Keegan: Coach: Can we visit?

An open letter to Texas Tech basketball coach Robert Montgomery Knight:

Dear Coach,

Please grant me a personal interview tonight after the game.

Please.

You wouldn’t remember me, and not just because I’ve put on 60 pounds, but I’m the guy who at a 1985 NIT press conference asked if you ever wake up in the morning and regret your actions from the previous day. Your response remains the best quote I’ve ever scribbled.

“Sure,” you said. “Sometimes I don’t even have to wait until I wake up in the morning. Sometimes I regret them when the chair is halfway across the floor.”

Great line, though not as funny as author John Feinstein’s. He reacted to you calling him “a pimp and a whore” for writing “A Season on the Brink” by saying, “I wish he would make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”

You definitely won’t remember that while writing for the National, I visited Bloomington during Damon Bailey’s freshman year with the intention of interviewing him, but couldn’t because he did or didn’t do something that required an extra session with the academic adviser. So I interviewed your son Pat, who had a good sense of humor.

While in town, I watched you grant an interview to a local TV reporter after practice. He showed you, on a slip of paper, eight or nine questions. You studied it for maybe 30 seconds. Then you spoke for about two minutes and incorporated the answer to every one. That blew me away.

While covering UC Irvine in the mid-’80s, I enjoyed long chats with the man who first hired you to coach at an Ohio high school. Andy Andreas was helping the Anteaters on a volunteer basis until leaving the program, frustrated at a lack of commitment to defense.

Andy told me that when he recruited for you as an assistant at Indiana, if he was undecided on a player, he’d ask himself: “If five duplicates of that player took the floor for us, could we win with them?” Never forgot that.

New Jersey Nets coach Lawrence Frank told me he went to see you at the end of his four years as a manager at Indiana to see if you could help him get into coaching. You left him with the impression you had blown him off. It wasn’t until six months later that he learned from Marquette coach Kevin O’Neill, then his boss, it was you who got him the job. Frank still smiles at the memory of you dubbing him the “Jersey Shore Pimp” for coming to practice with short socks.

Coach, I’ll even give you the questions:

1. If Dr. James Naismith, buried here in Lawrence, could see a college basketball game, what would you guess he would most enjoy about the game as it’s played today and what would you guess he would find most disturbing?

2. If you could steal one personality trait from Kansas University coach Bill Self and implant it into your DNA, what would it be?

3. Of all the players you’ve coached in college, who’s the one you’d want to send five duplicates of onto the court? Same question for current Big 12 players.

4. If you could sit at a table and converse with three people from history, who would they be and what would you discuss?