Pity Indiana’s Players Most of All

Indiana University has a zero-tolerance policy for morons.

Bob Knight was fired Sunday. Coach Knight said he would have had to have been a moron to grab and swear at a student.

Bingo.

The first honest thing Coach Knight has said in 17 weeks.

He leaves the coaching profession, and it isn’t a sad occasion or a joyous occasion. It is just pathetic.

The most pathetic thing is the way Knight let down a team of young men who have put their reputations on the line for him.

Knight couldn’t walk away from a smart-aleck teenager who seemed most happy to goad the temper-challenged coach. Nope, Knight just had to teach another lesson.

A lesson of stupidity and rigidity, a lesson that nothing in the world was more important at that moment than the way he, himself, him, Coach Knight, Mr. Knight, Sir Knight, King Knight, was addressed.

In that moment Knight might have betrayed his employer. Except IU deserved to be betrayed.

For two decades no one at Indiana had the courage to be a good boss, to stand up to a supremely talented, supremely spoiled employee, to set boundaries of behavior, to establish what the boss saw as right and wrong.

If you let a puppy, no matter how cute the puppy, have the run of the house and relieve itself wherever it wants, the puppy will always have the run of the house. All of a sudden, the puppy is grown up and it isn’t so cute. It is too messy, and no matter how much you loved that puppy, you can’t love the dog enough to keep it.

Knight was once a puppy. Nobody set limits. Then Knight made one too many messes. He couldn’t be kept. Indiana got what it deserved. There will be protests and ugliness--and good luck in the healing process.

Even at the end, as university President Myles Brand was explaining how Knight had not only grabbed the arm of one 19-year-old but had defiantly refused to attend alumni affairs and had even had another scary, nasty temper tantrum at the expense of a female employee of the athletic department since the zero tolerance was initiated, it was clear. The university has no guts.

How in the world was Knight allowed, again, to bully a female underling? He had previously come to near physical contact with an athletic department secretary. Now, under zero tolerance, he reportedly lashed out at a female assistant basketball coach. That should have gotten the coach fired.

Knight also may have betrayed the loyal fans around the state of Indiana. Except he didn’t.

Those fans never confronted Knight, never made him answer, for them, the most important question.

Why did Coach Knight demand, rightly, standards of conduct, discipline and moral behavior, from his players that he never demanded of himself?

If there is one question it would be nice to have Knight answer, that would be it.

Hoosier fans were mostly content to make excuses for the coach and look for ways to trash the Knight accusers. They will do so now. It will be the media’s fault. It will be a 19-year-old wiseacre freshman’s fault. It will not be Coach Knight’s fault. According to Hoosier fans, it is never Coach Knight’s fault.

But the only people Knight has truly betrayed are the Indiana players who stood sullenly against a wall, listening to their university president fire their coach.

At Brand’s news conference, reserve player Tom Geyer told the Associated Press that there was no way Coach Knight could have borne the burden of zero tolerance.

“It’s awfully hard to live under the guidelines that the university gave him,” Geyer said. “I’m not really sure that I could live by those guidelines.”

That one of his players could make that statement, that someone given to Knight so that the young man could learn lessons of good conduct, discipline and morality, could say that the zero-tolerance guidelines were unfair, that is why the coach should be fired.

Because all Indiana University asked Knight to do was live by the standards he expected everyone else to abide. To be civil, to be mature, to be disciplined in his conduct.

This Hoosier team that stood against the wall Sunday and defended its coach, those are the ones Knight so badly let down.

These kids had come to Indiana knowing all the bad about Coach Knight. All of those recruits expected to be yelled at, grabbed, shoved, swore at, but they also expected their coach would stand up for them.

And by having the total inability to walk away from an unimportant, smart-mouthed student, Coach Knight was saying to his team, to those kids who had the guts to come and play for him, that they didn’t matter. Coach Knight was saying that nothing mattered more than grabbing the arm of a stranger.

Coach Knight was saying to his players that they were of no importance. That is the final lesson of Coach Knight’s career. Nothing matters but Coach Knight. And now Coach Knight doesn’t matter at all.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com