Bob Knight never coached at a school in North Carolina. And the teams he did coach only played there 7 times in his 42-year career.

And yet few if any had a greater impact on college basketball in the Old North State.

That’s because without Knight, the world might never have gotten to know the name Mike Krzyzewski.

Let alone learn how to spell it.

It was Knight who gave Krzyzewski his biggest break as a player by recruiting him to West Point, then launched a coaching career that produced 5 national championships at Duke and more wins than anyone in the history of the game by giving him his first job as an assistant.

Because of his success, Krzyzewski is known throughout the sport by a single-letter nickname. But with a legacy that includes 902 victories and 3 titles of his own, Knight – who passed away Wednesday night at the age of 83 after years of declining health – is the original Coach K.

“I’ve only called 1 person Coach in my life and that’s you,” Krzyzewski told Knight upon his induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001. 

“Everybody needs a start and I got two starts with him, 1 as a player and 1 as an assistant coach.”

After 1 season together at Indiana, Krzyzewski returned to Army for his first head coaching job before eventually moving on to Duke in 1980.

He stayed there for the next 4 decades, joining with ACC rivals at North Carolina and NC State to help the Tar Heel State in general and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle in particular – become the virtual center of the college basketball universe.

As much as Knight contributed to that through his mentoring of the skinny point guard he once described as having “done pretty good for a kid who couldn’t shoot,” it’s not his only connection to North Carolina’s rich hoop legacy.

Though not as well known, the former Army, Indiana and Texas Tech coach also had a major influence on the career of another fellow Hall of Famer, Roy Williams.

“Dean Smith was my biggest mentor,” Williams said recently, referring to the UNC coach who gave him his start in the profession. “He had more influence on me than anybody else. But Bob Knight was 2nd.”

Williams’ loyalty to Smith and his alma mater kept him in Chapel Hill during the early 1980s, even after Knight called Smith asking about the possibility of hiring his ambitious young assistant away.

But he was quick to seek out Knight’s counsel once he got a head coaching job of his own, at Kansas in 1988.

“I called him my 2nd year at Kansas and asked if I could come up and watch his practice,” Williams recalled. “I went up, watched his practice and then we sat in his locker room for over 2 hours. He treated me like I was one of his. That lasted forever.”

The friendship endured even though Williams’ teams dominated Knight in their head-to-head meetings. He was 5-1 against him while at Indiana and 3-0 after his move to Texas Tech.

“Everybody said that he’d be friends with you until you beat him,” Williams said. “But he got even closer.”

Perhaps that’s because of the success Knight enjoyed previously when Williams was an assistant at UNC.

One of his most memorable victories, in the 1981 national championship game in Philadelphia, came at the expense of the Tar Heels. Three years later, Knight’s Hoosiers handed Smith and Williams 1 of their most bitter defeats by upsetting them in the Sweet 16 in what turned out to be the final game of Michael Jordan’s college career.

The disappointment from that defeat still lingers to this day for Williams.

“That’s something I still remember,” he said. “Coach Smith handled those losses so much better than I did. He and I talked much later about difficult losses to handle. I said ‘Coach, I always wonder what if.’ He said, ‘I do a little bit, too. But you can’t do that.’”

Smith and Knight had their share of epic battles over the years and appeared to be bitter rivals.

It’s a perception based on their contrasting sideline personas. Knight was loud, brash and borderline out of control. Smith was calm, studious and almost always under control.

Away from the court, though, the 2 were best of friends. 

Yin and yang. North and South. Night and day. 

Or as Jordan once put it, “Coach Smith is the master of the 4-corner offense, Coach Knight is the master of the 4-letter word.”

In 1984, not long after that memorable Sweet 16 victory against the Tar Heels, he visited Chapel Hill to recruit Jordan and Sam Perkins for the U.S. Olympic team that would eventually go on to win a gold medal in Los Angeles.

He and Smith would regularly have dinner together the night before their teams played and even teamed up as golf partners from time-to-time, especially when there was money on the line against other coaches.

“The key to their great relationship was the respect they had for each other,” long-time ESPN analyst and mutual friend Dick Vitale said. “Though they operated in a totally different manner as far as their personalities, the common denominator was their understanding that they were both able to get the maximum from their personnel. They also appreciated the fact that they achieved success on a consistent basis for a long period of time.”

Another shared trait was their competitiveness. Even though like their personalities, it manifested itself in uniquely opposite ways.

Smith usually internalized his will to win, although every now and then the green monster would emerge from its hiding place – as was the case with his sideline clash with Clemson’s Rick Barnes at the 1995 ACC Tournament.

Knight, on the other hand, wore his drive on his sleeve like a badge of, well, dishonor.

One such instance happened in Winston-Salem after an NCAA loss to Colorado in 1997. Angered by his team’s performance and his 3rd straight opening round defeat, Knight vented on the moderator of his postgame press conference, then skipped the team bus and walked 2½ miles in the rain to the team hotel.

Coincidentally, Smith’s Tar Heels would have played Knight’s Hoosiers in the 2nd round had Indiana won. Instead, UNC beat Colorado for Smith’s 877th career victory, moving him past Adolph Rupp for No. 1 on the all-time coaching list.

It’s a record later surpassed by Knight, who after being dismissed by Indiana because of his behavior, stuck around at Texas Tech long enough to get to 902 wins before walking away midway through the season in 2008.

Krzyzewski eventually lapped the field and now owns the record at 1,202.

“There is no one I respect more for the way he went about coaching and following the rules than Mike,” Knight said in a statement issued the night the pupil supplanted his teacher as the winningest coach of all-time in 2011. “The history of college basketball has had no better coach than Mike Krzyzewski.”

Despite those kind words and a postgame embrace after Duke beat Michigan State for victory No. 903, Knight and Krzyzewski have had several well-documented personality clashes. The most recent, in 2015, effectively ended their relationship.

Williams, on the other hand, remained close – a dynamic that highlights the contradiction between the good Knight and the dark Knight.

“Last spring I called just to check on him,” Williams said. “He answered the phone and we talked for a few minutes. You could tell (his health) wasn’t perfect at that moment, but he still answered questions.

“He is such a caring person. He had a way he thought the game of basketball should be played and a way he thought the game of basketball should be coached. And he never varied from that regardless of what anybody else said.”

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Knight left an indelible mark on college basketball.

Even in places he never coached.