing about Coach -- people are always saying how he thinks he's bigger than the program, and bigger than the university. That's just dumb -- Coach is the program, so how can he be bigger than the program? And the program is the university -- ask any of the alumni, they'll tell you. It's not Coach's fault that some losers in the administration couldn't figure that out, and kept acting like they were supposed to be in charge of him. And it's not threatening anyone to remind them of who's really in charge, even if he raised his voice once or twice just to make sure they got it. Plus you had some of these know-it-all professors saying he was out of control and an embarrassment to the university and garbage like that. It's a credit to Coach that he put up with it as long as he did, and personally, I don't think poisoning the food in the faculty lounge was even overreacting, not after everything they were saying about him. And this latest thing that probably clinched it for him -- you know what I'm talking about -- was a total accident. Yes, he was angry at the team for not going hard during practice. And yes, he locked us all in the locker room and slid a couple of lit matches under the door. But was he trying to kill anyone? Coach Hoop says no, and that's good enough for me. And he certainly wasn't trying to kill all those other people -- they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But at least we didn't lose any starters, and the boosters club is already raising money for a new field house, so I don't see what all the commotion is about. Fire him? They should build him a statue! Posted 9/12/00. You'll
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Rick Horowitz