Bobby knight quotes

If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for.

I have as many good friends in the media as anybody in sports has. It's just that I probably have a hell of a lot more enemies than anybody else.

Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?

I've never felt my job was to win basketball games - rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.

If universities want to save a little money, they ought to make some cutbacks in administration and in faculty people who teach one class a week.

Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is willing to prepare to win.

Everybody hears, but few listen.

Everybody wants to be on a championship team, but nobody wants to come to practice.

This is like the town council just hired a new marshal to clean up the town, I guarantee you, if I stay here long enough, they'll get rid of me, too.

Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.

Son, my name isn't Knight to you, it's coach Knight or it's Mr. Knight. I don't call people by their last name and neither should you.

Offense is not equal opportunity

From the time I started teaching, when I was 21, I've always signed my name Bob Knight. My college coach called me Bobby, still does. But I have never introduced myself to anybody in my adult life in any way other than, "I'm Bob Knight."

You remember when you were a kid growing up, and believed in Santa Claus? There's not much difference between Santa Claus and me today, you know. We're two overweight lovable guys that kids really enjoy.

My overall point is that 'one and dones' are not healthy for college basketball. I should not have made it personal to Kentucky and its players and I apologize.

A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn't like to play against

The structure of your practice is the main reason for your success or lack of success as a coach

There are as many guys in coaching who do a lousy job as there are in the media. Those are two professions that are a lot alike. There aren't a hell of a lot of really good coaches or writers.

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.

The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.

Discipline is knowing what to do. Knowing when to do it. Doing it to the best of your abilities. Doing it that way every single time.

My practices were not set up to be easy or enjoyed.

When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.

The goal is to make practice more difficult, physically/mentally, than anything your players will face during a game.

Pat has been instrumental in what we've done here so far and the most selfish thing for me is that I want to see what we've done placed in the hands of the most competent person, and that's Pat. No one would come close to being able to continue to build on what we've done here so far like he will.

As his team prepares, a coach's entire being must be concentrated on winning games.

Superiority and success doesn't favor good effort or self-esteem... The mentally precise and physically fit win, while the mediocre and obtuse take solace in hopeful cliches.

I think that to stop an offense, you must go to the heart of that offense. If it is a particular move, a screen, the break, an outstanding scorer, whatever it is that they like to do and rely on, you have to work in your plans on taking that completely or as much as possible away from them.

Competitive drills enhance quickness.

Good planning avoids the need for fixing up a project that plowed ahead without thought... about potential pitfalls.

The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

We talk in coaching about "winners" - kids, and I've had a lot of them, who just will not allow themselves or their team to lose. Coaches call that a will to win. I don't. I think that puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Everybody has a will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win.

Defense is all about helping. No one can guard a good dribbler, You have to walk kids through how to help and then how to help the helper

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

I don't believe in luck, I believe in preparation.

To be as good as it can be, a team has to buy into what you as the coach are doing. They have to feel you're a part of them and they're a part of you.

I was worried about losing until I looked down the floor and saw Dale Brown. Then I knew we had a chance.

I sit and wonder why no one uses the shot fake. The shot fake, when used correctly, can eliminate a defender

Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done the best way it can be done, and do it that way every time.

There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I've always been too confrontational, especially when I know I'm right.

People change over the years, and that changes situations, for good and for bad.

Passing is your best weapon against man to man. Dribble penetration is your best weapon against zone.

During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.

Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.

I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.

I always designed my practice plans the night before and then made tweaks a few hours before practice began

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.

In my dealings with the press, I was like the guy who goes into the cathouse and the madam gets him prepared and looks at him and says, "Who are you going to satisfy with that?" And he looks back at her and says, "Me." That's kind of my sense of humor at times.

To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation

Offense at Indiana is not equal opportunity. Those players who shoot best are going to shoot most. It is important that every player know his offensive limitations. It is also important that a player know who the best shooter is on the team. When a passer has the option of passing to two players, I expect him to get the ball to the best shooter. I continually stop practice and ask players who the best shooter is and I expect them to know. It is important that you get the ball to your best shooter.

We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.

I recognize that I have a problem with my temper. For those times it has ever caused me to do anything that gave anyone understandable and justifiable reason to be upset, I am sincerely sorry.

At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.

It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language. My definition isas follows: 1. Do what has to be done; 2. When it has to be done; 3. As well as it can be done; and 4. Do it it that way all the time.

It is better to anticipate than to react.

I also believe that when something negative comes out about you in the media, that's only one person's opinion. These guys sometimes believe they've been ordained from on high to give the general opinion of the populace, and that just isn't the case.

You don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.

I just love the game of basketball so much. The game! I don't need the 18,000 people screaming and all the peripheral things. To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation.

BS is just what it stands for, an MS is More of the Same, and a PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper.

I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that's going to happen, let's make it happen.

All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit.

Positive wish: 'The sun will come out tomorrow.' Negative reality: 'Yeah, and it will flash brand-new daylight on the same old mess unless something is done to clean it up.

America has the greatest reputation in the world for helping others whenever and wherever disaster strikes. Now, more than ever,it's important for us to contribute to those who are in need. Your assistance is really beneficial and will be greatly welcomed and appreciated.

What is the best thing you can do in a close game? Drive to the basket and put pressure on the defense! Not jack up jump shots

As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one.

When my time on earth is done and my activities here are past, I want them to bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass.

Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.

Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.

A primary goal of teaching anything is the advantage that learning gives to people over their competitors who haven't been as well taught.

Perform drills that force your players to think

If you're not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

You play ball against yourself; your opponent is your potential.

A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.

The thing that bothers me the most about the media is simple accuracy.

I'm not sure sports writing is an art.

I don't intend to retire.

We've gotten into this situation where integrity is really lacking and that's why I'm glad I'm not coaching. You see we've got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he's still coaching. I really don't understand that.

Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it was made for Indiana.

The red I wear is Indiana's red, not Moscow's red. Indiana was here long before communism.

If the NBA were on channel 5 and a bunch of frogs making love were on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs, even if they were coming in fuzzy.

I'm an unemployed teacher right now and I'm looking for a place to teach.

You can't imagine the number of people in professional sports who have come up to me and said, "God, you treat those assholes like I'd like to treat them." And my question is, "Then why don't you?".

I've never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can.

I've always felt that, you know, the Almighty has a lot of things to do other than help my basketball team.

Writing was far more of an art in the sports world than it is now.

Well, I think it's pretty much established that I just didn't have any interest in coaching in the pros.

I've always had an a$$-to-the-brain theory. When a player's a$$ gets put on the bench, a message goes straight to the brain saying, Get me off of here.

You are never going to be driven anywhere worthwhile, but you sure as hell drive yourself to a lot of great places. It is up to you to drive yourself there.

Al McGuire talked to me I don't know how many times about dealing with the press: "You've got to be a con man." I tried that for a day or so, but it never really worked for me.

I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.

Learn to do things right and then do them right every time.

Practice structure determines success.

A great way to test the conditioning of your team is the two-mile run.

Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.

Players must be able to carry out simple instructions from the bench to the court. If they can't, then they can't play

If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can. I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we'd beat everybody.

If I were in charge I'd drug test all you sons of b****es, not just the athletes.

I don't think I have ever been out of control.

I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?

We just got our ass beat by a much better team. It happens once in a while. Does every team win every game?

Good basketball always starts with good defense!

In order to achieve to achieve positive results, one must work for them, not hope for them

I think the ability to motivate might be interpreted as the ability to lead, or to show people their goals or, perhaps more important, what their potential is - as a person as well as a player. You've got to show players that being part of a team will carry over to the experience of becoming part of society.

As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense.

I'd probably be better off without trying to satisfy me, with my sense of humor. There are things that I have said that are funny to me, but they weren't to somebody in the press. So that hasn't worked to my benefit.

I would rather be thought of as a teacher than a coach.

I hate casual shooting. Every shot is preceded by working to get open and catch and shoot under game like conditions

So when I hear a guy after a game-winning home run say or gesture that God was on his side, I think to myself, 'He's saying God screwed the pitcher.

I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.

The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices

I tell you what really fries my ass. When somebody gets on me for the way I look. Fat. Overweight. Well, I may be overweight. But I'm sure not fat. And I guarantee you, I'm a better athlete than any f***g body writing. To this day, they don't want to play tennis with me. The don't want to play me in golf. They don't want to f***g run with me

Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.

For me to get an award from the press, I know there's been no favoritism.