Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Still Life of Sidelines with Bob

63 Still Life of Sidelines with Bob The Game Away from the Ball Basketball coach Bob Knight of the Texas Tech University Red Raiders is riding the referee. It is the opening seconds of the home game with Oklahoma University, and the ref lucky enough to pull the assignment to patrol the bench-side corridor from Texas Tech’s back court to Oklahoma’s base line is weathering the sniping coming from Knight, pacing parallel. After a few minutes of this criticism, the ref has developed a twitch. He is flinching, his head turning toward the coach then shying away. Every call, no matter who is calling it, is being questioned, commented on, underscored. The ref’s attention is being divided. His reaction time dulled. Running up the court, he stalls sooner after crossing the timeline, adding a bit more distance from the glowering coach. He is being conditioned. He can’t take his eyes off his own periphery now. And then, like that, Coach Knight lays off, slumps into his chair and assumes the position, his arms wrapped around his broad chest, his head down, brooding, Olympian, his dark eyes looking out from beneath his dark and darkening brows, intent on the game before him. I have no idea what is going on in the game. I have been forcing myself to watch this drama on the sidelines, one of Coach Knight’s calculated contributions to the flow and tenor of the remaining minutes of play. Roger Angell has pointed out that in 64 Still Life of Sidelines with Bob baseball, the only game where the ball doesn’t do the scoring, the spectator must widen the field of vision to the whole playing field. Basketball fans certainly know of the game away from the ball—the screens and constant cuts, the choreography of checks and switches, pickups and block-outs performed covertly while the player in possession dribbles into position or coils in anticipation of the perfect bounce pass to the now-open man. In spite of sensing the complete action of the court, that bouncing ball more than likely rivets the fan’s attention, its trajectory through the air mesmerizes. That is why I have had to expend so much energy to ignore the attractive nuisance of that ball in its flight and the furious action swirling around it to focus on the nowstill center that is Coach Bob Knight. In his thirty-five years of coaching college basketball, he has constantly shifted our attention to the game away from the ball. By that I don’t mean simply the machinations of his players on the floor or even his psychological gamesmanship on the sidelines . It still matters that teams he coaches win, that the ball goes through his team’s hoop more than the other team’s. After thirty-five years in the presence of Bob Knight, however, the game away from the ball has expanded way beyond the game on the floor, in the arena, in the league, in the season. The game away from the ball has expanded to include institutions, state governments, whole peoples even. Our vision has shifted. We no longer keep our eye on the ball. Our eye is drawn to Knight. Dazzleflage Coach Knight, inert in his chair on the sidelines, wears a black pullover. Black is one half of Tech’s colors. The other is scarlet, the shade of the collar of the golf shirt he has on beneath the black sweater. There are a couple of things odd about this black. For one, it’s not red, or more exactly, crimson, a color of Indiana University, where Coach Knight coached famously for twenty-nine seasons. The scarlet at his throat today is a tease, sharing some of the same frequency of that other red, but it is eclipsed by that ex- Still Life of Sidelines with Bob 65 panse of smothering black. This black, the black of his sweater, is matte, flat, a color drained of color, and it could stand for all that will not be spoken about the history of his years in Indiana and his departure from the university where he was, until recently , so closely identified. The media guide I got along with my souvenir basketball scrupulously records his statistics of victory, the irresistible climb to 800 wins, the three national championships , the Olympic gold medal, the histories and careers...