Giants legend Bill Parcells and the Bobby Knight most people never saw | Izenberg

It came across in the timber of his voice — and the pauses — as he searched the backroads of his mind for just the right memories to describe the “other side” of the man Bobby Knight almost never let people see.Knight passed away at age 83 and, as always happens when you mourn a best friend lost, Bill Parcells took the hit hard. The first thing he said was, “He was not the Bobby Knight most people saw or knew.”Parcells, the Hall of Fame Giant coach, was saying something that had taken me a long time to realize. I didn’t like Knight when he started to win big at Indiana — but then, except for the Indiana students and fanatical followers of Hoosier Nation, who did? You couldn’t quarrel with the numbers, impressive at first and then better than anyone else. In some ways, after he was fired at Indiana, his tenure was even more surprising at Texas Tech, where there was major basketball legacy. The baggage he acquired back then was well-reported:The chair thrown on the floor, the referee-bai...