ESPN’s decision to broadcast “A Season on the Brink” Sunday night, obscenities and all, drew a fair amount of attention from the entertainment industry. Understandably so: The bio-pic about former Indiana University and current Texas Tech basketball coach Bob Knight contains a fair mumber of four-letter words.
This is all part of the recent “warts-and-all” approach filmmakers have adopted for dramatizing stories about real-life individuals. The idea is that presenting inadequacies of larger-than-life personalities will make the characters seem more human.
The executives also assume people will want to tune in to see the fictional Bob Knight for the same reasons as they want to see the real one — his famous tirades, of which “A Season on the Brink” has plenty.
In this case, the tantrums display Knight (Brian Dennehy) not as an intense, complex, explosive individual but more of a naíve ninny with an anger-management problem. Dennehy, employing another cliché used most recently and notably by Will Smith, declared his portrayal was not meant as an imitation of Knight, but rather as an interpretation.
The shame is that Knight, though accused of many things, has always been considered a man of principle; a combustible bombardier, but not a hypocrite. Yet the made-for-TV role has Dennehy contradicting himself left and right, blaming at one moment the team and the next an individual.
Knight’s final downfall may have been his inability to blame himself, and it is hard to blame Dennehy either. The trouble with putting Knight on screen is that observers always had a sense that his imbroglios possessed a theatrical character of their own, and this reflexiveness gets lost in the reproduction.
Perhaps this is why Knight sympathizers such as Digger Phelps and Brent Musberger signed on for cameos. In fact, the movie is full of basketball references. Names like Fred Taylor, Pete Newell and Rick Pitino are dropped casually. Key characters like Steve Alford (James Lafferty), Andre Harris (Yorick Parke) and Delray Brooks (Al Thompson) are introduced as if the viewer should know who they are.
In this way the film, ESPN’s first original feature, is very much a movie for sports fans — and it shows this in the highly realistic basketball sequences.
Based on the book by John Feinstein, “A Season on the Brink” trails the Hoosiers through the tumultuous 1985-86 season, which began under the shadow of Knight’s most infamous moment: tossing a plastic chair onto the court during a game in the spring of ’85. It traces the ups and downs of a truly and unexpectedly successful year, contrasted by the emotional upheaval of the team and isolating pressure on the coach.
A closing epitaph captures the fence Bob Knight rode between idolatry and iconoclasm. The movie, wanting at once to wag a finger at Knight’s antics and swathe the wounds with moments of basketball glory, trods a similarly thin line.
