Reaction to 'Brink' is mixed

Bobby Knight is a figure who seems to be constantly surrounded by controversy. So it comes as no surprise that the debut of the ESPN film "A Season on the Brink" about Knight's 1985-86 season at IU was met with a wide range of opinions and criticisms from the student body. \n"I don't know how accurate it was," senior Chris Janowiecki said. "I'm not a basketball player, so obviously I don't know how he acted in the locker room, but I think on a whole the film was over dramatic. They played on his outside reputation to make it seem like he was a big jerk."\nBut, senior Victor Neff said the film portrayed Knight in an overly positive manner.\n"The movie almost leaned toward Bobby Knight, in favor of how he coached," Neff said. "The movie made it appear as if Bobby Knight was in control all the time and that he knew what he was doing when he was doing something else. I don't know how accurate that is."\nThe film, based on the book of the same title by John Feinstein, follows Knight and the Hoosiers through the '85-'86 season when the team lost their first two Big Ten conference games and eventually lost in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. ESPN estimated that over three million households tuned in for the made-for-TV movie.\nESPN cast Brian Dennehy to recreate Knight's attitude and to try and provide a punch that some students felt the film failed to deliver. \n"I think it's probably pretty hard to portray Bobby Knight, I didn't think they really got his sense of humor," senior Brett Helfner said. "I just think you can't duplicate Bobby Knight. So it seemed like the acting was pretty forced."\nWhile the film focused on the action described in the book, captions at the end brought viewers through time to Knight's firing. Senior Brian Waskiewicz said the culmination of the film favored IU president Myles Brand and went against Knight.\n"I think it did a lot to bolster Myles Brand's side of the case," Waskiewicz said. "I mean, they didn't have a nice thing to say about Bobby Knight in the whole movie." \nAside from Knight himself, some students expressed concern that the film portrayed the state of Indiana as an unsophisticated, rural state. Senior Casey Chiles said not only did it misrepresent the state of Indiana, but also failed to accurately portray the campus. \n"I was a little shocked at the portrayal of Indiana as a whole," Chiles said. "It made us all seem like country hicks who live in the middle of a cornfield. I also wasn't really impressed with the portrayal of the campus because they didn't really come into the campus and show the rest of it."\nESPN introduced the unedited film with a parental and viewer discretion warning about vulgar language and also ran an edited version without obscenity on ESPN2 at the same time. Junior Nathan Gutting thought the network should have cut back on the language anyway. \n"I think it had a little too much cussing," Gutting said. "It took away from the actual action."\nFor some students unfamiliar with Knight, such as sophomore Shanti Das Wermes, the film served to offer a unique and new perspective on IU's history with Knight.\n"I have a lot more respect now for Knight than I did before," Das Wermes said.