It is the second Sunday in December, the day after Indiana performs desultorily in a loss to Kentucky, and the Hoosiers are gathered in their Assembly Hall awaiting the start of practice. They expect a holy terror of a practice and when Bob Knight appears in an outwardly convivial mood, they are surprised and exchange quizzical glances.
”He`s happy. What`s wrong?” thinks Eric Anderson, their estimable senior center.
Now Knight orders all but his freshmen and redshirts off the court, and Anderson joins his banished teammates on a slow walk to their locker room. They expect their coach to surface soon to give his traditional prepractice talk, but then five minutes, 10 minutes, countless minutes pass and he remains absent. Finally, and further confused, Anderson and senior guard Jamal Meeks lead this troupe back toward the court, but before they can reach it, they hear their coach yell: ”You guys can get out of here. My team`s on the floor.”
The next day, Monday, Anderson and Calbert Cheaney and Damon Bailey learn they will not be starting Tuesday against Vanderbilt, and another thought strikes the surprised Anderson: ”I think I`m doing as much as I can.”
”But,” he says now, ”you have to try and realize why he did it. It`s hard to do. I really didn`t re-alize it for a while.”
This is not the first time Knight has benched a star. He did that, for one example, even to Quinn Buckner in the midst of the Hoosiers` run to the 1976 national title. Anderson knows that, knows too that his own benching is intended to make a point. Yet, as he struggles to understand it, that knowledge provides little comfort. In his first three years at the school, he has started all but a trio of games, yet he is again on the bench when his team tips off against Boston University and Central Michigan.
”I didn`t really think it would last that long,” he admits now.
And what goes through your mind as it stretches on?
”You`re frustrated,” he says. ”You`re hoping you can play again. You`re hoping you work hard enough at practice to play in the next big game. All I could think of then was the St. John`s game.”
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Last Tuesday, in its biggest game of the season, Indiana attacked Ohio State off Anderson screens and with the darting cuts of Cheaney and Bailey, of Greg Graham and Chris Reynolds. It was a bold plan founded on aggressiveness, and eventually it drove the Hoosiers to a 19-point lead.
But over a remarkable six-minute stretch the Buckeyes rallied, took the lead and sent the Hoosiers searching the deepest recesses of their souls. Now they were involved in a gut-wrenching affair, traveling up a hill with the steepest pitch imaginable, and their nerves, their fiber, their steeliness all were confronting a rigid exam.
They would pass it by winning 91-83, but the next afternoon Eric Anderson says:”We would have ended up losing that one by 20 if we`d played it in December.”
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The St. John`s game is set for Dec. 21 in Madison Square Garden, and it marks the end of Eric Anderson`s exile. He does not remember when he learns this will be the case, but as soon as he realizes it, he begins exhorting his teammates.
”We have to play our butts off. That`s all he wants,” he tells them.
”Being a senior,” he remembers, ”I should have come out from Day 1 playing my butt off, getting everyone into an aggressive mode. That`s the only way we can be a successful team. But I hadn`t, and that was what he was really mad at me about.
”I came to realize that what he wanted from me was instead of hustling just once in a while, he wanted me to hustle all the time. I had to play each possession as if it was the last possession. Once one person starts treating every possession with that intensity, it carries over, and since I was the senior, that`s what he wanted from me.”
That is the way the Hoosiers performed that Saturday, and not only did they defeat the Redmen, they ended a trend that had been gnawing at their entrails. They had folded against Kansas in the 1991 NCAA tourney, had floundered against UCLA and Kentucky in this season`s opening weeks, had failed to beat a highly ranked team in nearly two years, but here they withstood a St. John`s rally and set off on the 10-game winning streak they carry into Northwestern on Saturday.
”It was a gut check for us. Me, personally, too,” Anderson says of that December afternoon.
His sentence with the reserves, he goes on, was the toughest time in his career, was the most trying interlude of a career characterized until then by continual success. Illinois` Mr. Basketball as a senior at St. Francis de Sales in 1988; Big 10 Freshman of the Year as a starter on a conference champion a year later; the 12th spot on Indiana`s all-time scoring list, and a reputation for dependability, for toughness, for showing up every night-those are some of the accolades he had accrued, but now he was just an example, cast on the bench to deliver a singular message. ”Until then, I always had a peaceful time,” he finally continues.
So was the benching a shock?
”Yeah. Really. It was something I battled through.”
Did you take it personally?
”You can`t help but take some of it personally. You try not to, but when he`s angry at you day in, day out at practice, you can`t help but think, `This guy really doesn`t like me.` You just have to look past that and wait for the opportunity to disprove his thoughts.”
Did benching you work? Did it serve its purpose?
”I believe it was very successful. I realized that if we were going to lose big games, he wasn`t going to play me. Why play me if we`re going to lose big games anyway and he has younger guys he can be developing? He relayed that thought to me, and it was very true. Why play a senior when the season`s going to be a failure anyway?
”That thought clicked in. `Here it is my senior year, and I`m not going to play.` I believe he`s truthful when he makes a threat. I didn`t take it as an idle threat, I`d been sitting on the pine for three games. So it helped me out, helped the team out that December, uh, December, uh, December whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Until then we really didn`t realize how tough it was to beat a top team, we didn`t know what we needed to do to get over the hump against a good team.
”Now we have more of a killer attitude.”
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On Tuesday, during its rally, Ohio State ran in full cry, unfurled open-throttle fastbreaks that left countless Hoosiers looking like statues. That happened once to junior forward Matt Nover, who was so mezmerized he didn`t bother to pick up a Buckeye, and here Eric Anderson-normally a quiet leader-responded forcefully, just jumped right into his teammate`s face. ”Can`t have that,” is part of what he then roared.
”Sorry if I went crazy,” he would tell Nover later.
”Coach is the one who curses us out, and I don`t mean to be out there being mean. But I wanted to let him know that kind of stuff can`t happen,” he says now. ”I don`t want to lose now at any cost. I don`t want to lose any games. I know what happens when we lose games.”
