Keep Outside the House That Always Wins

This is an American sports story about addiction and attention -one KIESE MAKEBA LAYMON has only told to his casino friends after losing his paycheck and nearly the rest of his life

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OVER OR UNDER? "Casinos try to lure me into losing all my money by offering me great seats to watch the greatest basketball players on earth," Kiese Makeba Laymon says. "They're betting on me relapsing."

This is an American sports story that I have only told to casino friends.

The year is 2000. The date is September 10. It is the beginning of my third year as a graduate student in creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington, and I am speeding back from a recreational league basketball game in a neighboring town called Martinsville when I hear that Bob Knight, the iconic head basketball coach at IU, has finally been fired for grabbing a student named Kent Harvey, who purportedly called him “Knight” instead of “Coach Knight.”

By the time I get back to my apartment, literally breathless, I hear from a downstairs neighbor that thousands of students are marching to university president Myles Brand’s house, some hoisting a burned effigy of Harvey. I step out of my apartment on Third Street and follow the roar. The roar leads me to the mob.

The mob reminds me of American stories from Mississippi, my home. I thought I knew mobs after having been kicked out of college five years earlier, for an altercation with some Confederate cape-wearing frat boys on Bid Day, until I saw thousands of mostly young white men marching for their coach, a shameless, withering basketball genius who'd survived being videotaped choking one of their players, survived throwing chairs during games, and survived saying to a female journalist on tape, “If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”