We didn't write it. But we should have.
The following story recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal and comes to you courtesy of a BDS wife. It's a little dated considering the Hindenburg-like disaster that occured last weekend at the NCAA tournament in OKC, but it speaks volumes nonetheless. And if you heard someone scream "Oh, the humanity!" on TV as the clock struck midnight for KU, you heard Jeff who witnessed the horror first-hand. The only reason we know he survived the fiery disaster over the weekend is because our inbox was filled with porn this morning.
At least something's still right with the world.
I Am a Jayhawk
The University of Kansas basketball team meant nothing to one student. Until he left.
By KEVIN HELLIKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 14, 2005; Page R12
What I remember about the 1988 University of Kansas victory in the NCAA national championship game isn't the performance of the Jayhawks' star, Danny Manning, or the improbability of a team seeded sixth in its tournament bracket taking it all.
Rather, I remember the telephone interrupting my solitary living-room celebration in Phoenix, and the voice of a renowned professor of literature screaming like a 5-year-old, "We did it! We did it!" This was the first of many calls that night from Kansas.
Success is an end in itself, I suppose, but for me the perennial greatness of the University of Kansas basketball program has had a side benefit. It has been 23 years since I left the state of Kansas. During that time, I've lived in six states and one foreign country. I've tried hard to remain connected to home, and in that effort I've received a big assist from Kansas basketball. It is what many Kansans talk about when we talk about home.
It wasn't that way for me when I attended the university. Then, I talked about getting out. I understood that Kansas had a rich basketball tradition -- its program having been started by the founder of the game, James Naismith, and its players having included Dean Smith and Wilt Chamberlain. But more important to me was the tradition of rebellion at the university; in 1970, antiwar protestors had set fire to the student union and precipitated an early end to the semester.
By the time I arrived as a junior in 1979, the Vietnam War was long over. But I longed to rebel, and at a school where students go so far as to travel hundreds of miles en masse to cheer the Jayhawks on the road, ignoring basketball was a sure way to do it. During my three years on the campus in Lawrence, I never attended a single game.
Of course, the ultimate form of rebellion against any place is to leave it. Having gone to college only 40 miles from home on a campus populated with students I'd known since grade school, having always lived within minutes of parents, brothers, grandparents, cousins, friends and former teachers, I longed for new faces and landscapes, for the chance to be a stranger.
But the instant I got my wish, I discovered it was important for me to be a specific kind of stranger -- a stranger from Kansas.
A newfound Kansas pride prompted me to wear Jayhawk caps and sweatshirts that I never would have worn at home in Kansas City, Kan., or in Lawrence. The arrival of this pride also coincided with the end of a dry spell in Kansas basketball. The coming of coach Larry Brown and his star player, Danny Manning, restored luster to the program and ultimately brought the national championship in 1988.
Ambivalence and Perspective
I must confess that I felt some ambivalence about the basketball program's fame. If I wore a shirt that said "Kansas," people would say, "Basketball." Yet by now, I'd been out of Kansas long enough to appreciate the value of something else -- my education. In the two fields I'd studied, literature and journalism, I found upon leaving Kansas that I could hold my own amid recent graduates of higher-ranked academic institutions. But try telling a Harvard graduate that you attended a school known in Kansas as "Harvard on the Kaw" (the Kaw being another name for the Kansas River).
The inextricable association between Kansas and basketball stirs dislike of the game among some graduates. When Erin Felchner started law school last year at a top-rated institution, Northwestern University, some fellow students expressed dismay that as an undergraduate she'd gone to "a basketball school." A 1998 political-science graduate of Kansas, Ms. Felchner responded by making Law Review -- and continuing her boycott of Jayhawk basketball. "I've never watched a game," she says.
Nor is the importance of keeping basketball in perspective lost on KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway, a literary scholar. During halftime at home games, he has a tradition of announcing from the center of the basketball court Jayhawk accomplishments that are nonathletic. "Athletes aren't our only stars," he says.
I've come to think of Kansas basketball as a symbol of the university's broader appeal: its underranked academics, its low cost and its spectacular campus atop Mount Oread.
Then there is the program's role in keeping me connected back home. In calls to Kansas, I've found that mentioning the Jayhawks answers an unspoken question: Have I remained loyal? It is a question I not only answer but ask. I'm proud to say that my youngest brother, a biology professor, never cheered Stanford University's Cardinal team during his stint there. Now, he's cheering the Jayhawks from Austria. A recent e-mail from him on the prospects of this year's
team in the tournament said, "They definitely have the talent to win it all, but will Self pull a Roy and not do a thing when the game plan doesn't go his way?" To the uninitiated, he's referring to new coach Bill Self and former coach Roy Williams.
Dad and Roy
My most regular correspondence on these matters is with my dad. This is somewhat surprising, because my dad is a Missourian by upbringing and traditionally not a fan of college sports. But the most amiable newcomer the state of Kansas ever welcomed, Roy Williams, totally charmed my dad after taking over as Jayhawk coach following the 1988 championship. I believe that Dad, a meat cutter, felt as though he wouldn't have needed a college degree to feel comfortable around Roy, as the entire state took to calling him.
It came to my attention sometime early in the 15-year Roy Williams era that Dad had started watching or listening to every Kansas game, usually from the kitchen table back home in Kansas City. A ritual developed between us. I'd long been frustrated at my inability to follow games from afar, in places that don't broadcast the Jayhawks. But now I know where to turn. When the phone rings during a game, Dad has a pretty good idea who it is. And being a man who loves to feel useful -- at 73 he still cuts meat at a place called House of Sausage, and not for the money -- he takes to the role of sportscaster with enthusiasm. "Oh, it's nip and tuck,! " he will say. "We're just not shooting well at all."
Of course, this reaching back can be annoying for one's significant other, if he or she isn't a Jayhawk. In such a situation the most anyone can request is forbearance. I, however, struck gold. Before she met me, it had never occurred to my wife, a University of Chicago graduate, to join the community of people who believe that Kansas basketball matters. But now she watches just as enthusiastically as I do.
Indeed, when the Jayhawks made the Final Four in the 2003 NCAA tournament, it was Devon who declared that we should head to New Orleans to watch them vie for the championship. What I remember about that Final Four isn't the 18 missed free throws that doomed the Jayhawks in the championship game. I remember walking the French Quarter with the loveliest Jayhawk in New Orleans, as well as with a brother of mine we'd persuaded to come, and whom I'd almost never beforeseen outside Kansas.
Change and Continuity
So now, the madness begins again. Will coach Self grab the national title that eluded coach Williams during four trips to the Final Four?
I have no idea. What I know is this: The Kansas players come and go. The Kansas coaches come and go. Each change is an excuse for me to make contact, not only with others but also with my past.
One semester in Kansas, I sat in a room where two instructors talked to each other for 90 minutes twice a week for an entire semester about one book: "The Odyssey." We students could neither ask questions nor take notes. Our role was to listen. What I remember hearing them say is that I should leave and seek adventures elsewhere, but never forget home. I also remember a poem they recited to us over and over, until we could recite it back:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
In all the hours I sat in that class, I never heard mention of basketball. I would have guessed that these two giants of the classical world paid no attention to it. But after decades of lost contact, I recently called the surviving member of that duo, Dennis Quinn, who is still teaching at Kansas.
"Basketball?" Dr. Quinn said, "Oh, yeah. I go to the
games."
--Mr. Helliker is a senior editor in The Wall Street
Journal's Chicago bureau.
At least something's still right with the world.
I Am a Jayhawk
The University of Kansas basketball team meant nothing to one student. Until he left.
By KEVIN HELLIKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 14, 2005; Page R12
What I remember about the 1988 University of Kansas victory in the NCAA national championship game isn't the performance of the Jayhawks' star, Danny Manning, or the improbability of a team seeded sixth in its tournament bracket taking it all.
Rather, I remember the telephone interrupting my solitary living-room celebration in Phoenix, and the voice of a renowned professor of literature screaming like a 5-year-old, "We did it! We did it!" This was the first of many calls that night from Kansas.
Success is an end in itself, I suppose, but for me the perennial greatness of the University of Kansas basketball program has had a side benefit. It has been 23 years since I left the state of Kansas. During that time, I've lived in six states and one foreign country. I've tried hard to remain connected to home, and in that effort I've received a big assist from Kansas basketball. It is what many Kansans talk about when we talk about home.
It wasn't that way for me when I attended the university. Then, I talked about getting out. I understood that Kansas had a rich basketball tradition -- its program having been started by the founder of the game, James Naismith, and its players having included Dean Smith and Wilt Chamberlain. But more important to me was the tradition of rebellion at the university; in 1970, antiwar protestors had set fire to the student union and precipitated an early end to the semester.
By the time I arrived as a junior in 1979, the Vietnam War was long over. But I longed to rebel, and at a school where students go so far as to travel hundreds of miles en masse to cheer the Jayhawks on the road, ignoring basketball was a sure way to do it. During my three years on the campus in Lawrence, I never attended a single game.
Of course, the ultimate form of rebellion against any place is to leave it. Having gone to college only 40 miles from home on a campus populated with students I'd known since grade school, having always lived within minutes of parents, brothers, grandparents, cousins, friends and former teachers, I longed for new faces and landscapes, for the chance to be a stranger.
But the instant I got my wish, I discovered it was important for me to be a specific kind of stranger -- a stranger from Kansas.
A newfound Kansas pride prompted me to wear Jayhawk caps and sweatshirts that I never would have worn at home in Kansas City, Kan., or in Lawrence. The arrival of this pride also coincided with the end of a dry spell in Kansas basketball. The coming of coach Larry Brown and his star player, Danny Manning, restored luster to the program and ultimately brought the national championship in 1988.
Ambivalence and Perspective
I must confess that I felt some ambivalence about the basketball program's fame. If I wore a shirt that said "Kansas," people would say, "Basketball." Yet by now, I'd been out of Kansas long enough to appreciate the value of something else -- my education. In the two fields I'd studied, literature and journalism, I found upon leaving Kansas that I could hold my own amid recent graduates of higher-ranked academic institutions. But try telling a Harvard graduate that you attended a school known in Kansas as "Harvard on the Kaw" (the Kaw being another name for the Kansas River).
The inextricable association between Kansas and basketball stirs dislike of the game among some graduates. When Erin Felchner started law school last year at a top-rated institution, Northwestern University, some fellow students expressed dismay that as an undergraduate she'd gone to "a basketball school." A 1998 political-science graduate of Kansas, Ms. Felchner responded by making Law Review -- and continuing her boycott of Jayhawk basketball. "I've never watched a game," she says.
Nor is the importance of keeping basketball in perspective lost on KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway, a literary scholar. During halftime at home games, he has a tradition of announcing from the center of the basketball court Jayhawk accomplishments that are nonathletic. "Athletes aren't our only stars," he says.
I've come to think of Kansas basketball as a symbol of the university's broader appeal: its underranked academics, its low cost and its spectacular campus atop Mount Oread.
Then there is the program's role in keeping me connected back home. In calls to Kansas, I've found that mentioning the Jayhawks answers an unspoken question: Have I remained loyal? It is a question I not only answer but ask. I'm proud to say that my youngest brother, a biology professor, never cheered Stanford University's Cardinal team during his stint there. Now, he's cheering the Jayhawks from Austria. A recent e-mail from him on the prospects of this year's
team in the tournament said, "They definitely have the talent to win it all, but will Self pull a Roy and not do a thing when the game plan doesn't go his way?" To the uninitiated, he's referring to new coach Bill Self and former coach Roy Williams.
Dad and Roy
My most regular correspondence on these matters is with my dad. This is somewhat surprising, because my dad is a Missourian by upbringing and traditionally not a fan of college sports. But the most amiable newcomer the state of Kansas ever welcomed, Roy Williams, totally charmed my dad after taking over as Jayhawk coach following the 1988 championship. I believe that Dad, a meat cutter, felt as though he wouldn't have needed a college degree to feel comfortable around Roy, as the entire state took to calling him.
It came to my attention sometime early in the 15-year Roy Williams era that Dad had started watching or listening to every Kansas game, usually from the kitchen table back home in Kansas City. A ritual developed between us. I'd long been frustrated at my inability to follow games from afar, in places that don't broadcast the Jayhawks. But now I know where to turn. When the phone rings during a game, Dad has a pretty good idea who it is. And being a man who loves to feel useful -- at 73 he still cuts meat at a place called House of Sausage, and not for the money -- he takes to the role of sportscaster with enthusiasm. "Oh, it's nip and tuck,! " he will say. "We're just not shooting well at all."
Of course, this reaching back can be annoying for one's significant other, if he or she isn't a Jayhawk. In such a situation the most anyone can request is forbearance. I, however, struck gold. Before she met me, it had never occurred to my wife, a University of Chicago graduate, to join the community of people who believe that Kansas basketball matters. But now she watches just as enthusiastically as I do.
Indeed, when the Jayhawks made the Final Four in the 2003 NCAA tournament, it was Devon who declared that we should head to New Orleans to watch them vie for the championship. What I remember about that Final Four isn't the 18 missed free throws that doomed the Jayhawks in the championship game. I remember walking the French Quarter with the loveliest Jayhawk in New Orleans, as well as with a brother of mine we'd persuaded to come, and whom I'd almost never beforeseen outside Kansas.
Change and Continuity
So now, the madness begins again. Will coach Self grab the national title that eluded coach Williams during four trips to the Final Four?
I have no idea. What I know is this: The Kansas players come and go. The Kansas coaches come and go. Each change is an excuse for me to make contact, not only with others but also with my past.
One semester in Kansas, I sat in a room where two instructors talked to each other for 90 minutes twice a week for an entire semester about one book: "The Odyssey." We students could neither ask questions nor take notes. Our role was to listen. What I remember hearing them say is that I should leave and seek adventures elsewhere, but never forget home. I also remember a poem they recited to us over and over, until we could recite it back:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
In all the hours I sat in that class, I never heard mention of basketball. I would have guessed that these two giants of the classical world paid no attention to it. But after decades of lost contact, I recently called the surviving member of that duo, Dennis Quinn, who is still teaching at Kansas.
"Basketball?" Dr. Quinn said, "Oh, yeah. I go to the
games."
--Mr. Helliker is a senior editor in The Wall Street
Journal's Chicago bureau.
posted by TheBDS at 5:20 PM
1 Comments:
Awesome, I love it.
That class indeed sounds like it rocked. I have nearly a BA in English from KS - where was my Odyssey class?
I was on campus that night in 1988 and my future husband and I, dating at the time, found each other by accident amid 25000 screaming, elated students.
Coincidence? I think not.
What a great night. What a great school.
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