YouTube Gold: Bob Knight Loses It At Purdue

Bob Knight had a legendary career at Indiana which was, in many ways, a race between his unquestioned coaching genius and his inability to control his anger.

There are a few incidents that really illustrate his anger. There was his explosion vs. Ted Valentine, a guy whose ego is nearly as big as is Knight’s. There was the incident in Puerto Rico where he pushed or shoved a cop into a garbage can, an act the Puerto Rican government never forgave or forgot. There’s the notorious audio tape where he berates his team about losing to Purdue. And of course there’s the Neal Reed video that ended his IU career.

Then there’s the chair.

We didn’t realize that it was 30 years ago yesterday that Bob Knight got up and tossed his chair across the floor in a game at Purdue.

We also had no idea it happened in the first five minutes of the game. How crazy is that?

The tragedy of Knight is that his outbursts repeatedly sabotaged himself and his team. His bad behavior overshadowed his good qualities and so people tend to forget that at times he has been warm and compassionate to many.

Instead, he’ll be most remembered for things like this.