Mountains out of molehills: same song, new verse.

Bob Knight doesn't need me to provide him a defense (there's some sort of defense-related punchline that would fit there), but I will anyway.

Surely, if you've been paying a minuscule amount of attention to the news in the last 18 hours, you've heard about the latest hubbub surrounding the Hall of Fame coach. To wit:

Texas Tech athletic director Gerald Myers insisted today that Bob Knight did nothing wrong when he “quickly lifted” the chin of Michael Prince in the latest clash between the hot-tempered coach and a player.

Prince and his parents also defended Knight, who confronted the forward and pushed his chin upward, as if to make him look the coach in the eye, during a timeout late in the Red Raiders’ 86-74 victory against Gardner-Webb on Monday night.

I'm flabbergasted that this is even an issue that merits the coverage it's received thus far. THIS WAS NOTHING. Nothing! Especially nothing that merits 11 minutes at the top of ESPNews' 4:30 CST airing - an amount of time usually reserved for the death of a very important sports figure or Super Bowl coverage.

You know something? It occurs to me as I'm writing this that the problem is not with Bob Knight. I think the problem is with the ESPN-ization of sports. They have 120 hours of programming per day (note: corrected from earlier version when I mistakenly said "week") to fill, with the five ESPN-branded networks, and it's inevitable that there will be folks there who will believe that they are Very Important Sports Journalists - a horseshit term if there ever was one - and the fact that Knight is anything but a white-bread, vanilla, plain ol' basketball coach leads some of these pantywaists to cry foul at the fact that he doesn't "play nice" as often as they'd like.

I have a great idea. Let's take some cameras and follow some ESPN journalists around at their job every day for a decade and see if we can find anything worth writing about. By applying the same heavyhanded horseshit standards, I'm sure we could uncover some supposedly aberrant behavior. (I suspect, for instance, that there is plenty of crack use in Bristol, given the Worldwide Leader's clouded judgment in continuing to allow the hemmorhoidal Bill Simmons to write for their website.)

Here's an Associated Press-compiled list of "controversies" surrounding Coach Knight over the last 30 years. You'll note that the further the timeline delves into the '90s, the more often that Bob Knight's every supposed misstep is meticulously detailed, which coincides with the meteoric rise of ESPN as an arbiter of "sports journalism." You'll also note that the bulk of these are nothing! "Playfully fires a blank shot at a reporter"? Hell, more journalists should have blanks fired at them - it's really the least they deserve, to have a target on their back for once. "Brought a donkey wearing a Purdue hat onto his television show"? Pretty funny, really! "Knight takes the public address microphone and recites a profane verse directed at his critics"? Cover the kids' ears - he said "ass!"

Knight didn't hit anyone (in spite of the banner headline on ESPNews that screamed "Bob Knight Strikes Player During Timeout"), didn't murder anyone, didn't advocate the destruction of the West in favor of a shari'a state. Not that you'd pick this up when you hear these angry failed athletes and pseudo-journalists tell it.

I'm so glad I'm out of the journalism business. I'd hate to think what kind of bitter, hateful person I'd be today if I stayed in it.