Sportswriter and award-winning author John Feinstein, who wrote Season on the Brink and had a new book, Back Roads to March, releasing on March 3, joined Jim Coyle and Todd Leary on Indiana Sports Beat to discuss the writing of Season on the Brink, some stories of his time with Bob Knight and the team, and to preview what his new book entails.
“I lived in Indiana for six months. When I traveled to Indiana, which I’ve done many, many times through the years, it’s interesting how many of them recognize me. They liked Season on the Brink. They thought Season on the Brink allowed people who didn’t understand what Bob Knight did as a coach, to understand it. You would never guess the number of letters I got from Kentucky fans who say, ‘I will never like Bob Knight, but I respect him now, having read your book.’”
Why people from Indiana enjoyed Season on the Brink:
“People in Indiana understood Bob Knight more than 99 percent of the rest of the world. Because of the access that Bob gave me, I think they found some of the anecdotal storytelling I was able to do fascinating because I was an outsider who was on the inside for that season.
Feinstein's response to Knight's return to Assembly Hall and how it tied in with Season on the Brink:
“I wrote a column about when he returned to Assembly all, and I thought the column was very balanced. I basically said, ‘Look, you can’t excuse some of the things that he’s done. He is a bully, and there have been times when he’s turned on friends. But you have to acknowledge that A.) He was a good coach – anyone who says that he wasn’t doesn’t know anything about basketball – and B.) He touched a lot of lives in a lot of ways. . . You wouldn’t believe the vitriol in some of the comments on that column. ‘How can you defend a guy that did this?’ My general answer was, ‘I know you didn’t read the book.’”
How he came across the title Season on the Brink:
“Ninety-nine percent of the research I do is done by the time I start writing. As far as titles are concerned, it’s totally random. The title for Season on the Brink came from a day in Minneapolis. The team had lost the night before at Iowa, badly. Naturally, Bob was furious. We almost crashed taking off from Iowa City. The plane did a 360 on the runway. It’s funny because, as we’re going down the runway, Bob is railing on about the fact that we’ll never be any good until we get rid of Alford. Then the plane does this 360 and there’s dead silence.The pilot comes on and says the runway’s slick, and we’re not talking because we’re scared to death. Then Knight picks up mid-sentence and says, ‘I’ll tell you another thing about Alford!’ The next morning we’re in Minneapolis, we’ve been up watching tape until three or four in the morning, of course. As we’re walking out, we come across a Minneapolis columnist named Sid Hartman. He comes in and Bob’s not talking to anybody. He figures his best target to get a response is probably me. He said, ‘So what are you going to do all day in the snow here in Minneapolis?’ Bob was a few steps ahead of us, and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do what I do every day and follow Knight around.’As we learned in the incident that led to him being fired, he doesn’t take well to being referred to as Knight. Bob whirled on me and said, ‘You don’t ever call me Knight. How dare you? Who do you think you are?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘I’ll see you at practice’ because I knew arguing with him was a lost cause. So I went for a walk in the snow, and as I was on the walk, I said to myself, ‘Every day we’re on the brink of some disaster. Every day!’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the title. Season on the Brink.’”
An additional story after Leary noted, out of appreciation, that there are no fun days when playing for Knight:
“I’m blanking on the player’s name, but Knight told him after practice, ‘You’re not playing. I can’t play you.’ They go up and they lose to Michigan and they get on the plane and there’s McDonald’s that the managers have brought to eat. (The player) goes, ‘Well, the only good thing about this is that you can’t yell at me, because I didn’t play today.’ Of course, Knight gets on the plane, takes all the McDonald’s and throws it on the runway. Nobody’s going to eat. He runs back to (the player), screams in his face, ‘If we could play you, we wouldn’t lose the game.’ The whole tirade was directed at him even though he didn’t play a minute.”
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