Ron Felling, longtime high school and Indiana basketball coach under Bob Knight, dies

Indiana head coach Bob Knight and assistant coach Ron Felling react to game action in Bloomington on March 5, 1997.

BLOOMINGTON — Ron Felling, the legendary Illinois high school coach who later spent more than a decade on Bob Knight’s staff at Indiana, died Tuesday, according to his family.

With Knight through much of the 1980s and '90s, Felling came to IU after winning four state championships in 16 seasons at Lawrenceville High School in Illinois. He was an accomplished shooting coach, perhaps one of the best in the sport at the time, and he worked with some of Knight’s all-time best practitioners, including Steve Alford and Jay Edwards.

Hired to replace Jim Crews (after Crews took the head job at Evansville), Felling was offered the job in a middle-of-the-night phone call from Knight.

On March 29, 1985, Knight called Felling past 2 a.m., in the hours after IU lost to UCLA in the NIT final.

“I say, ‘If this is Bob, you just got your ass kicked by UCLA,’” Felling said, recounting the story to IndyStar’s Gregg Doyel in 2020. “He says, ‘I want you to come work for me next year.’”

Felling would work for Knight from the start of the 1985-86, until 1999, after a falling out that culminated with Felling suing Knight after the late Indiana coach pushed him to the ground in Felling’s office.

His first season in Bloomington was the one chronicled in late author John Feinstein’s famous book, “A Season on the Brink,” and Felling’s second came in the winter Knight won his third national championship, in 1987.

“Felling and Knight were almost the same age,” Feinstein wrote, describing the longtime Indiana assistant, “Felling the elder by nine months. They shared a passion for country music and basketball. But where Knight was consumed by basketball, Felling often felt the need to escape from it. …