A Season Inside (20 page)

This isn’t even close to a tough night for security, though. Two years ago, a fight broke out during an American-Westchester game. As the players rolled on the floor, armed MPs and dogs came roaring through the doors and onto the floor to break up the fight. That won’t be necessary tonight.

GW goes quietly, losing 78–63. It is never close the last five minutes. The Jinx has worked again. “Tough place to play,” Kuester says. “Of course, they have to play under the same conditions. We have nothing to complain about.”

Tapscott, with only one game left to play here, is getting nostalgic. “I’ve coached in here nine years. It’s home. Look, so what if we change in a weight room. Tom Scherer [senior center] knows that he hangs his clothes on the bench press machine. That’s where he changes. We know which bench is our bench. We’re comfortable here.”

Make no mistake though, Tapscott is looking forward to his new gym. “We have to have it,” he says. “But you know, this place is like a throwback. It’s like this is the last bastion of fifties basketball. You expect to walk in here and see a bunch of white kids with crew cuts and black high tops and maybe one black guy on the team.

“But times change. Now we’ve got a black guy coaching the team.” Tapscott smiled. “Of course I do have two white guys with crew cuts.”

They are inside throwing their uniforms on the bench press machine. Soon, they will have a real locker room. But, like everyone else who ever set foot inside the place, they’ll all remember The Fort.

When top teams get together to play each other in December basketball games it is usually for one reason: television. It was not so many years ago that the best teams put together December schedules that their JV teams would be able to handle, looking to load up on wins to impress the NCAA Tournament Committee in March.

But, thankfully, times have changed. The tournament committee looks at strength of schedule first in selecting teams and, just as important,
TV has become an important scheduler. If one of the networks wants Kansas and North Carolina State to play in December, you can bet Kansas and North Carolina State will play.

The two schools have played the last three years in a row, largely because the networks (first CBS, now ABC) thought that bringing Danny Manning back to North Carolina would be a good story. They couldn’t match Kansas with North Carolina because Larry Brown played for Dean Smith and Smith doesn’t believe in playing his friends during the regular season. The fact that Smith’s assistants publicly ripped Brown after he signed Manning doesn’t change any of this.

The Brown–Smith–N.C. State–Manning family quadrangle is one of the more interesting to come along in recent years. It began, really, when Danny was still a little boy and his father, Ed Manning, was still playing in the old ABA for the Carolina Cougars. The coach was Larry Brown.

Ed Manning used to bring Danny with him to practice in those days and Danny can remember Larry Brown helping to teach him how to hold a basketball. He can also remember him shouting a lot. Danny’s first impressions of Larry Brown? “A little man with a big mouth,” he says, smiling but not joking.

In all, Ed Manning played pro ball for nine years. He was, by his own description, “a garbage man,” a player not blessed with great gifts but a hard worker who came in every night and played tough defense, rebounded, and hustled. “Ever since he was little I’ve always told Danny that no matter how bad you’re playing, you can always hustle,” Ed Manning said. “Hustle isn’t a talent, it’s just something you have to want to do.”

When Ed Manning retired he went into coaching, working at North Carolina A&T. But in 1978, he got caught in the middle of a coaching shake-up and found himself out of work. With two young children to support he found work driving a truck. This meant he was on the road constantly, just as he had been as a player and then a coach.

The travel was hard on father and son. Danny, just beginning to blossom as an athlete, couldn’t really understand why his father was away all the time. Often, he would ask his mother why his dad never came to his Little League games or his basketball games when all the other fathers, or so it seemed to Danny, were there.

“I always tried to explain to Danny that his dad was out doing what he had to do for him and for the family,” Darnelle Manning said. “He
knew that his dad loved him, but it was hard for him because he felt deprived.”

By the time he was a freshman at Page High School in Greensboro, Danny was emerging as a star on the basketball court. He was already 6–6, not that surprising since his father was almost 6–8 and his mother just under six feet. But he wasn’t just tall. He was agile, quick, and seemed to have an instinct for the game. When he did get to see his son play, Ed Manning recognized this quickly.

“A lot of players have to work very hard to develop offensive moves,” he said. “Danny never did. He just had a knack for it. He could do more with a basketball instinctively when he was fifteen or sixteen than I ever could.”

Although the Mannings were hardly wealthy when Danny was growing up, both mother and father worried about their son becoming spoiled by the adulation he was receiving because of his athletic ability. When Danny tried to quit the baseball team in junior high school to concentrate on basketball, Ed wouldn’t let him. “You start something,” he told his son, “you finish it.”

“They fought about things like that,” Darnelle Manning said. “Danny never understood how easy he had it compared to Ed when he was a boy. Ed used to drive the school bus every day to and from school, pick up all the kids, drop them all off and then go to school in between. He worked on his daddy’s farm [in Summit, Mississippi] from the time he was little. He went to a segregated school and never had any idea what a summer camp was. The toughest thing Danny ever had to do was cut the grass.”

And yet, Darnelle Manning understood her son’s frustration when his father went back on the road again and again. “I know it bothered him when I was the only mother at father-son dinners,” she said. “But it couldn’t be helped.”

During Danny’s junior year, he was targeted as one of
the
players in the country. He was 6–10 and he could run, pass, and shoot. It was also during that year that his father began to have heart problems.

The doctors tried to treat him with medication, but it didn’t work. The doctors told the Mannings there was really no choice: Ed needed bypass surgery. It was dangerous, but necessary. The night before the operation, driving home from the hospital, Darnelle Manning explained to her son exactly what was involved in the surgery. “I didn’t want to hold anything back,” she said. “Danny had to understand that
his daddy was sick and there were risks involved. I called a spade a spade.”

When Darnelle Manning was finished, her son was silent for a moment. Then he began crying uncontrollably. “He was crying so bad I had to pull the car over. He was just frightened. I didn’t blame him.”

Ed Manning came through the surgery. And, as often happens when a father and son have not been close, they became closer afterward. “Danny didn’t say a whole lot while I was in the hospital,” Ed Manning remembered. “But he was always there. I knew how much he cared.”

That winter, as a junior, Danny led Page High School to the state championship. He was being courted heavily by both North Carolina and N.C. State. Both felt they had a great chance to sign him the following fall. They were right. Almost certainly, Danny Manning would have played for Carolina or State
if
Larry Brown had not become the coach at Kansas.

Brown was coaching the New Jersey Nets in the NBA when Ted Owens, the longtime coach at Kansas, was forced to resign. One of the first people Kansas called during the search for a new coach was Dean Smith—Kansas, Class of ’53. Smith, knowing that Brown was unsure about whether he wanted to stay in the pro game, suggested the school contact him.

If Brown was certain about one thing it was that he wasn’t certain about staying in the NBA. He had been successful everywhere he had coached—Carolina in the ABA, Denver in the NBA, UCLA in the NCAA, and New Jersey back in the NBA. But even though he won, Brown was never really happy. That had as much to do with the nature of the man as with the nature of the jobs. When he was in the pros, he wanted a college atmosphere. When he was in the colleges, he wanted the money of the pros.

Kansas called Brown. Brown thought about it and decided he wanted to go back to college. He took the job with almost a month left in the Nets season. That created a tremendous amount of bitterness in New Jersey—but by that time Brown was in Lawrence putting together a coaching staff.

One of the first people Brown called was Ed Manning. Did the fact that Ed had a son who was a junior in high school and perhaps the best player in the country influence him?

“Certainly,” he said. “I never said it didn’t influence me. But what really makes me mad is when people say I hired a truck driver. They
act like Ed never played or coached. He did both. They act like I never heard of Ed Manning before I came to Kansas. He played for me. He was a friend. I knew if I hired him, even if we didn’t get Danny, that he’d be my friend and work hard for me.”

The ironic thing about Brown, who has been accused of disloyalty in so many places, is that he treasures loyalty. He knew Ed Manning would be loyal to him and he knew there was a damn good chance Danny would be loyal to his father.

Hiring Ed was not all that easy. First, on the Kansas side there was the job description. It said “college graduate.” Ed Manning had left Jackson State three credits shy of a degree. Brown changed the job description. When that got out, the howling in North Carolina could be clearly heard in Kansas.

Back in North Carolina, the Manning family was meeting to talk about the job. Darnelle Manning didn’t want her husband driving a truck all night after his heart surgery. Ed Manning wanted badly to get back in coaching. But then there was Danny, who was being asked to leave his home, his friends, and his teammates with one year left in high school.

“Danny wanted to stay behind and finish up at Page,” Darnelle Manning said. “I told Ed I would stay behind with him and then move out in a year. Ed said no. If his family couldn’t go with him, then he didn’t want to go. We talked some more and finally decided this was best for Ed and for the family.”

This was a major move, though, and Darnelle Manning wanted to be sure it was not going to be a brief one. “When we went out to see Larry,” she said, “I told him if he didn’t stay at Kansas at least five years, I’d kill him.”

As soon as Ed Manning’s hiring and Danny Manning’s transfer from Page High School to Lawrence High School became official, the screaming intensified. Larry Brown was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first coach to hire an assistant with the recruitment of a star player in mind, but he had done it to the detriment of Dean Smith and Jim Valvano, who in addition to being big stars back home, had just won the last two national championships.

Neither was thrilled. Valvano didn’t even bother to continue recruiting Manning. Smith went through with his home visit, telling Danny Manning, “Don’t go to school to make your father happy or to make Larry Brown happy. Go where you think you’ll be happy.”

That was exactly the advice Darnelle Manning gave her son. When Danny worried about how it might affect his father if he didn’t go to Kansas, his mother told him, “You worry about you and no one else.”

Darnelle Manning wasn’t certain Kansas was the best place for her son. She knew how much Ed expected from Danny and how demanding he would be coaching him.

“You have to be sure you can deal with your daddy’s mouth for four years,” she told him.

Danny nodded. “Mom, if I go too far away you’ll never see me play and you’ve been coming to my games since fifth grade.”

“Danny, if you go play in West Hell I’ll see you play.”

He thought about it some more and finally told his parents: “I want to play at Kansas.”

The decision surprised no one. The circumstances that led to it meant that Manning would be under the microscope before he ever played a college game. He would be joining a veteran team, one that had reached the NCAA Tournament in Brown’s first season. They compared him to Magic before he ever scored a college point and predicted great things for the Jayhawks.

“My freshman year, I worried too much about people’s expectations of me,” he said. “I kept hearing about how great I was supposed to be and when I didn’t play that way I let it bother me. It took me a while to figure out that if you try to live up to other people’s expectations of you, you’re bound to fail.”

His team didn’t fail that year, going 26–8. Manning was the only freshman starter and tried hard to let the older players be the stars. He is not, contrary to what has been written about him, shy or quiet, but he is uncomfortable with the trappings of stardom.

“My friends always laugh when they read about how shy and quiet I am,” he said. “When I’m comfortable, I’m not either one of those things. But when I go out in public, I’m never sure how to handle all the attention. People come up and want autographs or to talk about the game. It’s nice that they care but sometimes I just want to say, ‘You know, I didn’t come out tonight to sit around and analyze the game with you.’ But that’s rude and if I do it, people will think I’m an asshole.”

Manning didn’t want anyone to think ill of him, so he rarely asserted himself, on or off the court. Almost from the first day he was at Kansas until the last, Brown was on him about that. Each year, he turned up
the volume of his criticism, trying to make Manning understand that the best player has to be the leader whether he’s a freshman or a senior. Manning really didn’t want that role. He just wanted to play.

“I think Danny would be happiest if he could just be the best player and have all the other players know it,” Brown said. “He would rather not deal with all the other things that are part of being a star. He’s got to learn that the world’s just not that way.”

As a sophomore, Manning started to become the star everyone had thought he would become. Playing with a strong senior group led by Ron Kellogg and Calvin Thompson, he led the Jayhawks to a 35–4 record and the Final Four. Ironically, his best and worst games of the year came against schools from North Carolina.