There was no handshake or ''nice to meet you.''
It was the summer of 2001. I was the new beat writer covering the Texas Tech men's basketball team, working for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. I was going to meet the team's new coach.
After an aide went into the office and told him I was outside waiting in the hall, Knight walked out of the office, right past me and into the other room, where he retrieved a newspaper with an article I had written recently. The article was about how Tech was going to hire a former player of his, Steve Downing.
"Did you write this?" he asked, pointing to it.
"Yes," I said, a little nervous.
"It's bull(expletive)," he said angrily.
He then said if I wasn't going to be accurate, neither he nor his staff would help me do my job. I responded that I got the information from a source in Indiana.
"Well, then you go write for a paper in Indiana then," he said, before storming off.
And so it began.
Tech hired Downing for an administrative post. But I felt terrible because I didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with the new coach.
It took me two years of covering his program to learn that there is no right or wrong foot with Knight when it comes to working with him. Instead, it's his way or no way. During the two years I covered his team - 45 wins, 22 losses - I was excommunicated two times at length, once for ending an article with a sentence that said Knight had been fired at Indiana. The article was about a lawsuit involving Knight, and the sentence was only included for readers who might not have known all the background. He just didn't like having to read it again, I guess. So he had somebody on his staff call me to tell me, "Coach doesn't want you around the team anymore."
During the season, I always tried to ask him the first question in postgame news conferences. Sometimes he'd yell his response. Sometimes he'd give thoughtful responses. One time he called me an idiot on national TV.
But you know what? I liked the guy, mostly because I never took any of it personally. For my part, I only had one beef with him - I couldn't understand why he held such big grudges over such little things. I always felt like if we could just talk things over, things wouldn't fester unnecessarily. But that wasn't his style.
After realizing this, I figured the best I could do was just keep working, acting like nothing was wrong. If he wouldn't talk to me, I would find somebody who would and still write informative stories about his team. It made me better. If I just kept plugging away, eventually the tempests would blow over, and they usually did.
One time after a game at Baylor, I asked him about the game's last two possessions in a close game.
"I was hoping they wouldn't score, and I was hoping we would," he said, mocking the question. "I'm not sitting there with nuclear equations going through my mind."
The next morning, I was eating breakfast alone at a Chili's restaurant in the Dallas airport. In walks Knight, wearing a hat, alone. He sees me and invites himself into my booth. We had a pleasant meal, talking basketball and barbecue. No hard feelings this time. You couldn't predict him, so there was no use trying.
Meanwhile, I think I figured the guy out to some degree (maybe). This was one of America's greatest coaches ever, maybe he knew it, and he just really cared about doing things the way he thought they needed to be done.
In his first year at Texas Tech, he allowed me to watch his team's daily practices. I learned about basketball the way it was meant to be played - cutting, passing, concentrating, finding the open man, tough man-to-man defense.
Which is why I felt sad Monday when I heard he was retiring immediately.
Basketball will miss him, because he was the master at teaching the game the right way. Today's game is often just dunks, little defense and "Hey, look at me." It can be boring and thoughtless, quite unlike the beauty of Knight's motion offense and gritty defense.
Sports will miss him, too. Those who don't like him can show the video and play the sound bites featuring his more famous theatrics.
But if you know him and you learn not to take his jabs personally and you have a sense of humor, you see something else in him. Passion. He cares. We all should be so lucky to care about our jobs and our industries the way he did his.
Sometimes it showed itself with his temper and volume. But I always felt that the root of it was that he cared deeply. I admired that passion even if I didn't agree with him.
Over those two seasons, the number of outbursts and disagreements was relatively small. When they came, I learned that similar passion was my best defense - to show I cared about what I did as much as he cared about what he did. I knew he had to respect that.
In many ways, every day, his players all learned the same lesson.
