The January 2010 issue of Armchair General featured John Ingoldsby’s exclusive “10 Questions” interview with legendary coach – and history fan – Bob Knight. Since ACG magazine articles are of necessity limited due to space considerations, we thought our readers would enjoy more comments from Coach Knight during his interview with Ingoldsby that we were not able to include in the magazine’s “10 Questions” article.

On other West Pointers: There was a great guy there who worked with General (Leslie) Groves on the Manhattan project in World War II named John Jannerone, and he was a Rhodes scholar, and he wound up his career as Dean of Academics for many years at West Point. The vast majority of people that I met there were really, really first-rate people.

Coach Knight’s 2008 Army Sports Hall of Fame induction: Colonel Earl “Red” Blaik [West Point football coach, 1941-58] was there, as was [former West Point hockey coach] Jack Riley, who coached the U.S. Hockey Team to the Gold Medal in 1960 in Squaw Valley. Also, [former West Point coaches] Joe Pallone and Eric Timpton were there. So all four of those guys I knew came. I had a tremendous relationship with Colonel Blaik, and he was one of the great coaches in American History, and I got to know him and spent several really enjoyable hours talking and asking questions of him.

On Gen. George S. Patton: He gave his players something different than the normal coach would give his team, and that was Patton and who Patton was and what Patton was, and how they could really, in the end, count on Patton. And then the second part of it was he just seemed to have a knack of knowing where to go. Like we’re not going to go across this river and swim across it; we’re going to go build a bridge down here so we can cross it, and we don’t need to go through these, we don’t need to take these fortifications, we’ll surround them and go on to fight somewhere else. [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur is greatly criticized because of his ego and, yet, probably if it wasn’t Patton that did it, MacArthur probably operated against more enemy personnel in the South Pacific with fewer casualties than anybody in history.

On Ohio State Football Coach Woody Hayes: Woody’s attachment to Patton and Patton’s legend was simply because of the kind of leader he was. He got things done. And even when he called the wrong plays or he had the wrong game plan, he somehow made it work out. And I think that’s the true genius of the guy. [I discussed military history with Coach Hayes] a couple of times after I got out of school and he and I were at football and basketball clinics together, and I really, really enjoyed that. A great story on Woody was that he was pontificating on the Battle of the Bulge before the Ohio State – Michigan game, and a writer in the audience corrected him on something, and Woody really got kind of upset and said, “Damn it, how the hell do you know that?” His name was Tom Pastorius, and he was a tough guy who wrote for the Columbus Citizen Journal. He was walking away, and Woody finally chased him, “Damn it, why would you counter that? Why would you disagree with that?” And Pastorius turned around, and said, “Woody, ‘cause I was there.” So I always used to kid him after that, and say, “Tom, you were there.”

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