A Season on the Brink
ESPN

In the ESPN movie A Season on the Brink, based on John Feinstein's 1986 book, we learn that former Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight swore and screamed at his players a lot.

Who knew?

The film reveals nothing about the volatile Hall of Fame coach that hasn't already been discerned by even the most casual college basketball observer over the 35 years of Knight's coaching career. It does, however, allow Brian Dennehy, as Knight, to say "fuck" and "shit," words ESPN normally doesn't air, unless you lip-read coaches during the network's ballgames. This must have seemed like a no-lose proposition for ESPN's first foray into movies — use as source material one of the biggest-selling sports titles of all time, and feature one of the most interesting and controversial coaches of all time. And yet, ESPN created a boring, pointless movie that will be rerun 'till the end of time.

The biggest criticism leveled at sports movies is that they always end with The Big Game. Hoosiers, The Longest Yard, Major League, Victory — no matter the venue or the sport, everything ends in some version of a championship game. But there's a good reason sports movies rely on The Big Game — it provides a natural, satisfying climax and gives a point and payoff to everything that happened beforehand.

A Season on the Brink proves this point with its anti-climax — the 1985-86 Hoosiers finishing second in the Big Ten and losing in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Knight didn't have a heart attack, a player's mom didn't die; the season just petered out.

A Season on the Brink also doesn't capture what made Knight truly feared — his cruel, cutting, dry sense of humor that goes beyond mere swearing and yelling. Even if Dennehy, a fine actor, had been working with a decent script, it would've been hard for him to accurately portray the otherworldly intensity that boils inside Knight.

Also, it's never made clear why anyone would want to play for this guy. Without knowing this, all you get is a meaningless pattern of Knight yelling, players looking down or stone-faced; Knight yelling, players looking down or stone-faced; etc. In reality, Knight actually can be quite charming, even to the press — when he's in the mood. Three minutes before the movie aired, in fact, Knight, now coach at Texas Tech, was on ESPN happily discussing life in West Texas and his team's NCAA tourney bid. But when Dennehy tries to play to this part of Knight's personality, he still sounds like a grump.

If ESPN wanted to do a movie based on a popular, year-inside diary, it should have gone with "Instant Replay," the 1968 best-seller by Green Bay Packers guard Jerry Kramer (with Dick Schaap) detailing the final championship season with Vince Lombardi. There you have a volatile coach, an interesting cast — and a satisfying Big Game.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)