Blood? What Bad Blood? A look back at Bob Knight vs. Gene Keady and the most hateful of Hate Weeks

Look at them, perched behind matching podiums on a stage at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, laughing along with 2,000 fans at Purdue Agricultural Alumni’s 2016 fish fry. As they nod in appreciation when the other speaks, it’s hard to believe that these genial old men were once at the heart of the most heated Hate Week in college basketball. 

They are close friends now, despite the vast distance between them. Listen to them, heaping praise on one another; one thinks that maybe distance — replacing the two-hour drive on I-65 that separates Bloomington and West Lafayette with an eight-hour connecting flight — is what makes hearts grow fonder. These days, Bobby Knight lives in Bozeman, Mont.; Gene Keady in Myrtle Beach, S.C. But these old rivals, four years apart in age and straddling both sides of 80, still call each other from time to time to catch up on family, discuss politics and, of course, talk basketball. 

Even at the fish fry, years after the mutual admiration that was always there had grown into genuine friendship, Keady is still surprised that Knight has agreed to appear with him. And the sea of Boilermakers are absolutely gobsmacked that Knight showed up wearing a version of his famous red v-neck sweater — but this time in gold.

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This, the first ever public appearance by Knight and Keady, will lead to three more dates over the next two years in Indiana. There will be one in Carmel, another in Fort Wayne, one in West Lafayette — but no stop in Bloomington. At each of these, the coaches will studiously avoid mentioning Knight’s controversial dismissal from Indiana in 2000 and his refusal to return to the campus. Instead, they’ll tell each other how great they think the other is. 

Keady announces that Knight is a coach he has “always idolized,” even though Knight is four years younger. In turn, Knight anoints Keady as “the very best coach that I know.” Better than Dean Smith, the man Knight passed to sit atop the all-time wins list? Better than Mike Krzyzewski, the man Knight mentored and who passed Smith on that same list? Well, it makes some sense to a proud man — unlike Dean and Coach K, Keady has a winning record against Knight, 21-20.

But the most improbable aspect of this big, wet public display of affection? That it’s happening at all. The scene is surreal, especially for those fans who saw how the rivalry began: two epic battles in what would be a 41-game war encompassing the 1980s and ’90s. That first home-and-home exchange — in Keady’s debut season at Purdue and during Knight’s second of three NCAA championship runs — set the tone for a rivalry that continues to fuel the fires of Hate Week. 

And that’s no small accomplishment, especially this season, the day after perhaps the worst display of basketball in the rivalry’s history. So, to chase the hangover from Purdue’s 48-46 win at Indiana on Tuesday night, a game in which the teams combine to shoot 29.6 percent from the floor, let’s dig into the two games from 38 years ago that marked the beginning of the great and gritty Knight-Keady era. 

The Hoosiers and the Boilermakers squared off twice during Hate Week in 1981, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 7. Those games resulted in dozens of personal and technical fouls, an alleged sucker punch, weeks of jawing between the adults on both sides and a TV interview with a donkey.

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Knight and Keady had first crossed paths six years earlier, in Stillwater, Okla., and under much friendlier circumstances. Keady had just taken a job as an assistant at Arkansas and was with his new boss, Eddie Sutton, at a coaching clinic at Oklahoma State. Knight, only in his early 30s yet already established after leading Indiana to its first Final Four in 20 years, was one of the event’s big draws. These were different times, before head basketball coaches were treated like captains of industry, and Knight needed a ride back in the general direction of Indiana. So he hitched along with his friend, Sutton, back to Fayetteville. Keady sat in the car and didn’t say much, just taking it all in.

“Most of my coaching success has been what I’ve learned from other coaches,” Keady, now 82, told The Athletic. “All these coaches I learned from and stole from. So I just listened to Eddie and Bobby talk about some strategy, how to recruit.”

If Knight knew what the future held, he may have talked a little quieter. After the 1979-80 season, Purdue coach Lee Rose shockingly left a Boilermaker team coming off a Final Four appearance to coach at upstart South Florida. Keady, by then a success at Western Kentucky, was approached about the job and started seeking advice.

“When Coach Keady was looking at the Purdue job, he called certain people like Dick Vitale and Al McGuire,” says Bruce Weber, Keady’s assistant at the time and now the coach at Kansas State. “A lot of them told him, ‘You know, I don’t think you should take the job. Coach Knight is so established. They’re just a dominating power, and it’s going to be hard to overcome that.’ People were saying, ‘You’re not going to be able to survive.’ ”

“I always highly respected Bobby Knight,” says Keady. “When I got there, Indiana and Purdue fans didn’t really like each other. But I just wanted to win games, whoever we played next. If we played IU, fine. If we played Wisconsin, great.”

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Don’t be fooled, Keady knew how basketball went down in the Hoosier State.

“The culture when you came to Purdue was you don’t like players from IU,” says former guard Brian Walker, now an attorney. “You didn’t need to know who they were. They had IU on their uniform. That was enough.”

Weber, who at 25 was the youngest member of Keady’s staff in 1981, was often tasked with scouting opponents. So when Purdue played at Iowa on Jan. 29, Weber was in Minnesota instead, watching Indiana beat the Gophers, 56-53 in overtime. The young assistant came back with a long list of how Purdue might approach Indiana two days later, including some important, if obvious, advice for Keady himself.

“Coach Knight had his way with the officials,” Weber says. “I’m 25 and naive, and I’m watching Coach Knight work the officials and saw the game at Minnesota just change. I come back and said, ‘Coach, you can’t allow coach Knight to control the game. This is wrong.’ ”

Keady didn’t take long to show Weber he was well aware.

In the opening moments of Purdue at Indiana, official Dick Bestor unintentionally yet ill-advisedly blocked Knight’s line of vision. So, Knight being Knight, he put his hands on the ref’s waist and moved him out of the way. Keady became irate, fuming that Knight shouldn’t be allowed to touch an official. So, the refs T’d up Keady, which only infuriated him more. The angrier Keady became, the more the Assembly Hall crowd erupted. When the refs slapped him with a second technical (two did not result in an ejection back then), Indiana cashed in by trimming a 6-0 deficit to two. One more T, and Keady would be ejected before his players broke a sweat.

“I’m just trying to shrink under the chair,” Weber says. “I’m like, ‘Coach, I didn’t mean for you to get technicals.’ He said, ‘I just wanted to make sure he knew I was in the building.’ ”

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“Bobby’s one of my best friends, professionally,” Keady would tell reporters after the game. “But it’s ridiculous that they don’t have enough courage to sit him down or sit me down or sit anyone down.”

The outburst sparked a 20-2 Hoosiers run, including 12 points by Isiah Thomas, but Keady had made his point. The Boilermakers knew Keady would lead from the front, and the Hoosiers saw that the new rival coach was no pushover.

“He had that attitude of, ‘I’m not going to let Knight get control of these referees,’ ” recalls Ted Kitchel, who made all four of the technical free throws.

The Boilermakers responded but would lose, 69-61, in what was described as a brutally physical game: the teams combined for 53 personal fouls and 62 free throw attempts. Keady’s technicals were two of four called in the game, with Knight also T’d up and Kitchel getting one for grabbing the rim. 

The Hoosiers won that first matchup, in large part because of the heroics of Thomas, who scored 26 points on 10-of-12 shooting. Thomas wasn’t perfect — he earned three fouls himself — but it was a foul that wasn’t called that would stoke the fires for Game 2.

Roosevelt Barnes was a 6-foot-2 powerhouse guard who also played football and baseball at Purdue and became a safety for the Detroit Lions. He was ideal for Keady to bring off the bench for some hard-nosed defense.

“Roosevelt was a physical specimen,” Walker says. “Back in the day, basketball teams didn’t go to the weight room, Roosevelt did. Roosevelt could bench 300 pounds.”

Keady put Barnes in that first game to make Thomas’ life miserable. He was in his face, bumping him and checking him, fouling him and generally being aggressive.

“There was a little more physicality in the game than there is today,” Indiana forward Steve Risley says. “We didn’t have flagrant fouls. If you wanted to bust somebody up, you busted ’em up. You didn’t try to hurt anybody, but Isiah’s coming to the lane, he’s going to pay a price.”

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As the game wore on, Thomas became increasingly heated. He and Purdue freshman center Russell Cross were both Chicago products, and Thomas even asked him to intervene.

“They would bring (Barnes) in, he’d be real aggressive,” Kitchel says. “And he’d be bumping Isiah and banging him. Isiah kind of looked at Russell Cross and said, ‘Hey, Russell, tell your boy to just play. You know?’ Well, he kept banging him and bumping him.”

Finally, Thomas decided he’d had enough, and he took a swing at Barnes’ head. He connected. There is a discrepancy as to whether this was a slap or a sucker punch. Either way, Thomas managed to do it so that no one noticed at the time. But when Barnes next came off the floor, Weber could tell something was different.

“I knew when he came to the bench, he didn’t know where he was,” says Weber. “He didn’t know what game it was, he didn’t know anything. Something happened, there’s no doubt about it.”

Barnes apparently didn’t mention the incident in a postgame meeting with the media. According to a Bloomington Herald-Telephone report, he was sporting a cut above his left eye from an elbow he took from Risley. All Barnes would say was, “I thought I did a good job on (Thomas.). It was a physical game, and that’s the kind of game I like.”

The incident between Barnes and Thomas did not surface publicly until Barnes spoke to reporters after Purdue’s win over Minnesota the following Thursday. The Lafayette Journal & Courier ran a story the next day, describing it as a rematch of a boxing bout. Barnes had said he didn’t take it personally that Thomas had punched him late in the previous game, pointing to that cut above his eye.

“Oh, there’s no bad blood or anything,” Barnes told the Journal & Courier. “I’m just looking forward to playing him. He’s supposed to be the best.”

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By that point, both teams had viewed game film from the incident. Indiana saw evidence that Barnes — possibly inadvertently — first hit Thomas in the face. And Purdue saw Thomas clearly take a swing at Barnes.

“We watched it on film,” Kitchel says. “Time after time after time we watched it. Knight wasn’t even there when we watched it.”

Says Purdue’s Walker: “Looking at the film the night before, you see the sucker punch and it makes you mad. One of your teammates got blindsided.”

Knight, who declined interview requests for this story, was bothered by the media labeling the exchange a “sucker punch.” On Friday before the game, he released a statement defending Thomas.

“It is a sorry commentary when a singular incident in a game such as what took place between Isiah Thomas and Roosevelt Barnes is taken totally out of context and used to bring a pseudo-emotional state to a college basketball game,” Knight said in the statement. “An extremely unfair and undeserved reflection has been cast on the character of Isiah Thomas, by insinuation coming from Purdue and then written in the press. Isiah Thomas did slap Barnes in the face as a retaliation for being slapped on the chin by Barnes just seconds before. This occurred after several such instances directed not only toward Isiah but at other members of our team. I had warned the officials repeatedly about that was happening from early in the game. The Purdue film of the Thomas-Barnes incident apparently does not show the aforementioned, but our game film does. This will be shown at an open press conference at Assembly Hall in Bloomington Monday at 11 a.m. Any of you interested in what actually happened instead of reporting from hearsay evidence are cordially invited to see exactly what happened and why on my television show on Channel 4 at 12:00 pm. I make this statement because of the totally unwarranted and unjustified verbal attack on one of the finest young men I have ever known, Isiah Thomas.”

Before he could show the film, though, Indiana had to play at Purdue.

Mackey Arena was deafening as usual for the rematch with Indiana, ranked No. 17 and back in the Top 25 for the first time since December. The Hoosiers charged out of the gate early, making 10 straight field goals at one point, and carried a 42-37 lead into the locker room.

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“At halftime, we were looking around the locker room like, ‘This isn’t going to happen,'” Walker says. “We all knew the consequences of losing your rivalry game twice in the same season.”

The teams rallied back and forth, and the game was tied at 66 with 59 seconds left. Purdue killed clock until forward Kevin Stallings, who would later become the coach at Illinois State, Vanderbilt and Pitt, was fouled on a loose ball. He hit two free throws to give Purdue a 68-66 lead with five seconds left. Risley then found Thomas on a deep pass down the court. Thomas cut through traffic and delivered a bounce pass to Kitchel on the baseline, but an official ruled that Thomas had double-dribbled before dishing.

“I’ve watched Isiah Thomas play for three years and I’ve never seen him double-dribble,” Knight said after the game. “And it was called on him twice today by people 30 to 50 feet behind the play.”

The win extended Purdue’s home winning streak against Indiana to five games, its last loss coming to Indiana’s undefeated 1976 championship team.

“We were stoked,” says guard Greg Eifert, whose son Grady is now a Boilermaker. “We had it in the back of the mind about all of that stuff (with Barnes and Thomas.) But at the same time, when you grit your teeth and you’re fired up and just want to kick somebody’s butt, that’s how we were. Keady always wanted us to take it to the other team.”

Every Sunday at noon, Bloomington’s Channel 4 would air Knight’s half-hour coach’s show co-hosted by Chuck Marlowe, the Hoosiers’ TV play-by-play announcer. Marlowe asked the questions, but ultimately Knight determined the direction of the show. And on Feb. 8, Knight didn’t want to talk about the day before. He wanted to defend Thomas. 

“The video that we had,” says Jim Butler, a cameraman on that show, “you couldn’t really get a definitive look at what Isiah does. In his defense of Isiah, he got the 16-millimeter film that his person had shot, and that’s the game film. He had us bring in a projector and set it up so he could run the film.”

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Knight repeatedly played a clip that he said showed Barnes either slapping or shoving Thomas in the chin, which immediately preceded Thomas hitting Barnes with what Knight said on the show was “the heel of his hand.”

“I didn’t see this mentioned in any story I read,” Knight said on the show. “All I saw was ‘Thomas’ and ‘sucker punch,’ which was ridiculous.”

Knight found another clip that showed a possibly flagrant elbow by Purdue’s Keith Edmonson against Indiana’s Randy Wittman.

“It’s really blatant,” Butler says. “And Coach showed that over and over and over. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And that’s when he got into the Purdue mentality.”

Knight rolled those images together with accusations of profanity used by the Purdue student section and insults he claimed were directed at him and his then-wife, Nancy; he said that they spoke to Purdue’s character in a broader sense. In his Monday press conference, Knight called the whole episode “typical of a Purdue mentality of which I’ve grown very familiar with over 10 years of being here.”

Purdue athletic director George King asked Big Ten commissioner Wayne Duke to investigate the fan incidents and said the athletic department would buy advertising in Purdue’s student newspaper The Exponent, as well as the Lafayette Journal & Courier. But King, who died in 2006, also said he was upset about Knight’s comments.

“I’m sure this happened only because of the rivalry,” King told The Associated Press, “and Coach Knight’s statement about a ‘Purdue mentality’ is unfortunate.”

Knight invited King onto his show to discuss it, but King declined. A month later, after Indiana had won the Big Ten title, Knight welcomed a guest to his TV show in King’s stead.

“He seemed to think that we wanted to enter into debate,” Knight said of King. “I said, ‘If I wanted to enter into debate with somebody, I’d enter with somebody who really knew something about what he was talking about.’ I thought we’d just have George come down and talk about his career in coaching and maybe it would add something to our show.”

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Then he introduced King’s replacement. A donkey. Standing off-stage. Wearing a Purdue hat. Neither Knight nor the donkey broke character.

“I’ll tell you what we got though, Chuck,” Knight said. “I had a guy call me when he read that King wouldn’t come on our TV show and told me that he had a guest for us that if we’d like to use him would probably express the same kinds of views and be very symbolic of a lot of the thinking at Purdue.”

Purdue officials had varying reactions to the incident. King filed a complaint with the Big Ten, to no avail. Keady says now that he doesn’t even remember that it had taken place during his tenure, saying that he thought it happened when Rose was still the head coach. Weber remembers that Keady is wrong and that it did occur in 1981, but he didn’t seem insulted by it.

“At that time, I would go to church and I would rush home on Sunday just to see what he might do,” Weber says. “I still think it’s hilarious. Somewhere, I have it on my Beta Max. I used to tape all the Coach Knight shows.”

The only way of late to catch Knight’s act has been when Keady draws him out of seclusion for their two-man show. That explains why, on the eve of the 2017-18 basketball season, pockets of bright red Indiana gear smatter the audience at the Elliott Hall of Music on Purdue’s campus, just a half mile from Mackey Arena. 

Once more, behind twin podiums and with only moderator Bob Hammel between them, Knight and Keady recapped two decades of classic games and gamesmanship. Keady had always been more open about his respect for Knight, who mostly kept his true feelings under wraps. However, Keady revels in a story that took place a few years ago as he wound down his career, as a St. John’s assistant for one of his protégés, Steve Lavin. Knight was already well into his retirement from Texas Tech and serving as an analyst for a Red Storm game on ESPN. But Knight clearly felt the need to unload some emotional baggage.

“He was doing a game at the Garden,” Keady recalls, “And he had one of the managers come into my dressing room. He said, ‘Hey, Coach Knight wants you to come out and talk to him.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’ But I relinquished and went out and he said, ‘Sit down there, I want to talk to you.’ You know how he talks. I said, ‘OK, what’s up, Coach?’ He said. ‘I want you to know you were the hardest coach I ever had to prepare for.’ I about fell over, because I never thought he’d compliment me about anything.”

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As they wind up their two-man show in West Lafayette, Knight and Keady still have plenty to say about each other. Knight has so thoroughly won over the Boilermakers crowd that they serenade him with “Happy Birthday” a few days after he had turned 77. Knight’s response to the audience goes down as one of the most shocking statements he’s ever made, if only for its sincerity: “That may just be the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Even Hammel, a most cordial sportswriter, is taken aback.

“If people from back in that day would have seen the guys together on a stage,” Hammel says of those who witnessed the epic Hate Weeks of the ’80s and 90s. “Or heard a Purdue crowd singing Happy Birthday to Bobby? It wouldn’t have washed. That’s one of those things, ‘Can you believe it?’”

Keady and Knight want their fans to believe. And who’s going to argue with them, that without hate there can be no love?

(Top photo: Courtesy of Purdue)

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