The weirdest irony for Mike Davis is not that he’s head basketball coach at Indiana -- although that title still sounds pretty weird on anybody but the Man in the Red Sweater. It’s not that he used to be a football guy. Or that he quit being a prep QB because he stuttered so much nobody could understand his play calls. Or that he apprenticed for this magical hoops shrine by selling T-shirts out of his car and empty cans salvaged from a dirt road. Or that he wandered into his dream job only to stumble upon a nightmare soon after.

No, the weirdest thing is this: After persevering against all odds last season -- the unfairly compromised interim coach who somehow passes the audition while everyone from Pitino to Majerus waits in the wings -- this quiet, gentle, devout Baptist-next-door basically said, “Fine. But I wasn’t worried. I figured I could always get another job someplace else.”

Someplace else?! “Yeah, maybe a small, small school. That wouldn’t have been the worst deal.”

Excuse him for sounding so hopelessly practical. But Davis, a guy who grew up empty-pockets poor in Alabama, has faced far worse deals than the pressure -- and hate mail -- that comes with being Bob Knight’s successor and Indiana’s first African-American head coach in any sport. Likewise, he has endured far bigger distractions than those nasty, nagging rumors about the deposed ruler -- specifically, that Knight isn’t satisfied merely rebuilding his own legacy down in Lubbock, but that he’s still doing his damnedest to prevent Davis from building his own in Bloomington.

“I’m 41 years old now,” Davis says. “I’ve been around, made a lot of friends. I know I can coach. I know I can recruit. I know all about this business. I’ve been through it. I’m a grown man.”

***

There was no parting handshake, no “good luck” pat on the back. After Knight was fired in September 2000, it seemed like half of Hoosier nation, including much of the team, was ready to leave town with him. “He didn’t tell anybody to transfer,” says junior guard Tom Coverdale. “But he made it clear he would help us all if we were in a jam and wanted to go somewhere else.”

Once Davis decided to stay, however, he was on his own. Knight hasn’t spoken to him, or hardly anybody associated with Indiana, since. “Coach said he would pay us out of his own pocket if we didn’t get rehired,” says Davis, who still calls his former benefactor by title rather than name. “But they already had told me we could stay. He knew that. What was he talking about? ‘If you don’t want to stay, I’ll pay you.’ Like I said, I’m a grown man. I have a family.

“I’ve heard the story that the coaches all made a pact to leave together, and I broke it. Totally not true. He talked loyalty. He thought he could count on me to work through this thing and decide to go. But I thought about it over and over. My loyalty is to my wife, Tamilya, and my three kids [Lateesha, 19; Mike Jr., 16; and Antoine, 3]. I’d given the man three years, he paid me, we were square. I’ve heard that a lot of coaches say I should have left. But anybody who thinks I shouldn’t have taken this job is just plain stupid.

“I’m still one of the lowest-paid coaches in the Big Ten,” Davis continues. (He signed a four-year deal at $400,000 per.) “But should I have walked away from all that? This is the first time I’ve gone into a restaurant and not worried about how much it cost. No, I wasn’t going to leave. I wanted to give these guys a basketball season, and I wanted to give other people hope -- to know where I came from, to know my story and say, ‘Hey, that’s a true blessing.’ ”

Tamilya Davis doesn’t exactly mince words either. “Knight loyalists think we should be standing in the unemployment line or something,” she says. “Mike won’t acknowledge it, but yeah, he’s hurt how Coach has treated him. He worked really hard for him.”

Davis seethed after Knight urged 6'9" star Kirk Haston to leave for the NBA a year early. But it was hardly a surprise when Knight made a strong play for Sean May, a 6'8" Bloomington North product whose father, Scott, was a two-time All-America at Indiana. Though May never seemed serious about Lubbock (“The end of the world,” he called it), his surprising decision to attend North Carolina next fall sure looks suspicious to Davis supporters.

“I’ve heard he works against me in the background,” Davis says of his former boss. “I don’t know what to believe. Indiana is a great school and a great basketball program. It’s not coming down whether I’m here or not. But Coach knows if a great recruiting class comes in, it would speak volumes for me.” In fact, IU’s fall signees -- Bracey Wright of The Colony, Texas; Marshall Strickland of Carroll County, Md.; and Daryl Pegram of Los Angeles (by way of Worcester Academy in Massachusetts) -- are a high-wattage bunch even without May.

Davis certainly proved his O-and-Xpertise when Indiana, playing without a single senior, roared down the stretch last season, shocking Illinois in the Big Ten tourney before losing a two-pointer to Iowa in the championship game. Indiana led the league in blocked shots and defensive boards, set a Big Ten record for field goal defense (38.2%) and earned a No.4 seed in the NCAA Tourney. Coverdale, who had spent all but about 41 minutes of his freshman season on the bench, thrived running Davis’ new set offense, averaging 10.7 points and 34.1 minutes a game. The coach also turned Haston loose. After taking, and missing, only two three-pointers in his first two seasons, he hit 26 of 69 (37.7%) and was eventually drafted in the first round by the Charlotte Hornets.

But the Hoosiers were woefully shy of depth, and it caught up to them in their first-round loss to Kent State -- a game that ended with Coverdale, Dane Fife and others sniping about the team’s will, effort, attitude ... everything except the one thing that truly mattered. “We were so disappointed we’d lost to somebody we shouldn’t have,” Fife says. “But even more that we had given the school an excellent reason not to renew Coach Davis.”

Though the loss was Indiana’s fifth first-round exit in seven seasons, Fife and friends were off the hook barely a week later, when the interim tag was finally removed from Davis’ title. He had more wins (finishing 21-12) than any rookie coach in school history (Knight was 17-8), and he had an easy rapport with young talents like Jared Jeffries, the 6'9" soph out of Bloomington North who may be the Hoosiers’ best player since Isiah Thomas. “If it wasn’t for Coach Davis, I’d never have come to IU,” says Jeffries, averaging 15.8 points and 7 boards this season in leading IU to a 6-3 start. “I had told everybody I didn’t want to play for Coach Knight. I wasn’t listening to reason. But Coach Davis told me to sit down and give [Knight] a chance -- made me at ease. I knew Coach Davis as my friend before he was my coach. So when Coach Knight left, I couldn’t imagine playing for anybody else.”

Still, an underlying discomfort plagued Davis’ first campaign. Ugly e-mails. Loud challenges on call-in radio. Complaints about his changes -- everything from a more up-tempo playing style to open practices. (Imagine if the skeptics had known about Antoine’s toy cars cluttering the staff locker room, where Davis spent most of his time while refusing to move into Knight’s former office.) Were the citizens of Indiana simply experiencing Knight withdrawal? Or did some feelings run much deeper?

Davis hit the wall this time last year -- right after his struggling troops surrendered at hated Kentucky, 88-74. “I played against Kentucky myself,” says Davis, a suffocating defender in his days at Alabama. “I won an SEC title on that floor. I know what it takes. But I felt the kids quit playing.”

In a remarkably emotional press conference, Davis finally seemed to crack, wondering aloud, “What can I say? Do? I can’t want it more than them, but that’s the way it seems. Maybe the guy they bring in next year can get these guys to play hard, because I can’t. I told the players this: ‘I’m not the guy for this job.’ ”

Davis now says his performance was mostly for effect, that he knew his squad would read his remarks: “I’ve heard Coach Knight say, ‘I’m not the guy,’ too. Pitino says it. Pat Riley says it. All coaches do. But I didn’t realize how much the papers would blow this up. I thought I’d really screwed up, that there was no way they’d give me the job now.” Everybody from his wife to his former teammates to his 72-year-old mother, Vandella -- still working at the county waste department back home in Fayette, Ala. -- feared the same thing. “Terrific, Coach,” Jeffries told Davis in a phone call. “Lots of folks around here were just waiting for that.”

It took a reminder from down home for Davis to refocus. “I was a senior at Alabama when Bear Bryant died,” he says. “I should have realized certain coaching jobs aren’t just jobs. An old buddy called, and all he said was, ‘You bleeping crazy? You’re not at Miles College anymore.’”

No, but there was life before Indiana. Davis spent one year as an assistant at Miles, a tiny school in Birmingham, before coaching in Venezuela, then Wichita Falls and Chicago of the CBA, then back to Alabama and the SEC. Somewhere along the way, he got clean out of coaching and found himself making a living hustling cans and T-shirts. “Nike shirts, too,” he chuckles. “Then last year I signed a contract to wear the shirts.”

As a player, Davis had a sip of suds in Milwaukee Bucks camp before emerging in Switzerland, Italy and on the CBA rosters of the Topeka Sizzlers and Chicago Rockers. But Tuscaloosa has always been home. It’s just 36 miles from Fayette, where he grew up in cramped quarters with three siblings, eating spaghetti every night and picking blueberries to help his single mother keep a roof overhead.

His work ethic has been his calling card ever since he left Fayette as the state’s Mr. Basketball. Though overlooked nationally -- 1979 was the year of Sampson, Bowie, Thomas and Wilkins -- Davis quickly proved his worth with the Crimson Tide, earning the team’s Hustle Award all four years. “If somebody scored on me, it was like they were taking my life,” he says.

Shutting down opponents came a lot easier than speaking up. As an elementary student, Davis had to complete oral classwork in private sessions because his stuttering was so extreme. His press interviews as an Alabama undergrad were downright agonizing. “I always wondered, ‘Why me?’” he says. “I hate my voice so much, I don’t even listen to it on the voice-mail messages. Every statement I read is an ongoing battle.”

When he got the Indiana job, his first speech to a large alumni group scared him so much that “I nearly wet myself,” he laughs. But he pulled it off without a hitch because he works as hard at speaking as he does at coaching -- reading aloud and repeating difficult words at night to Tamilya and the boys. One-on-one conversations are a piece of cake. And only his slow enunciation and soft voice hint at any problem. (IU has added speakers for his postgame press conferences.)

Other recent signs that Davis is now officially in the house: new road uniforms, new basket stanchions in Assembly Hall, new banners listing all the school’s Big Ten championships -- not just those of the former coach’s choosing -- and new opponents, with Louisville and Miami filling the hole left by the cancellation of that cakewalk known as the Indiana Classic. (The Hoosiers lost to the hot Hurricanes in Miami on Dec.15; Davis gets his crack at Pitino in Bloomington on Feb.9.)

Although Davis denies personal responsibility for any of this -- “The administration somehow has a lot of new powers around here,” he smiles -- he did try to ramrod another radical change: names on the back of jerseys. You know, like teams had in the 20th century. “Too many fans protested,” he sighs. “But guess what? When we go to the Final Four, when we win the national championship, the players’ names are going on the uniforms.”

That’s when, not if.

This article appears in the January 7 issue of ESPN The Magazine.