The Peter Attia Drive - #142 - Robert Abbott： The Bobby Knight story—a cautionary tale of unchecked anger, ego, and winning at all costs

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health

00:00:24.600 and wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.320 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. I guess this week is Robert Abbott. Robert is a documentary filmmaker.

00:00:54.920 He's a director, an amazing storyteller. He's a six-time Emmy award-winning producer and a

00:01:01.360 director with over 30 years of experience in sports and entertainment for that matter. He's

00:01:06.080 the co-creator of E60 on ESPN. He's also the director of the ESPN 3430 documentary,

00:01:13.540 The Last Days of Night, looking at the untold story behind the scenes, story of Bobby Knight and the

00:01:20.480 events that ultimately led to his termination from Indiana University. I wanted to talk to Robert

00:01:26.060 for reasons I will explain in this podcast, because you may be wondering what the heck does

00:01:32.000 this have to do with longevity or anything that has to do with living better? And the short answer

00:01:37.320 is I can't really explain that in a sentence or two, but it becomes very clear throughout this

00:01:41.560 episode why I wanted to talk with Robert, who I would consider to be one of the experts now on

00:01:49.060 sort of Bobby Knight. We talk about a lot of things here, but most of it really is about the

00:01:55.060 investigative work that went into The Last Days of Night. And of course, some of the things that

00:02:00.960 Robert learned along the way and basically the 15 years of his career prior to that and why I think

00:02:06.220 that prepared him to be the right person to do this. There's one note I want to make before we jump

00:02:10.960 into this, which is there is a lot of profanity in this. That's just the nature of what this episode

00:02:16.960 is about. So it's a little graphic at times and there is quite a bit of profanity. So I just

00:02:22.520 want folks to be aware of that. If that upsets them in any way, shape or form, I apologize.

00:02:26.840 And without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Robert Abbott.

00:02:35.300 Hey, Robert, it's awesome to sit down with you today. You're one of the few people that I just sort

00:02:39.380 of randomly reached out to who actually responded to me. So I was super excited that day when I

00:02:45.280 sent you a direct message on Twitter and then next day you said, yeah, let's chat.

00:02:50.220 And I really appreciate it because I know responding to random strangers is always buyer beware.

00:02:56.880 I'm really excited to do this because once you reached out to me, I listened to some of your

00:03:01.020 podcasts and I said, I'd love to do it. So I'm ready to go.

00:03:04.880 We're going to talk a lot today about a guy named Bobby Knight, who I suspect most people listening to

00:03:09.060 this know a little bit about, or maybe even know a lot about. And I suspect some of these people will

00:03:13.820 have even seen the unbelievable documentary that you produced with ESPN the last days of

00:03:19.340 night, which we'll get to in significant detail. But I think to understand the work that you did

00:03:24.060 there, maybe people need a bit more of an understanding of who you are as a journalist

00:03:27.680 and some of the other things that you have done. So I'll start with perhaps the most pedestrian of

00:03:32.760 questions, but what drew you to journalism? Growing up, I was always a fan of sports and I

00:03:38.380 watched a lot of TV. So I think it was natural that I got into sports television. I went to

00:03:44.900 Florida State University. I was, to be honest, in my early life, golf drove my life. I was a

00:03:51.280 competitive golfer. I played in the Future Masters, Junior Orange Bowl, Tournament of Champions, all the

00:03:56.120 major tournaments for young people or juniors. And I decided to walk on and try to play for Florida

00:04:03.500 State. So I went there for golf. That lasted about a year. It was just so much work. And I got red

00:04:09.060 shirted, played in a couple of tournaments. And once I gave it up, I got into media performance or

00:04:13.920 the communications department at Florida State University. And specifically media communications

00:04:19.860 was media performance. I wanted to be an on-air kind of sports caster. And I took a journalism class,

00:04:26.860 ironically, at Florida A&M University. Florida State didn't offer it. And I was just fascinated by it.

00:04:32.500 It interested me. I never thought that's where my career would go. My career started, once I

00:04:40.100 graduated, I had done an internship at CNN Sports. And I had done one at a local TV station. So the day

00:04:47.160 after I graduated, I started at the local TV station as a cameraman, an editor, an on-air reporter. I was

00:04:54.280 like the nighttime reporter. They would send me to city commission meetings and a lot of things that

00:04:59.020 bored me to death. And I would always be like, send me to the high school football,

00:05:02.500 send me to the high school basketball game or the college game. So I always wanted to gravitate

00:05:06.940 to sports. I got laid off, ironically, from that first job. They canceled the 11 o'clock news,

00:05:13.100 got rid of three quarters of the staff. They decided to play MASH reruns instead because

00:05:17.980 they would get the same commercial dollars in for MASH and they didn't have to fund a 30-person

00:05:23.360 newsroom. So I went back to CNN. I started there as an associate producer, then a producer,

00:05:29.260 and I started to gravitate into becoming a storyteller. First and foremost, I love sports

00:05:35.780 and the drama of sports and the stories of sports. But after I covered a number of World Series,

00:05:42.300 Masters, you name the event, that became boring. And I don't want to say unfulfilling, but who wins and

00:05:49.860 loses is pretty simple. And I always wanted to go deeper. I always wanted to go deeper. So I started

00:05:55.740 doing profiles, becoming a feature producer, traveling around the country and spending time

00:06:00.620 with people. I just love the psychology of sports, what makes someone great, what they have to sacrifice

00:06:06.900 to give it up. And that's kind of what shaped my early career at CNN. Was there ever an experience

00:06:13.700 where you were deciding, okay, I'm going to do a profile on such and such an athlete and you finally

00:06:19.180 get to meet them and there's a letdown because of either just their personality and doesn't match what

00:06:25.540 you expected or the depth or introspection that you would be hoping is there, isn't there? I would

00:06:32.660 say I've had that experience myself, not just with athletes, frankly, sometimes with people

00:06:36.820 in other professions where when you don't know them, you create a persona of them that's probably

00:06:42.140 unfair. You meet them and you're sort of like, that's arguably the most uninteresting person I've

00:06:47.600 ever met. Did you ever have that experience with athletes when you were doing this?

00:06:51.480 Dozens of times, countless times. Interestingly, I started at CNN, excuse me, sports in 1987.

00:06:59.640 On around 91, they wanted me to go up and head up the New York Bureau. That fell through at the

00:07:05.900 last minute and my boss at the time, Jim Walton, called me in and said, hey, I'm sorry it fell

00:07:10.080 through. I really wanted that to happen. Would you be interested in covering the Olympics?

00:07:14.560 And I said, sure. I grew up as a kid watching the Olympics, watching Olga Corbett, Nadia Komenich,

00:07:21.600 all of the profiles. And I didn't realize this until I was much older, probably in my 40s,

00:07:27.020 maybe even my 50s, how much of an impact that had on me. Like I sat in front and I was fascinated

00:07:33.680 by their human stories, which Rune Arledge did, Dick Ebersole has since done. And when I got that

00:07:40.300 job, exactly what you said came true. It was my dream job. And I went and met a number of these

00:07:46.280 Olympic athletes. And I want to say more often than not, that may be a little unfair, but to become

00:07:53.700 great, many of them were one dimensional. And they weren't interesting to me. They were either

00:07:59.920 a speed skater, skated in a circle for six hours a day, went home, rested, and came back and skated

00:08:04.900 for two more hours. Or weightlifters. I remember I did some pieces on some weightlifters and I'm like,

00:08:10.400 what do you do? What do you do for fun? And they wake up at six and they have their workout. Then they

00:08:16.180 go and eat. Then they rest. Then they work out again. And doing those in the early years, when I did a lot

00:08:22.140 of profiles for the Olympics, I remember the people who fascinated me because they were just

00:08:27.920 different. And I realized that's what I'm drawn to. People have a story to tell. The way I describe

00:08:34.320 it is, I'm only interested in a story if it's an onion. If you can just peel off layer after layer

00:08:41.740 after layer after layer. And the more layers you can peel off, the more interested that character is

00:08:48.740 to me. I did a piece on a swimmer, Gary Hall Jr., lived out in Phoenix. And he was just a free spirit.

00:08:55.480 He had taken a VW bus and redone it. And I found that fascinating. We shot it. It's very visual.

00:09:02.820 He would wear a boxing robe out in shadow box on the blocks.

00:09:06.760 He was just a character. And I loved him. And I loved the three, four days I spent with him.

00:09:12.300 And one day we were there and I said, oh, what do you do? He goes, I skateboard a lot. And he's like,

00:09:16.400 hey, let's bust my little brother out of school. So we rode along with him as he walked into the

00:09:21.720 principal's office and said, hey, my brother has a doctor's appointment. I need to get him out and

00:09:25.700 need to get him out now. And he came and we were skateboarding. And his little brother was holding

00:09:29.460 onto the bumper of his VW bus as we're rolling down the street. And guys like Gary Hall Jr.

00:09:35.440 fascinated me. And so I always gravitated to people like that. I did early on in 91,

00:09:42.080 the winter of 91 for the 92 Winter Olympics. I went up and did, I spent some time with the Jamaican

00:09:47.840 bobsled team, hung out with them. It was just great because there were a bunch of characters.

00:09:52.760 Did a story on Prince Albert who drove for Monaco, their bobsled team. The Latvian bobsled team,

00:09:59.960 because the wall had just come down, communism had ended. And I didn't know this, but most of the

00:10:08.660 gold medal winning drivers for Russia were Latvian. So for the first time in their life,

00:10:13.940 they had pride. They're like, if we win a medal, it's for Latvia, not for the Soviet Union.

00:10:19.700 So when you peel away the layers, that's what interested me as a storyteller. I always try to

00:10:23.840 gravitate to stories like that. So let's say it's 91 and you're up and running on these other things.

00:10:32.860 By this point, bringing the story back to our main character, Bobby Knight, he's already won three

00:10:39.800 national championships, right? Bobby Knight at this point is probably in his early fifties.

00:10:44.500 He's coached the 84 Olympic men's team. So he's got a gold medal and three national championships

00:10:50.360 to his name, including that epic season. I forget which one it was, maybe 77, 76, 75 when they went

00:10:57.380 undefeated as well. 75 was, they lost one and then 76, they went undefeated.

00:11:02.940 So how much were you paying attention to this guy, Bobby Knight back in the early nineties?

00:11:06.640 I was a sports fan as a kid in the seventies. So I don't remember the undefeated season,

00:11:12.680 but I do remember Isaiah Thomas winning the national title in 81. I do remember him coaching

00:11:20.320 the Olympic team in 84. I remember vividly reading John Feinstein's book, A Season on the Brink.

00:11:27.680 I just graduated college. I love to read books and I read a number of them, not just in sports. I read

00:11:33.120 everything on the Vietnam war I could get my hands on across the board. And I remember grabbing that

00:11:38.100 book and devouring it in a few days. And I was fascinated by him. He would, in the book Feinstein

00:11:46.880 painted a picture where Knight would ride somebody, I believe it was Daryl Thomas and call him a pussy 1.00

00:11:52.540 and you've got no guts or whatever. And then Thomas would go back to his locker and he'd open it and 0.99

00:11:57.660 there'd be a box of tampons in there. And I was just like, Whoa, I couldn't believe what I was

00:12:03.360 reading. And yet, as I thought about it at the time, and this is the book came out in 87. As I

00:12:11.580 thought about it, the book ends, Feinstein ends with a line that says, it always comes back to the

00:12:17.800 question that ends justify the means. And I remember closing the book and in my own mind saying, yes,

00:12:23.940 he's won three national titles, an Olympic gold medal, and I've never heard a player speak

00:12:30.560 negatively about him. So when I closed that book, I said, yes, the ends do justify the means.

00:12:36.960 I had no idea that 13 years later, my boss would give me an assignment that ultimately I would be

00:12:43.840 asking that same question and presenting it kind of to the country. You see, to me, that's probably one

00:12:50.120 of the most interesting coincidences of this story, right? Is that that book comes out, as you said,

00:12:54.780 it's sort of 87, whatever you read it immediately. And at that point in time, you see the part of the

00:13:01.040 iceberg above the water. Again, as you would learn later, and we would all learn through your work,

00:13:06.120 even in 87, there were plenty of indications that there were players who had they been asked would

00:13:12.500 have something different to say than maybe what was presented. But I really love this thing that 13 years

00:13:17.540 later, your world collides with this guy in a way that you couldn't have imagined. And of course,

00:13:22.980 in the intervening time, a lot would happen. You would go on to cover the Atlanta Olympics,

00:13:26.680 which in and of itself is kind of an amazing story, not just because of the bombing, but all that went

00:13:32.180 on there. So fast forward me a little bit from call it 87 into the nineties. What else are you working

00:13:39.060 on? And perhaps more importantly, how is it helping you prepare for what might turn into be one of the

00:13:45.280 most difficult assignments of your career? After reading that book and leaving the local

00:13:50.120 station, going back to CNN, covering a lot of sports in the moment, and you name the event,

00:13:56.940 I've covered it. And you have to turn stories quickly. You know, a guy hits a home run in the

00:14:01.900 bottom of the ninth and within 30 minutes, you have to have the story written and sent back to Atlanta

00:14:07.120 and then to the world. As a journalist, I learned to make decisions quickly, not always the right one,

00:14:12.800 but you get a ton of at-bats and you learn. I always, like I said earlier, gravitated toward

00:14:17.980 telling the story of people and the psychology of people and what makes them tick. I used to sit

00:14:24.340 around, Nick Charles and I traveled the world. He was the lead anchor in CNN sports. I remember

00:14:32.240 vividly being at the Cooperstown for the baseball hall of fame and sitting on the back porch and Nick

00:14:38.260 loved his wine and he's having wine and cheese and we're just talking and we were knocking around

00:14:43.480 names of people we wanted to profile. And we talked about Bob Knight. We both wanted to go fishing with

00:14:49.900 him, wanted to hang out with him just to see what made him tick and look inside because not knowing it

00:14:57.260 at the time, but he was that onion to me that I knew if you peeled away layers that he would be a

00:15:02.080 fascinating character. Again, not knowing that in 1999, four, six, eight years later, I would be

00:15:09.880 asked to look into him. Prior to 99, for the first handful of years I was at CNN, I covered events.

00:15:16.540 Then I became a feature producer, the Olympic producer. And then I started getting special

00:15:21.520 projects. I did some documentaries for CNN. I did one on Title IX, which is about it's, you know,

00:15:28.700 shoe leather reporting. They were getting rid of men's swim programs, gymnastic programs to try to

00:15:34.460 balance the scales of Title IX with football. So that was some long form storytelling where you

00:15:39.320 spend a lot of time on a story. I also did one that I didn't know the impact it would have until

00:15:45.600 actually I did this film. I did a documentary called Field of Screens. And it was about the first

00:15:52.560 documentary was so successful for CNN. And we did it on such a small budget that the documentary

00:15:58.480 department for news wanted us to do more. The World Cup was coming to the United States and I

00:16:03.860 was fascinated by soccer hooligans. And so I had pitched a story like, is this going to be coming

00:16:09.340 to America? I read the book Among the Thugs. If you've never read it, it's a great read. It's a

00:16:16.320 literary kind of editor who immersed himself amongst the soccer hooligans in England and went into the

00:16:24.260 psychology of how those riots start. And it was fascinating to me. And that's what I wanted to do.

00:16:31.680 But my bosses said, no, it's not really going to translate to an American audience.

00:16:36.260 But the idea of kind of fan violence in sports did. So my film became much more about stalking,

00:16:45.640 death threats. I went and we'd spent some time, Jim Huber and I, with Mitch Williams,

00:16:49.940 who gave up the home run in game six to lose to the Toronto Blue Jays. He and his wife talked about

00:16:55.060 what it was like. This was the guy that played for the Phillies?

00:16:58.560 Yes. He was the reliever, wild thing, Mitch Williams.

00:17:02.300 Yep. Yep.

00:17:02.720 Real character. Again, you peel all the way layers. He was a character. He said what he would think.

00:17:07.580 And to sit there and listen, we went out to a ranch. He had a ranch out in Texas.

00:17:11.860 And he and his wife were there explaining what those days were like during the World Series.

00:17:16.540 He had given up the home run. He was back at his home in New Jersey. And he had gotten tons of

00:17:23.660 death threats. And his wife said, we lived in an old house and the floors creaked. And she said,

00:17:29.120 I remember vividly him walking around with a gun in his hand because the wind's blowing outside and

00:17:34.640 things are creaking and people have been outside the house. And so I tried to take people inside

00:17:39.220 because we hear it. We hear somebody gets a death threat. It doesn't really sink in. But to really

00:17:45.040 have someone take you behind what that threat is and how it impacts them mentally and emotionally

00:17:51.060 was fascinating. The other thing I looked into is stalking. This was part of it. It was kind of

00:17:57.540 like why fans will riot after winning the World Series or the Super Bowl. What will happen when a

00:18:03.060 fan sends a death threat to an athlete? And the other one was stalking. We looked at the Monica

00:18:09.040 Seller stabbing. I ended up meeting two of the more fascinating people I've ever interviewed.

00:18:14.380 Dr. Park Dietz runs a threat assessment group in San Diego. And he's the psychologist, psychiatrist,

00:18:21.360 and I'm probably going to get his title wrong, who spent 40 hours interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer so he

00:18:26.960 could prove that what he did was sane. The thought process of what he did so he couldn't use the insanity

00:18:32.840 plea. So just to talk to him over lunch was fascinating to me. And the other one was Dr. Gavin DeBecker.

00:18:39.040 And at the time, he was the one that every star went to if they got death threats or threatening

00:18:44.740 mail. Madonna, Letterman, all the stars of that era. And I followed the story of Katerina Vid,

00:18:52.620 who was stalked for three years. So you ask me how these things prepared me. This is, I spent nine

00:18:58.860 months on this documentary. It wasn't two days, three days, three weeks, three months. It was a long

00:19:04.200 time. So these documentaries prepared me in how to tell a story at an hour level, how to tell a story

00:19:11.480 at a two hour level, all the different places you could take kind of a narrative yard. So I had done

00:19:18.180 those two documentaries at CNN. Those two things probably prepared me the most for what the assignment

00:19:24.580 I was going to get in 1999.

00:19:26.000 Now in the nineties, were there other examples that came to you that would ultimately serve as

00:19:34.260 basically reminders of this idea that the cost of excellence in sports, you know, were there other

00:19:40.900 examples of sports or athletes even that you covered where you could say, Hey, have we gone too far in

00:19:47.660 society? Have we let this athlete or coach get away with things simply on the basis of their greatness?

00:19:53.880 And maybe we need to revisit that. I can think of a couple of examples in retrospect, although I will

00:19:58.920 admit at the time I was blind to it.

00:20:01.280 Who came to your mind? Who are the two that came to your mind?

00:20:04.320 I think Mike Tyson comes to my mind. I grew up as a huge boxing fan, like lived for boxing.

00:20:10.260 Absolutely the single most important thing in my life from the age of 13 onward. When you think about the

00:20:15.980 Mike Tyson of the late eighties and early nineties, I mean an incredible talent who was completely out of

00:20:22.640 control. And in retrospect, of course, now with the wisdom of being an old man, it's a very clear

00:20:28.660 understanding of what a traumatic childhood he had and how that childhood would produce a knife that is

00:20:36.560 very sharp on two sides, right? On the one hand, it made him an unbelievably rage filled fighter.

00:20:43.680 And he built up an armor to make sure he could never be hurt again. But without fixing any of the

00:20:49.820 underlying problems, he basically was going to be a nonstop hurting machine outside the ring as well.

00:20:55.780 That's certainly one example that comes to me. I think the other one, just sort of looking back,

00:21:01.540 would probably be Tiger Woods. I don't follow golf that closely, but when you look at everything that

00:21:07.720 sort of unfolded in Tiger's life, call it 10 years ago, you get the sense that this guy who was such a

00:21:14.760 prodigy may not have had enough people around him that could say, Hey, let's revisit how you're going

00:21:20.880 to sort of live your life. And things probably just got out of control. But again, when you're so

00:21:26.100 dominant and you're winning and the money is there and the titles are there, I think it's easy to

00:21:31.000 overlook these things. So I guess I'm not saying these things to be critical of the athletes.

00:21:33.840 I'm saying them more as with a little bit of wisdom, I look back and go, huh, that's interesting.

00:21:39.460 And of course, night, I think we'll end up being arguably one of the most extreme examples of that.

00:21:44.100 Kind of goes back a little bit to the onion where people, why do you like Andre Agassi,

00:21:49.540 but not Pete Sampras? Because people whose great moments and worst moments aren't separated by that

00:21:56.020 much or not as fascinating, but you get somebody like night who in one area is brilliant and a genius

00:22:01.480 and he's exceptional at so many different things and he's so flawed and others. That's why people like

00:22:07.980 Tiger, Tyson and Knight fascinated me. I didn't spend any time around Mike Tyson. We had a group

00:22:16.840 that did a lot of our boxing. Ironically, I was going to go out for the Tyson holofield fight,

00:22:21.780 but when he got arrested and incarcerated for rape, that fight never happened. That was going to be my

00:22:26.400 first time out there. But when he got out of prison, I did a show for ESPN of him returning to the ring

00:22:34.120 and I was fascinated by him. And to this day, I am, I have a curiosity, I think like you into what the

00:22:43.280 environment and the situation that forms these people. There's things that, as you eloquently said,

00:22:49.360 it sharpens the knife and it's on both sides, good and bad. And I always wonder with Mike, if he was

00:22:55.360 surrounded by better people, would his better character traits have come to the surface? I think

00:23:01.320 you've seen Mike in the last five to 10 years that he does have a sensitive side. He does have a caring

00:23:07.580 side. He's not a horrible monster, but there was years where he acted that way. When I did that

00:23:14.760 documentary, I spoke to the president of HBO Sports at the time. And after the interview ended,

00:23:19.360 he told some stories of Mike and his guys renting hotel rooms, suites in Philadelphia and just

00:23:28.220 marching as many women through there as they could in a three-day span. Told you things that the general

00:23:33.520 public didn't know what was going on. And he was surrounded by people. I think the challenge is

00:23:39.500 when you're a cash cow for everyone, they're worried about you making money. They're not really worried

00:23:45.540 about you and the underlying things that you need to work on that you mentioned, because that doesn't

00:23:51.700 make them money. They want to get as much money out of you as they can. So they're going to let you do

00:23:57.040 what you want until that gravy train of money runs dry. And I think that's sadly what happened to Mike

00:24:04.620 with Don King or Rory Holloway.

00:24:08.120 I always felt that when you go back to the beginning of Tyson's career, I mean, look,

00:24:13.220 there's probably nobody who was able to look at him purely as a person, including Custom Otto,

00:24:18.060 who was really a father figure to him. But there was a guy back involved in his life early on,

00:24:24.200 Steve Lott. Most people probably wouldn't recognize that name unless they're

00:24:27.460 real aficionados of Tyson history back in the mid eighties. But I always felt like Steve Lott

00:24:32.560 was probably, along with maybe even Teddy Atlas, were kind of people that could have kept

00:24:37.000 Tyson on the straight and narrow. He was also managed by these two guys that were

00:24:41.740 ridiculously shrewd and created kind of a grotesque deal where they took a third of his

00:24:46.640 purses, which was legally permitted, but obviously by any stretch of the imagination is completely 0.92

00:24:51.920 disgusting. But one of the two Tyson did have a fond affection for a guy named Jimmy Jacobs,

00:24:57.160 who died in early 88. The other guy, Bill Caton, he had no relationship with. And

00:25:01.700 I always felt that the end of Tyson was actually the death of Jacobs because D'Amato died in 85.

00:25:10.280 He'd already, by that point, kicked Teddy Atlas out of the camp. Actually, D'Amato did,

00:25:15.600 which was a huge mistake. He'd canned Steve Lott on the basis of Don King sort of brainwashing

00:25:22.280 him. And then Jimmy Jacobs dies. And then this is all before the Sphinx fight. The Sphinx fight was

00:25:27.020 really the last fight, in my opinion, where he went in as a great fighter and everything thereafter

00:25:32.220 was sort of downhill. Let's turn to Bobby Knight. Let's talk about when this first became the lead

00:25:39.200 thing for you. So is it easier, I guess, maybe you could give people a little bit of the history

00:25:43.860 of what's happening tonight in the nineties and then how you're getting brought into it.

00:25:49.480 He won his last national championship in the late eighties. And in the nineties,

00:25:56.700 he still had good teams, 20 win seasons, but he started getting bounced in the first or second

00:26:02.400 round of the tournament. And again, other than being a sports fan, I was never assigned to cover

00:26:08.240 him. I was never, but I followed it like probably the rest of America. You kind of just kept waiting

00:26:13.680 for him to get that player or get that sign of class that would put him back on top.

00:26:20.640 He had gone from 76 to 81 to 87. There's five to six years in between each of those. So

00:26:27.680 in the early nineties, you're like, oh, he's going to come back. And he just wasn't.

00:26:32.420 And other than just being a sports fan, he really wasn't on my radar. Then in 1999,

00:26:38.300 Luke Wrecker announces he's leaving Indiana. For those people who don't know, Luke Wrecker was the

00:26:45.020 leading scorer, got the most minutes. He was kind of the star of the team.

00:26:50.620 What year was he in? Sophomore?

00:26:52.840 He was after his sophomore season, he did leave. That's when my boss, Steve Robinson,

00:26:59.180 I was at this point at CNN, I did the Olympics. I did special projects and then wherever they needed

00:27:05.000 me. Cause I like variety. I get bored doing the same thing all the time. So, Hey, you need somebody

00:27:09.420 to cover the world series. I'll go. If you need me to do this, I'll go, Hey, if somebody's going on

00:27:13.800 vacation, you need a line producer in the studio, they'd plug me in there for three weeks. So I had

00:27:18.320 variety. I had come back from a site survey in Sydney, Australia for the 2000 Olympics.

00:27:26.200 I went ahead a year in advance to set everything up for CNN. And I had just gotten back and my boss said,

00:27:32.320 Oh, what do you want to do? We're just talking about it. I don't know. A day or two later,

00:27:36.560 Steve called me in the office and said, Hey, Luke Wrecker just left Indiana. And we talked about it.

00:27:41.740 And he said, why don't you look in to why he's the third McDonald's high school, all American in the

00:27:47.400 last two and a half years to leave the program. And he's the most popular player there getting the

00:27:52.820 most minutes. Normally somebody who's unhappy leaves a program. Your leading scorer usually doesn't

00:27:58.840 leave. And I remember sitting in Steve's office, not being very excited at all about this assignment.

00:28:05.680 I was just like, it's going to be a waste of time. Steve and I talked about how we thought

00:28:11.440 it may be more of a story on AAU basketball and how these athletes are coming out of high school

00:28:18.920 with inflated egos, big sense of themselves, and they can't play for a guy like coach Knight anymore.

00:28:25.740 They have a sense of entitlement. So we thought the story may kind of focus on that. The explosion

00:28:33.860 of AAU basketball, how these guys are stars now at 16, 17, and 18, and they're not willing to be

00:28:39.940 coached in college anymore. I vividly remember walking out across the newsroom of Steve's office

00:28:46.280 back to my desk, just not being that excited, thinking it's going to be a waste of time.

00:28:51.140 And maybe for the listener, Robert, give people a bit of background on Bobby Knight's coaching

00:28:57.880 philosophy, starting at West Point, himself obviously winning a national title, really being

00:29:03.920 a guy that coaches a team, not a star, even though stars came out of the program. What about his coaching

00:29:09.160 style led you to the conclusion that, hey, a 16-year-old high school star might just be not willing to be

00:29:18.040 coached under that system? What was your preconceived idea?

00:29:21.780 I thought what I think most people in America thought is these guys just aren't tough enough.

00:29:28.800 Coach Knight came out of Orville, Ohio. He went to Ohio State and he was a role player on their

00:29:34.580 national championship team with John Havlicek, Lucas, et cetera. And shortly after that, he went on

00:29:41.020 to Army to coach. By the age of 24, he was the head coach at Army. And then from there, he went on to

00:29:48.300 Indiana and he very much took what he learned at Army and applied it. The sense of, I'm going to break

00:29:56.660 you down to nothing and then build you back up into the person I want you to be. So he was hard on

00:30:02.780 players. It was team before I or me or you. It was very much about his system. It was very much about

00:30:11.860 unselfish basketball, playing defense, moving your feet. It was about sharing the basketball.

00:30:19.360 It was about there's no stars on my team. Other than Isaiah Thomas, I mean, the 76 team had a lot of

00:30:25.840 great players, but Isaiah Thomas was probably, I don't want to offend anybody who went to IU,

00:30:31.020 probably the only transcendent player that went there. Isaiah was a little different.

00:30:35.900 But the 87 team, again, they had Steve Alford, et cetera, but there was no superstar talents.

00:30:42.160 So Knight was all about team basketball and he was very hard. The portrait I had of Knight in my head

00:30:47.880 and the knowledge I had of him and the assignment, it just kind of added up that these kids weren't

00:30:53.500 tough enough. They're wimps, they're soft, they're pampered, they're entitled, and they couldn't take it. 0.95

00:30:59.700 And that's kind of the message that was put out when they left. Year and a half, two years earlier,

00:31:05.240 Neil Reed had left and they said he wasn't tough enough. And then Jason Collier had left. And then,

00:31:12.140 you know, there's whispers and rumors of why, et cetera. And then it wasn't until Wrecker left that my

00:31:18.360 boss said, wait a second, something's going on up there. And Steve had a great sense. Steve Robinson had

00:31:24.560 come from Sports Illustrated when CNN and Sports Illustrated merged to create CNNSI, a sports

00:31:30.040 network. And he had headed up their investigations for the magazine. So he had a great sense for news.

00:31:36.840 It wasn't me. I didn't think this was a story he did. And he said, go look into it.

00:31:42.000 And so that's the mindset I took into it. I knew who Knight was. I knew how hard he was on players.

00:31:49.360 And I just thought what I was going to find out is these guys just didn't want to do it.

00:31:54.640 And they wanted to go somewhere where a coach would just roll out the basketballs, let him play,

00:32:00.320 let him be the star, not play defense, maybe not even work as hard. So I wasn't excited. I didn't

00:32:06.380 think there was anything there there.

00:32:08.100 So when you show up, is Wrecker already gone?

00:32:12.200 Yes.

00:32:12.920 Is Reed still playing at this point in time? And Reed went to where? Reed went to Kentucky,

00:32:16.960 if I recall, right?

00:32:18.160 Reed went to, he was recruited by Kentucky, but he went to Southern Miss.

00:32:21.680 Okay. And Collier was already gone as well.

00:32:24.460 He had gone to Georgia Tech to play for Bobby Cremins. So Reed, when I called him,

00:32:31.640 he had just finished at Southern Miss. Collier was playing at Georgia Tech.

00:32:38.100 And Wrecker was transferring at the time he was going to go to Arizona,

00:32:42.100 got in a horrible accident in Colorado. He decided to stay closer to home. So he

00:32:47.260 enrolled at Iowa after I started looking into it. So Steve called me into the office the morning

00:32:54.220 after the announcement that Wrecker left. Interestingly, Wrecker faxed in notice to Coach

00:33:02.440 Knight at midnight, sent a fax at midnight saying, I'm not returning. It happened to be when Coach

00:33:09.220 Knight was leaving for a trip for Cuba. And it was just like, that's a weird way to say I'm leaving.

00:33:16.040 That interested me a little bit. So the next morning, my boss says, hey, do you see the news?

00:33:21.620 Luke Wrecker just left. Start making some phone calls, go up there and try to figure out what's

00:33:26.440 going on. Why are really good players leaving Indiana and Bob Knight's program? That was the

00:33:31.900 assignment. And what I've learned since then is all great investigative assignments start with a

00:33:39.040 really simple question. Why did somebody break into the Democratic National Headquarters?

00:33:45.380 That led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. It's a simple question. And my simple question was,

00:33:52.560 Steve said, go find out why good players are leaving Coach Knight's program. And it was as

00:33:57.340 simple as that. It wasn't an investigation. It's just a question. And we thought it would take us down

00:34:02.140 this society kind of, a look at society, entitlement. It was not an investigation at all at the start,

00:34:10.340 but it became an investigation with a couple of my first phone calls. I did a lot of reading

00:34:16.020 two days later. It was a Sunday night. I called and Neil Reed's dad picked up and he and I talked

00:34:22.820 and he didn't hold anything back. Terry told me everything.

00:34:27.880 And this was off the record or on the record?

00:34:29.860 It was off the record. Again, I was just trying to understand the story. And then I called Neil that

00:34:38.040 Sunday night. And Neil and I talked for about 90 minutes. And in the film, for those people who

00:34:43.580 haven't seen it, I saved everything. I can't tell you, I probably had a dozen notebooks from the 18

00:34:49.860 months I reported this where I took notes on people's phone calls and everything. And I saved

00:34:54.820 them all. They were in a box in my basement for 15 years. And when I did the film, I went back and

00:34:59.800 just opened the box, sat here in my office with three cameras on me and just went through every

00:35:04.800 single thing I pulled out. It took like six or seven hours. And it just refreshed my memory and it

00:35:10.300 became the spine of the film. So Terry Reed spoke to me and then Neil spoke to me.

00:35:16.980 And what did Neil tell you on that first call?

00:35:19.660 He told me why he went to Indiana. He loved Indiana. His father was a basketball coach. His father,

00:35:28.560 much like Coach Knight, was a hard ass. His father admired, I think probably loved Coach Knight's 0.99

00:35:35.000 style. And Terry was very much a coach in the mold of Bob Knight. So much so that the family moved

00:35:43.360 to Bloomington for Neil's beginning of his high school years, freshman and sophomore.

00:35:49.660 Then he moved back to Louisiana and Neil became two-time state player of the year.

00:35:54.520 He never made another visit. He knew he was always going to go to Coach Knight. He wanted to play for

00:36:00.720 Coach Knight. Neil was a tough-minded kid. The tougher it was, the tougher he got. He wanted to go

00:36:08.000 to Coach Knight, play for Coach Knight because he wanted to go play for somebody who was going to push

00:36:13.360 him and make him better. And he told me, you could just tell the love he had for Indiana basketball

00:36:21.080 and specifically Coach Knight. And that's why he went there. And then we started talking about why

00:36:28.340 he left. And he just took me through his three seasons there. And he started painting a picture

00:36:35.800 of what it was like day after day after day after day. There was three things that stuck out to me that

00:36:42.120 became the spine of my reporting in 1999 and 2000 when I was at CNN. One was that at a practice one

00:36:50.840 day, they were running a drill. Larry Richardson was a big man and Coach Knight had always taught Neil,

00:36:57.540 the point guard, hey, talk to your team, command their presence, command their attention. You're running

00:37:03.920 it. And he always wanted him to talk to the players during the play. So they ran this play where Neil

00:37:10.900 threw a bounce pass into Larry Richardson. Larry made the layup. And Coach was like, that's great,

00:37:16.240 Larry. That's great, great. And then Coach Knight laid into Neil. Why the hell didn't you call out his

00:37:22.300 name? Why didn't you talk to him? Why didn't you basically direct him to what to do? He gave all this

00:37:28.240 praise to Larry and then just laid into Neil in kind of an unrelenting fashion that was Coach Knight's

00:37:34.400 style. And Neil said, I did. And Knight was like, no, you didn't. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes,

00:37:41.580 I did. And then Neil made the mistake. If you look at it as a mistake to say, Larry, did I? And Larry

00:37:49.600 Richardson said, yes, you did. And that embarrassed Coach Knight. And that's when Coach Knight, according

00:37:55.240 to Neil at this time, came at him and grabbed him by the throat. That story interested me because

00:38:01.760 if it was true, it's an assault. I kept talking to Neil about the aftermath and other things that

00:38:07.940 had happened. And he told me two other stories that jumped off the pages of my notes. One was

00:38:14.380 that one time he had kicked the president of the university, Miles Brand, out of practice.

00:38:21.280 Anybody who's been around Indiana basketball knows that practices are closed. You're not allowed in

00:38:25.940 there unless Coach Knight lets you. There's a padlock and a chain on the doors. No one's allowed in to

00:38:31.700 see what he does. So one day the university president was there, brought some people in

00:38:36.100 on a tour and was kind of talking out loud to the group that he was with. And Coach Knight said

00:38:44.100 something to the effect of, shut the F up. I don't come into your office and talk while you're trying 0.96

00:38:50.060 to work. Get the hell out of here. And Miles Brand and the people he was with got up and left.

00:38:55.540 And looking back, I don't think Coach Knight like literally got in his face and said it. I think

00:39:00.780 he said it out loud for the whole gym to hear. He may have not even been looking at Coach Brand,

00:39:05.960 but the message was sent. At that point, I was like, holy shit, you've got the balls to throw 1.00

00:39:12.500 the president out of practice? Like who's running this school? And then the third story Neil told 1.00

00:39:17.200 me is one time they were playing real poorly and they were in the locker room and Coach Knight came

00:39:22.960 out of a bathroom stall with his pants around his ankles, with toilet paper in his hand, and he had

00:39:28.140 wiped himself. And he showed the toilet paper to the players and said, this is how you guys are

00:39:33.980 playing. You're playing like shit. And he brandished soiled toilet paper to the team. And those three 1.00

00:39:41.600 stories, I mean, jumped off, A, my notes that night and jumped through the phone in the 90-minute call

00:39:48.500 we had. So I had this all on background, off the record, not for attribution. But as I wrote in my

00:39:55.840 note to my boss, Steve, I said to him, and I read it in the film, I go, I think he's going to tell me

00:40:01.860 this on the record one day. And so that first phone call that I made to Neil Reed and when he picked up

00:40:09.020 the phone, all of a sudden it turned from a story in my mind about society, entitlement of AAU

00:40:16.340 basketball players, are they willing to be coached? Is night too tough? To an investigation, did these

00:40:21.820 three things happen? Can I confirm that these three incidents took place?

00:40:27.120 So when you get off that phone call, what does your intuition tell you? Does your intuition say

00:40:32.260 this kid is making this up? He's a disgruntled former player? Or does your intuition say this is

00:40:40.100 possibly right? The ends no longer justify the means. Which way are you leaning at this point?

00:40:46.340 50-50, because exactly what you said ran through my mind. I'm like, he's probably disgruntled.

00:40:51.440 Is he exaggerating? Did it really happen? But he described them in such detail that there was a

00:40:59.840 lot of validity to what he said. And again, part of what I've learned is if you're going to do a good

00:41:06.820 investigation, you can't get too excited and you can't get too down. You just have to be even keel.

00:41:13.800 And the one thing I'm proudest of is during this process, I just kept my nose to the grindstone.

00:41:19.220 I never really looked up. We can talk later. There's three times I kind of popped my head up

00:41:24.140 and saw what was happening. But the rest of the time, when I got off that phone call,

00:41:29.440 exactly what you said was rushing through my mind. Is he a disgruntled player who's out to get Coach

00:41:35.100 Knight? Or is there truth to this? And that was kind of my mantra. And as I say in the film,

00:41:40.680 I got on a plane the next day. I talked to my boss and I'm like, I got to fly to Indiana.

00:41:45.080 And I'm looking out the window. And I was like, is he lying to me? Is this kid lying to me or not?

00:41:51.600 As I looked out the window, that's what I was thinking. And I was also thinking that if he's

00:41:56.160 not, there's a story here. That's when I got interested. After that first phone call with Neil,

00:42:03.200 I said, I have to figure out if he's telling me the truth. And if he is telling me the truth,

00:42:09.100 how do I turn this into a story where people are willing to sit on camera and talk about it?

00:42:16.200 So where do you go from there? Do you go to Collier? Do you go to Wrecker? How do you,

00:42:19.440 I assume they're going to be an easier place to start than any currently active player, right?

00:42:23.600 Basically what I did is I took a big step back and I said, I have to understand Indiana basketball.

00:42:29.760 The first person I interviewed is Gary Donna. He passed away just within the last two years.

00:42:34.880 And he's the first person I sat down with. And he started Hoosier Basketball Magazine. For those

00:42:40.720 people who don't follow high school and college basketball, it is the thing in the state of

00:42:46.040 Indiana. High school basketball is the heartbeat of that state. And he follows high school basketball.

00:42:54.120 Every season he puts out the definitive thing on high school basketball. So he knows all these kids

00:42:58.960 from seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th grade, all the way through high school. So when I spoke to him,

00:43:05.540 it was the first interview I did. He just told me what he knew about it. And what he said that made

00:43:13.780 my initial reporting and is also in the film is that Coach Knight is like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,

00:43:20.300 that he can be the most charming, brilliant person in the world. And then when he gets behind the

00:43:25.700 closed doors, I told you, his practices are closed. When he gets behind the closed doors,

00:43:30.340 he can lose it and he wants nobody to see that side of him. And what you said earlier,

00:43:34.840 you'd see the tip of the iceberg, but you never saw the whole iceberg underneath.

00:43:38.900 So everything he told me led me to believe that there may be truth to what Neil said. But again,

00:43:46.580 as a journalist, Gary Donna wasn't there, so he can't confirm any of those stories. But he painted a

00:43:52.100 picture and an environment, I think there may be some validity to what he said. The other thing

00:43:58.740 that gave me a sense that what Neil may have said is true is because Gary Donna told me, he said,

00:44:06.120 I've known these kids, many of the in-state kids. And even the out-of-state kids who come there,

00:44:11.740 he follows recruiting so that they talk to him. A lot of them had gone to the school and they'd see

00:44:16.780 him at an event or a high school game and they'd just talk to him. What's it like? What was your time

00:44:20.780 like? So they talked to him because his magazine doesn't print that, right? So he just told me story

00:44:27.000 after story after story. So that was the baseline. That first interview kind of was foundational for

00:44:34.100 me, that it gave me a sense of what it's like and why the administration is afraid of Coach Knight.

00:44:42.240 It didn't confirm what Neil said, but he painted a picture of an atmosphere where what Neil told me,

00:44:49.360 now I understood that it may have happened and it could have, that environment exists.

00:44:55.320 Now, look, it wasn't like Bobby Knight hadn't said and done things up until the point that we're

00:45:00.880 talking about now that weren't already putting him in a league beyond what you're hearing from,

00:45:06.440 from Neil Reed, right? I mean, in 1988, he made a, an absolutely ridiculous statement to Connie Chung

00:45:15.220 on air that, I mean, to this day, I still can't believe a human would say that, let alone a guy

00:45:20.880 would say that and still have a job. You remember the statement, of course.

00:45:24.640 Yes. Ironically, Connie Chung was doing a special on stress and they picked Coach Knight because he has

00:45:32.640 a stressful job or whatever. Somehow the topic of rape came up and Coach Knight said something to the

00:45:38.520 effect of, if rape is inevitable, lay back and enjoy it. And what he went on to say is, hey,

00:45:45.740 you can't control it. The plane's down. You can't do anything about it. He would have been fired within

00:45:52.400 15 minutes in 2020 if that came out and probably in 2005 and probably in 1995. But in 1998, he was the

00:46:03.120 most powerful man in the state of Indiana. I was aware of that incident. I was aware of the chair

00:46:09.740 throw a number of years before during a game where he threw the chair across the court while someone

00:46:15.120 was at the foul line. I didn't know the impact of it. And to be honest, Peter, I didn't realize

00:46:21.880 how important that moment was until I did the film 18 years after my reporting. What I learned by having

00:46:30.660 18 years of hindsight is that at that point, Knight had won three national championships, an Olympic

00:46:36.620 gold medal in 84. In 1987, in my reporting, I had uncovered that the Bloomington Faculty Council was so

00:46:45.980 offended by the John Feinstein book that they wanted to look into Knight's conduct and they put together

00:46:52.580 kind of a bill of rights for athletes that said no coach should verbally or mentally abuse their

00:46:58.840 athletes. And I uncovered this. This was in 1999 during my reporting. And I was like, wow, they knew

00:47:06.900 about this in 1987. And I'm reporting on it in 1999. The timeline is they were looking into kind of

00:47:15.340 reprimanding Coach Knight, reining him in, knowing he's out of control. And what does Knight do? He wins

00:47:22.580 the national championship. Now they cannot put a saddle on. There's no way. The horse is out of the barn

00:47:27.600 and it is so far down the road that there's no coming back. He was a legend. He was the most

00:47:33.740 powerful man in the state. So when he said that with Connie Chung, there was a huge outcry initially.

00:47:39.660 The president released a tempered statement that said something to the effect of Coach Knight's

00:47:45.680 quote does not reflect Indiana University. It was very middle of the road, kind of. It didn't chastise him

00:47:51.440 or go after him. And what Coach Knight did is he went and interviewed for a job at New Mexico.

00:47:59.600 And as Alexander Wolfe, Sports Illustrated basketball writer, he's written so many books on basketball,

00:48:05.200 one of the best minds in the sport. In my film, he said it was a shot across the bow at the president.

00:48:11.200 Coach Knight was like, really? You're going to put out a statement about me? I'll go to New Mexico

00:48:15.220 and let's see what happens. All of a sudden, the entire state is up in arms, now attacking the

00:48:21.300 president. Not attacking Coach Knight for what he said, but attacking the president like,

00:48:25.640 you're going to drive away Bob Knight? He just won a national championship, three national

00:48:29.340 championships and Olympic gold medal. And so that shot across the bow gave Knight the power he needed

00:48:36.140 to survive up until 2000, if that makes sense. They knew about him in 87. They were trying to do

00:48:42.740 something. He won the national title. He makes a horrible statement to Connie Chung in 88, but he

00:48:48.280 survives all the way until 2000. And that's because he basically showed who was boss in the state.

00:48:55.680 The president of the university wasn't. Coach Knight was. And a number of presidents changed

00:49:01.340 during his 29 years at Indiana, but Coach Knight remained. And that's why he was allowed to exist

00:49:07.720 through the late 80s and early 90s, all the way up until 2000.

00:49:10.960 Did his behavior publicly get worse over time? I mean, you go to YouTube and you can find no

00:49:17.980 shortage of best moments in press conferences. And you could watch that and come away thinking,

00:49:23.640 there's not a press conference where this guy is not unhinged, but presumably those are just the

00:49:28.400 highlights. So it was clear that he had unbelievable disdain for the press when he didn't like their

00:49:35.240 questions. I mean, he was unbelievably rude in a way that you just don't see it even amongst

00:49:41.060 professional athletes. But there were many examples of him just telling a reporter to go fuck themselves. 1.00

00:49:46.720 Like you're a fucking idiot. I mean, what the fuck? Shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:49:50.460 That's a dumb fucking question, right? 1.00

00:49:52.420 Yeah. Yeah. Showing up to a press conference with a bullwhip, 1.00

00:49:56.160 telling everybody he's going to whip his players with it. You know, as you said, throwing chairs.

00:50:00.460 Having an African-American player, this was at the NCAA tournament. I believe it was Calvert Cheney.

00:50:06.520 He had a player bend over and he's like, you can't touch me. I'm going to do what I want.

00:50:12.280 To answer your question, as media grew from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, up until 2000,

00:50:18.400 we had greater access to him. I don't think he fundamentally changed. People have asked me this

00:50:25.920 a lot. Was he the same person in 2000 as he was in the early 70s when he went to Indiana?

00:50:31.760 And I said, fundamentally, he was the same. What I think changed was he had success at Army. He came

00:50:39.160 to Indiana, had immediate success, took him to the final four in the second year, won a national title

00:50:44.200 in 76, won two more in an Olympic gold medal. So the ends justified the means during that run

00:50:52.880 from when he first got to Indiana up until 1987. But when he started getting eliminated in the first

00:50:59.260 or second round of the tournament, and these incidents became more and more public, I personally

00:51:05.500 believe he took it out on his players and said, it can't be me. I've won three national titles,

00:51:12.980 Olympic gold medal. It has to be you. And if you put yourself in the position of those players,

00:51:19.120 I don't know if what he did to Neil Reed's class was any different than what he did

00:51:24.420 to Kent Benson's class or Isaiah Thomas's class. But you'll put up with a lot of shit all year long. 1.00

00:51:31.900 And if you win the national championship, you forget about a lot of it. And you're a hero forever. 0.99

00:51:37.920 But when you start losing in the first and second round of the tournament,

00:51:41.280 you're less willing to put up with that. So did he change? Did he get worse?

00:51:46.440 I think what I've come to understand is in the early 70s and 80s, right when he'd push you to

00:51:53.480 your breaking point, he'd throw his arm around you, walk out of practice, say something to you

00:51:58.060 for 15 seconds, and it all went away and you're willing to run through a wall for him. And next

00:52:03.420 thing you know, they're fitting you for a national championship ring and you're like, hey, it was all

00:52:06.940 worth it. But in the 90s, instead of throwing his arm around kids, there's the tirade that was caught

00:52:13.120 on audio in 91. He took it out on them. And anybody can Google, you know, Bob Knight audio

00:52:20.700 locker room.

00:52:21.920 Yeah, this is the one for the Purdue game. But there's an interesting point about that, Robert,

00:52:25.920 which is any player that was asked about that doesn't remember it specifically because they

00:52:31.360 basically say something to the effect of that happened every day. That just happens to be one

00:52:35.820 that got recorded. But that's what every single day in the locker room was like. It's not like,

00:52:40.380 okay, that was a really bad day. And we were really playing badly. And he went a little too

00:52:44.620 far. But it stands out. And I remember it. It's like nobody actually remembers that discussion.

00:52:50.060 That's one of my questions to Richard Mandeville, who played for five years for Coach Knight. I said,

00:52:55.780 you've heard the audio on the internet. And he immediately said, that's what I wish everybody

00:53:00.460 who was watching this would understand, that that's every day. And what interests me,

00:53:06.060 because I recommend everybody who listens to this, go listen to the audio. And you hear the F-bombs and

00:53:12.080 the GDs and all the profanity. But listen to how many times Coach Knight says, I or me. Here's a guy

00:53:19.420 from his days at Army. It's about team. It's not about an individual. It's not about I. It's not about

00:53:26.260 me. And that's what everybody in the state of Indiana, and that's what I admired about him,

00:53:32.360 that it was about teamwork. But in that, you will not put me in that fucking position again. 0.99

00:53:41.100 I've had to sit around for a year with an 8 and 10 record. If you do that to me again, 0.98

00:53:47.520 I will run you. It's I and me, I and me, I and me, I and me. And I think that's where Coach Knight

00:53:54.520 possibly changed in the 90s. He had been so successful that when he started not being successful,

00:54:02.360 in his mind, it was, it can't be me. It's got to be my players. And then he wasn't throwing his arm

00:54:10.280 around him. He'd push him to the breaking point in the 70s and 80s, and then reel him back in just

00:54:15.920 enough to push him again to reel him back in to win titles. But in the 90s, he didn't do that. And then

00:54:22.880 come the tournament, they were mentally and physically done. And they wanted no part of winning.

00:54:29.400 A number of players told me that in the 90s, when the NCAA tournament would come,

00:54:35.260 probably the greatest three weeks in sports for people who love basketball,

00:54:39.300 we didn't care if we lost. Yeah, we wanted to win. But if we lost, we knew we didn't have to go to

00:54:45.460 practice the next day. So the silver lining in losing was the season's over. And I don't have to

00:54:51.680 listen to that again. And that's why you saw him lose often in the first and second round,

00:54:56.200 in my opinion. You make a really important point here, which is, there's this view that

00:55:02.300 Knight is this guy who places the importance of the team at the highest level. But I think you hit

00:55:07.780 the nail on the head. I think this was really about his ego. And I think that whether that was

00:55:12.660 something that changed from the 80s into the 90s, I can't speak to that, of course, perhaps nobody can.

00:55:18.100 But I think a lot of people who give off this aura of team first, team first, team first are really

00:55:25.900 quite ego driven when you really get underneath the surface. And that's a great example. There

00:55:32.560 are times when I find myself doing the same thing. There are times when I find myself being

00:55:36.780 so ego focused, so focused on myself that I sort of lose sight of what the purpose is with respect to

00:55:43.700 others. And if you stay in that state for a very long period of time, it's a bad place to be.

00:55:48.540 You're going to behave badly. And the other point you make is that really, he had lost all sense of

00:55:53.780 checks and balances. There was nobody in that guy's orbit that could offer any sense of sanity. Do you

00:56:00.980 have any sense, by the way, of what his private life was like? Because it's one thing for a group of

00:56:06.940 20-year-olds who worship you to show up and take that type of abuse. But do we have any sense of

00:56:15.920 what his personal relationships were like with friends, with family? And was he able to sort of

00:56:21.620 put some sort of restraint in place with respect to his anger in that setting? Do you have any indication

00:56:27.400 of that?

00:56:27.920 The only indication I have is he was divorced once previously. When I started doing, again, after I

00:56:36.200 spoke to Neil Reed after I flew up to Indiana at first and did a basic kind of round of interviews

00:56:42.640 to get a sense in the lay of the land, literally, I backed up all the way to Army and started talking

00:56:49.000 to people who knew him there, why he left there. It didn't point to what my assignment was, was why

00:56:56.240 did three players leave in the last two years? But I wanted to get a sense of that. I wanted to

00:57:01.220 understand him from head to toe. At one point, I got a phone call and was put in touch with a

00:57:08.380 professor at the school who, on background, he has since passed away, so I can share it. At the time,

00:57:17.040 he was on a hunting trip with Coach Knight in Argentina. And he said, I don't want to go public,

00:57:23.220 but I just want to make you aware that I was there in a hunting lodge with he and his son and Coach

00:57:30.280 Knight got in a fight with his son. And I don't have my notes in front of me. I don't know if he

00:57:35.600 dislocated his shoulder and bloodied his nose, but it wasn't pleasant. The professor told me,

00:57:43.380 described it to a T of what took place. At the time, I had done my reporting and CNN had done our initial

00:57:51.980 report. It was a 16-minute piece alleging the three things that Neil had told me, that Coach

00:57:57.560 Knight had grabbed him by the throat, he'd kicked the president out of practice, and he had brandished

00:58:00.940 soiled toilet paper. So it's front page news around the country. Everybody's attacking CNN,

00:58:07.540 me, Neil Reed, anybody in the piece. And so I start getting phone calls from people. I'm put in touch

00:58:13.140 with this professor who said, hey, I don't want to go public, but I want you to know what I know.

00:58:18.200 And again, much like Neil, he told me everything. And I went to my bosses and said, I got to fly to

00:58:23.940 Argentina to find out if this is true. And we didn't have huge budgets at CNN Sports at the time.

00:58:29.480 We were getting attacked as if we were going after night. So my bosses said, hey, just,

00:58:35.520 we can't go down there. We can't make it look like we're out to get him. And I go, I'm not out to get

00:58:39.620 him, but people are calling me. So I kind of went around my bosses a little bit and called a stringer.

00:58:45.480 A stringer is in the news businesses. We have contacts at different places,

00:58:50.400 countries, cities, towns around the world that aren't on our staff. But if we hire them for the

00:58:55.360 day, they'll do work for us. So I found out a stringer for CNN and I called, I said, can you go

00:59:00.200 over to this hunting lodge? And can you talk to this person? Here's the phone number, this, this,

00:59:06.260 this. And the stringer came back and said, he confirmed what happened. He runs a very high-end

00:59:12.840 lodge. He doesn't want to bad mouth his very wealthy clients. But he did confirm to me that

00:59:20.680 he drove them to the hospital and said to Coach Knight, you're no longer welcome here.

00:59:27.200 And that really, to me, you talked about the tip of the iceberg or what we see. You asked me about

00:59:33.720 his private life. And I'm like, that was evidence to me that he couldn't control his temper in his

00:59:39.500 private life. And I wanted to report it. I had two different people who wouldn't go on the record

00:59:44.620 or confirm it with me at the time. So I couldn't. As a journalist, I can't report it because I can't

00:59:50.980 definitively confirm it. So what did I do? I called Christopher Simpson. Christopher Simpson was Miles

00:59:56.680 Brand, right-hand man. He was the vice president of kind of media communications. And he was the voice

01:00:02.260 of Indiana University for Miles Brand. So I'm like, well, at least I'll let him know that I know.

01:00:09.640 So I start poking as a journalist, poking and prodding and people. I'll never forget it was the

01:00:16.700 day where they would ultimately announce zero tolerance. And I may be getting ahead of the story,

01:00:22.740 but I'm on the phone with him. And I said to Christopher Simpson, I said, if Coach Knight

01:00:28.940 can't control his temper so much so that he would harm his own son, how can you as a representative

01:00:37.140 of this university ensure that if mothers and fathers around the country are going to send their

01:00:43.200 sons to play for him, that they're not going to be safe? And I was appalled at his answer. I was

01:00:49.480 walking on the sidewalk outside of the, it was the center in Indianapolis where they're going to have

01:00:56.760 the press conference. And I remember pacing up and down the sidewalk. And he said, Robert,

01:01:01.280 that has nothing to do with his coaching. And I about jumped through the phone at him.

01:01:07.760 And I said, how can you not see the connection and the correlation? He can't control his temper and

01:01:14.060 will do that to one of his sons. How can you ensure that kids who come here to play are going to be

01:01:20.740 protected? We went back and forth at it that day, but that gave you a sense of where the university

01:01:27.360 was in trying to do damage control and protect him. So what ultimately gave you and the senior

01:01:36.820 leadership at CNN, the confidence to publish the story? And when was that? So 99, you start looking

01:01:42.680 at this, how long did it take and how much digging did you need to do before you were willing to write

01:01:48.700 this? And I don't want to give the story away, but there's a tape in here somewhere. And I can't

01:01:53.180 remember if the tape came before or after the publication of the piece. I'll back up to April

01:01:57.900 of 99 is when I get called into Steve's office. Luke record just left the third player in two and a

01:02:03.020 half years to be gone. Talk to Neil that Sunday night, several days later, fly up to Indiana. And

01:02:10.180 literally for the next nine months or more, I'm reporting it. And other than peripheral people,

01:02:17.820 no one's going on camera. No one wants to speak out against coach night. And as I said in the film,

01:02:23.980 I could hear and feel the fear in their voices as I spoke to them. And that's something that

01:02:31.680 fascinated me as a journalist. I'm like, why are they so afraid of this guy? Why will they tell me

01:02:38.940 everything on background or off the record or maybe on the record, but not for attribution,

01:02:44.920 which means you can use what they say, but not tie their name to it. That drove me. That actually

01:02:50.280 drove me for a long period of time. I said, there's something here and I have to be patient

01:02:55.700 and I have to give Steve Robinson, my boss credit because I did a lot of different things during this

01:03:02.820 nine months, but he allowed me to pursue this story at my tempo because I knew if I called you,

01:03:10.040 Peter, and you told me a lot of things and then I give you the full court press a week later,

01:03:14.600 trying to get you on camera, you're probably going to say no. I had to play and develop a

01:03:19.740 relationship with each individual and they're all different. So I had to kind of keep everybody on

01:03:25.060 the hook until I could start getting, I knew if I got one person on camera, I could probably get the

01:03:30.640 second. If I got two, I could get the third. And if I got three, I could get five, but who was going

01:03:35.660 to be the first? So I interviewed professor Murray Sperber. I interviewed other people in and around

01:03:41.060 campus. And I basically, to be honest, I had the story the first night I called Neil Reed. Those three

01:03:48.120 things became the backbone of the story. I just had to confirm it. So you asked earlier at one point,

01:03:56.520 early on, I called Luke Recker, would not speak with me.

01:04:00.260 And even speak with you on background, nothing at all.

01:04:02.880 No, no.

01:04:04.380 And what about Collier?

01:04:05.780 I spoke to Luke's mother on background and I spoke to others who told me that Luke wanted to

01:04:12.740 quit after his freshman year. And he and his mother went in to speak to coach Knight about,

01:04:18.460 hey, he doesn't want to play here anymore. And coach Knight basically said, I'll change,

01:04:23.000 I'll change, I'll change. I understand. I'll change. I don't want to lose him. And so Luke decided

01:04:28.300 to stay and year two, nothing changed. So at the end of year two, Luke wants out. So I had a sense

01:04:34.680 of his story through other players, through his mother. And then I call Collier and I was based in

01:04:40.260 Atlanta at CNN, in downtown Atlanta at the CNN Center. For anyone who knows Atlanta, Georgia Tech's

01:04:45.740 two miles away, three miles away. So I get his number and I call him. And he, as I say in the film,

01:04:53.380 he's like, no, no, not interested, not interested, not interested. And as an investigative reporter,

01:04:58.700 you just don't want them to hang up. Because if I can keep him on the phone for two minutes,

01:05:03.400 I can keep him on for five and you can't keep him on for 10 unless you can keep him on for three. So

01:05:08.240 you just try to tread water. And I was like, well, how about background? I'm right up the road. Let's

01:05:13.400 grab a cup of coffee. I'll take you out to dinner. I'll do like, I'm just trying anything to get him

01:05:18.160 to say, okay, I'll talk to you. And he was, no, no, no, no, no. And I just, I said, Jason,

01:05:25.040 I'm not going to put your name out there. I'm just trying to understand what it's like to play

01:05:29.900 for Coach Knight. And he goes, you know what it's like to play for Coach Knight? And I had heard this

01:05:34.760 a number of times before, and usually it would lead to an hour conversation. So I'm like, oh,

01:05:39.300 I've broken through. And he goes, go rent Full Metal Jacket. And then he hung up on me. And for those

01:05:46.040 of you who haven't watched Full Metal Jacket, it's about an army recruit, someone in the military,

01:05:50.580 and they have a drill sergeant that is just relentless on them. And the army recruit goes

01:05:55.760 crazy, kills himself, kills the drill sergeant. And so I had seen the movie, but right after Luke said

01:06:01.360 that, I was taken back as he hung up the phone. And I went, I think it was the blockbuster still

01:06:05.940 existed back then, rented the movie, brought it home and watched it again to try to understand what

01:06:11.240 he was talking about. And that was the extent of my conversation with Jason Collier. You want to know

01:06:18.880 what it's like to play for Coach Knight? Rent Full Metal Jacket. So I did. I now knew that Jason

01:06:24.900 wouldn't speak with me. Luke wouldn't speak with me for now. So I started going through the roster that

01:06:30.520 year. And I started trying to track down Charlie Miller. He was Neil Reed's roommate at one time.

01:06:35.460 He was a guard, kid out of Miami. And it took me forever to track him down. I called Miami,

01:06:42.680 made a number of phone calls down there. I heard he was playing in Sweden and Finland and started

01:06:46.900 calling teams over there. And all of a sudden, I can't even remember how I found out, but I heard

01:06:53.000 he was in Chicago. And I tracked him down and he said, yeah, I'll talk to you. And that was a huge

01:06:58.100 breakthrough for me because he went on camera. First, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes of the interview told me

01:07:05.060 how much he loved Coach Knight. He had the respect for Coach Knight. Coach Knight gave him an opportunity.

01:07:10.180 Other people didn't. He was just praising Coach Knight. And then I asked him about Neil Reed and

01:07:14.420 why he left. And he said, yes, he did put his hand around Neil's throat. I don't think he should

01:07:20.760 have. Do I think he choked him? No, but I don't think he should have done it. So he confirmed that

01:07:26.160 there was physical contact and he did it on camera. And that was a huge breakthrough for me when I got

01:07:31.400 Charlie Miller on camera. And once I got Charlie, I was hoping, pretty confident that the dominoes

01:07:37.760 would start to fall. That once, you know, I could go back to Neil and say, hey, Charlie Miller confirmed

01:07:42.640 what you said. So you're not going to be out there by yourself. And I had called Richard Mandeville.

01:07:48.100 I mentioned earlier, he had played for Knight for five years. And I had spoken back and forth with him

01:07:53.960 a number of times. And he said, no, I'm not interested, blah, blah, blah. And I came back and I said,

01:07:57.840 hey, I spoke to Charlie Miller. I spoke to Neil Reed. Would you now go on camera? And then he sat

01:08:03.620 on camera and so did Neil Reed. So those are the three players that I got to go on camera.

01:08:09.160 You know, it's probably worth pausing for a moment because I'm sure the listeners sort of sitting here

01:08:12.400 wondering, what is it about Bobby Knight that's so interesting to me, right? On this podcast. I think

01:08:18.760 the reason, and I don't even know if I really explained this to you, Robert, when I reached out to you,

01:08:23.880 but I'm a perfectionist. And I've been that way as long as I've had any sort of conscious awareness

01:08:29.460 of anything. I mean, my mother tells stories about me as a kid doing things that my siblings didn't do

01:08:35.200 as far as just being such a perfectionist. And also I've had a terrible temper my entire life.

01:08:40.880 Again, one of those things that I didn't know how to explain it, especially because neither of my

01:08:45.680 parents have a bad temper and neither of my siblings have a bad temper. So it's always this sort of weird

01:08:50.080 thing. Like if I'm five years old and I was building a big Lego tower and it broke, I'd smash

01:08:55.040 it into a million pieces. I mean, I was just utterly pissed off beyond words when I couldn't do something

01:09:00.040 perfectly. My guess is there are probably a lot of people listening to this who can relate to that

01:09:04.440 because that phenotype can lead to some pretty good accomplishments, right? You can become pretty

01:09:11.660 good at sports. You can do really well in school. You can do really well professionally,

01:09:15.880 but it comes at a great cost. And I think now that I'm older, I'm becoming more and more and

01:09:21.720 more aware of that cost. So much so that in the past year, one of the biggest kind of breakthroughs

01:09:28.920 I've had in therapy, which was very difficult. I consider it the single biggest step function I've

01:09:34.960 ever experienced in my life was becoming aware enough of my inner sort of monologue, not dialogue,

01:09:42.460 but monologue with myself. And I was actually going through my journal because journaling is a

01:09:48.960 pretty big part of what I sort of do to kind of keep track of myself. I came across a sort of an

01:09:56.120 entry from maybe seven months ago where my therapist said something to the effect of, look,

01:10:03.320 your lack of self-compassion is really extreme. I want you to sort of personify that entity inside of

01:10:12.360 your brain that is constantly berating you. I want you to become more aware of it. And I want you

01:10:17.520 to actually give it an identity. And without hesitation, the identity was Bobby Knight and

01:10:22.120 that assumed the name. So now in the journal, I could refer to Bobby Knight and what Bobby Knight says

01:10:27.880 to me. Luckily, I've been meditating for a number of years and meditation gives you enough of a pause or

01:10:35.840 at least an awareness of the inner voice. So now I just had to listen for it. And it was really

01:10:42.480 shocking what it would say over some of the most trivial things. People who listen to this podcast

01:10:48.160 probably aware, like I love archery. I love, you know, race car driving, all these things,

01:10:51.620 even a mistake in one of those things, which are completely inconsequential, right? I'm not a

01:10:56.360 professional, anything like I do these things as a pure hobby, but just what I would say to myself

01:11:02.300 when I make a mistake, it would never be, oh, try again, better, you know, do it better the next

01:11:06.880 time. It would be you fucking idiot. You are so bad at this. How dare you practice this hard and 1.00

01:11:16.200 still be this shitty? I mean, what is wrong with you? Can you imagine being this bad at something 1.00

01:11:22.320 and caring as much as you do talk about it? And it was just this never ending insult. And so this idea

01:11:29.360 expanded into something of how, like, we're all made up of these different pieces of our personality.

01:11:35.980 You have sort of the child in you, you have this adaptive child, you have this entity that's trying

01:11:41.480 to become a functional adult. But unfortunately, what I realized was, hey, the chairman of my board

01:11:46.240 is Bobby Knight. And it's going to be really hard for me to make progress in life when the chairman of

01:11:51.820 the board inside of my head is Bobby Knight. And somehow seeing your documentary is, I think,

01:12:00.900 what allowed me to come up with this idea. You know, again, be able to put a name and a face to it

01:12:08.440 and a character so that I could literally picture Bobby Knight in my head screaming at me every time

01:12:13.140 I made mistakes. And that was step one. But then step two was learning to offer an alternative

01:12:18.100 explanation, which was basically my way of saying, you're no longer the chairman of the board. Thank

01:12:22.680 you very much. In fact, you can leave the boardroom now. Now you're still going to be knocking and

01:12:26.400 you're going to be very loud for very long. We're going to a place where you're not allowed to talk

01:12:31.080 to me that way. And eventually when you stop talking to me that way, I'm going to stop talking to others

01:12:36.180 that way. I'm going to stop talking to myself that way and those other things. So I throw that interjection

01:12:40.280 in because I want people to understand like where my fascination comes from with this, because I just

01:12:44.880 don't believe I'm alone in this. And while Bobby Knight may be one of the most extreme examples of

01:12:50.520 the outward manifestation of this, I suspect there are many people who can relate to that inner critic

01:12:55.420 that is brutal and this sort of lack of compassion we can have for ourselves.

01:13:00.920 Fascinating to me because there's a number of similarities and words that jumped out to me

01:13:05.940 that make what you just talked about so connected to Coach Knight. The similarities are you talked about

01:13:14.360 a Lego tower and you would explode. There were stories of Coach Knight. He read every book in

01:13:21.700 the library when he was a kid, supposedly, and he'd play board games with his grandmother and she'd let

01:13:27.220 him win because if he didn't, he'd throw a fit. And the first thing that came to my mind is that story

01:13:32.400 when you're telling me your story. So the similarities and the connective tissue and you using him as a

01:13:39.900 character and a name to define it, he's a perfectionist. Like you said, he has a terrible

01:13:46.260 temper. That's actually was his greatest undoing is his temper. I, to an extent, have some of those

01:13:53.260 character traits so I could understand Coach Knight. My dad was great, but he was a direct communicator

01:14:00.320 who would yell and it would be tough. I knew he loved me. So it wasn't, didn't go that deep into me.

01:14:07.000 I get frustrated quickly when things aren't perfect, but things don't work out well. I can

01:14:13.180 have a temper. I'm a perfectionist. I could understand Coach Knight at a level. The one word

01:14:18.900 that you used that jumped out to me a number of times was awareness. The awareness you've come to

01:14:25.840 realize is powerful. And if you're not aware of it, you can't help yourself or help solve it.

01:14:32.480 And when you said that, I wrote down that a story came to mind. I interviewed Dave Kindred. When I did

01:14:39.060 my film, I didn't want to interview Knight haters or people who love Knight. I wanted to interview

01:14:45.120 people who had known him for a long, long time and knew the good side and the bad side, the Dr. Jekyll

01:14:51.360 and Mr. Hyde. And Dave Kindred, longtime journalist at the Atlantic Constitution, I think USA Today,

01:14:57.300 he's known him since the early 70s. And he told me a story where he attended a basketball game

01:15:05.380 in the mid 70s, Indiana versus Kentucky. It was a famous game where Coach Knight and Joe B. Hall kind

01:15:13.860 of met at mid court on the sidelines and Knight kind of cuffed him on the back of the head. There was a

01:15:19.480 photo of it. It was a big deal. And Dave Kindred kept asking Knight about it in the press conference

01:15:25.340 and Knight would not answer it and got angry and got frustrated. And so Kindred leaves the press

01:15:31.000 conference and he goes to write his story. So he goes back out onto the court where Press Row is

01:15:37.200 and he's writing his story with a couple of other writers. And here comes Knight walking across the

01:15:42.620 court. And Kindred looked at the other sportswriters and said, this isn't going to go well. This looks

01:15:48.760 like trouble. Not in a bad way, but just observationally. And he said Knight sat down with him

01:15:54.520 and he said, how do I get myself into these situations? And he went on to tell how he and

01:16:00.900 Coach Knight, he's like, how does this keep happening to me? Which led me to believe that

01:16:06.140 Coach Knight had an awareness of his flaws as early as the mid 70s. Unlike you, he didn't try to address

01:16:14.020 them, maybe tried to and just couldn't. But that story I found fascinating. It didn't fit into my

01:16:20.080 reporting because my reporting was on the teens in the 90s, why those three guys left. But it was a

01:16:25.040 story that never made the film, never made everything, but really told me a lot about

01:16:28.740 Knight. That he very early on knew that there was something in his nature and his character

01:16:35.040 and that he had a temper and that he would keep putting himself in situations that maybe after they

01:16:42.380 were over, he'd look back and go, why the hell did I do that? But he never got it under control.

01:16:47.320 And it ultimately led to his downfall 25 years later, but he was aware of it.

01:16:53.960 I interviewed an amazing therapist named Terry Real for the podcast. And we've spoken a lot about

01:16:59.920 this idea of the anesthetic that is anger. So anger is actually kind of an interesting emotion because

01:17:06.600 in the short run, it is actually quite anesthetizing. It overcomes a lot of the inadequacy that underpins

01:17:15.500 it. Inside there's a hollowness. I think there's a void that needs to be filled. There's a grandiosity

01:17:22.140 that stands in the place of a true inner strength. The anger kind of fills that void and numbs that pain

01:17:28.660 in the short run, but it's immediately followed by quite a bit of shame. If you're any reasonably sane

01:17:34.020 human being, which is to say you do not have true psychopathology, you have to feel shame after

01:17:40.520 these outbursts. There's no way that Knight isn't screaming at his players every single day and

01:17:47.860 shoving toilet paper with shit in their face and leaving the locker room thinking, I'm a great guy. 0.99

01:17:53.640 No, he's feeling ashamed of what he's doing. And as a result of that, he's beating himself up more. 1.00

01:17:59.700 And it's creating this greater and greater vicious cycle of needing greater grandiosity to overcome that

01:18:05.740 shame, which leads to more outbursts of anger. That's a very difficult cycle to break. And I don't

01:18:11.300 say that to make an excuse for him in any way, shape, or form, or frankly, to make excuses for me

01:18:15.360 in times when I've found myself on those roller coasters. But I can just say from personal experience

01:18:20.140 and from observational experience of countless people, it's hard to break that cycle without somebody

01:18:26.260 else to help you do so. You really need a person who can challenge you and push you, or sometimes you

01:18:32.860 need a devastating crisis. I trained in surgery and I knew people that I trained with whose anger was

01:18:39.860 so bad that they got into real trouble, basically became an existential crisis, a threat to their

01:18:46.700 career. If you don't get your anger under control, it will threaten your career. So my guess is it's

01:18:52.700 just a combination of all of these things. In that sense, he became a victim of his success. His success

01:18:57.740 kept him far enough away from crisis that there probably wasn't enough impetus to change until it

01:19:03.600 was too late. You're exactly right. And for people who didn't see my original reporting on CNN or the

01:19:10.340 film, that crisis, I'll back up to April of 99, the following college basketball season, I released my

01:19:18.360 first story. And it has Neil Reed, Charlie Miller, Richard Mandeville, a number of other people.

01:19:23.400 And they make those three allegations. He kicked the president out of practice. He brandished soiled

01:19:28.480 toilet paper and he grabbed Neil Reed by the throat, chokes Neil Reed. So those are the allegations in

01:19:34.240 the 16 minutes. Indiana rallies the troops. Everybody says it's not true. And we can go back to it in a

01:19:44.360 minute, but I'm going to jump to the crisis. So I do that first piece. I do a second piece and we can

01:19:50.800 talk about it in a minute where I actually get the videotape that's proof that he grabbed Neil Reed

01:19:56.520 by the throat. And that changed the entire narrative of the nationwide story.

01:20:02.240 Explain for a moment how that makes it to you. Because that's, I mean, look, at this point,

01:20:05.660 people who haven't seen the documentary, I hope are going to see the documentary because it's

01:20:09.900 very powerful for reasons we haven't even got to yet, by the way. That changes the game. And it's out

01:20:14.680 of a movie how this tape makes it to you.

01:20:16.500 I do my first 16 minute story, making those three allegations. Indiana, all the players,

01:20:23.040 the university, everyone, even people in the media push back and say, it's factually not true.

01:20:29.860 CNN's out to get him. A lot of it wasn't directed at me or I didn't pay attention, but it was directed

01:20:35.180 at Neil Reed, anybody in the piece and CNN in particular. Once I had heard almost immediately,

01:20:42.220 almost a year before when I heard about the choke, I was told that a tape exists of it because

01:20:49.200 Indiana tapes all their basketball practices. They have student managers up in the stands on the

01:20:54.880 sidelines and they videotape it. And Coach Knight analyzes it at night, has his assistant coaches

01:20:59.960 analyze it, shows it to the players. It's just part of their process. So if something happened on that

01:21:05.080 court, chances are it was captured on video. I had heard about it forever. And it's just,

01:21:10.420 I don't know, it's my style as a reporter that I never want to ask for something if the percentages

01:21:16.400 are that the answer would be no. So I didn't pursue the video because I thought if I pushed or asked

01:21:26.300 about it, much like I said, if I was talking to you, Peter, and tried to push you to go on camera

01:21:31.300 and I got a no, then where do I go from there? I work every one of my sources, how I feel I can best

01:21:38.860 connect with them, gain their trust, whatever. So I had heard about the video. I was in Indianapolis

01:21:45.260 to do a site survey for the final four. It was going to be in the final four that year. And

01:21:50.080 I made the rounds with a number of my sources at the school. And I went out and had lunch and a few

01:22:00.900 beers with one of them and a source invited me back to their home. And I kind of knew what may or may

01:22:10.920 not happen, but I never let on. And somebody goes, Hey, I want to show you something. I'm like, Oh,

01:22:16.800 what do you want to show me? And so I saw the tape of practice from high above coach night going towards

01:22:24.660 Neil Reed and Neil Reed's head snapping back. And even in that moment, I didn't ask for the tape.

01:22:30.740 I didn't ask for it. And people who are listening to this may say, how the hell do you not ask for it?

01:22:36.560 Are you an idiot? Are you a moron? Because for a month now, CNN's under fire or my reporting's under 1.00

01:22:42.660 fire. I just, I wasn't sure that the answer would be yes here. I'm proud because I've been in this

01:22:48.880 business for 33, 34 years. And I've tried my hardest and I'm not perfect, but I try not to use

01:22:56.400 people. I try not to use people to get something. And I think because it took me almost a year to

01:23:05.620 report this, people got that sense with me who had, the more I talked to somebody and it's not on the

01:23:11.400 front page or it's not in the news, the more they trusted me. So what would they do? The more they would

01:23:15.600 tell me, the more they would tell their friend, you can trust this guy. Oh, you should call this

01:23:19.420 guy. Oh, you have something you should call Robert. That's how I got everything I got in this story.

01:23:24.200 So in that moment where I watched the video that kind of vindicate my reporting and shut up all the

01:23:30.280 critics, I didn't ask for it. And it was just an instinct of mine. A number of days later, I remember

01:23:38.700 it vividly. We were watching an episode of The Sopranos, my wife and I, and the phone rings.

01:23:45.600 And it's my contact talking about some stuff that was going on. And I said, ah, just send me the tape.

01:23:53.560 I won't use it until you get a lawyer. And so I made a deal with that person in the moment.

01:24:03.880 Actually, to be honest, let me back up. I had a conversation. I said, let me call you back.

01:24:08.140 I called Lester Munson, who people may know from ESPN. I hired him at ESPN. He used to be,

01:24:13.340 he's a lawyer. He was an investigative producer for Sports Illustrated, somebody I'd work with at

01:24:17.920 CNNSI. I had the utmost respect. I go, if there's anybody I can trust, it's Lester. He's a lawyer.

01:24:23.080 I said, hey, Lester, here's the situation. I may be coming into possession of a tape that may or may

01:24:28.940 not be perceived as stolen by somebody. I want to make sure I don't do anything incorrectly and how

01:24:34.380 I get it, blah, blah, blah. He gave me some great advice. The tape shows up at my house a number of

01:24:40.120 days later. It's vindication for all my reporting.

01:24:45.020 From the time you get the tape until the tape is made public is how long?

01:24:48.880 You gave the university a heads up first, right? Because they had dug their heels in and said,

01:24:53.680 you guys are wrong. 0.60

01:24:55.220 Yeah, they had dug their heels in. Everybody was attacking Neil, CNN,

01:24:58.400 me, anybody in the piece. That Monday, I'm at Augusta National for the Masters.

01:25:04.540 So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm doing all the pre-story coverage for the Masters.

01:25:10.740 But because this night thing is a number of weeks before our first piece had aired,

01:25:15.180 I was kind of scheduled to leave the Masters and come back.

01:25:18.500 I come back on a Wednesday and the tape had arrived in my mailbox. I knew what it was.

01:25:23.780 I popped it in, but I didn't really even have to look at it. But I actually didn't tell my bosses

01:25:30.460 I had it. And people may wonder why, because I had given someone my word that I wouldn't run it

01:25:38.300 until the person got legal advice and called me back. And I trust Steve Robinson and Jim Walton with

01:25:46.040 my life. Those are my two immediate bosses. Worked for Jim for 14 years and Steve quarterbacked this

01:25:51.540 whole investigation with me. We're literally the only two people who were involved. There was no

01:25:56.340 reporter, no nothing. At the end, we had an editor that put it together, but it was just Steve and I.

01:26:02.320 So I trusted them impeccably. But I didn't know if somebody up the food chain would say,

01:26:08.840 we have that tape, CNN's under fire, we're running it. I never wanted anybody to say that I lied to them

01:26:15.200 and that I used them. So the only way to prevent that from happening in probably being in complete

01:26:22.280 control, where as a producer, I am much of a control freak. I didn't tell my bosses I had it.

01:26:28.200 That's Wednesday, Thursday, Friday morning. I get a phone call. I remember it like it was yesterday.

01:26:35.940 I was walking down the hall of my house. The phone rings and I pick it up and I can tell them on

01:26:41.840 speakerphone and I hear, this is so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so,

01:26:47.040 and it's a law firm. A bunch of names. And I'm like, ah, here's the moment of truth. Did I make

01:26:52.540 the right decision or the wrong decision? Because I'm in possession of a tape that vindicates my

01:26:56.980 reporting. But if this phone call goes in another direction and I keep my word, I may never be able

01:27:02.660 to show it. But my instincts told me I was doing the right thing. So there's this long conversation

01:27:07.520 back and forth. And I explained, here's how I think it'll all go down. I kind of convinced

01:27:14.240 the people on the phone call that the best thing to do is let me air the tape. So I go into the

01:27:22.440 office later that day and I walk into Steve's office and I say, I got the tape. And he's like,

01:27:29.100 what? Rick Davis, he's the head of standards and practices at CNN, had been there, God,

01:27:33.420 probably close to 40 years. He's still there. And he was involved in all the reporting of the

01:27:37.760 first piece. And he says it in an interview I did with him for the film. He's like, we got the tape?

01:27:42.520 Like he so freaked out that we had it. So I bring Steve, the head of sports, Jim Walton,

01:27:47.700 who later became the president of CNN into a room, shut the door and I play it for him. 0.99

01:27:52.480 And I remember Steve going, holy shit. And I remember Jim, who was the president of sports, 0.98

01:27:57.760 would go on to be the president of the network. He just looked at me and he said,

01:28:00.640 if you did that at CNN, you'd be fired immediately. And we discussed what should happen. And they said,

01:28:08.100 hey, you got to start working on a second piece and we want to air it Monday. This is Friday

01:28:12.600 afternoon. So I'm sitting there going, okay. So Saturday, I'm starting to think about how I'm

01:28:19.120 going to put together this follow-up piece to my original 16 minute piece. I had just been at

01:28:24.100 Augusta National on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And for those who are not members of the media,

01:28:28.400 which is 99.9% of the people listening to this, when you cover Augusta, you can drop your name.

01:28:34.120 Back then it was like into a fishbowl in the media center. And they'd pick 20 names out of that bowl

01:28:39.640 who could play the course Monday morning after the tournament was over. I'm starting to put

01:28:44.800 together this piece on Saturday. And I get a phone call from my colleagues and my best friends

01:28:49.080 who are covering the event. And they go, dude, they drew your name. You got a tea time at Augusta

01:28:53.980 National at nine o'clock Monday. So I have to call my boss and say, I know you want this piece on

01:28:58.900 Monday, but please, for the love of God, can I play Augusta and can we air it on Tuesday?

01:29:03.980 And my bosses were so good, they said yes. But I hope people understand why I didn't tell my

01:29:10.920 immediate bosses because I didn't want somebody to overrule their decision. And I never wanted anybody

01:29:17.320 who placed their trust in me to think I fucked them. And the only way I could ensure that a hundred 0.98

01:29:24.040 percent is, was to hold the tape and not let anybody know I had it. So we air the piece. I put

01:29:30.480 together the piece on Tuesday. When I get back, we're going to air it on Wednesday or Thursday. I

01:29:35.740 think we were going to air it on Thursday. My bosses say, we have to call Indiana. So I've been

01:29:41.440 reporting this story for almost a year. My bosses say, in order to be fair journalists,

01:29:46.380 we have to give them a chance to respond. I had been battling them for nine months to a year.

01:29:52.460 And I go, we don't owe them anything. They should see it like the rest of the world. Like,

01:29:57.740 I wanted to throw a haymaker and just have them watch it on TV like everyone else. 0.69

01:30:02.240 And to Rick Davis's credit, Jim Walton's credit, and Steve Robinson's credit, they push back,

01:30:07.520 push back, push back and say, no, to be honorable journalists, to be fair, we have to give them a

01:30:13.320 chance to respond. So they called Indiana. And I kept saying, I don't think this is a good idea.

01:30:18.540 And I said, what if they slap an injunction on us for having stolen property, then we may be in

01:30:23.980 possession of a tape that we can't air. So there's back and forth between us. And they're all my bosses,

01:30:29.060 so they're going to win. I knew they'd win, but I just kept presenting a front. Plus, it was probably

01:30:33.920 personal frustration of all of the roadblocks and hurdles that Christopher Simpson specifically,

01:30:39.900 and the lies he had said to me over the nine months, 10 months of my reporting, or now it was

01:30:44.720 over a year, actually, of my reporting, that I didn't think we owed them anything. So we call them

01:30:51.400 and four individuals get on two private planes, three come out of Bloomington, one was on vacation

01:30:59.840 in Key West and gets on a private plane, the president of the board of trustees, and they all come to

01:31:04.380 Atlanta. When I had gotten the tape, I arranged to have Neil Reed fly into Atlanta to view the tape

01:31:11.320 to verify it. So Neil flies into Atlanta. I watch the tape with him. I take him into his studio. I

01:31:17.820 play the tape with him. He has a microphone on. I'm interviewing him while it's playing.

01:31:22.160 Probably do 40 minutes of an interview with him, watch it over and over again, talk to him about it.

01:31:27.040 I need to get Neil Reed out of CNN Center because the four Indiana board of trustees and vice

01:31:33.080 presidents are on their way in. They probably passed on I-85 coming to the airport and from

01:31:39.580 the airport. About 40 minutes after I put Neil in a cab, sent him back to the airport, they arrive.

01:31:45.800 Did Neil come by himself?

01:31:47.640 No, he did come by himself. I called Neil and I said, I have something you may be interested in seeing.

01:31:53.140 There's a ticket waiting for you. I'll have a ticket waiting for you. I'll have a car waiting for

01:31:57.200 you. So we paid for him to come to CNN, but he came by himself. And I had spent nine months with

01:32:03.920 Neil. I had talked to him over those nine months before the initial report had come out. Now it was

01:32:10.300 another month later. I had talked to him probably a couple of times a week. Sometimes it was just,

01:32:15.660 we were just shooting the breeze. And Neil later did an interview with ESPN for another project about

01:32:21.500 it. And he told them, yeah, Robert and I became friends. We just started talking. And that's my

01:32:27.520 style. If you're real with people and they trust you, they'll tell you anything. And Neil told me

01:32:33.780 everything. And I never reported, I never hung him out to dry. I never betrayed his confidence in me.

01:32:40.900 In fact, when I got married during this whole time and I went on my honeymoon with my wife to

01:32:47.640 Turkey and then like a cruise through the Greek islands. And I called Neil before that. And then

01:32:52.840 I called him from my honeymoon to say, hey, I'm in Europe. He was playing in Holland at the time. I

01:32:57.860 go, can I come by and interview you? This is before the first piece aired. So he and I had talked

01:33:02.580 forever. So when I called him and said, will you come here? He would kind of almost do anything I asked

01:33:07.380 him to. So he came and watched it. And then 40 minutes later, the Indiana, two members of the board

01:33:13.480 of trustees and two vice presidents of the school, including Christopher Simpson, came to CNN Center

01:33:19.440 to watch the tape. What was their reaction? As I had predicted to my bosses, but they didn't

01:33:26.140 believe me at the time, I said, you can't trust them, specifically Christopher Simpson. So we literally

01:33:33.760 go into a conference room. It's Frederick Eichhorn, who used to be the president of the Indiana Bar

01:33:39.940 Association, John Waldo, who's the president of the board of trustees, Christopher Simpson, and Terry

01:33:46.600 Claypex, who's a vice president who oversaw the athletic department. The reason I thought they may

01:33:51.760 slap an injunction on us is because Frederick Eichhorn was the head. He was the head of the Indiana State

01:33:57.480 Bar Association at one point. So I knew he's a lawyer. They may try to legally stop us from doing

01:34:02.920 anything. So when we sat down, it's myself, Steve Robinson, my immediate boss, and Jim Walton,

01:34:08.600 the president of sports on the opposite side of the table of these four. And literally, as our butts 0.69

01:34:15.100 hit the chair on our side of the table, Christopher Simpson, Miles Brand's right-hand man, says,

01:34:21.240 we understand you're in possession of stolen property that belongs to Indiana University,

01:34:25.260 and we want it returned immediately. I was like, holy shit, you have balls coming into our office 0.99

01:34:34.540 and fucking dropping that bomb. And I kind of looked to my bosses and I was just glanced. I was 1.00

01:34:41.000 kind of like, now you know what I've been dealing with for the last year. For me, I was like, you

01:34:46.080 didn't believe me. And I'm not going to be able to paint a picture of how powerful the next 20 seconds

01:34:55.040 was. But without missing a beat, because literally he dropped a nuclear bomb in the room that normally

01:35:02.760 would have put 99.9% of the people on the defensive. Steve Robinson, my immediate boss, without missing a

01:35:10.940 beat, there was just a breath of silence. And he said, and I'm not going to do it justice, but in the

01:35:18.520 most even keeled, emotionless tone, just said something to the effect of, well, I'm disappointed

01:35:28.020 that you would come in here and say that. We were kind enough to invite you down to view this tape. If

01:35:34.040 you'd like to pursue legal action, we'll escort you out the door to the bank of elevators outside. I'll push

01:35:41.520 the button for the 13th floor and you can speak to our legal department. But before the door opens on the

01:35:47.600 13th floor, this tape will be on CNN, CNN International Headline News. We'll send it out

01:35:52.940 to 300 affiliates around the country. Now, did you come here to threaten us or would you like to

01:35:57.880 watch the tape? In my 34 years of being a journalist, I've never seen a more powerful moment by someone I

01:36:05.860 worked with. I mean, Christopher Simpson came in with a lot of balls and my boss, literally, there was

01:36:13.720 just a breath of air and then he just surgically castrated him. And he just said, no, what would 0.98

01:36:20.060 you like to do? And so then there was some conversations back and forth. I don't think

01:36:24.880 they expected that answer for Steve. I looked at Steve with as much admiration as any journalist

01:36:30.680 I ever did in that moment. I just went, wow. Like, how did he not get emotional? How did he not attack

01:36:37.120 them? But he just surgically cut their legs out from under him, castrated him and said, do you want to 0.88

01:36:42.360 watch the tape? And then there was some back and forth where Indiana's representatives, mostly 0.52

01:36:49.220 Christopher Simpson said, well, we'd like to watch it in private. And at first, Jim Walton said,

01:36:56.200 sure, we don't have a problem like that. And then I cleared my voice was like, and Jim looked at me

01:37:00.720 and I just shook my head. And then we adjourned for a second and Steve, Jim and I walked out and I go,

01:37:06.420 I don't trust him. And I said, oh, by the way, my source said, don't ever let anybody see the

01:37:12.100 actual tape because it may give them a clue as to who shot it, where it came from, blah, blah,

01:37:16.960 blah, blah, blah, blah. And I actually, I made dubs the tape, but I was actually showing them the

01:37:21.320 exact tape. So they couldn't say it was dubbed, altered or anything. I'm a journalist. I'm like

01:37:27.040 you, I'm a perfectionist. So I had the tape in a VCR. And so we walked back in and Jim, my boss said,

01:37:34.780 hey, these are going to be the ground rules. If you agree to him, you can watch the tape as many times

01:37:39.560 as you want. What happens in this room is off the record. Robert will be in here with you and

01:37:43.580 operate the machine, but we're not going to let you watch it by yourself. So they agreed. And then

01:37:48.960 I didn't think about it at the time. I'm 35 years old, I think at this time, Jim and Steve leave the

01:37:55.940 room. And I didn't think about it until years and years later when somebody asked me about it.

01:38:01.840 And so I'm sitting in there, Steve Delson, he's an investigative journalist. He worked for ESPN for

01:38:07.420 years. He wrote a book and there was a chapter on this. And he said, Robert was left alone in a room

01:38:13.520 with four men who wished he was never born. It was a great line. And I was like, I never thought of it

01:38:21.540 until I read it in his book. It's the four of them and me. I had spent a year covering this. I knew

01:38:26.920 everything that was going on at Indiana. I had the tape. I didn't think anything of it in the moment.

01:38:32.360 And once my bosses leave, one of them starts asking me, again, everything's off the record

01:38:38.700 in this room. So one of them asked me, how many games have you been to? How many this? How many

01:38:42.340 that? And all he was trying to do, I am probably much like you. I'm a perfectionist. My mind races

01:38:48.340 and works really, I make connections very, very quickly. And I'm like, I know what you're trying

01:38:52.780 to do. You're trying to find something that you can use to undermine my credibility to do the story.

01:38:57.700 And I just said, hey, everything in this room is off the record. Do you want to sit here and ask

01:39:03.620 me a bunch of questions? Or do you want to watch the tape? And then Christopher Simpson said he wanted

01:39:09.180 to see the tape. He was sitting across the conference table for me in this big room.

01:39:16.100 And he got up. You got to understand, I was frustrated that whole day because I didn't want

01:39:21.320 him there. You know, I had argued with my bosses, you shouldn't bring him here. Christopher Simpson's

01:39:26.780 lied to me for a year. I don't trust him. Then they came in and dropped the bomb. So I'm sitting

01:39:31.320 there going, I didn't want this situation to happen, kind of, meaning I didn't want them there.

01:39:38.000 I just wanted him to see it on the air. He gets up and he starts going towards the tape machine,

01:39:44.420 which I had on the floor in the corner, like I was in between. I said, sit down. And he didn't,

01:39:50.360 took another step or two. And I said, Mr. Simpson, sit the fuck down. I don't care what my bosses say. 1.00

01:39:58.500 If you don't sit down right now, I'm going to unplug that machine, walk out to my car and drive

01:40:02.460 back to my house. And you guys aren't going to see this tape. Did you come here to see the tape? Or

01:40:07.600 did you come here to ask me questions? Did you come here to look at the tape? You're not going to see

01:40:11.240 the tape. Sit down. You want me to do it. At that point, it's probably the only time I really lost my

01:40:16.460 cool. It was like 10 seconds. And I just told him to sit the fuck down because he was starting to

01:40:21.120 piss me off, to be honest. I'm like, you don't come into my office and tell me how things are 0.99

01:40:25.780 going to go down. And so he sat back down. I played the tape. They watched it a number of times.

01:40:30.820 They didn't say anything. And even if they did, it was off the record. So I couldn't report it.

01:40:35.600 And then we had made an agreement when Jim said you could watch the tape and then afterwards,

01:40:41.400 Robert will interview one of you. So I played the tape for them. We adjourned the meeting.

01:40:46.460 And then I went into a studio and interviewed John Walda. He was heading up the investigation

01:40:53.100 by the school. He was the head of the board of trustees. I think for five weeks or so,

01:40:57.880 he had been investigating it. As it states in my film, my first story came out a month before

01:41:03.680 John Walda, head of the board of trustees, was quoted in the Indianapolis Star saying,

01:41:09.540 I put no stock in what Neil Reed says. If CNN's saying it, then I don't believe it. Something to

01:41:16.280 that effect. So he's on the record as saying he doesn't believe the guy. And then he's placed

01:41:21.360 in charge of the investigation into the guy's allegations. So my first question to him was,

01:41:27.980 you've now seen the tape. Do you put any stock in what Neil Reed says? And John Walda was really

01:41:34.720 good. I got to give him credit. He was a broken record of just saying, we've seen the tape.

01:41:40.960 We're in the middle of an investigation. It's going to be part of our investigation.

01:41:44.620 No matter what question I asked him, he gave me the same answer. You got to understand for 10 months,

01:41:51.040 I had been waiting to interview anyone from Indiana and hold them accountable. And so he started to

01:41:57.340 frustrate me. I'd ask him, is that conduct you want your coaches at Indiana to do? We've seen the tape.

01:42:04.220 We're taking it part of our, it was just this broken record after about four times. I knew I was going

01:42:09.180 to get nowhere. So then I got to be honest, it was just more of self-satisfaction for me because I

01:42:16.200 kind of had him. So I kind of wanted to squeeze a little bit the balls. Like I was just, for the 0.99

01:42:23.100 longest time, I wasn't not proud of it, but I wondered if I crossed the line as a journalist. So I said,

01:42:28.180 what do you say to people who want to send their sons to play for Bob Knight? Is that what's going

01:42:33.220 to happen to him? We're going to look at it. And so I asked a couple of personal things like to

01:42:38.220 piss him off and prompt him. And ironically, I heard Christopher Simpson behind me say to my bosses,

01:42:44.200 he can't ask that. And once I heard, I got a reaction out of him. I was done with the interview.

01:42:49.220 I asked about four more questions just to prolong the agony of him standing there. And then they left

01:42:55.820 and we put the story on about two hours later where we had Neil watching it. We had the four members

01:43:02.720 of Indiana University watching it. We did our follow-up piece and it was front page news across

01:43:07.040 the country. Everybody had a still of the grab. Everybody had it, but it was a pretty eventful

01:43:13.260 day having Neil Reed come in and leave, having them come in and leave and having to turn the story

01:43:18.120 around in about an hour or two after that. How long would it be after that before you realized

01:43:24.720 what you missed the first time, which was when you sat down with Neil and Neil watched the video

01:43:30.480 with you? You comment on this. I think it's actually the most powerful part of the documentary,

01:43:34.680 but I don't recall how long after you realized what you sort of missed that first time.

01:43:40.800 It's certainly understandable why you would have missed it. There was a lot going on that day. It

01:43:44.520 was getting Neil in, getting Neil out, getting the bozos from Indiana in, getting the bozos from

01:43:50.400 Indiana out, getting the story out, the legal stuff, the heated emotions. There's a million things going

01:43:55.180 on. But the human tragedy of this is a guy, Reed, has to sit down and watch over and over and over

01:44:04.820 again, one of the most traumatic experiences of his life. And for anybody listening to this who's

01:44:11.100 suffered trauma, it's bad enough once. And for most people, they never have to see it again or have a

01:44:16.900 visceral reminder of it again. And yet Neil had to watch it over and over and over again. You notice that

01:44:23.680 later. I noticed it immediately. I had spoken to Neil for 10 months. To be honest, he had probably

01:44:32.580 told me things that he had probably never told anyone else. Like that's how close we were with

01:44:37.520 regards to this incident, this moment. There's things he can or can't tell his parents. He didn't

01:44:43.540 really speak to other teammates. Once he left Indiana, he had no contact really with any of them.

01:44:48.680 In the moment, I knew how difficult it was for him. In the moment, I knew how much he trusted me.

01:44:55.800 I knew how far I could push him, maybe the right, wrong word, but dig and pull it out of him.

01:45:03.580 I knew in the moment how painful it was for him. But sadly, the focus of that day, and to answer your

01:45:12.000 question, probably 15 or 16 years later, until I really, I truly, honestly noticed how I fucked up 0.87

01:45:21.100 or what I didn't do. You have to understand as a journalist, you have to be impartial.

01:45:27.480 I can't be Neil Reed's friend. I have to report the story. But in order for him to trust me,

01:45:33.580 I have to spend a lot of time and have this trust. He would tell me anything and everything.

01:45:37.720 So when the first story comes out and he's under fire, I spoke to him for a month after that.

01:45:43.740 And then when he comes back in and watches it, the purpose of that second story was to say,

01:45:49.580 we did a first story where this young man alleged these three things and everybody said it's

01:45:54.700 factually incorrect. Oh, by the way, it was correct and here's why. You can see it for yourself.

01:46:00.960 The trainer for Indiana University, after our first story came out, said,

01:46:04.860 the choking thing never happened. You can give me a lie detector. It never happened.

01:46:09.100 We lined up all the people who discounted our original story. And our second story,

01:46:15.540 as I say in the film, just focused on the journalism of was what we reported right?

01:46:22.280 And was what Neil Reed initially said to us, was it factually accurate? And that's what the second

01:46:28.460 piece was. What I say in the film is I missed the human story sitting right in front of me.

01:46:33.840 I didn't miss it. I knew it was there because I had developed a relationship with Neil. If I could

01:46:40.820 turn back the clock 20 years or whatever, I probably would have done a follow-up piece with

01:46:47.400 Neil several weeks, several months, whatever later to say, what was this like personally?

01:46:53.980 But the original story was about an investigation in a journalism to show wrongdoing. It was poo-pooed,

01:47:00.260 denied, and attacked. The second piece was to say, no, it was factually accurate. The third piece I

01:47:07.220 should have done was this was the damage it did to this young man. And as I stayed in the film,

01:47:14.980 Neil and I stayed in touch for a number of years after that. And I probably erred on the side of,

01:47:20.820 in the moment, keeping him somewhat at arm's distance. There's this balancing act.

01:47:25.180 If you get too close to a story, you're going to make mistakes. If you become friends with the

01:47:29.580 people in your story, your credibility is going to be questioned. And there's a fine line to walk.

01:47:34.740 Looking back as a human being, and that's why I devoted so much time to it in the film,

01:47:39.380 is when I was asked to do this film, one of the first things I did is take out the box where I

01:47:46.060 had all the materials from my reporting. And I watched that. And Hillary Horgan, who was a producer

01:47:51.760 on the film with me, she had worked with me a number of times at ESPN. I had hired her

01:47:56.040 to work on shows I had done. She was in my office when I played it. She watched the 40 minutes and

01:48:02.340 said, you could just hit play and watch that 40 minutes. I can't take my eyes off of it.

01:48:06.700 To answer your question in a long roundabout way, that's really the moment when I was in this office

01:48:12.060 with Hillary and she watched it. And she just said, oh my God, look at the trauma on him. Look at this.

01:48:19.520 And that's why when I went to do the film, I showed everybody it. And I confess that I fucked up 0.99

01:48:25.540 as a journalist. And I did the journalistic part of the story, but I missed the human story sitting 0.99

01:48:30.680 right in front of me, which was Neil. It's just got the saddest ending in a way. I mean,

01:48:35.200 it's sort of a bittersweet ending as you walk us through in the documentary, which is that

01:48:40.520 Neil seems to go on and do okay. I mean, he marries a wonderful woman. He has these great kids.

01:48:46.900 He's coaching kids in high school, playing basketball. He seems to be an amazing coach.

01:48:51.180 The athletes love him. And he dies of a massive heart attack at the age of 36.

01:48:56.860 You just couldn't script something like that. It's so tragic. And so while there's a part of me that

01:49:01.660 thinks, how amazing is it that this guy who is so traumatized, so humiliated, manages to not pass that

01:49:09.400 on to others. And that's a big deal. Most people who traumatize people are themselves traumatized.

01:49:16.060 And he could be someone who stopped the cycle at such a young age is amazing to me. And yet,

01:49:22.680 I don't know, not knowing anything about him, I can't help but wonder, was he able to sort of

01:49:27.360 reconcile all the horrible things that had happened? And why did he have to go so soon?

01:49:32.100 I thought that was the most powerful thing. Again, as I look back, I saw so many things,

01:49:38.640 16, 17, 18 years later, as I put the film together and relived my reporting from long ago.

01:49:44.700 And one of the more powerful things to me was, what happened that caused Neil Reed to leave

01:49:51.500 Indiana? Took everything from him. He once told me, he said, Robert, I don't know what's worse,

01:50:01.980 never having your dream come true, or having your dream come true and it turning into a nightmare.

01:50:08.320 nightmare. And that's what happened to him, his whole being from probably six, seven,

01:50:14.340 eight years old on. You can see him in the film in a Bob Knight basketball camp t-shirt when he's

01:50:19.680 under 10. His whole life was to go there, play. He said it was an out-of-body experience for him to

01:50:25.600 put on the candy-striped sweats at Indiana and run out onto Assembly Hall. So when it turned into a

01:50:31.740 nightmare for him, he questioned his entire being and everything that his life had led to, to that

01:50:38.180 point. When Neil Reed left, Bob Knight didn't lose anything but a point guard who he quickly replaced.

01:50:45.520 He still had three national championships, an Olympic gold medal. He was still in the Hall of Fame.

01:50:50.940 And yet, all these years later, he never overcame Indiana firing him for that.

01:50:58.240 And yet, Neil was able to put it behind him. For 20-plus years, Knight wasn't able to put that

01:51:05.740 firing behind him. He finally returned to Assembly Hall last year, but it took him 20 years to come

01:51:15.840 back. So he held that grudge for 20 years, whereas Neil struggled for a number of years,

01:51:23.700 but ultimately put it behind him. And the abused, as you point out, the abused didn't turn into the

01:51:31.760 abuser. I went out to California to the high school where he was a teacher and a coach. He only coached

01:51:40.280 basketball one year. He coached football. He was mainly the golf team coach. And I talked to a number

01:51:46.340 of students. I talked to the principal. I talked to the athletic director. In many ways, he was the

01:51:51.780 Pied Piper at that school. He would walk through the courtyard and everybody would go, hey, coach,

01:51:57.220 hey, coach, hey, coach. They said he had an infectious smile. And it was everything. I almost

01:52:02.840 think Neil turned into everything he wanted Coach Knight to be and everything he wanted from Coach

01:52:11.280 Knight while Neil was at Indiana. Everything he yearned for. And a number of the players have said

01:52:17.820 that. A lot of the players I interviewed in the late 90s, to a man, they all said, I didn't have

01:52:22.840 a relationship with Coach off the basketball court. If you look back to the guys on his 75, 76 team,

01:52:30.420 his 81 team, his 87 team, many of them have had relationships over the years with him. I think

01:52:36.920 that 90s era, because they didn't have the success, he turned on them and never let them get close enough

01:52:43.820 to him. I think Neil became the coach that Bob Knight never became. Yeah, he's won three national

01:52:50.500 championships, an Olympic gold medal, and he's in the Hall of Fame. But the kids at Pioneer Valley High

01:52:57.220 School loved Neil Reed. And I'm not saying that because I'm biased or anything. I went out there and I was

01:53:04.900 shocked by the emotion they still held for them. I interviewed one student who said, he's been gone

01:53:11.420 four years. I still have the last texts he sent me on my phone. I've never deleted them. It's a kid

01:53:18.060 who's a golf pro. Neil helped him get a job. He played on the golf team for him. He said Neil was

01:53:22.100 a Nike guy. He goes, every day, I only wear Nike. So I have Neil, I have the Nike swoosh on my chest or

01:53:29.220 my armor and my hat to remember how I got here. It was Neil. There's all these stories that just blew

01:53:35.480 me away as to the man he became before he passed away. And at such a young age, that's the part that

01:53:41.460 just amazes me is to put yourself back together after all this. It's humbling. You sent me an email

01:53:46.940 a month ago, maybe longer, and I couldn't believe you dug it up, which was the last tweet that Neil

01:53:53.340 sent about 10 days before he died. Do you remember that? Yeah. Do you have it in front of you? Because I

01:53:59.200 don't. I can recite it. But if you have the exact wording. I do. So it was six days after Jerry Sandusky

01:54:06.320 was found guilty in the Penn State scandal. And it was 10 days before Neil died. He tweeted, I now realize

01:54:14.620 that kids deserve to be punched, spit on, choked, and raped in the shower. So a select few can be worshipped 1.00

01:54:21.940 like gods. When I first started doing research for the film, I came across that and

01:54:29.140 it literally took my breath away. I mean, I read it and read it and read it again because

01:54:35.700 I found it on Twitter, on his Twitter account. And then I cross-referenced like, when did he

01:54:39.840 write this? And I went, oh my God, it was 10 days before he passed. And then I'm like, why

01:54:46.400 the reference to rape in the shower? And then I Googled the timeline and I was like, oh my

01:54:51.000 God, that was right in the middle of the Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach who's

01:54:56.560 now spending the rest of his life in prison for taking advantage of young men. And one

01:55:02.480 of them that was detailed in the court in the shower. And when I read that, what it told

01:55:07.920 me is, and this is before I went out to Pioneer Valley High School in California to see what

01:55:15.220 became of Neil Reed. I'd stayed in touch with him for a number of years. I'm asked to do the

01:55:19.360 film. I come up, I read this tweet and immediately I'm like, he died a tortured human being is what

01:55:27.000 that tweet kind of said to me. It never left him. It aided his mind. It aided his heart. It

01:55:34.260 aided his soul. He never escaped what happened to him at Indiana. And yet when I went out to speak to

01:55:41.960 his wife, Kelly, I actually interviewed his two daughters, which was amazing. I didn't include it in

01:55:47.700 the film out of respect for them, but it's something that Kelly will have forever. Them

01:55:53.220 talking about their father. I was amazed because I went out there having read that tweet. And when

01:55:58.860 you read that tweet, what do you think of when you know Neil Reed's story? And that's what was in his

01:56:04.940 mind and that he tweeted 10 days before his death. What comes to your mind? It's everything you said,

01:56:11.420 which is he is still, he still has PTSD. And yet when I went out there, that's what I was expecting

01:56:18.900 to hear. I interviewed his best friends. I interviewed guys who were in the office with

01:56:23.540 him in the athletic department. I interviewed all the kids. I interviewed the principal. She said,

01:56:27.800 he worked here probably for three years before I even knew that was him. The kid who got choked.

01:56:32.700 Kelly told a story, his wife, where they were wrestling around on the bed once. And she's like,

01:56:41.240 he's so much bigger than me. I kind of went up at him and just by where they were, her hands kind of

01:56:47.620 went up and was kind of near his throat. And literally he just stopped and she didn't say he

01:56:54.280 turned white, but she noticed a distinctive change in him. And I included that in the film

01:56:59.680 because it showed me that he did have PTSD and that moment never left him. Even where he's

01:57:07.640 in a playful, loving moment with his wife, that flashback still came to him. I had seen the tweet.

01:57:15.560 So I knew even 10 days before he died, it was still in his mind and his heart and his soul.

01:57:21.000 And yet when I went out there, the story I uncovered was the exact opposite, that he had kept it from

01:57:27.700 everyone and he kept it locked up in a way. And even his best friends would say he rarely ever

01:57:32.800 talked about it. He didn't bring anybody down. He didn't wallow in what had happened. He wanted

01:57:38.740 to move on from it. And admirably he did. What do you think Knight's legacy is going to be? I mean,

01:57:45.160 I guess just for posterity, we can finish the story somehow to the amazement of any sane person,

01:57:51.880 despite having video evidence that Knight choked a player, which by extension effectively means

01:58:00.180 every other allegation is true. Somehow this university and its infinite wisdom decides not

01:58:06.720 to fire him. And instead, in arguably one of the top 10 acts of cowardice in the history of at least

01:58:13.660 the modern civilization, comes up with this goofy idea of, well, you get one more chance, but it's

01:58:20.700 going to be under a zero tolerance umbrella. I don't think it took very long for him to violate

01:58:26.280 his zero tolerance, right? It wasn't it later that year? It was in the fall of 2000 that he grabbed

01:58:31.320 another kid's arm. And I don't even want to go into the story. It's so idiotic, but the point is it

01:58:36.120 didn't take long for him to violate zero tolerance. He got fired. And I got to tell you, I hope that the 1.00

01:58:42.740 kids that chanted his name and cursed the kid who got grabbed that ultimately led to his firing and all

01:58:49.500 the best. Well, I hope those kids are able to watch the videos of themselves 20 years ago and at least

01:58:53.920 have some, some degree of appropriate shame and remorse for the way they behaved. He goes on to

01:58:59.500 coach eight years, I think at Texas tech before retiring. And I don't know, he's done some commentary

01:59:04.540 work on ESPN. Look, he's at the end of his life now. He's 80, at least to my eye, doesn't look too

01:59:09.760 healthy. What's his legacy? I think it's mixed. I think it's very mixed. I want to back up one thing

01:59:16.620 because you spoke earlier about having a devastating crisis that kind of brings an

01:59:22.300 awakening to someone. In a perfect world, my reporting of what happened, my getting the tape

01:59:30.420 could have been that moment for coach Knight. I'm an optimist. And at that point, as much as

01:59:37.500 I had battled Indiana, when they placed him under zero tolerance, which means if you do,

01:59:43.780 you know, we're going to wipe the slate clean, you've been here 29 years, we don't want

01:59:47.700 the faucet just to keep dripping of all these bad things you've done over the 29 years, we're

01:59:52.880 turning it off. But if there's one more drip, if there's one more outburst, you're gone.

01:59:57.420 You would think that would have been the devastating crisis that would have given him an awareness

02:00:01.900 that he had to get his temper under control and all these things. But it didn't. When he grabbed a

02:00:08.620 student, that was a public violation or a breaking of zero tolerance. I was getting phone calls almost

02:00:17.600 immediately after zero tolerance of the ways he was breaking zero tolerance. He wasn't showing up

02:00:25.300 to functions. I think what ended up happening with coach Knight is he met with Miles Brand and kind of,

02:00:32.000 for lack of a better term, begged and pleaded for his job. Miles Brand gave him one last opportunity,

02:00:38.100 partially, I believe, because what he had accomplished at the school and partially because

02:00:43.440 he believes Indiana, the university system was partially responsible for allowing it to happen.

02:00:50.360 So how can the school allow it to happen forever and then all of a sudden say,

02:00:54.080 you're out of here because of this? And again, as a journalist, I try not to take sides in it,

02:00:58.620 but I see his thought process and giving him one last chance. And in a perfect Pollyannic world,

02:01:05.260 he changes. The people around him keep him under control and he breaks Dean Smith's record for

02:01:11.120 all-time wins at Indiana. And this is a learning experience for him. But it was anything but.

02:01:18.080 Immediately after zero tolerance and keeping his job, he resented the people at the school. He resented

02:01:26.180 from everything that everyone told me. He was like, how dare you humiliate me like this after

02:01:33.600 everything I've done for the school for 29 years, winning national titles, graduating young men,

02:01:39.620 winning an Olympic gold medal. Like, how dare you question me? And that's where it becomes about I

02:01:45.820 and me and he's a bully and all that stuff. So this could have been that devastating crisis that you

02:01:51.680 talked about earlier. The hope was that it would be, but immediately after it wasn't. I was getting

02:01:57.780 phone calls. One of them I got that I talk about in the film was that he was suspended for three

02:02:04.520 games and had to pay a $30,000 fine. So he met with the head of the university council for the

02:02:09.760 school, Dottie Frapwell, to decide what games he was going to sit out, how he was going to pay the

02:02:14.460 fine. $5,000 out of six checks, however they were going to do it. I was told he screamed and yelled at

02:02:21.180 or called her to see where did this, this, this, this, this. And so I get a phone call that this

02:02:26.920 happened. So I can't report it because I don't have two eyewitnesses as a journalist. Me, I like

02:02:32.660 to have three or four verify it. So I can't report it. So what do I do? I pick up the phone and I call

02:02:39.640 Dottie Frapwell. And it was a great phone call because I don't know if it was her assistant, but

02:02:45.240 whoever picked up the phone goes, Dottie Frapwell's office. I goes, Dottie there. Yeah, she's standing

02:02:48.760 right here. May I ask who's calling? I go, Robert Abbott from CNN. May I ask what this is

02:02:53.220 regard to? Oh, a meeting she had with Coach Knight. I'm put on hold. Dottie can't come to the phone

02:02:58.500 right now. Can I take a message? I said, yeah, have her call me. Here's the number. Because I

02:03:03.080 don't know this is true. I've heard it, but I don't know as a journalist. I can't report it. I don't

02:03:07.100 know if it's true. My phone rang in less than a minute and it was Christopher Simpson, vice president

02:03:12.940 of the school. And I remember mouthing into the phone, you dumb mother blankety blank. Like, 0.99

02:03:20.580 how stupid are you? Like, I wasn't sure it happened. But the fact that he called me back 1.00

02:03:25.880 within like 30 seconds told me, yeah, now I'm pretty sure it happened. Now I got to find out

02:03:32.600 if it did. And when he was ultimately fired, it was put in one of the reasons he was fired that exact

02:03:37.260 moment he berated her, et cetera, et cetera. Which he denies, by the way, if you look at Jeremy

02:03:41.680 Sharpe's interview with Knight, I mean, just pathological lying, just pathological lying,

02:03:52.040 probably to the level of what a psychopath is capable of.

02:03:55.620 Right. Again, when I go back to what we talked about early, what fascinates me in a story is an

02:04:00.840 onion. You can peel away layer of layer upon layer of the genius, the brilliance, the perfectionist that

02:04:08.200 is Bob Knight. I will say this. I interviewed and spoke to a lot of players throughout his tenure there.

02:04:17.820 And I can't think of one that was a punk. He recruited really, really quality individuals.

02:04:24.660 I remember after my original reporting being how impressed the body of people I spoke to were.

02:04:30.620 And I interviewed Angelo Pizzo. For those of you who don't know, as a screenwriter, he wrote the film

02:04:38.160 Hoosiers, which is based on Milan basketball. Gene Hackman plays the role that was kind of

02:04:44.340 passionate about Bob Knight. He also wrote the film Rudy, the Notre Dame kind of walk-on football player.

02:04:50.400 I interviewed him. And the reason being is Hoosiers came out right before he won the 1987

02:04:55.360 national championship. And Angelo told a great story about the Academy Awards. His film was up

02:05:02.400 for, I think, two Academy Awards. Dennis Hopper was up for one. Sorry for the tangent, but it's an

02:05:09.020 interesting story. So Angelo is an Indiana grad. And so is, I believe it's David Anspar's co-writer,

02:05:17.980 producer, whatever. They did the film. So it happens to be the Academy Awards are being played the night

02:05:23.260 of the national championship game, and Indiana wins and is now in the national championship game.

02:05:29.580 So Angelo Pizzo has to decide, do I go to the Academy Awards where my film's up for two? I think

02:05:33.880 it was up for Dennis Hopper and score, musical score, something like that. Or do I stay home and watch

02:05:40.060 my beloved Indiana? So there was a rehearsal for the Academy Awards, and they gave Dennis Hopper

02:05:46.260 like a Sony Watchman. And they said, hey, when you're there for the rehearsal, can you turn on the

02:05:52.580 Sony Watchman and see if you can get ABC or NBC, whatever the network is that's going to show the game

02:05:57.760 the night before. So Hopper's in there for the rehearsals, and he's like, there's no way. There's so much

02:06:03.620 RF in this building, you'll never get a signal. So the two directors, writers, producers of the film

02:06:09.180 stayed home to watch Indiana and didn't go to the Academy Awards. When Knight wins the national

02:06:14.860 championship that night, he invites Angelo Pizzo to a practice. And Angelo tells me the story. He

02:06:21.680 goes, I go into assembly hall, and like I told you, it's usually locked, and you're not allowed in

02:06:25.500 there. He's sitting way up high, and he sees Knight looking at him, and he's like, God, I felt so

02:06:30.600 uncomfortable and awkward. Should I be here? And he's such a great storyteller. And he says, he almost

02:06:35.740 gets up to leave, but he stays. And then a trainer comes up to talk to him right at the end of

02:06:40.960 practice, says, Coach Knight would like to meet you. He says he walks down to Coach Knight,

02:06:44.840 and they start talking. I liked your film, blah, blah, blah. He goes, what are you doing?

02:06:48.840 He goes, why? He goes, I'm going on a recruiting trip, and you're coming with me.

02:06:52.180 So he gets in a car with Coach Knight. I think they drive to Chicago, or maybe they got on a

02:06:56.520 private plane and then flew to Chicago. I forget, but he basically spends like the next 10 hours

02:07:01.160 with Knight as he goes on a recruiting trip. And he said he talked about Russian history with Knight

02:07:06.840 for like six straight hours. And the reason I bring this up is in many ways, Coach Knight is brilliant,

02:07:13.040 a genius. He's, as only God can do, give some of us amazing gifts in one area and so many flaws in

02:07:21.180 another. Pizzo talked about how smart he was. They jumped from topic to topic, mostly about Russian

02:07:27.720 history. And he goes, I consider myself a Russian history buff. Knight blew me away with the stuff he

02:07:32.140 knew. We rarely talked about basketball. And that's the genius of Coach Knight, how well-read he was,

02:07:38.940 how he can motivate people. But ultimately, like Icarus, he didn't understand his flaw and he flew

02:07:45.480 too close to the sun. He couldn't control his temper. Dave Kindred, who I mentioned earlier, says in my

02:07:51.220 film, he goes, he had an anger in him. I don't know where it came from or why it was there, but it never

02:07:57.740 left him. And that was ultimately his undoing.

02:08:01.120 Robert, the story is, it means so much to me on so many levels. And it is a cautionary tale.

02:08:07.680 Even though Knight is a very extreme example of this, I don't think I would have gone to the

02:08:13.520 lengths to have this podcast with you if I didn't believe that others could benefit from sort of a

02:08:18.880 deeper examination of this. The work you did on this was amazing. I'm so grateful you did it first

02:08:24.780 and foremost for Neil. I think you probably deserve at least some credit for the fact that even though

02:08:33.020 Neil's life was taken too soon, he was validated. He got to spend that last 12 years of his life,

02:08:43.360 the last decade of his life, knowing that what happened, hopefully he understood it wasn't his

02:08:48.440 fault, which is easy to say because cognitively, of course it wasn't his fault, but that's not always

02:08:54.600 easy to understand as a victim. So first and foremost, I thank you for what you did for someone

02:08:59.480 I've never met, but have great affection for, and obviously for the rest of us who have benefited

02:09:04.020 immensely from such an unbelievable story. I owed it to Neil. It's as simple as that. I owed it to Neil.

02:09:12.240 At one point, one of the cuts of the film, I got some feedback from ESPN and one executive said,

02:09:19.560 you need to cut that Neil Reed part down to maybe one minute. And I was kind of like over my dead body.

02:09:27.100 It's what gives the film its heart and soul. I screwed up 16, 17 years before by not telling his story

02:09:35.520 sooner. And I feel I owed it to him to make his story part of this film. Because when somebody trusts

02:09:45.580 you like that, I'm working on another film now where that trust is almost even greater for the situation

02:09:52.840 the person I'm going to profile is in. It's a weight, it's a weight on you. And as a journalist,

02:09:59.900 you don't want to let that compromise your objectivity. I think as a 35-year-old journalist

02:10:07.300 at the time, I think I kept Neil possibly too much at a distance. Not personally, but at least to the

02:10:16.340 rest of the world. I felt like if I did a story then, I was doing it because I knew him, not because

02:10:22.680 we were friends. I was just like, I got to be careful. I got to be careful. And I'm angry with

02:10:26.600 myself because I was too careful. And by doing this film, at least I told Neil people who the

02:10:32.900 real Neil Reed was, who the Neil Reed I came to know was. And as I say at the end, thank you for

02:10:40.220 trusting me to tell your story. That's what was the most important thing in The Last Days of Night to me

02:10:47.880 is the ending. And that's what gave the film the heart and soul of it. It is about Bob Knight,

02:10:53.940 but it's not about Bob Knight. It could be about a local sheriff. It could be about the president.

02:10:57.520 It could be about anyone. But it was really about a young man who somehow found the strength to put

02:11:04.260 it behind him. And someone who went out all the success in the world, more success than anybody

02:11:09.380 could ever imagine. And that human being couldn't put it behind him. And to this day is angry, bitter,

02:11:16.800 has a temper. Neil was the opposite. And that juxtaposition has always amazed me as I look at this

02:11:23.680 story. The one kid who had everything taken from him was able to move on. And the one person who in

02:11:30.300 reality had very little taken from him, yes, he had his job, maybe some humiliation, but he still had

02:11:38.600 three national champions, an Olympic gold medal, hall of fame. He just couldn't move beyond it. And it

02:11:44.400 tells you about the character of both individuals. Robert, thank you very much. This was a great

02:11:50.180 discussion. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening

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The Peter Attia Drive - December 21, 2020

#142 - Robert Abbott： The Bobby Knight story—a cautionary tale of unchecked anger, ego, and winning at all costs

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