I had been looking forward to this past Thursday for most of the week. Not only was it going to feature Purdue playing at Minnesota in a key Big 10 matchup, it was going to feature Bob Knight in a color commentary role.
Growing up here in Indiana, I definitely knew about Bob Knight. My mom graduated from Indiana and so I grew up a big fan of the Hoosiers. Obviously things changed later in life, but for most of my years I followed the exploits of Knight up until his firing from the university in September 2000. Later when he was coaching at Texas Tech, I saw a few of his games, but never really paid much attention (other than the game in which he broke Dean Smith’s victory record.)
I knew that I was never going to go to IU (who’s really ever heard of their CS program before?), but I still followed the program a lot up until my senior year when I decided to go to Purdue. After that point, I converted over and soon became a die-hard Boilermaker, watching pretty much all of the basketball games during my four years there–which covered the transition period from Knight’s old rival Gene Keady to the current coach Matt Painter.
This all led into Thursday night and the basketball game. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bob Knight was a decent color commentator. He was able to give a lot of flavor to the game both from his experience at the arena and from his coaching career. After one traveling call, he stood up, took off his microphone, made the traveling motion to Donnie Gray, and bowed. He also was surprisingly pretty balanced in his coverage of Purdue, although his coverage was a bit incomplete at times. (He apparently didn’t realize that Chris Kramer has started most all of his games while at Purdue and has just recently been coming off the bench due to his ankle injuries). About the only complaint I have came in the last few minutes when he started mixing up the two teams when talking strategy, but that was a minor flaw.
The reason that I decided to write this post was in conjunction with a trip I’m making tomorrow. My brother goes to Indiana, and tomorrow I’m going down with my family to visit him and see my first game in Assembly Hall. I’m sure it’s some sort of heresy to watch a game there not involving Purdue, and definitely more of one to actually root for them. I’m going to try avoiding the latter one, though, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens if the old people around me all choose to get involved in the game. We’ll see what happens… I’ll try to post up a report about the game and my feelings on the arena tomorrow.
Posted by themoonsofbill 
