In 1971, months before spanking-new $14 million Assembly Hall was set to debut, Indiana University ordered 100 plastic-molded chairs from the Howell Company in St. Charles, Ill., paying roughly $4 a chair.
The chairs, more orange than red, were meant for the team benches, some auxiliary press seating and a slew of team managers sitting around the court, including under the basket to occasionally mop up the floor.
Little did anyone know at the time, that 14 years later, one of those chairs would become the most famous artifact in the storied history of the Indiana men's basketball program.
The problem? No one knows which chair.
Assembly Hall wasn't the only thing new in 1971. So, too, was the coach in Bloomington: Robert Montgomery Knight, who from Day 1 was the more vocal type of Army man, who exerted his style and discipline through a steady dose of yelling.
Indiana won the national championship in 1953, but by the time Knight came to town, the Hoosiers had only appeared in the tournament three times in the last 18 seasons.
In his first decade with the Hoosiers, Knight's team won two national titles and seven Big Ten championships.
By the time, the 1984-85 season rolled around, Knight and Indiana fans were accustomed to success.
Ranked No. 4 in the preseason poll, the Hoosiers won 11 of their first 14 games. But the winter wasn't kind to them that year.
An 86-84 loss to Ohio State in Columbus in mid-January kicked off a four-game losing streak. Knight was so angry with losing to his alma mater, he didn't allow two players — the team's No. 1 rebounder, Mike Giomi, and best defender, Winston Morgan -- to fly home with the squad. He sat both of them for the next two games, both losses.
Loss No. 3 came against No. 6 Illinois, in which Knight played a lineup of senior Uwe Blab and four freshman for the entire game, producing the lowest-scoring first half by Indiana in Assembly Hall history (12 points). The team's leading scorer, Steve Alford, was never called off the bench.
The fourth loss came to Iowa. After the game, Knight refused to talk to the press, and Indiana didn't make the players available.
Three straight wins against unranked teams followed, but success was only temporary.
The gauntlet of another run of Ohio State, Purdue and Illinois was next up, all three games coming at home. A nine-point loss to Ohio State was followed by a 16-point loss to Illinois.
Bobby Knight was a pressure cooker waiting to blow.
On the afternoon of Feb. 23, 1985, this much was clear: With a 14-9 record, Knight's team had to run the table to make the tournament. Lose and an NCAA Tournament berth would go out the window.
Purdue would not be an easy out. At 14-7, the Boilermakers' postseason chances were fairly secure, but coming off a crushing 18-point defeat at the hands of Ohio State, Purdue needed a bounceback to bolster its résumé.
Five minutes into the game, Indiana's Marty Simmons tied up a Purdue player in what appeared to be a jump ball. A foul was called, and Knight was enraged. He was still yelling when Indiana forward Daryl Thomas was called for a questionable foul. Knight lost it. He picked up two technical fouls and was ejected.
"The technicals came pretty quick," said Chuck Crabb, Indiana's PA announcer from 1977-2022. "And he wasn't backing down."
As Purdue's Steve Reid got set to take the foul shots, Knight, in a fit of rage, reached behind him and threw one of those plastic chairs across the floor. A third technical was called on the ejected Knight.
"He had support, too," Crabb said. "I remember hearing (athletic director) Ralph Floyd say in his Virginia drawl to ref Fred Jasper, 'That wasn't a foul, Fred!'"
The crowd joined Knight in hostility, cheering on their irritable hero: BOB-BY! BOB-BY! BOBBY!.
Crabb, also Indiana's marketing director at the time, said he tried to calm the crowd, but it was out of control. Some of the 17,000-plus were throwing coins on the floor. One coin hit Purdue coach Gene Keady's wife, Pat, in the eye.
And amidst the commotion the chair disappeared in a sea of sameness.
Video shows an Indiana usher in a red vest picking up the chair and bringing it somewhere behind the basket.
Was it returned behind the bench or was it brought to the storage room behind the home locker room, where the other chairs sat?
"When it was in his hands, that's the last time I saw what was definitively the chair," Crabb said.
There was no interest in preserving the actual artifact at the time, because the chair-throwing game didn't seem like it was historical for that reason. It was, in fact, more memorable for Purdue beating Indiana for the first time in Bloomington in eight years, as well Keady's 100th win as the Boilermakers head coach.
But, as outrageous of an action as the chair-throwing might look today, Indiana didn't suspend Knight. The Big Ten did — for one game.
As the years went on, the chairs cycled out of their use. Indiana soon ordered padded chairs and Crabb, who was named the assistant athletic director for facilities, saw the count dwindle.
Thanks to ESPN running the highlight for the 10th anniversary in 1995 and the 15th in 2000, interest in the chair moment skyrocketed, seemingly getting as much airtime as Knight's 1976, 1981 and 1987 championship highlights.
Knight joked with David Letterman in 1987 that he was simply throwing the chair to a little old lady, who was calling to him across the way and needed a place to sit.
In 2003, Kurt Esser, who was a freshman during the 1984-85 basketball season, was having a fundraiser for the University of Nevada, and he brought in Knight. Wanting to raise money by having Knight sign something, he called Crabb and asked whether there were any chairs left.
Crabb obliged and sent an original-issue Howell chair to Esser for auction. Knight signed it for the winner, longtime memorabilia collector Rick Reviglio, who paid $8,000 for it.
It was reported to be "the chair," but Crabb said that's not the case.
"No authentication would be possible any time after the day the chair was thrown," said Crabb, who was responsible for the chairs when he took over as assistant athletic director for facilities in 1990.
In Nov. 2018, the story gained new life after Hoosier-turned-media-personality Dan Dakich revealed Knight had plenty of practice with throwing chairs.
"He threw 52 chairs against the wall in practice one day. So, when he threw the chair, none of us were surprised. It wasn't a big deal, but apparently it became a big deal."
Despite Indiana's rich history, the Knight chair game continues to be a collecting grail.
Mega-collectors Matt Banes and Chris Williams have both a ticket and a program to the game, but that comes after years of searching.
"There are Purdue collectors who need it for their collections, and they can't find it," Banes said.
Indeed, PSA has graded 31 tickets from the 1976 final, 13 from the 1981 title game and 22 from the 1987 final.
Graded tickets from the chair-throwing game? Two.
"If someone could say it was definitively that chair, I think it's more than $100,000 to the person with the right capital," Banes said.
"If there's one singular item that is Coach Knight, it's the chair," Williams said. "Younger people, born after 2000, don't know one thing about him other than he's the guy who threw the chair."
Toward the end of Knight's life, chairs were the most popular items he signed. In the last three years, Pristine Auctions alone has sold 54 Knight signed red chairs.
Williams knew his collection wouldn't be complete until he had one of the real chairs. After years of searching, he found an authentic one, with ASSEMBLY HALL stenciled on the bottom of the seat in yellow paint, on Facebook Marketplace for $75.
On the 38th anniversary of the chair-throwing incident, I bought a ticket to the game for $5,000. I sent it to an autograph dealer, who had a deal with Knight.
"I have a lot of things to get signed, and I don't want him to be upset," the dealer told me of the signing, which took place March 6, 2023. "So, I'm going to hand it to him on the way out."
That's exactly what happened.
Eight months later, Knight died, with the last autograph he signed for a signing being a game ticket from Feb. 23, 1985.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.