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Bobby Knight’s fondness for his 1960 championship mates remains strong, even if the NCAA still sparks his ire: Bill Livingston

Defeats in the two succeeding title games did not diminish the accomplishments of Ohio State's 1960 NCAA basketball champions. Honored in a ceremony Sunday, Bob Knight, John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and the others clearly never lost their drive to succeed.

Jay LaPrete / Associated PressFor only the second time since he graduated from Ohio State, Bob Knight took part in an OSU ceremony on Sunday as the school honored its 1960 NCAA championship men's basketball team. Knight, a reserve on that team, spoke of his respect for his old coach, the late Fred Taylor.

• Surging Bucks rip Minnesota | Video of banner raising | Knight's welcomeCOLUMBUS -- Flushed with victory before anyone thought it was their time to win, several members of Ohio State's 1960 NCAA basketball championship team went looking for sustenance after the game. The Buckeyes had just trounced California in the Bears' backyard at the San Francisco Cow Palace, but the doorman at the first restaurant they found said it was closing time.

"We just won the national championship," said Larry Siegfried.

"Of what?" said the man, shutting the door in their faces.

In 1960, the NCAA Tournament hadn't morphed into the Big Dance. It was a different world, smaller, and not as driven by the need for instant gratification, the players' growling bellies aside.

The luminaries on the Ohio State team were sophomores Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek. Sophomore Bob Knight was a substitute who averaged 3.7 points. They are so well remembered, Knight thinks, because they are the only Ohio State team to win it all.

Jay LaPrete / Associated Press"Where there’s a great team, there’s a great coach. No team ever won a national championship with a better coach than Fred Taylor,” Knight said before a banner honoring Taylor and the 1960 team was raised at Value City Arena.Never the team's best player, he became in later years its lightning rod. He could be a one-man tempest, overheating, boiling and torturing the Indiana University teapot until the school blew the whistle on him in a scream of exasperation. Even to some of his teammates, it was a calculated risk to turn the public address microphone over to him at halftime of the Buckeyes' rout of Minnesota on Sunday.

"Where there's a great painting, there's a great painter. Where there's a great and unique building, there's a great architect. Where there's a great team, there's a great coach. No team ever won a national championship with a better coach than Fred Taylor," Knight said of his old Ohio State mentor.

It was a sweet, self-effacing moment. Knight, making only his second appearance ever at an official OSU function because of his many years of coaching elsewhere, stood in a pool of light in otherwise darkened Value City Arena. He is a man with a very pronounced sense of his own place in the sport, yet he paid a heartfelt tribute to the man who shaped him when he was young.

Only when there was a hitch in unfurling the new banner that honored Taylor from the Value City Arena rafters did a playful bite return to Knight's remarks. "I thought there was a referee involved for a minute," he said, as it finally unrolled.

He remembers game days, and sometimes he must want to whip off the headphones and take over a coach's grease board now that he is an ESPN analyst. But he will see a referee he doesn't like, and the feeling subsides. (Ted Valentine, an old Knight sparring partner, worked Sunday's OSU-Minnesota game.)

Or he will think about what he considers the NCAA's unconscionable abandonment of academic integrity in this era of "one-and-done" players jumping to the NBA, and the feeling is replaced by anger.

"Do you know you can go to school for one semester, get a 'D' average, not go to a single class the next semester, and you're eligible to play in the NCAA Tournament?" Knight said. "A player who does that is not a student. He's hired to play basketball."

The Lucas-Havlicek team lost in the national championship game to Cincinnati in 1961 and '62, or it would have rivaled John Wooden's developing UCLA dynasty as the greatest team of the 1960s.

It says something that defeat did not estrange the players from each other, nor did disappointment diminish their drive. "If you're going to let a loss determine the outcome of your life, you've got a lot of problems," Knight said.

Lucas expanded the possibilities of basketball as one of the first "stretch" big men. After making so many memories, he devoted his post-basketball life to amplifying the mind's capacity to hold them.

Havlicek was one of the greatest NBA players ever, and he did it at two positions -- shooting guard and small forward.

Knight, of course, won more games than anyone in college basketball history, along with three national championships as the Hoosiers' coach.

Lucas, Havlicek and Knight all stayed all four years. All three graduated.

"My mother was a teacher," said Knight. "I couldn't do anything but get my degree."

All three never lost their hunger. The San Francisco doorman was not the reason why.

Buckeyes hang banner honoring Fred Taylor, coach of the 1960 Ohio State team: Video

Ohio State honors its late Hall of Fame coach.

Bob Knight, who won more games than any coach in men's college basketball, introduces a banner that will hang from now on in Value City Arena honoring the late Fred Taylor, coach of the Buckeyes from 1959 to 1976.

The banner is washed out in the video, but it reads "Fred Taylor, Head Coach, 1959-1976, 7 Big Ten Titles, 4 Final Four Appearances, 1 National Championship."

Every member of the 1960 NCAA championship team, gathering for a 50-year reunion this weekend, has talked about how great of a coach Taylor was, on and off the court

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