This is a tough column to write because it’s more than pontificating about the political scene. It’s related to politics, but mostly it’s personal.

It’s about moving on, which is not an easy thing to do.

A few days ago, The Donald received the endorsement of The General, Robert Montgomery Knight.

Understand, I have a couple of degrees from IU. I used to bleed cream and crimson. Tuesday and Thursday evenings during basketball season were sacrosanct. Even today, on appropriate occasions, I still bleed cream and crimson, and what with the blood thinners and all, I probably bleed more today than I did back then.

I was a Bobby Knight fan.

I was not blind to his dark side. It is not acceptable to toss chairs on the court in the middle of a game. It is not kosher to punch a policeman in Puerto Rico. On occasion, he could be pretty rough with Chuck Marlowe, his sidekick on the “Bob Knight Show” that ran on local TV for 29 years. I was willing to overlook those peccadilloes because of the other stories about Coach—stories about private kindnesses, his generous support of the IU Library, the fact his players (for the most part) graduated. Even years after their time at IU, the swagger and loyalty of former players who had made it through the Knight system signaled that there was more to the man than his sometimes boorish public manner would suggest.

I didn’t mind the three national championships either.

I was in his corner as the game changed around him. He had problems with the “one and done” attitude of many of the blue chippers. He had trouble recruiting them, and had to make do with what he could get. He still did okay, but the championships quit coming. Most importantly, I think he was unwilling, or unable, to deal with a new generation of players who were equally unwilling, or unable, to accept without question the darker aspects of his tutelage.

When he was forced out of IU, I felt that he had come out on the short end of a power play with a new university president out to prove who was really the biggest, meanest, man on campus. I still feel that way today.

But that was 16 years ago. In his shunning of all things IU, at what point does an understandable feeling of grievance become pathological truculence? After all, the actors in his ouster are long since gone from IU, and in the case of his primary antagonist, dead and buried. What remains constant is the continued support of most of IU Nation.

How has he treated them?

My disillusionment began a few years ago when I attended a Knight appearance at the Honeywell Center in Wabash. He told the old war stories and back stories. Some of his former players were in the audience, and they sparred back and forth. It was nostalgia writ large.

Then came the question-and-answer session.

There was a guy in a wheelchair who literally begged Coach to bury the hatchet and make a return visit to Bloomington. When I say “begged,” I mean if he could have got out of that wheelchair and gone down on his knees, he would have done so.

The former IU coach stalked off the stage without a response.

The final straw came this last season when he failed to show up in Bloomington to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the 1976 undefeated season and national championship.

His players deserved that. IU Nation deserved that.

And now, just like in a good Donald Trump speech, I am going circle back to the original point, The General’s endorsement of The Donald.

It wasn’t the endorsement that frosted me. Sure, I was a bit disappointed that a self-described student of history thought Harry Truman ordered dropping the atomic bomb on Japan in 1944, and in so doing saved billions of American lives. Harry Truman was not the president in 1944. The bomb was not dropped until 1945. There were not then, nor are there now, a billion Americans on the face of the planet. But, hey, maybe I’m just being persnickety about the facts. It isn’t the first time such intellectual sloppiness has happened in this campaign and it won’t be the last.

I don’t mind that the endorsement was for Donald Trump. Their personalities and world view are not that dissimilar.

No, what I found irksome was that a man whose “legendary” status is the result of his time at IU, and the often fanatical support of IU Nation, would spend 16 years shunning the university and disrespecting the fans who made him what he is, and then have the unmitigated gall to come back into the state and trade upon that “legendary” status to presume to tell them how to vote.

We all have our breaking points, and I have reached mine.

Without anger, and with more than a little sadness, it is time to move on.

Have a good life, Coach, but you are no longer part of mine.