In the hours after the news of Bobby Knight’s death at age 83, the polite euphemism machine was in predictable overdrive, the legendary chair-tossing college basketball coach generously eulogized as fiery, controversial, and of course, the mother of all posthumous genteelisms, complicated.

Knight would have been amused by such restraint. This was a man who publicly asked to be buried upside down, in order for his many critics to kiss his posterior. Except he didn’t say posterior, he used the pithier, three-letter term, which was Bobby Knight, effortlessly brusque and vigorously himself, through his many achievements and occasional episodes of self-destruction.