A Season Inside (47 page)

For once, Larry Brown was relaxed, comfortable—even happy. If there was an afternoon when he should have been nervous, this was it. Kansas was about to play at Oklahoma, taking on what Brown thought was probably the most talented team in the country.

Brown wasn’t worried. “We’ll probably get beat,” he said. “But I can’t be upset about it. The way these kids have played the last couple of weeks, there’s no way I can be mad with them. To tell you the truth, I’ve enjoyed these last three weeks as much as any time I’ve ever had in coaching. It’s been an amazing experience.”

The experience had started with a four-game losing streak, a string that had capped a month of sheer frustration for everyone connected with the team. After the loss of Archie Marshall and Marvin Branch and after the loss at Iowa State, the Jayhawks had won a walkover nonconference game against Hampton University to raise their record to 12–4. Then came the losses.

First at Notre Dame, 80–76, the kind of game Brown hates to lose. Then a real killer, 70–68 at Nebraska. The Jayhawks blew a 16-point lead in the last twelve minutes and, holding for the last shot with the score tied, Danny Manning dribbled the ball off his leg. Beau Reid then hit at the buzzer for Nebraska.

“That was the low point for me,” Manning would say later, looking back at that night. “Losing was awful, but feeling as if
I
had lost the game was worse. It wasn’t like there was any doubt about it, either. I
lost the game for us. I shot terribly [five-for-thirteen] and dribbled the ball off my leg. It was a nightmare.”

On the trip home that night, the coaches huddled at the front of the plane, looking through the schedule, trying to see if they still had a realistic chance to get into the NCAA Tournament. “We kept saying, ‘If we can get to eighteen wins, the committee will take us because of Danny,’ ” assistant coach R. C. Buford remembered. “But looking at the schedule, eighteen wins weren’t a lock by any means.”

It got worse before it got better. Kansas State came into Allen Field House and, playing a textbook second half, ended KU’s fifty-five-game, four-year home winning streak, 72–61. It was the first time Manning had ever lost a home game. And yet, it was in that game that Brown first saw a glimmer of hope. “K-State just played great that night,” Brown said. “Mitch Richmond [35 points] was unbelievable. I told our kids after the game that if they played as hard every night as they had that night that we’d be okay. I’m not sure they believed me right then, but I really believed that.”

Brown had become a salesman during this time. With the team depleted physically and struggling emotionally, he felt it was his job to convince his players that they could compete. He wanted help from Manning, but he wasn’t really getting it. Manning was playing well, very well in fact, but he had to do even more. That fact was never more apparent than during the fourth loss in the streak. Manning scored 28 points and had 16 rebounds, but Kansas still lost to Oklahoma, 73–65. The rest of the team was 15-for-40 that night and that just wasn’t good enough.

Now, the Jayhawks were 12–8 and the school began making phone calls to NIT officials to find out what their chances would be of hosting a first-round game. A victory over Colorado—even that game was a struggle—finally broke the losing streak but did little to pick up anyone’s spirits.

Then, during a ten-day period, everything turned around. Two things happened that turned a season spinning hopelessly out of control into what would become a memorable one.

First, Brown decided to move Kevin Pritchard to point guard. This was not a move he was comfortable with because Pritchard, a 6–3 sophomore, was not a point guard in any sense of the word. He was not a great ballhandler, he was not a natural leader, and all of his instincts were those of a scorer, not a creator.

But Brown felt he had no choice. All season, he had hoped that one of the two junior-college point guards he had brought in—Otis Livingston and Lincoln Minor—would step forward. He even talked about putting Clint Normore, the ex-football player, on the point. Nothing worked. Often the Kansas offense looked like a sailboat with no rudder, just floating around in the ocean with no direction.

“I made a mistake at the beginning of the season,” Brown said. “I forgot that it takes kids a while to really understand me, especially point guards. Kevin, at least, was used to me.”

When Brown put Pritchard on the point, he did two other things: He moved Jeff Gueldner, a little-used but hard-nosed sophomore, into the starting lineup at Pritchard’s old spot. He also told Manning to help bring the ball upcourt at times and to help Pritchard call plays. If this team was going to sink, it was going to do so with Manning as the chief sailor.

The new lineup made its debut at Oklahoma State on February 10. It worked—at least this time. Pritchard, who had been having shooting troubles, was 6-for-8 with 20 points. Manning had 23 points and nine rebounds. Gueldner only had 5 points but his presence on defense seemed to help at that end. KU won the game 78–68, its first Big Eight road victory of the season.

Back home, the Jayhawks got even with Iowa State and with Nebraska, beating both teams convincingly. Against Iowa State, Manning was unconscious, scoring a career-high 39 points. Against Nebraska, he only had 21 but the defense, improving every game, held Nebraska to 48 points.

It was shortly after that game that Brown and Manning had a run-in—not their first or their last, but possibly their most serious. During practice one afternoon, Normore and freshman center Mike Masucci exchanged some angry words and elbows. After practice, back in the locker room, the two of them were still angry. More words were exchanged and, finally, punches. The other players watched, letting their two teammates settle their differences. When Brown heard what had happened, he was furious—at Manning.

Like everyone else, Manning had watched Masucci and Normore go at it. Brown felt he should have broken the fight up, that his sitting by and just being one of the guys was exactly the reason why he had never become the leader Brown insisted he had to be.

“You are not one of the guys!”
Brown screamed at Manning in his
office two days before the Jayhawks were to play at Kansas State.
“How many goddamn times do I have to tell you that?!”

Manning had heard this speech a hundred times if he had heard it once. His tendency was to tune it out. He had grown weary of Brown’s yelling and felt that the whole team had grown weary of it. But now, Brown brought up David Thompson, and when he did, his voice turned from harsh to soft.

Brown had coached David Thompson in the NBA, in Denver. Many who saw David Thompson play at North Carolina State still insist that, Michael Jordan or no Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson or no Magic Johnson, David Thompson was the most gifted basketball player ever. As in
ever
. Thompson was 6–4 but he could block anyone’s shot, as he proved in the Final Four in 1974 when he cleanly stuffed Bill Walton during N.C. State’s double-overtime victory over UCLA. Thompson could shoot, he could jump, he could ball-handle. He could do
anything
. He was a star among stars. But, more than anything else, David Thompson wanted to be one of the guys.

“He never wanted the responsibility of being the best player,” Brown said. “David wanted to be one of the guys and people protected him. They made things easy for him. Whatever David wanted, he got. Everyone wanted to keep David happy.”

Brown didn’t have to tell Manning the rest of the story. Thompson eventually became a cocaine addict, hurt a knee, and was out of basketball before he turned thirty. Today, he is clean and trying to get back into basketball. When people talk about talent wasted, the first name often brought up is David Thompson. Brown wasn’t really trying to tell Manning that he was going to end up like David Thompson. The analogy went only so far as the refusal to take responsibility for being the best player. “The best player has to be the leader, Danny,” Brown said. “It isn’t a matter of choice. By the time you’ve been in the NBA for two years, you’re going to have to be the leader on your team. You won’t have any choice.”

Manning and Brown talked for a while that day. Brown told him not to worry about his statistics, that if he was only the second player chosen in the NBA draft instead of the first he would still be a very wealthy young man. Manning told Brown he thought a little less yelling would be positive for the team. Each listened to the other. When it was over both felt better.

“I’ll tell you what, Danny,” Brown finally said. “I don’t want to yell
so much. You get on the guys sometimes when they mess up in practice and I won’t have to do it. Do it your own way, but
do
it.”

Manning nodded. Later, he told his teammates, “In the end, we can only be as good as you guys are. Not one of us in this room can win by ourselves.”

Two nights later, Kansas went to Kansas State and shocked the Wildcats, 64–63. Manning, double- and triple-teamed all night, only had 18 points. But Milt Newton had 14, Gueldner had 10, and Pritchard had 12 (and 6 assists), including the three-pointer with twenty-nine seconds left that won the game. The Jayhawks had won five straight, they were 17–8, and they had stopped making phone calls to the NIT.

Two days later, with a display of superb defense, they jumped to a 23–8 lead on Duke. But the Blue Devils came back, forced overtime and won the game 74–70, even though Manning scored 31 points and had 12 rebounds. The loss was a bitterly disappointing one. Duke had beaten Kansas twice during Manning’s sophomore year, once in the preseason NIT final and then in the Final Four. That was the game in which Manning only scored 4 points and Marshall tore up his knee for the first time. Now, Duke had come into Allen Field House and come from way behind to steal a victory.

Yet, amidst the disappointment, there was hope. Kansas’s defense had made life miserable for the Blue Devils. Only Duke’s defense, as good as any in the country, had kept it in the game. And in the overtime, Quin Snyder, the long-struggling point guard, had stepped forward, hitting two big shots, including a three-pointer, to finish with 21 points.

That was why Brown felt very little fear as his team prepared to play Oklahoma. Duke didn’t have as much sheer talent as Oklahoma but it played just as hard, and the Jayhawks had proved they could match that intensity. The feeling that his team would go out and play just as hard as Oklahoma made Brown feel good.

“This team is playing as hard right now as any I’ve ever coached,” he said. “Since Danny and I had our talk, he’s been great. He’s done everything I could possibly ask. It’s funny, all season long Ed [Manning] has been on me to get on Danny more. He’s been worried whether Danny was going to be mature enough to handle the pros next year. Now, I think he feels like he’s taken that step forward. Right now, we all feel good about the way this season is turning out. A month ago, we were all miserable.”

Manning had a chance to make a little history in this game. He needed 28 points to break the Big Eight scoring record set by Wayman Tisdale during his three years at Oklahoma. Tisdale had left after his junior year and had a much higher points-per-game average than Manning, but a record was a record—and Manning had a chance to break it on Tisdale’s home floor.

Naturally, when the Jayhawks walked into the Lloyd Noble Arena that night the first sign they saw read, “Hey Danny, Wayman did it in three.”

“Nothing but class in this place,” Buford murmured, looking at the sign.

Actually, Oklahoma had offered to stop the game and present Manning with the ball if he broke the record. Brown had turned down the invitation because “their fans will probably be booing the whole time anyway.”

Oklahoma’s fans were a strange group. This was a team ranked No. 4 in the country. It had a record coming into this game of 24–2 and it had been
destroying
teams all season long. The opponent tonight was a bitter rival that came in led by the best player in the country. Yet the Lloyd Noble Center was nowhere near being sold out. There were 9,785 people in the arena—one thousand shy of a sellout. This is, after all, football country. That the Sooners were as good as they were, yet largely ignored, was evidence of that. That the fans who
did
come spent most of the game sitting on their hands was further evidence of that. Undoubtedly they were all waiting for spring football to start.

Brown honestly thought the setup for his team was pretty close to perfect. “Nobody in the world expects us to win this game,” he told the players. “Whenever you play these guys you’re always in the game, no matter what the score is. They’re going to take bad shots. You’ll make mistakes, but don’t get frustrated. So will they.

“These guys aren’t any better than Duke. Remember, when we get to the NCAA Tournament we aren’t going to play anybody any better than Duke or these guys and you’ll see tonight that we can play with both these teams.”

The one problem going in is Gueldner. He twisted an ankle in practice and, after testing it in pregame, tells Brown he can’t play on it. Normore will start in his place.

“The only thing I ask of you,” Brown says in conclusion, “is that you walk out there thinking you’re going to win.”

Kansas didn’t win. But it came close. Manning was, as was now the norm, brilliant. Pritchard and Newton played well and so did Scooter Barry coming off the bench. But Oklahoma’s inside combination of Harvey Grant and Stacey King was a little too good on this night. King scored 22 points, Grant scored 17, and Mookie Blaylock, the lightning-quick guard, had 19 points and caused at least half of the Jayhawks’ 24 turnovers.

With 4:42 left in the game, Manning hit a turnaround twelve-foot jumper that closed the lead to 75–72. The PA announcer told the crowd that with that basket, Manning had become the Big Eight’s all-time leading scorer. The fans booed lustily, easily their most animated reaction of the evening. Brown’s prediction had been right.

The Jayhawks hung in until the final minute. A Newton three-pointer made it 83–80 with 1:59 left, but eleven seconds later Manning fouled out—finishing with 30 points and 11 rebounds—and that was all for KU. The final was 95–87.