Darn that Bobby Knight. He’s the kind of guy you love to hate because it’s so easy to do. The temper tantrums during games, practice, outside the gym, all make it easy to believe he is an egotistical misanthrope.
Then he comes along and does something that is hard to criticize. He passes up his base salary, telling his employer he didn’t earn it.
Knight announced the decision last weekend. It is the second year in a row he has done something like this.
This season the Red Raiders of Texas Tech, the team Knight coaches, went 6-10 in the Big 12 Conference. In his announcement, Knight said the missed opportunities that led to the losses were his fault. He said he failed to teach his players the ability to see those opportunities.
As a result, he is declining to take the $250,000 base salary he was supposed to get under his contract. The athletic director said he hasn’t decided yet what will happen to the money.
Last year, Knight said that he was so grateful for being hired by Texas Tech that he worked for free. He only took $15,000 so he would get employee benefits from the college.
Don’t worry; he won’t be living out of his car this summer. Knight’s contract is $4.5 million over five years. The quarter million is just base pay. The contract also pays $150,000 in deferred annual income and half a million a year in guaranteed outside income.
It all makes Knight sound like he deserves a statue. Especially so when you hear of executives of large corporations getting multi-million dollar bonuses even though the companies they run hemorrhage money. One would think that the CEO’s,
CFO’s and COO’s who can’t get their companies to earn a profit are not worth what they are paid.
They are the ones who should forego their salaries.
On the other hand, what if this idea catches on? We all have bad days … days when we make mistakes, forget to do things, maybe don’t push quite as hard as we know our employer would expect us to if he/she was standing behind us.
What if you were expected to pay back what you didn’t earn?
“Boss, there was an hour last Wednesday … remember when you went out to lunch? ...T hat I just stood around talking football with some of the other guys. Here’s $20.”
Yeah, that’ll happen.
And how would your boss react if you did this several times? Altruism
is all well and good but production is what makes profit. You’d still be
out on your ear.
So is Bobby Knight trying to do the right thing? Is it the right thing for him to do? Or should he instead find a way to earn the money he already has contracted to receive?
Haven’t written much about all this St. Bonaventure/Georgia/Harrick/Harrick, Jr. mess in major college basketball. Partly because it is too hard to follow and partly because it’s just pretty darn sordid.
You’ve got a team forced to forfeit games they won because one of their players was ineligible, then forfeiting games they haven’t even played, leading to the resignation of the college president and suspension of the coach.
All this over college basketball?
And you have a historically successful program, hiring a coach who was very successful at several other colleges but not always, apparently, too scrupulous. And he brings along his grown son as an assistant and, Lo and Behold the University of Georgia learns that the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.
The College of Agriculture could have told them that.