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Nov. 3, 2023 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
07:49
How Bobby Knight Connects To Donald Trump

This is a preview of our full episode that you can access over at http://Patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Become a member today and help us maintain our editorial independence as well as unlock a lot of special features like live shows and our private discord.  Co-hosts Jared Yates Sextonn and Nick Hauselman discuss what former Indiana University basketball head coach Bobby Knight meant to each of them and the damage his legacy has done. They then talk about whether the US has enough influence on Israel to make them stop their assault on Gaza under the guise of a "humanitarian pause." They finish up on the slow descent of Twitter as a business and whether this was all on purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's right, everybody.
Welcome to the Weekender edition of the Buckcrank Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
How are you doing today?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm ready for the weekend, I think.
I'm ready for the weekend as well.
I'm hoping it's going to be nice.
It's going to be temperate.
It's going to be going to be beautiful outside.
But thank you, everybody, for tuning into this to start your weekend off the right way.
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We need it in order to grow and keep on moving.
Also, for those patrons, Nick, next week, Wednesday, November 8th.
It's the third Republican primary debate live from Miami, Florida.
This one's going to be a brawl.
There's going to be a lot that's really going on here.
That's Wednesday, November 8th.
We are going to be live immediately afterward, giving you the post-debate primary coverage that you have come to depend on for us.
I don't want to say I'm looking forward to it, Nick.
But I do enjoy doing the live shows and doing this during the election season.
You know, any time to hang out with you, Jared, it's worth doing no matter what.
And the community, by the way, as well.
That's really, really the best part about all of that.
And it makes it bearable, I think, to have to go and parse what the GOP is busy saying out aloud, I suppose is the word.
It's going to be a lot, and I agree.
I'm looking forward to doing it and seeing the community, and obviously these are weird, hard times, so we're looking forward to that.
That is next Wednesday.
We will go live immediately after the third GOP debate.
Before we get to our regularly scheduled programming, Nick, I was hoping you would indulge me on this show and everybody else would for a second.
I promise, I'm getting ready to talk about something personal, but I promise it has a political and cultural spin to it.
You and I, a couple of weeks ago, we got into a really impromptu discussion about your work in basketball and how you're trying to push back against coach culture and particularly abusive coach culture.
Very briefly, I talked about how when I was younger, I admired a coach for Indiana University named Bob Knight.
One of the most famous basketball coaches.
One of the most successful basketball coaches of all time.
He died yesterday.
We're taping this on Thursday, November 2nd.
He died on Wednesday, November 1st.
I sat with it a lot.
I had a lot of conflicting emotions for a variety of reasons for those who maybe don't follow sports.
They're maybe not interested in these things.
I promise again.
We're going to make this political and it has a there's a reason we're talking about it.
Bob Knight coached for 29 years at IU, Indiana University.
He won championships in 1976, 1981, and 1987.
You know, as a kid growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Indiana, he was one of the most important figures in my life up there with my parents, my teachers, my community members, my pastor, you name it.
He loomed large over our culture, and he affected our culture in ways I'll talk about in just a second.
He was eventually fired in 2000 after a zero-tolerance policy was put into place.
He choked a player named Neil Reed.
He then grabbed a student by the arm, jerked him around.
He was fired.
It led to near-riotous situations in Indiana.
I personally was really upset about this.
I still hadn't processed who he was.
It wasn't the first time that he had done these things.
He had abused players for years.
He had assaulted people throughout southern Indiana and around the world, including in Puerto Rico.
A really, really problematic person who cast a large shadow, not just over sports, but culture as well.
I have a lot of things that I want to say about it.
And again, I think it's relevant to what we're going through in the world today, particularly with Trumpism and the Republican Party.
But before I get into that, Nick, what are your parting thoughts for Bob Knight?
Well, I suppose you could say that his teams played the game the way it was supposed to be played.
So the result of what you saw once the ball was tossed up on the hard court was, you know, pure basketball and that was all, you know, the good stuff that we could enjoy and respect.
But I'll also say that he did more damage to the coaching philosophy and communication methods than anybody else by an order of magnitude, to the point where we're still picking up the pieces, you know.
He hadn't coached, you know, since, what, the early 2000s?
It's been a long time.
We're still dealing with that.
It's interesting, maybe uniquely American phenomenon as well, where this notion of toughness and, you know, extreme masculinity that you've written books about is celebrated, right?
And it's sort of like, you know, that's the model to uphold that we want to aspire to.
And it made it worse when I was in sixth, seventh, eighth grade.
And in my middle school, I played the basketball team for a coach that was as bad as Bobby Knight was.
But what made that worse was that we were 11 years old and he was doing exactly what Bobby Knight was doing to, you know, adults, 18, 19 year olds and older.
And so the absolute horrible effect that it would have, not only was it detrimental to the development of playing, you know, the game itself, But it also convinced a whole host of people and players that they needed that kind of coaching to excel or to play hard.
And that's probably the most soul-killing thing about this whole thing.
So I can't say a lot of great things about him, except for the fact that the teams played the way they were supposed to.
But other than that, his communication methods were so off the charts terrible that we're going to be reeling from it for decades.
It's really incredible.
Thinking back on that time period, what an effect Bobby Knight had on Indiana and Hoosiers in the culture in general.
I cannot tell you the number of coaches that I had who were abusive, who mistreated the players, not just talk down to them and demean them and terrorize them psychologically, grab them, threw them around, you know, basically kept them in a state of terror constantly.
But it wasn't just coaches.
It was the men as well.
You know, they had their own harshness to them, their own abuses that they heaped out on people, their families, their kids, their spouses, you name it.
But it went ahead and it told them that that was okay.
And not only was it okay, it reinforced it culturally.
I know we have a few Hoosiers who listen to this show.
There aren't a lot of things that Hoosiers are necessarily proud of.
They're proud of their humbleness, in a way, and that's something that I've always been very proud of the state for.
But Bobby Knight, as the coach of Indiana University, it was something that the community could be proud of.
It was one of the few things that everybody knew, right?
Like, Indiana won.
And as a result, it didn't matter what was going on at your job.
It didn't matter what was going on politically or culturally.
Like, you had that.
You know what I mean?
And yeah, was he a real bastard?
Absolutely he was.
He was our bastard.
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