Bobby Knight, Discipline and Success.

Indiana coach Bobby Knight, left, and team members Scott May, center, and Quinn Buckner, are all smiles as they hold the trophy for winning the NCAA Basketball championship in Philadelphia on March 30, 1976. (Image: from Associated Press.)

I received the following from one of my blogging friends today, and find it very relevant as in the paper is news of the latest scandal involving some of our foot ball players, another in what seems to be a never ending stream from high profile sportsmen. In looking for an illustration I found a lot of negative news items on this guy.

Much of it seems to boil down to his being a tough no nonsense coach from an era before political correctness polluted objectivity, and men were big enough to take harsh criticism if it was warranted. Bobby Knight has a record of success that makes him a legend.

From C.B.

I sent this to the local paper as a guest editorial. I doubt they'll print it, but who knows?

I lived in Bloomington for over thirty years. Bloomington and IU have their problems, but absent problems are something you take for granted, things that don't happen here. There are many things you can say about Bobby Knight, many of them not very positive, but the one way in which he had an immeasurable impact is this:

He was squeaky clean, and he ran a squeaky clean athletic program. He had the highest graduation rate over his 29 years at IU than any other NCAA coach in history, and although the athletic program does employ tutors, I was never pressured to up an athlete's grade, and never heard of anyone at IU who was.

The General coached at West Point before he came to IU, and he brought a drill sergeant's approach to coaching with him. At IU, it was Bobby Knight's way or the highway. Period. Athletes at IU were among its most upstanding citizens, because Bobby Knight would tolerate nothing less. Before the season began about 10 years ago, one of his freshman players to be called his professor a bitch in class. Bobby Knight heard about it, and threw him off the team for it. And it wasn't only the basketball team that was clean. It was the whole athletic program, because Bobby Knight owned it. If a coach was pulling strings under the table for his players or tolerating bad behavior and Bobby Knight had found out about it, he would have had the coach fired.

For those thirty-some years I lived in Bloomington, athletic program scandals were something you read about in the paper that happened at other campuses. The last athletic scandal in Bloomington I can remember happened in the late 80s or early 90s when a football player was shot and killed -- and the football player was trying to bring down a drug dealer.

Here, every week, there's a story in the paper either about some Penn State athlete (usually a football player) being charged with a violent felony, or an update on a trial of an athlete being tried for a violent felony. Assault, rape, manslaughter, you name it. It's hard to get used to after 30 years of squeaky clean athletics. Strike that last sentence, because no civilized human being should get used to it. It's disgusting. It's embarrassing. It's downright unacceptable.

People here (and in nearly every other college town) shrug their shoulders and say, "That's the way it is." Well, it may be the way it is, but it is not the way it has to be. Bobby Knight is proof that you don't have to tolerate criminals or criminal wannabes or anything less than "yes, sir" behavior to win -- and nearly every other college coach in every varsity sport, including Joe Paterno, would give his right arm for the record Bobby Knight achieved at IU. It's time that the Penn State athletic program figured that out.