Day 3

Winnipeg, Manitoba - We're halfway through our first week of shooting. As you probably know, in the movie production business, we don't shoot films in the order they appear in the story. Instead, we shoot all of the scenes that take place in one location together. Today, we continued shooting in the Indiana locker room. We were there yesterday and will continue shooting there a few more days.

We started with a scene where Bobby Knight abusively berated Daryl Thomas for a poor performance after a scrimmage. This was the darker side of Knight - the rage that overtakes him when he can't handle disappointments or losses.

Our director, Bob Mandel, told me that Steve Alford wrote that Knight absolutely couldn't handle losing. As Bob told me, Alford witnessed Bobby's unbridled ire whenever the Hoosiers lost and he had a theory on why Knight acted this way. Knight has a total understanding of the game of basketball and a very specific way of teaching it. Because he had such great success with this method in his first coaching job at West Point, he only knew winning. His success was so sudden that it cemented together for Knight his specific game plan and victory. This success continued when he went to Indiana and quickly turned that program around into a national contender.

According to Alford's hypothesis, achieving this extraordinary success at such a young age spoiled Knight. He only knew triumph and didn't have the tools to deal with defeat. The season before the "season on the brink" was his worst ever. That was the year of the Purdue chair-throwing incident and the first time the Hoosiers had missed the NCAA tournament since he had turned the program around. Even Knight himself said he couldn't live through another season like that.

That's the brewing frustration and simmering rage that he took into the 1985-86 season that we are portraying in our film. That's why he explodes at Daryl Thomas after a sloppy scrimmage.

But, like all of us, Knight is complicated. While he has his demons, he also has many redeeming qualities. That was never more evident than today. After we shot the Thomas tirade, we then played a very different Bobby Knight locker room scene.

I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

Past Diaries

Day 1
Day 2