The basketball coach of Indiana University is a fool, as well as a phony, and thankfully has nothing more sinister to do than to bully other people’s children and occasionally give away conference games to the University of Illinois.
If the Indiana coach were doing something truly vital, such as your laundry or mine, he might be a perpetual irritant, but he is seasonal and avoidable, like poison sumac.
In fact, there are many citizens who think of the basketball coach of Indiana about as often as they do insurance, and with equal fondness.
What amusement there is in paying the least attention to the man comes from wondering what new and original way he can make a jerk of himself, though such curiosity is as pointless as wondering whatever happened to your first bicycle.
None of this is a startling discovery to have made on a cold Sunday afternoon while watching the coach of Indiana insult Illinois and the rest of college basketball, a sport he pretends to protect, for his own private amusement.
The greater surprise would have been if he had not done something to confirm his loutishness, though the last thing anyone expected was that he would play to lose.
The coach of Indiana has won national titles and was only recently the headmaster of our Olympic effort, which resulted in gold medals all around from stomping foreigners without remorse, hardly a challenge.
Maybe the only thing he had never done in the game was lose on purpose. And now he has.
Unless, of course, the coach of Indiana has simply allowed his ego to disengage him completely from reality.
Ordinary coaches can win with their best players, their starters. That’s the way it’s done every day. But only the most exceptional coach can win with the very bottom of his roster, and only the most arrogant would try.
The coach of Indiana tried. He played six freshmen against Illinois, the point being not their ability, of which there was precious little, but their age.
He was apparently teaching his regular players a lesson in humility, or defense. Maybe he was merely making some insane point for the guardians of Illinois athletics, in whose house he was playing and whom he considers unrepentant pirates.
Maybe he thought it beneath him to play games with crooks. Which it was is not important to anyone but him.
It could be that he was showing everybody who is in charge at Indiana, who is the boss, a question that needs to be posed but has never been raised except possibly in his own curious mind.
All that is known right now is that he did it in public, as only a fool or someone overly enchanted with his own legend would do.
He did throw in one regular senior starter, who stands sometimes without falling at 7 feet 2 inches. One imagines he did that so that when the pictures come out, it will look like a real basketball team was on the floor.
Otherwise, the team that represented Indiana was as unkempt as a teenager’s room and had no more chance of beating Big 10-leading Illinois than it did of finding a clean shirt under the bed.
His explanation was not as amazing as the fact that he bothered to explain at all, even in his fashion, which was to pretend like nothing unusual had happened at all.
“I enjoyed watching our kids today,” he said. “They played defense.”
And even the coach of Illinois lied right along with the coach of Indiana.
“Different coaches have different ways of handling their players,” Lou Henson said. “I am not complaining.”
What Henson ought to be doing is calling for an investigation, or at least an apology. This wasn’t college basketball, this was an inexcusable fraud.
It was a man tripping over his own mania, which is that only he knows what is good for himself and for everyone else.
The coach of Indiana has lately and loudly expounded on the evils of his sport, accusing without proof almost every other basketball program in the nation of the most terrible things.
The danger in calling into question the integrity of others is that you must be above reproach yourself, and that was the edge he enjoyed.
His honesty and his concern for the game had never been an issue until now. But the evidence of Sunday is that the coach of Indiana cares as little about the integrity of college basketball as he would have us believe everyone else does.
Which is worse, to buy players in order to win or to use players who have no chance of winning?
Choosing up sides on this issue is as appealing as trying to decide whether to sleep with a weasel or a warthog.
One of which is Bobby Knight.
PHOTO: UPI Photo. Brian Sloan, one of 4 freshmen who started for Indiana in its loss at Illinois, flips the ball between Bruce Douglas (25) and Efrem Winters.