On Thursday he grabbed Kent Harvey. On Sunday he was fired. Bobby Knight wasn’t just a coach at Indiana, he was an institution. An institution that often folded under itself, and perplexed its admirers. Kent Harvey is not the reason for the firing. Last May, Knight was called to change his ways of 29 years. He never did. Myles Brand, Indiana University president, reported that in the past six months Coach Knight also verbally abused a high-ranking female officer. IU officials began questioning Knight at every turn. `How can a coach that preaches discipline and personal accountability fail to show up for administration meetings and basketball clinics in the past few months?’ the administration wondered. With all this, the rap sheet came close to bursting. Harvey just burst the bubble. However, this is Bobby Knight. Take him or leave him. But before you go the way that Indiana went, realize that he must have done something right to stay at IU for 29 years. Bobby Knight preferred to not know how much he was paid. He only knew that it was too much in regards to the professors of Indiana. When Adidas won out a sponsorship battle in the late `70’s for the shoes of Knight’s players, Knight turned the “pimp money” over to the university. Knight was such a proponent of education, that he once proposed implementing a system where if four players lost eligibility one year, and only one of the four graduated the next, the basketball team could only fill one of the four scholarships that they had to fill. But all of these pleasantries are moot. Wins keep you employed over the summer. 661 wins make you a legend. The General was hired on as the head coach of Army at the tender age of 24. By 40, he had coached a perfect season and had a national championship under his belt. (1976 was the year for both accomplishments at Indiana.) He left Indiana with three national championships and numerous Big Ten titles. But with Knight, for every virtue, there is a vice. Knight’s demise may have been that in recent years, the wins haven’t been accumulating on a yearly basis as they used to. Wins can excuse almost any bad behavior. When you win, you can punch a Puerto Rican cop at the Pan-Am Games. Also you can hurl a vase at a secretary and watch it shatter over her head, and keep her from leaking her assault to the press. When you win, you can call a former IU Women’s Basketball coach a D.A.B. (dumb-ass broad). Some people believe the reason he has not been winning (and subsequently, losing to teams like Pepperdine in the first round of the NCAA tournament) is because the game has passed him by. Perhaps the game hasn’t passed him by. Perhaps teens today have just been unable to live up to Knight’s stringent policies that he holds for his players. Twenty years ago, Knight wasn’t the lone whip-in-hand disciplinarian in collegiate athletics. But when Woody Hayes (former Ohio State football coach) clubbed an opposing player, the hard-nosed coaching style gave way to a less domineering, more supplementary coaching philosophy. Knight taught by intimidating, but he taught well. His 763 all-time wins is a testament to that. That’s the Dr. Jekyll side. The Mr. Hyde side of his coaching was choking Neil Reed in practice, head-butting his own son Pat in a game and showing his players the excrement left on a wad of toilet paper, while referring to how they were playing at the time. You can’t label Knight. Maybe that’s the way he wants it. Maybe the best way to define Bobby Knight is through a Bob Knight moment. Frank Deford wrote a feature story on The General for Sports Illustrated some years back. In the feature, Deford tells of a night at Assembly Hall where the students were swearing at the officials for a call made against the beloved Hoosiers. Knight grabbed the microphone at mid-court and told the student section to quit with the disparaging remarks. After the game, he told a reporter, “that showed no fucking class.”