The General’s Shadow:

On the first day of the season, Knight walked into the locker room with a short 30-year old man wearing a tweed jacket over a golf shirt and carrying a notepad.

Knight stood at the front of the locker room, his gaze signaling that what was about to be said was not up for discussion.

“John’s going to be around a lot this year,” Knight told the team. “He’s writing a book about our year, so give John whatever he wants.”

The players were stunned. Friends of Knight were common guests, but they always came and went without much fanfare. They weren’t used to someone sticking around.

Why would Knight invite not just an outsider, but a reporter to spend the year with them?

The players were not alone in their concern.

“We were surprised there was no heads up,” assistant coach Joby Wright remembered. “But to be fair, Coach didn’t really have to. We also wondered how long John would last. I’m not saying we were betting on when — one week, maybe a month — but he made it.”

Knight did not give them any time to question the decision. He turned to the board behind him.

“Now, on those downscreens…” star guard Steve Alford remembers Knight saying next, according to his book, “Playing for Knight.”

The players opened their notebooks and started taking notes.

So did Feinstein.

Former IU men's basketball assistant coaches Dan Dakich and Scott May talk on the bench Dec. 13, 1986, during a game against East Carolina University at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.

Feinstein walked out of his apartment and crossed East 17th Street to Assembly Hall. He strolled into practice, pulled up a chair on the sideline and sat there, sipping coffee and pouring through a stack of newspapers.

Every once in a while, he’d glance up. Rare was a dull practice for Knight’s team.

New day, same episode of “BK Theater,” a phrase Feinstein coined to describe Knight’s methods of motivation.

For nearly five months, Feinstein watched Knight’s one-man show and learned why he was called the General. His orders were absolute.

At first, Feinstein remembers, it was shocking.

He expected the yelling — he knew how competitive Knight was and that perfection was the unachievable baseline. He expected Knight’s stubborn nature. The coach always needed to have the last word.

What he did not expect was the psychological warfare.

Bob Knight talks to then-sophomore Steve Alford on Jan. 12, 1985, during a game at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. The No. 11 Hoosiers beat the Wisconsin Badgers 90-68, but the team went on to lose the next four games and drop from the AP poll.

“John had his invisible act,” said Alford, the star guard and captain of the team. “He knew when to be seen and talk to people. Even more importantly for us, he understood when it was best to back off and give us our space.”

After IU defeated Iowa at home on March 2 — four days after Knight read the Los Angeles Times article — Knight finally spoke.

“I thought seriously about just throwing you the hell out,” Feinstein remembers Knight telling him. “But I’m not going to for two reasons. The first is I thought you showed a lot of guts, just showing up every day knowing how pissed off I was, and you didn’t just duck the situation.”

“The second reason is because I know you rooted like hell for this team.”

Feinstein smiled.

He knew Knight never apologized. This was as close as he’d get.

As the other coaches entered the room, Knight made the announcement.

“Feinstein lives,” Feinstein remembers him declaring. “Let's all go to Zagreb’s and have steaks for dinner.”

***

Feinstein and Knight sat in a near-empty Big Wheel restaurant well past midnight. The giant neon wagon wheel sign shone through the window.

“Will we ever win another game?” Knight asked, sipping his milkshake.

Knight loved this rhetorical question, and it grew into a running joke among the coaching staff that season. He had more confidence in himself and his system than anyone, but still, the coach lived in a constant state of worry.

Did his team stack up? Was it prepared for the challenges that lay ahead?

Nights were long.

Knight could never sleep after a game. He was too wound up. He’d replay it in his head, analyzing every defensive breakdown, every wasted possession and every missed opportunity.

As soon as the players left Assembly Hall, Feinstein would grab a cup of coffee and meet the coaches in the Cave. By the time he walked into the room, Knight usually was already hunched over in his seat, yelling about Alford or Thomas. No matter how well those two played, he always found something in their performance to complain about.

If IU won, the coaching staff was treated to a short evening, leaving around 2 a.m. If they lost, the couches became beds — if they got any sleep at all. Feinstein was there for it all.

“I definitely don’t remember going home early,” assistant coach Joby Wright joked. “I remember that room though. Every inch of it.”

Knight did not need the coaches there as he picked apart the film. He could do it on his own, but according to multiple sources familiar with Knight, he could not stand to be alone. Knight was in the middle of a divorce with his wife and was raising his youngest son, Patrick, a freshman at Bloomington High School North.

Those close to the coach said he was lonely. He needed someone to talk to.

Normally that burden fell on the assistant coaches. Wherever Knight went, one of them would follow.

The coaching staff saw this as the price for learning at Knight’s feet. Feinstein saw it as an opportunity to understand Knight's complicated personality.

“Usually one of us would go to dinner with him, then back to the stadium to watch film, and all we wanted to do was go home,” then-graduate assistant Dan Dakich remembers. “John was great for that. Instead of us, Coach always asked him.”

To those close to Knight, he seemed to enjoy Feinstein’s company.

“John could communicate with Coach at a high level,” Wright said. “It wasn’t like they were just sitting around telling jokes. You couldn’t be a wiseass, asshole or dumbass and be friends with Coach.”

The two of them would spend hours in the Cave talking. Mostly, it’d be about the team and what the Hoosiers were doing wrong. Occasionally, it’d be about Patrick’s freshman squad, one of the few things that stressed Knight out as much as the Hoosiers. Other times, they’d just trade stories.

After several hours in the Cave, Knight would grow tired. He’d watched all the film, put together his practice plans — usually multiple times — but he still didn’t want to go home and be alone.

“Come on John, let's grab some food.”

***

The sun was setting as Feinstein walked along the beach on Shelter Island, New York. He stopped for a moment and stared out over the waves.

It was done. At the end of the summer of 1986, the book’s final edits were complete and ready to be sent back to his publisher.

“I’ve actually written a book,” Feinstein said to himself out loud. “I just hope it does well enough to write another one.”

A month before “A Season on the Brink” hit the shelves, Feinstein sent Knight an advance copy. The coach stopped reading before finishing the first chapter, where Feinstein described in detail his berating of Thomas from that early practice.

“I made one of my biggest mistakes,” Knight wrote in his book, “Knight: My Story” in 2002, talking about granting Feinstein access. “I read the first six pages and I think the word [fuck] was used sixteen times. I put it down, sick, and never read another word.”

Knight felt betrayed.

He thought there was an agreement between him and Feinstein that his profanity would not be included. For Feinstein, that was not an option.

To him, writing the book without the word “fuck” would be the same as not mentioning basketball. The word was a part of Knight’s identity.

“As a reporter, you usually get in trouble because someone says, ‘The story is not true, you didn’t quote me accurately,’” Feinstein said during a speech in 2014. “In this case, Bob Knight was unhappy because I quoted him too accurately.”

Feinstein had already toned down the profanity considerably. He never used another one of Knight’s favorite words — one that “rhymes with bunt,” the author said — or some of the crude, sometimes racist, jokes the coach was occasionally fond of telling. Feinstein joked that if he kept it all in, he’d still be writing the book 35 years later.

When Feinstein learned that Knight refused to read it, he was crushed. He wrote the coach a letter, explaining that the book accomplished everything they’d set out to achieve: There was a method to Knight’s madness, and everything in these pages proved it.

There was more to the coach than the outbursts. Everything was planned out, everything purposeful. The book revealed how Knight deeply cared for his players off the court, and that on it, he was trying to mold them into one perfect unit.

“He was such a teacher,” Wright said. “The book did a great job showing what our program was like. The expectations were clear when you came to play for Coach Knight.”

A few weeks after the book was published, Feinstein found himself back on press row in the Joyce Center in Notre Dame, Indiana, where IU was set to take on Notre Dame. As he sat there waiting for tipoff, he spotted Bob Hammel of the Bloomington's Herald-Times — one of Knight’s closest friends — walking toward him.

Before Feinstein could even utter a hello, Hammel reached over and handed him the envelope with the letter Feinstein had written Knight. It was unopened.

Feinstein said what upset Knight more than anything was that the book took away his ability to have the final word. He lived to be in control, but now the narrative was set for him. People would read the book and decide how to view him, and Knight knew it would not be favorable.

“He began to assume a starring role in that most classic of historical narratives—the centuries-old, cautionary tale of hubris and absolute power corrupting absolutely—he was either blind or helpless to stop it,” wrote Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated in 2017. “From King Lear to Ozymandias to Caesar, the arc and choreography of power’s demise is familiar, almost to the point of cliché. Then came the Indiana version of the theme.”

As the book took off, Knight drew a dark line across Feinstein’s name on the List.

For eight years, Feinstein was cut out of Knight’s life.

When IU won the national championship in 1987 — the year after Feinstein was in Bloomington — he was not invited to the celebration. When Knight got remarried, his former friend was noticeably absent. When Knight was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1991, there were no cheerful congratulations between the two.

Knight finally broke his silence at the 1994 Maui Invitational.

While Feinstein walked down the hallway of the hotel with Maryland head coach Gary Williams, the two unexpectedly ran into Knight. “Uh oh,” Williams whispered as Feinstein braced for the worst.

Surprisingly, Knight was pleasant as the two talked about Feinstein becoming a father, but you wouldn’t mistake them for friends. Long gone were the days of watching film until 2 a.m. and late night meals at Big Wheel.

Feinstein’s now 63 and has written 44 books about some of the biggest stars in sports. But his career continues to be defined by the winter he spent in Bloomington, and the explosive words that resulted from it.

While Knight may no longer be the center of attention at IU, the book passes down his legacy from generation to generation.

And even now, 35 years later, the characters in those pages still hear about the 1986 season.

Bob Knight rests against padding in Feb. 1986 during a practice. IU ended Feb. 1986 as the No. 15 in the nation, with a record of 19-6.

“When [Lakers general manager] Rob Pelinka introduced me to his son and told him I played at IU, the first thing he said was, ‘Do you know “A Season on the Brink?’” Wright remembers. “If you could have seen him when I told him that I was an assistant coach on that team.”

At 79, Knight has finally begun to forgive some of the grudges he’s carried with him for so many years.

After 20 years away, he returned to Assembly Hall last winter for the first time since being fired in 2000 for violating the athletic department’s “zero-tolerance policy", soaking in a raucous ovation from fans who never thought they’d see the day.

Still, other grudges Knight can’t let go of.

It has been nearly 10 years since he’s spoken to Feinstein.

The last time the two talked, Feinstein was writing his book, “One on One,” a behind-the-scenes look at his first 10 books. He wanted to end the book with a quote from Knight, hoping “A Season on the Brink” could come full circle.

Knight was in Madison Square Garden, calling a game for ESPN, when Feinstein arrived unannounced looking for a favor, just like he had that afternoon in Assembly Hall in the winter of 1985.

“Bob do you have a minute?” Feinstein asked while Knight walked off the court.

“No,” Knight responded.

“Bob, I literally want to ask you just one question,” Feinstein said.

Knight whipped around.

“John, do you speak English?” he barked. “I said no!”

Correction: a photo caption previously misidentified Scott May. The IDS regrets this error.

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