He was still Bobby back then, and he had not been promoted yet through the ranks to general.
At 35, he was in only his fifth season guiding Indiana, but already Bob Knight was an eclectic blend of genius and temper, charm and rage.
For him, the lines already were drawn, and, as his 1975-76 Hoosiers cut through their schedule like a scythe, he made certain they knew just what was important.
“You know the way he felt about the media,” remembered Quinn Buckner, and then he laughed.
“We have to clean it up. But he always told us, `Don’t worry about what those blanks think about you. Worry about what I think about you.’ It was his mantra to us. Live in the moment is a Zen thing that came later with Phil Jackson. But he’d tell us, `Don’t worry about the future. Worry about every possession.'”
Those Hoosiers, which featured Buckner as their point guard and captain, did that well enough to end their season as undefeated (32-0) national champions.
They were only the seventh team in history to manage that feat and only the fourth school in history to run the table. In all the years that have passed, no one has managed to equal that accomplishment.
That same season, Rutgers entered the tournament 28-0. It lost to Michigan in a national semifinal.
In 1979, Indiana State entered the NCAA at 29-0. It lost to Michigan State in the national title game.
In 1991, Nevada-Las Vegas entered the tournament 30-0. It lost to Duke in a national semifinal.
Now there’s Illinois, 22-0 and flirting with history as it awaits a Super Bowl Sunday visit from the current Hoosiers. Behind it are its toughest Big Ten tests, recent visits to Wisconsin and Michigan State. Still lurking is the same danger Knight bluntly took on so many years ago.
“The hype, and it’s probably three, four, five times more now because of all the media outlets,” Buckner said. “Players hear so much now. It’s easy to worry about what people outside the team say and think about you. If you stay committed to your team and what you have to do, you have a great chance. But every moment you worry about the outside, your chances diminish.
“Those kinds of things can get to you. If you understand that, it can’t be a concern to you. [Illinois’] concern has to be coach [Bruce] Weber. They have to worry about what he thinks about them. . . . They have to buy in, but even that only takes them so far. They have to understand the way it goes.”
It is so difficult to maintain that No. 1 ranking.
“Even in our good years, we only maintained it for about a week, two weeks,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. “That’s hard, and that’s one thing I really admire about the job [Illinois] has done. Even though they’re pretty much movie stars now, they have handled it. They still play hard. They have kept their blue-collarness.
“That was the one key when we had our big runs. We didn’t change our character much. That, I think, is the secret to success over time . . . [and] that’s the way I look at the Illinois team.
“I’m not there day to day. But I look at Dee [Brown] and Deron [Williams], and I like how hard they play almost all the time. It gives them a chance.”
Entering 1975-76, Buckner and the other Hoosiers knew they had a chance too. They were experienced, featuring four seniors and a junior, and a season earlier they had won 29 straight before losing to Kentucky in a regional final.
Still, they were not thinking of an undefeated season.
“What we were thinking, frankly, is that we had the best team the previous year and had let it get away,” Buckner said. “That builds a certain kind of resolve, so you don’t have the kind of ending you had a year before.
“With that, we could carry the burden of being undefeated. That’s where we stayed in our hard hats. We’d been undefeated and lost, so we knew the ramifications if we didn’t do that. That loss in ’75 was a big reason we were so resilient.”
Their resilience earned them an overtime victory over Kentucky in mid-December, got them into mid-January at 15-0 after a four-point victory over Purdue. Yet Knight was not happy with Buckner, and when Indiana visited Minnesota on Jan. 24, he benched his guard.
“When you’re playing good, we’re really good,” Knight told him. “When you’re not, Jim Wisman makes us a better team.”
“It was a good psychological ploy,” recalled Buckner, whose experience mirrors another danger stalking the Illini. “I was a young man on campus. I hadn’t done anything really wrong, but I hadn’t taken care of myself. I had no energy. I had to get tired in six-minute spurts, and I was getting tired in two-minute spurts.
“He was absolutely right to bench me. Now I would never tell him that, but he was trying to get my attention and he did. He said that from that point forward, after he put me back in, I was the best guard in basketball. Those were his words, not mine. I’m not sure what I was. I was just trying to survive.”
The Illini recently survived a scare at Wisconsin, coming back from eight points down to win, and Indiana survived its own scare, defeating Michigan in overtime after Kent Benson’s fluke basket tied the game at the end of regulation. But the Hoosiers had issues that still could burden the Illini, no matter that their public face looks so unblemished.
Indiana’s looked that way too back in 1976, but behind closed doors it still had its shaky moments.
“We had a share of them, but they didn’t last very long,” said Buckner, who took care of them along with All-American forward Scott May.
Bobby Wilkerson, the tough 6-foot-7-inch guard, was one player they had to tend, and another was Benson, the only junior among the starters.
“For our [senior] group we were interested in winning and getting out of school. That brought us a sense of urgency,” Buckner said.
“But Benny could get caught up in it. He grew up in an environment where he always had been successful and always had been the best. The rest of us were from an environment where others were always better, so our egos were more managed or suppressed. He never had that until he got with us, so we policed him.”
Knight, of course, was their omnipresent conscience, cajoling, demanding, guiding, prodding, pushing them toward perfection. But the Hoosiers, led by Buckner and May, policed themselves, which is what it always comes down to.
They ignored the outside blandishments and pressures. They kept their egos in check and their hat sizes constant. They attended the present and did not worry about future careers in the NBA.
They did all that and simply torched the postseason, winning their five NCAA games by an average of 13.2 points and the national championship with an 18-point victory over Michigan.
That is the challenge facing the Illini, whose talents are unquestioned. If they hope to emulate those Hoosiers, if they hope to add their name to the few on the list of undefeated champions, they must police themselves as well.
They must police themselves under greater scrutiny than those Hoosiers ever endured, and with more distractions, with more people whispering in their ears, with more money awaiting some of them in the future. Knight, Buckner remembers, read everything that was written about his team.
“If [Knight] thought for a moment we were buying into it, he challenged us in practice one way or another,” Buckner said. “He knew the adverse impact of that.”
What is the greatest danger to Illinois’ undefeated season?
“Themselves,” Buckner said. “Getting caught up, as the kids say, in the hype.”
And how do they get around it?
“Play every possession as if every possession matters,” he said. “Which it does. In addition to that, I never wanted to be the weak link.
“Play for your teammates, and don’t think of going to the [NBA] or anything else. Know your success is predicated on playing for the team.”
