INDIANAPOLIS — Bob Knight must have felt at home at Marian University yesterday morning.
The school’s nickname is the Knights, and it’s a comfortable setting for the retired coach for other reasons: New athletic director Steve Downing is one of Knight’s former players and a longtime friend.
Maybe someday an event like this will take place in Bloomington rather than Indianapolis.
Knight’s latest Hoosier State stop was a two-day reunion with ex-players about 75 miles north of Indiana University. Knight spoke after receiving an award Friday night, then sat inside a tent yesterday morning with former player Landon Turner, where the two signed autographs for roughly three hours to help raise money for Marian’s athletic department. Everyone else was stationed at folding tables on the football field and spent their free time mingling, retelling stories and answering the one question Indiana fans have been asking for more than a decade: What do the Hoosiers have to do to get Knight back to Bloomington?
“I hope someday he will be honored at Indiana. That needs to happen. Somebody needs to make that happen,” said Scott May, a starter on Knight’s 1976 unbeaten championship team and an outspoken critic of Knight’s firing.
“I think they should name Assembly Hall after him, the Bob Knight Center.’’
But nobody can say whether even that would be enough.
School officials have made attempts recently to mend fences with the man who brought the Hoosiers three national titles and won a school-record 661 games.
In 2009, Knight was voted into the school’s Hall of Fame along with Downing. Indiana athletic director Fred Glass wrote to Knight twice, asking whether he would attend the induction ceremony. A week before the ceremony, Knight declined the offer, saying he didn’t want to detract from the other inductees.