Part II of Danny Manning's magical season at Lawrence High School.
Danny Manning was drawing rave reviews before he even arrived at Lawrence High School for his senior year in 1983. He was considered one of the top three high school players in the land, along with Chris Washburn and John Williams, while Mac Morris, Manning’s coach at Page High in Greensboro, N.C., compared him to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Prep superscout Howard Garfinkel even told Sports Illustrated that Manning was the “best swingman since Benny Goodman.”
And Will Browning of the Greensboro Daily News wrote this foretelling statement: “He is a player, if surrounded by the proper supporting cast, could take a college team all the way to the NCAA finals.”
Manning, though, never got caught up in all the hosannas. Off the court at LHS, the 17-year-old senior was just enjoying being one of the guys and forming great friendships with classmates like best friend Jeff Johnson, Tom Whitenight, and basketball/volleyball standout Amy Lienhard, the daughter of Bill Lienhard, a member of KU’s 1952 NCAA championship team.
Manning was a typical teenager who liked to socialize and have fun. He’d go to movies, parties, and take road trips to Kansas City to watch the LHS football team play. Manning was even named Sweetheart King at the school’s Valentine’s Day dance.
He’s always been known to the public as a shy, introverted person. But to his friends and people who know him well, Manning’s a very fun, popular and engaging person. Just ask Johnson, who bonded closely with Manning and took him under his wing at Lawrence High.
Johnson actually called Manning in the summer of 1983 before he moved to Lawrence to introduce himself and talk about the Lions’ basketball team.
“He’s very humble and initially he’s very soft spoken. Once you get to know him, (he) can’t hardly (stop talking),” Johnson said, laughing.
Howard Fulton also has fond recollections of his former teammate. He remembers Manning inviting him over to his house for his mom’s home-cooked spaghetti dinner with his sister Dawn and starting forward Melvin Hunter.
“We had a pretty good relationship,” Fulton said. “We didn’t hang out that much, but when we did, we talked quite a bit.”
One of Johnson’s favorite memories of Manning involved his pre-game routine. Four hours before the game, the team would have a huge meal of pasta, steak and pancakes. Then 90 minutes before game time, Johnson would pick up Manning at his home in his blue cutlass.
The skinny phenom always had one request.
“He’d invariably have me stop at Kwik Shop on 23rd Street,” Johnson said, where Manning would buy “hot dogs, popcorn, doughnuts, all kinds of stuff.”
“I’d just marvel at how in the world he could run up and down the court eating that stuff. I’d just shake my head thinking, ‘You are going to throw all that stuff up,’ and he never did,” Johnson added with a laugh.
“He was an eater, that’s for sure.”
Manning loved every bite.
“At that time, I could eat a lot,” Manning said. “I could use it, I was pencil thin. Not anymore. That was part of my routine at that time, get a little junk food in me.”
Manning kept on eating and hooping that magical season. His play was seemingly effortless and so smooth that Johnson said “you always wondered if he had a different speed. What may have seemed like he was pacing himself was probably just a guy who was going his speed, which was faster than anyone else.”
Johnson admired Manning’s work ethic and motivation. He said Manning won every wind sprint in practice.
“He got it done,” Johnson said.
And so did the Lions. With every win, the pressure and expectations mounted. Coach Ted Juneau said the team was still “feeling our way around all this” early in the season when they played Shawnee Mission West nine days before Christmas.
A defining moment in the season happened after the Lions trapped at midcourt when Manning stole the ball and raced in for a thunder dunk.
“It really ignited the crowd,” Juneau said. “I really felt from that point on, some of the pressure was off. The kids were a lot more comfortable. That started I thought to turn our season around.”
And then during Christmas break, Juneau received a surprising phone call at 2 a.m. On the other end was Manning and point guard Kirk Joy. It was 20 degrees below zero and their car wouldn’t start. The two friends were afraid to call anybody but their trusted coach.
“They said, ‘You told us to call you if we ever needed you,’” Juneau recalled.
Even though the Lions ran “a little extra” during the next morning’s practice, Juneau said “from that point on, I knew we were going to have a special relationship. ... I really felt after Christmas, after the first five games, we really started to jell a little bit.
“But I think throughout the year, the kids felt lots of pressure. If you win, you were expected to. If you lost, ‘Oh my God, how can you do that?’ They knew that.”
Lawrence High won 21 straight games following the loss to Wyandotte in the second game of the year and reached the Class 6A state finals at Allen Fieldhouse on March 10, 1984, where they met Wyandotte again for the highest stakes.
LHS was up 41-35 entering the fourth quarter before Wyandotte rallied and took a 50-49 lead when the unlikely William Davis banked in a shot from the top of the key with four seconds left.
After a Lions’ timeout, Manning received the inbounds pass and dribbled furiously up the right side of the floor. With the partisan Lawrence High crowd of nearly 7,000 watching and praying with bated breath, Manning let a bomb fly from just inside halfcourt.
“I thought it was going in,” Juneau said.
The ball, though, “rattled out” as Wyandotte won the state title.
“There were some things I wish I would have done different, a couple of shots I would’ve made,” Manning told the Lawrence High School Budget newspaper at the time.
“But we played our best.”
For Lawrence High, it was a devastating loss. Fulton, who played junior college basketball at Neosho (Kan.) Community College, admitted in an interview in 1998 that he stayed up many nights afterwards replaying the game in his mind.
“I figured life goes on, you gotta move on,” said Fulton, who added Davis’ game-winning shot still haunts him.
“I switched (defensively) from top of the key to play the ball coming inbounds,” Fulton said. “If I wouldn’t have switched places, I would have probably stole the ball.”
Juneau said his kids played hard but tentative, while Fulton added that “when it came down to crunch time at the end of the game, we probably started playing not to lose instead of playing to win.”
The consummate team player, Johnson felt most sorry for Manning, who ended his Lions’ career with 20 points yet was unable to win back-to-back state titles.
“It was really frustrating playing at Allen Fieldhouse where Danny was set to play the next four years,” Johnson said. “We should have won, we were a better team. We really wanted that one. ... One of my first thoughts, ‘Doggone it, you move to Lawrence High and we couldn’t get it done for you.’ (I felt like we) kind of let Danny down. It was really too bad.”
Interestingly, on that same night, KU beat Oklahoma, 79-78, in the Big Eight Tournament championship in Kansas City. The Jayhawks were back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in three years, and with Manning’s arrival at KU in the fall, you could sense greatness to come for KU basketball.
Despite the loss to Wyandotte, Juneau called the 1984 season very successful. LHS went undefeated in the Sunflower League and won the Topeka Invitational Tournament for the first time since 1967.
“We achieved really the goals that we set out to do, which was win the tournament and the league, and then obviously, also the opportunity to play for the state championship so we were close,” Juneau said.
“This was one of my most satisfying seasons as a coach, especially to see them grow as a team throughout the season,” Juneau told the 1984 LHS Red and Black yearbook. “This was the most exciting season in terms of spirit and enthusiasm.”
The superlative Manning averaged 22.7 points, 9.1 rebounds, 4.2 blocks, 5.0 steals and 2.2 assists per game for the 22-2 Lions. In three years of high school, Manning’s teams at Page High and LHS went an astounding 71-5.
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In the two months following Lawrence High’s heartbreaking loss, Manning played in the Capital All-Star Classic in Washington, D.C., and the McDonald’s All-American game, while I played my final season on the Lions’ tennis team and anxiously awaited graduation day and beginning my college studies at KU.
Finally, on May 23, 1984 at Memorial Stadium, myself, Manning and over 500 of my Lawrence High senior classmates received their diplomas at commencement.
After the final speech that evening, and after we were officially high school graduates, I turned over my right shoulder and the first person I saw was Daniel Ricardo Manning (at 6-10, he was hard to miss). He stood up from the bleachers and gave the 6-5 Whitenight a high-five, and no doubt reveled with anticipation and wonder at the bright future and endless possibilities ahead.
I certainly didn’t think that May evening— and I doubt Manning did either— that four years later he would be back at Memorial Stadium on April 5, 1988 celebrating with thousands of Jayhawks, including myself, the national championship KU had won the previous night in Kansas City.
He had grown from a skinny, unassuming teenager to a man who led KU to a national title over Oklahoma in one of the most dominating performances in years (31 points and a career-high 18 rebounds). Manning was famous and would soon play for the U.S. men’s basketball team in the Olympic Games and become the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft while eventually being a two-time All-Star and carving out a 15-year pro career, despite undergoing three ACL surgeries.
But to people like Johnson and Juneau, he was no different than the genuine high school senior who humbly greeted them that August day at the Holidome in 1983 when Manning first arrived in Lawrence.
He always “just wanted to be one of the guys.”
Juneau and Manning developed an especially close friendship over the years. That was never more evident when Manning became Tulsa head coach in April 2012 and hired Juneau on his staff as director of basketball services.
“I think our relationship was built on the fact, to me, he was a 17-year-old kid coming in from another high school, probably homesick at times for where he was,” Juneau said. “I’m (not) thinking, ‘Boy, here’s a college player of the year. Here’s a first-round NBA player.’ This is just a 17-year-old kid that I want to make comfortable his senior year. He was just one of my players, and I wanted to do the best for him as I would everyone else.
“That’s how our relationship started, and that’s how it’s always been.”
After the College Basketball Hall of Fame press conference concluded during the early evening on Nov. 23, 2008, and just 90 minutes before the 8 p.m. induction ceremony at Sprint Center in Kansas City, where Manning would achieve one of his greatest honors and enter the Hall, he graciously signed autographs and posed for pictures with fans. I walked up to the dais and asked my former high school classmate about his relationship with Juneau.
Manning smiled as his mind suddenly raced back to his senior year at LHS. He certainly appreciated Juneau for not treating him any differently than a seldom-used reserve point guard like Mike McCubbin.
“He didn’t play any favorites,” Manning said. “That’s definitely something you respect and like in your coach.”
“We were both in a tough spot,” Manning added. “He won a state championship the year before I got there. The following year, we were supposed to win a state championship. We lost in the state championship game. We were both under a little duress.”
Their relationship only grew stronger after that loss to Wyandotte and especially after Manning graduated from KU. Juneau and his wife, Judy, played a mentoring role to Manning and his wife, Julie, as they raised their two kids as young parents.
“Coach Juneau is a godfather to one of my children (Evan, now a sophomore walk-on guard at KU) and one of my best friends,” Manning said. “He’s a wonderful person. He has a great wife and a lovely daughter. His friendship to me is something I definitely cherish. His thought processes and his mentality, I always bounce things off him. He’s definitely a mentor and obviously a great friend.”
Juneau was at the press conference and induction ceremony that night with his wife, looking on with great pride at one of the greatest players in college basketball history.
“It’s obviously a thrill to see Danny go into a great Hall of Fame where he deservedly belongs,” Juneau said. “We enjoyed the moment with him then (at LHS) and I’m enjoying the moment with him now.”
Johnson, who teamed with Manning at KU for two years as a Jayhawk walk-on, also remains buddies with his former Lions’ teammate. He’ll never forget that 1983-84 season when he made a new best friend and got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play with such a versatile and transcending player.
“He was kind of a point guard in a big man’s body,” Johnson said. “It was exciting. I remember just the thrill of walking into the gym and having everyone’s attention on him. You could throw the ball anywhere near the basket and look like a hero. He’d turn average plays into great plays.”
While Manning said the loss to Wyandotte in the state championship game “was a disappointment,” his fond memories during that lone season at Lawrence High 30 years ago will last forever.
“Coming in and meeting new friends and having those guys accept me with open arms was a lot of fun,” Manning said. “I definitely enjoyed my senior year.”
So did the LHS Class of ‘84. Danny, thanks for the memories.
