Word: knightly
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...stadiums and practice facilities while stiffing undergraduate education, and he papers academia's ivory towers with the evidence. It's been a virtuous crusade, but Sperber made one blasphemous mistake along the way. In May he called for I.U. to fire radioactive, chair-tossing basketball coach Bobby Knight...
Taking on Knight in Indiana was like walking the streets of Baghdad with a sign saying SADDAM MUST GO. It didn't matter that there was a tape of Knight in a meltdown, making like the Boston Strangler on a former player. The 1997 incident, replayed endlessly when the tape surfaced last spring, brought outrage in Indiana. Not outrage aimed at Knight, whose three championships had always served as penance for his sins, but at Sperber, who had the gall to say it was time for Knight to go. Not to quibble, but it might have been time...
Eventually Knight did go, fired in September after another incident in which he laid a hand on a student. The firing led to a near riot on campus, but Sperber was forced out long before then. "I see dead bodies," said a message on a website that named Sperber and other Knight critics. "I got a call at home from someone who said if I didn't shut my mouth, he was going to shut it for me," Sperber says. On campus one day, a student offered to rearrange his smile. "But the most disturbing thing was finding...
...Sperber took this semester off, and only after Knight's firing did he consider a return. "I felt silenced, and I missed teaching," he says. After 29 years at I.U., he'll teach two "stealth courses," as he calls them. Students won't know in advance that their teacher is the anti-Knight. "Murray's a good guy and a great teacher," says student Heather Dinich, 21, who welcomes his return...
...Feinstein has established himself as the authority on men's college basketball by writing about the antics of former Indiana coach Bob Knight in A Season on the Brink to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which annually boasts the nation's most successful hoops programs. In The Last Amateurs, however, Feinstein has turned to the little-known Patriot League, where academics is more important than athletics...