I’ve never forgotten where I was when Bobby Knight had his chair-throwing moment. I was diagonally on the other side of the court from him, seated in temporary bleachers beneath one of the two walls that separated the main seating areas of Bloomington’s Assembly Hall from the floor itself. The chair traveled its designated route, splitting the three-second area, and stopping near the baseline, where soon enough a student manager in coat and tie scooped it up.

Good thing Coach Knight threw it with care. Steve Reid, Purdue’s point guard, was at the free-throw line, shooting earlier technicals called on Knight during the buildup to the climactic event. Reid was one of Knight’s favorite opponents, and he could only smile on being interrupted in such an unusual way.

From that moment, for sure, analysis of Knight’s temper became a growth industry. From what I can tell from the many writeups I’ve seen since his death on Wednesday, it remains topic number one, however knee-jerk and uninformed. What could have led Knight to throw that chair? One thing I forgot is how early in the game the toss occurred, after a little more than five minutes of official playing time. The game to that point had already seemed endless. The play was ragged, sloppy, disjointed, and fan reactions were no better. Purdue was Indiana University’s biggest rival, and a game that started off this way soured most everyone. A basketball purist like Knight most of all, I could only assume.

That’s when the refs came to the rescue. A mad scramble for the ball led to a major pileup at midcourt. Normally in such conditions a whistle is sounded and play resumes with a jump ball. But not that day. Instead, a foul was called on Indiana’s Marty Simmons. That’s all Knight needed to see. Ugly, ugly basketball drove him up the wall.

Best I can tell, he was simply an artist, and I was fortunate enough to enroll in graduate school in Bloomington in 1971, the same year he was hired to coach basketball at IU. I didn’t know much about him, but a friend did and he made sure we attended every game we could. During his first year his team was usually overmatched — the point guard was a smallish fellow named Bootsie — but by his second year it was wonderfully competitive and was a referee’s call away (it went in Bill Walton’s favor) from getting to the NCAA championship game. By 1974–76, his teams were undefeated — save for a bitter single loss to Kentucky in the regional finals in Dayton. Every Hoosier knows that if not for Scott May’s broken arm late in the 1974–75 season, Knight and Indiana would have had two perfect seasons in a row.

Scott May, I should add, was those teams’ best player, a machine in Knight’s motion offense, deadly accurate in the 12–15 foot shots it produced. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Knight loathed the three-point shot and the mindset behind it. Not that he couldn’t adapt, as in the NCAA final against Syracuse in 1987 which saw Steve Alford score 21 points on 7 field goals. I’m sure Knight was prouder of the 12-footer Keith Smart hit to win the game in the final seconds. By then, alas, I never heard anyone say as I often did in the mid-seventies that Knight’s team had put on a clinic. I blame it on what basketball’s big shots did to Knight’s mastery of the game. Just tune in any brick-throwing college or NBA contest these days, and you’ll see what I mean.

Thanks to a professor of mine who was close to Knight, I was able to attend tryouts for the Pan American Games team in 1979 which Knight would be coaching. Over the course of a few days I saw the future NBA in action, including high schoolers Isiah Thomas and Ralph Sampson (the former impressed, the latter did not). Many thrills there, of course, but observing Knight was the real revelation. He was as relaxed as I’d ever seen him, going from court to court in the practice gym as the players scrimmaged under the watchful eyes of his coaches while Knight himself shot the breeze with his players or mussed Kelly Tripucka’s curly hair and shoulders or teased Auburn’s Frank Johnson about something. It didn’t bother him that he needed some upper bridgework completed in an upper row of his mouth. This was down time and he was happy. Just a delight. That’s how I’ll remember him.