| | Associated Press
NEW YORK -- Jeremy Schaap got exactly what he expected when he sat down for an interview with Bob Knight.
|  | | ESPN's Jeremy Schaap, left, only spent a couple minutes with Bob Knight before interviewing him Tuesday. |
It was a contentious 35 minutes of live television on Tuesday night, with the former Indiana basketball coach providing rambling answers, bristling at Schaap's attempts to keep him on-subject, and even spouting a personal barb at the ESPN reporter.
"Knight likes to go on," Schaap said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
"He doesn't like to be interrupted. If it were up to him there would be one question at the start and he would talk for 40 minutes."
At one juncture, the two had a heated exchange about who was
interrupting whom, and Knight told Schaap, son of veteran
sportswriter and broadcaster Dick Schaap: "You got a long way to
go to be as good as your dad, you better keep that in mind."
That line was not surprising to the younger Schaap.
"He knows my father, and I expected that was exactly the kind
of thing he might say," Schaap said.
Knight was fired Sunday for a pattern of "unacceptable" behavior. He led Indiana to three national titles in 29 years.
Digger Phelps, the former Notre Dame coach who's now an ESPN
college basketball analyst, helped arrange the interview. Schaap
said he did not speak with Knight "until two minutes before we hit
the air. I didn't want to see him and I didn't think I should see
him, so there would be no chance of him influencing the interview.
"We know each other. He's been kind to me in the past, and he's
also been unkind to me, I should say."
Schaap said he would have liked to have been able to extend the interview.
"I wish I had had more time. I think the interviewer always wishes he had more time," Schaap said. "There are some issues I would have liked to address that I didn't get a chance to, but not many."
One question Schaap wishes he'd formulated: "But Bob, what did you think zero tolerance meant?"
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AUDIO/VIDEO
 Bob Knight sits down for an exclusive interview with ESPN's Jeremy Schaap.
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