Robert Abbott: The Bobby Knight story—a cautionary tale of unchecked anger, ego, and winning at all costs

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Robert Abbott. Robert is a documentary filmmaker. He's a director, an amazing storyteller.
He's a six time Emmy award winning producer and a director with over 30 years of experience in sports and entertainment for that matter. He's the co-creator of E60 on ESPN.
He's also the director of the ESPN 3430 documentary, The Last Days of Knight, looking at the untold story behind the scenes, story of Bobby Knight and the events that ultimately led to his termination from Indiana University. I wanted to talk to Robert for reasons I will explain in this podcast because you may be wondering what the heck does this have to do with longevity or anything that has to do with living better? And the short answer is I can't really explain that in a sentence or two, but it becomes very clear throughout this episode why I wanted to talk with Robert, who I would consider to be one of the experts now on sort of Bobby Knight. We talk about a lot of things here, but most of it really is about the investigative work that went into The Last Days of Knight. And of course, some of the things that Robert learned along the way in basically the 15 years of his career prior to that and why I think that prepared him to be the right person to do this. There's one note I wanna make before we jump into this, which is there is a lot of profanity in this. That's just the nature of what this episode is about. So it's a little graphic at times and there is quite a bit of profanity. So I just want folks to be aware of that. If that upsets them in any way, shape or form, I apologize. And without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Robert Abbott.
Hey Robert, it's awesome to sit down with you today. You're one of the few people that I just sort of randomly reached out to who actually responded to me. So I was super excited that day when I sent you a direct message on Twitter. And then next day you said, yeah, let's chat. And I really appreciate it. Cause I know responding to random strangers is always a buyer beware.

**Robert Abbott** (2:57)
I'm really excited to do this. Cause once you reached out to me, I listened to some of your podcasts and I said, I'd love to do it. So I'm ready to go.

**Peter Attia** (3:05)
We're going to talk a lot today about a guy named Bobby Knight, who I suspect most people listening to this know a little bit about, or maybe even know a lot about. And I suspect some of these people will have even seen the unbelievable documentary that you produced with ESPN, The Last Days of Knight, which we'll get to in significant detail.
But I think to understand the work that you did there, maybe people need a bit more of an understanding of who you are as a journalist and some of the other things that you have done. So I'll start with perhaps the most pedestrian of questions, but what drew you to journalism?

**Robert Abbott** (3:35)
Growing up, I was always a fan of sports and I watched a lot of TV.
So I think it was natural that I got into sports television. I went to Florida State University. I was, to be honest, in my early life, golf drove my life. I was a competitive golfer. I played in the future masters, Junior Orange Bowl, Tournament of Champions, all the major tournaments for young people or juniors.
And I decided to walk on and try to play for Florida State. So I went there for golf.
That lasted about a year. It was just so much work. And I got red-shirted, played in a couple of tournaments. And once I gave it up, I got into media performance or the communications department at Florida State University. And specifically media communications, was media performance. I wanted to be an on-air kind of sports caster.