Posts Tagged Texas Tech

Knight no longer news for Indiana

For those of you addicted to front-page news stories and television, I just wanted to give you a brief update about some Bloomington area news that might have been overlooked: Mike Davis was hired as the men’s basketball coach.

Yeah, that news has been swept under the covers of the latest scoop about Bob Knight — he has been hired by Texas Tech University, a once highly regarded school.

Based on the news coverage around here, it’s hard to tell we’re in Indiana. At least two of the three major network stations out of Indianapolis bothered to send a reporter 1,000 miles to provide live reports back to those of us here in Indiana telling us about the hiring of Knight at the home of the Red Raiders.

Such obsessive behavior even extended to the Sunday Hoosier Times (the Sunday publication of the Bloomington Herald-Times), in which an exclusive Knight interview from Lubbock, Texas, by Lynn Houser appeared. One can only surmise that this Bloomington-based newspaper will soon be stationing a sports reporter in Lubbock so it can remain the leading source for all Knight news.

Knight has shown a clear and unmistakable pattern of behavior over the years — one that really isn’t worthy of front-page coverage in any newspaper. He’s a jerk, we all know it, and if we did not know it before, it was certainly confirmed in the March issue of Playboy magazine.

The situation is a bit unbelievable: Knight thrives on headlines, and I am sure that he is extremely happy that his hiring in Lubbock has managed to overshadow the hiring of his former assistant here in Bloomington.

So toward this end, I have a special message for the professional journalists around this area: Give it up!

Let’s wipe Knight off the front pages and relegate him to the inside pages of our sports sections — if there at all. For people who truly are obsessed with Knight, they are more than welcome to spend time on the Internet visiting ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated and Texas Tech-related Web sites to learn the latest Knight news.

Meanwhile, there are a few Bloomington news and sports stories worthy of television coverage in Indianapolis. Davis is one, but so is the woman sitting in the tree on the west side of Bloomington who is protesting development.

Or how about contestant No. 3 on the America’s Messiest College Apartments Contest, a senior named “Matt,” who from the pictures seems to like Pizza Express but doesn’t know what a trash can is. (And if you vote for him, he might win $10,000.)

The local newspaper could also show us more detailed photographs of this guy’s apartment (in all fairness, 6News did the story, and it sent chills down my spine when Matt showed us the cheesecake spouting green things). The local newspaper could also redeploy its Knight correspondent in Lubbock to Bloomington and have more coverage of lesser-known IU sports teams, such as women’s crew, women’s water polo or any of the club sports on campus. There is no point in wasting good money sending reporters to Lubbock to cover a man who no longer coaches in this state.

I doubt the local media will pay any attention to my pleas. I suspect I will have to jump over pages of Red Raider coverage over the next year before I can learn about the Hoosiers. It’s sad; the current IU basketball players deserve better.

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