I was at a game early in this season when I saw something that immediately made me think of Bob Knight.

A coach, upset because his team had given up a 9-0 run in the first two minutes of the second half and squandered a seven-point lead, yelled for a timeout.

He walked quickly to midcourt, waving his players to him. He met them at center court, red faced and screaming. He grabbed players by jerseys, got in their faces. You couldn’t hear what words were being said, but a little lip reading indicated they weren’t something you’d hear sitting on the front row in church. After getting them back to the huddle, he sat in a chair facing them and continued the screaming. This wasn’t about downs screens and blocking out, not Xs and Os. To punctuate his point, he got up, grabbed the chair and slammed it to the floor. The chair bounced almost into the laps of his players.

On the Bob Knight scale of tantrums, it would probably have been a four out of 10. But whatever was said worked. The coach’s team, its focus recovered, went out and won a key road game. Asked about it afterward, his players shrugged it off, said they needed it, and that the message was delivered.

It reminded me of my days in Bloomington, Ind., covering the Hoosiers when Knight’s players would offer a similar reaction.

The outburst, however, was seen only by those of us who were there. No TV cameras. This wasn’t Bloomington or Lubbock.

As I sat there and watched, made notes and realized why that outburst had been so important to that particular team, I also understood what would have happened had that been Knight grabbing jerseys and slamming chairs. It would have led SportsCenter for days. National columnists turned talking heads would have been railing about another example of Knight’s inability to control himself, that it was time for him to be gone.

Guys who have probably never set foot in Bloomington or Lubbock would be writing about the man as if they’d covered him for years. Big-time national columnists would be calling for his head – from afar, of course. I call it drive-by journalism.

But on this November night, that coach wasn’t Bob Knight. He was just another college basketball coach – of which there are many -- who yells, screams, questions his players’ manhood in practice and games, their motivation, sometimes grabs a jersey or two and can cuss a blue streak.

He just does it far from the bright lights of TV.

If Knight continues to coach, which I hope he does, he could put the all-time wins record all but out of reach. To have Knight at the top of the list will make his detractors as red-faced as the sweaters he used to wear in Assembly Hall. They can’t stand the thought of someone like Knight at the top of the list, ahead of someone like Smith.

I say it’s perfect that Knight and Smith are 1-2. They took different approaches to get to the same goal. But both men are competitors, great teachers, loyal to their players and honest to their profession.

Call me a Knight apologist, but the positives far outweigh the negatives for me.

My relationship with Knight covered two seasons and 63 games in Bloomington. It was an eventful two seasons. Neil Reed quit. Jason Collier quit. Ted (call me Mr. T) Valentine and Knight hooked up in that altercation that cost Knight $10,000 and a reprimand from the Big Ten. Some recruit in Chicago sued Knight, his high school coach and others because Knight had offered a scholarship then pulled it when the kid’s senior year grades went south.

Knight’s teams lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in 1997, ironically in the same regional where Smith would break Rupp’s record. The Hoosiers would win a first round game in 1998 and lose to Connecticut in the second.

During one post-season conversation with Knight, I thought there might be a chance he’d walk away from coaching. He was disappointed in his team’s play and, I think, disappointed in himself.

Being around the man was never dull, including the time he announced to several thousand Hoosier fans at a preseason luncheon that he felt like I would be OK “as soon as we get him trained.” Maybe he knew I was in the crowd. Maybe not. The next day, I showed up at practice and he, in his surly way, asked, “What the (blank) do you want?” I simply said I was reporting for more training. He laughed and proceeded to tell me what I wanted to know.

We got along during those two years – why, I’m not sure. After all, I was replacing Bob Hammel, one of Knight’s closest friends. I had come from North Carolina. Knight didn’t know me. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know if I knew a back screen from window screen. I think we came to understand each other, which in most things always helps.

I sat through countless practices and watched him work. Some days I cringed at what I saw, at how hard he could be on players. But since then, I’ve watched other coaches do the very same things and wondered why they were never called to task for their methods.

Yes, it’s a shame Knight couldn’t have done some things differently.

But the one thing that always remained the same was and is his ability to coach the game. While in Bloomington, I heard too many times how the game had passed him by. Then I’d watch him draw up a game plan and beat someone with it and understand those who thought the game had left him in the dust never understood the game to begin with.

One of my favorite memories from Bloomington, from covering college basketball, happened in January of 1997. A couple of nights earlier, the Hoosiers had led Minnesota by eight points with a minute to play and lost, 96-91 in overtime. That Minnesota team would go on to the Final Four.

Knight was in his office. He asked assistant coach Dan Dakich to “give me the tape of my favorite minute in college basketball.” The sarcasm was thick.

He had Dakich make a tape of nothing but that final minute of regulation play. He played it and replayed it, using a laser pointer to highlight the tiniest of mistakes that could have made the difference. Foot work here. Going around a screen there. Hand position. Body position. I learned more about basketball watching him break down that single minute of video than I had ever learned. To that point, I thought I knew something about the game. On that day, I realized just how good he was.

And I also learned his greatest flaw. He’s always searching for the perfect game. We all know the perfect game isn’t going to happen. He probably knows it, too, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to keep looking for it. And when the search gets off track, sometimes a little yelling helps.

As I watched that other coach try to get his players back on track that night, I also thought Bob Knight might be proud of the way the message was delivered.

Because it worked.