A movement is afoot to rename the portion of 17th Street that passes just south of Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall and Memorial Stadium in Bloomington.
Former IU football player, coach and administrator Harold Mauro has started a petition at Change.org to rename that section of the street “Bob Knight Way.”
Here is what Mauro says in the petition:
We ask that Indiana University with the cooperation of the City of Bloomington rename 17th street from Fee Lane to Dunn Street “Bob Knight Way”.
Bob Knight stood for excellence in his 29 years of coaching the Indiana Hoosiers. His teams won three NCAA Championships, one National Invitation Tournament Championship and 11 Big Ten Championships. His 1975-76 team won the 1976 NCAA Championship with an undefeated record. It is the last team to be undefeated national champions. In 1984, he coached the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal, becoming one of only three basketball coaches to win a NCAA title, an NIT title, and an Olympic gold medal.
He was one of college basketball’s most successful and innovative coaches, having popularized the motion offense. He received national coach of the year honors four times and Big Ten Coach of the Year honors eight times. All but four of his four-year players completed their degrees- a graduation rate of nearly 98 percent. He donated millions to libraries in Indiana University and Texas Tech and endowed two faculty chairs at Indiana. In 2007, the Texas Tech library honored him with an exhibit titled “A Legacy of Giving: The Bob Knight Exhibit.”
In short, Bob Knight showed the way to excellence in athletic competition and in academics. He has left an indelible mark on the history of Indiana University and deserves to be recognized.
Knight passed away last November. He and Mauro worked on the Bloomington campus for most of Knight’s 29 years as the IU head basketball coach.
Mauro was inducted into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2016. He participated in nine of IU’s 10 bowl games as either a player, assistant coach or administrator. He spent 22 years as a senior associate athletics director, where he supervised the department’s support services and served as a sport administrator, before taking over as director of football operations from 2005-09.
A native of Verona, Pa., Mauro was a linebacker on the 1964 and 1965 Hoosiers. Prior to the 1966 season, he moved from linebacker to center, where he started on IU’s 1967 Rose Bowl team.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1968, Mauro worked as an Indiana graduate assistant that season and returned to the Hoosiers as an assistant freshman coach in 1971, and an assistant on the varsity staff in 1972. He followed his college coach, John Pont, to Northwestern for four years before returning to IU and head coach Lee Corso’s staff in 1977 as the guards and centers coach. After four years in that capacity, he was promoted to offensive coordinator in 1982.
