Bob Knight could do nothing that would surprise us anymore, not after all his seasons in the spotlight. He filled them with so much bombast and brilliance, with so many antics and accomplishments, we knew anything was possible.

Still, his sudden resignation Monday as the coach of Texas Tech arrived with all the unexpectedness of a squall stirring on the plains. It came without warning, and that made it a shock even after Knight explained his decision.

“I didn’t know, I’ve never really known, when I was going to step down from this job,” Knight told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. “My thinking was that for Pat and this team – most of which is returning – the best thing for the long run for this team would be for Pat and his staff to coach these remaining 10 games and get an understanding, get a real feel for each other.”

Knight seeped into the basketball consciousness in 1965, when he took over at Army as a brash 24-year-old, and rarely has he not demanded its attention. An outsized personality, he found his home on center stage, and there he frolicked while never bothering with the pretenses or the niceties that could have muted his wildness.

Always he operated outside normal bounds, which made him different from you and me, and with a single-mindedness and singleness of purpose that resulted in both admiration and opprobrium. His approach not only delivered the three national championships he won at Indiana and his 902 career victories, the most for any Division I men’s coach, it also left him free to throw chairs and to rage at players and to produce the litany of questionable acts that ultimately resulted in the Hoosiers firing him in the fall of 2000.

In public there was never anything predictable about him, not when he won, not when he lost, not even when dealt with a mass of media that he could alternately charm and chide. That is how so many will remember him as he walks away at the age of 67.

Yet we recall him more in private moments, like the time he was propped up against a wall in the bowels of a gym in November 1991 in Springfield, Mass. With all calm around him, we asked what motivated him to carry on even after so much triumph and tempest.

“Oh. I don’t know,” he began, and then he paused. Finally, looking down, he explained, “If I’m going to take you fishing, I want to take you fishing where we can catch some fish. If I’m going to coach a basketball team, I want it to look as if it’s been coached. I want it to look as if it knows what it’s doing. I want it to play well. I want players to feel that having played basketball was important to them. So I work to get that done.”

The conversation meandered some after that, and then, suddenly, he was remembering a talk he had with Hall of Fame coach Joe Lapchick shortly after Knight had taken over at Army.

“Is it important to you that you’re liked?” Lapchick asked him.

“Well, yeah, by certain people. I think it would be important to me that you like me,” Knight replied.

“Then we went on to discuss players,” Knight said. “His whole approach was if you make decisions on whether you’re liked or not, then you’re not going to coach very well. That’s the way I’ve coached from that day on.”

That is surely the way he both coached and carried on in life, and that is how we will remember Bob Knight. He may not always have been liked. His unpredictability made that certain. Yet his teams looked as if they were coached.

They respected the game, and he did too.