MOTHER AND BOBBY KNIGHT [sun, 10-11-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscenes of A Very Old Man—MOTHER AND BOBBY KNIGHT [sun, 10-11-26]

 

The Indiana University basketball season starts today, sort of, so it is worth recalling that my mother once took a course in coaching basketball. At IU. From Bob Knight.

That probably sounds strange, to anyone who knew Mother or who knew Knight. Until you remember that they were both outliers.

Mother liked basketball. No sports for girls in her day, of course, so they had to play vicariously. For Mother, it was through her brothers, especially her oldest brother, Ted.

He was born in 1900 and played before the Francisco, IN school had a gym. Just having a school at all then was not to be taken for granted. When Mother graduated, her class actually dedicated their yearbook to the taxpayers of Center Township for providing a school for them. That was after Uncle Ted’s playing days.

 

Uncle Ted played basketball in a barn. That’s how we get the basketball term, “barn burner,” a game so exciting that the barn catches fire, at least emotional fire. Mother talked of Uncle Ted’s games like that.

When I started on the staff of “Oak Barks,” the Oakland City High School newspaper, as a lowly fourteen-year-old, editor Benny Albin gave me the job of doing the “years ago” column, as in Ten Years Ago, Fifty Years Ago, Etc. In our archives we had the school papers from all the Gibson County schools, including Francisco. Going through the archives, I discovered that Uncle Ted had indeed been a standout player. He had often been high point man. In games that ended in scores like 6 to 4!

Of course, the game was slower then. Whenever anyone scored a basket, someone had to climb up to the loft to get the ball, since the baskets were actual baskets, with the bottom still in.

Francisco was named for a Mexican who was helping to build the Eerie Canal. He lived in a hut there. As other people began to settle in the area, they referred to the place as Francisco’s. It is often called Frisco. There are several members of the Pond family, Mother’s family, who still live there.

When Mother was growing up in Francisco, it had about 600 residents, about the same as today, but in those days before automobiles it had two hotels--to serve the drummers, [1] two doctors, a bank, a barber, several restaurants, several grocery stores, several churches, a blacksmith, etc. And, of course, the infamous “company store” of the coal mine owners.

 

I think Uncle Ted started his general store to try to put the company store out of business, by giving miners, like his father, decent goods at a reasonable price.

Mother and Dad went to live in Frisco in their last years, because Mother’s 7 siblings gave her the family home when Grandma died, but Frisco, like all small towns, was rapidly declining. When the last grocery store closed, my brother moved Mother and Dad to a house he owned in Bloomington, IN, only a couple of blocks from the Indiana University campus.

That’s where Bob Knight “taught,” [2] so that’s where Mother bought a pink sweatshirt with Indiana University on the front, and walked over to campus to listen to Bobby explain the motion offense.

 

She finally got what she always wanted; she was a college girl.

John Robert McFarland

1] Called “drummers” because they traveled on the railroad, from town to town, “drumming up” business. The opening scene of Meredith Wilson’s great The Music Man pays tribute to them.

2] In his early days, before everyone knew who he was, when people asked Bob what he did, he replied simply, “I teach at IU.”