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Bobby Knight

From Bloomingpedia

Robert Montgomery "Bobby" Knight (born October 25, 1940), was the IU Men's Basketball coach at Indiana University from April 1, 1971 to September 10, 2000. He was the coach of the last undefeated college basketball team in 1976. He previously coached for Army, and since March 23, 2001 was the head coach for Texas Tech University until his retirement on February 4th, 2008 with 902 career wins since he started coaching at Army. He now works for ESPN as a Basketball Analyst.

On February 23, 1985, during a game against Purdue, Knight was given a technical foul for protesting a referee's call. He picked up a chair and threw it to the floor of the court. (This earned him a second technical foul, and when he protested that, he was thrown out of the game.) Since this incident, chair-throwing is almost synonymous with Knight (they have even put wires on the chairs to hold them down, even though he is gone.)

In January, 1993, Knight commented on his Sunday television show that the 6'8" 230 lb. Yugolav Ivan Renko had agreed to sign with Indiana and that he was "very pleased to get this commitment."

Knight created Renko in an attempt to exploit several so-called recruiting "experts" and to show that their services were actually worthless to subscribers. Knight was successful in his task, and even though Renko was completely fictional, several recruiting services started listing him as a prospect with in-depth descriptions of his potential and game style. Some recruiting gurus even claimed to possess or to see film of him actually playing basketball. Even today, Ivan Renko is considered to be one of the greatest hoaxes in sports.

On September 10, 2000, Coach Knight was fired by IU President Myles Brand while on disciplinary probation.

In 2002, Knight became the college basketball coach with the winningest record of 880 wins. It was reported that both then-NCAA President Myles Brand and then-Indiana University President Adam Herbert wrote to Knight to congratulate him on this achievement.

On January 17th, 2008 Knight became the first men's basketball coach in Division 1 history to win 900 games. He did so by defeating the 10th ranked Aggies of Texas A&M while coaching at Texas Tech. Later that season, Knight retired from Texas Tech and was succeeded by his son Pat Knight.

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