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After the party, when you look in the mirror
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 12, 2000 Events are less random than they seem. Bobby Knight, the raging bull of college basketball, went down Sunday when he was fired as coach at Indiana University. Darryl Strawberry, the drug-addicted Yankees star, went down Monday in Tampa when he was arrested again, this time for driving while impaired. You could have almost predicted it. Knight and Strawberry were tripped up by the weakest parts of themselves, the way a lot of us are. They have this other thing in common. They're both junkies. Addiction is part emotional, part physical, all disease. The chief difference between Knight and Strawberry seems to have been that Knight did nothing to mellow himself. He likes this thing he's hooked on, his rage. For Strawberry, the hook had been cocaine. Monday at a north Tampa crossroads, the problem was a potent sleeping pill called Ambien. Strawberry admitted to deputies he was taking it. At 9 in the morning. While he was on the way to see his probation officer and crashed into a stop sign and another car and then tried to flee. Strawberry, at least, elicits a little sorrow from a normal heart. The man has cancer again. There is no doubting his other disease; he has been suspended three times from baseball for drugs. His outrageous pay is somewhat less outrageous now. He was just three months from the end of his probation for his last bust in Tampa, last year. Now he might end up in the clink for more than just overnight, like a regular nobody. Knight elicits only astonishment and what his behavior clearly suggests he enjoys -- fear. He's like the father who beats his kids and terrorizes his wife because he has some overwhelming need to control them. He needs to control them because he's so limited that any other way of living threatens him too much. Only a psychiatrist could discern what is in Knight's heart, what injury his rage conceals. You get the feeling, though, that he's the kind of guy who would go storming out of the shrink's office, screaming that he doesn't have a problem with his anger. Here's the sadder part. While Darryl Strawberry will get his punishment, to the extent that sports superstars who break the law get any, college basketball's raging bull will prosper. Another team will want Knight. He'll get a TV contract. Some gig with six, seven figures attached. Knight will go on, secure in his belief that he was wronged by the university that threw him out Sunday, finally. Here's the saddest part. People will still worship him. The Bobby Knight fervor runs so high in Indiana, that on-the-surface, as-pretty-as-a-picture of a state, that an IU professor who criticized Knight had to take a sabbatical because he was afraid for his life. Some among the 3,000 protesters who roamed Bloomington's streets Sunday night held signs that said the freshman who was involved in Knight's last outburst should die. Why do I think these are the same people who think Bill Clinton is subhuman and everybody in jail ought to be there forever and that schoolteachers are overpaid? The question is rhetorical, posed for effect, to make the point that we're partly to blame for Bobby Knight, Darryl Strawberry and their long-running acts of big-boy bad boyism. Somehow, we like the show. Who wouldn't want to be a bully now and then, or live high on the hog, and get away with it? You crash eventually, the way Knight and Strawberry did, but nobody ever sees the crash coming, or cares, when the party's on and the music is good, and loud.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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