I'd like to thank Calvin Thompson, one of the best players and shooters in KU history, for this extremely candid interview in 1999 at his home. We talked for 90 minutes in one of the most candid interviews I've done in my 23-year writing career. This is a look back at how KU's run to the 1986 Final Four was all possible after an emotional team meeting in the spring of 1985, when head coach Larry Brown apologized to his players for the way he mistreated them during the 1984-85 season.
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Kansas basketball's road to the 1986 Final Four 32 years ago all began when Calvin Thompson walked by Danny Manning on campus shortly after the Jayhawks lost to Auburn in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in 1985.
“We started crying at the same time,” Thompson told me during an exclusive 90-minute interview in 1999 for Jayhawk Insider.
These were tears of frustration and heartache from handling coach Larry Brown’s verbal abuse during the season. Brown, who blamed a few losses on Thompson, Manning and Ron Kellogg, was so overcome with emotion that he actually told his three star players “not to come back — to transfer.”
The team leader, Thompson knew something had to change that day he saw Manning on campus. After immediately holding a players’ meeting in the locker room, Thompson called the basketball office and asked Brown to come down.
“He said he wasn’t coming,” recalled Thompson, “and I told him we weren’t leaving.”
So Brown reluctantly walked down to the locker room. Thompson described what transpired.
“’We’re here for you,’” he told his coach, who had been experiencing marital problems and taking “it out on us.”
“’We want you to be here for us. We need to get on the same page.’ We didn’t leave the locker room until he apologized to everybody.”
Brown did so and the Jayhawks got “on the same page.”
“He realized he needed to make some adjustment. You see the results in ‘86,” Thompson said about the 35-4 Final Four squad. “We’re one of the better teams in Kansas history.”
Indeed, they were.
Kansas won the most games in school annals at the time and still holds KU’s single-season field goal percentage record (55.6) while advancing to the national semifinals for the first time in 12 years. With Greg Dreiling (11.6 ppg) at center, Manning (16.7 ppg) and Kellogg (15.9 ppg) at forward, and Thompson (13.4 ppg) and point guard Cedric Hunter (9.1 ppg) in the backcourt, this was an extremely potent offensive team that shared the ball very well.
The Jayhawks, who boasted four career 1,000-plus point scorers (Manning, Dreiling, Kellogg and Thompson) for the first time in school history, went eight deep with post player and defensive presence Chris Piper, sweet shooter/swingman Archie Marshall, and fiery point guard Mark Turgeon coming off the bench.
And each player knew their role, including the last man on the team.
“Jeff Johnson (sophomore walk-on) or whoever was the last one on the bench ... but they were so important to our team because they made us practice,” Thompson said. “People don’t realize that. It’s not an individual game. Practice players and bench players are just as important. We wouldn’t have had the great success we had if we weren’t a team.”
This was, indeed, a close-knit family who endured some rough times the first few years when Brown took over the head-coaching job in 1983 from the fired Ted Owens.
”I didn’t like the way he treated us when he first came,” Thompson said. “He said we were his stepkids and were going to be really good when his kids came in. So how does that look on us. Not going to sit back and agree with him. I was still a little smart-mouth kid ... It was just like a marriage; you already got a family established and here comes a new daddy. ‘Why should I do what you say when you’re not my daddy, you’re not my kid?’ It was the same thing. There were some growing pains initially.”
After a “year and a half, two years, team meeting after team meeting, things clicked.”
“The adversity we had to get through just to get adjusted to coach Brown, it brought a lot of us closer together,” Thompson said. “It helped us to grow. When we became close -- (we’d go to) movies, study hall (together). We could depend on each other on the court.”
That was certainly the case during the 1985-86 season. KU stormed to a 12-1 start with its only loss to Duke in the Big Apple NIT in Madison Square Garden on Dec. 1, 1985. After losing a heartbreaking 83-80 overtime game at Memphis on Jan. 4, the Jayhawks took their play to a higher gear, winning 23 of 24 games and capturing the Big Eight Championship and conference tournament title before advancing to the program’s first Final Four since 1974.
While the Final Four seemed KU’s destiny since the season kicked off with Late Night with Larry Brown in October, the players weren’t just satisfied with being one of the last four teams standing at Reunion Arena in Dallas.
“We’ve wanted to win it all from day one,” Marshall told the Lawrence Journal-World at the time.
Standing in KU’s way of a date in the national title game was No. 1 Duke, the team which had given the Jayhawks just one of their three losses during this magical season. Plagued with foul trouble (Manning, who scored a career-low four points, fouled out, along with Hunter and Dreiling), KU still found itself tied with the Blue Devils 67-all when Duke forward Mark Alarie missed a shot in the final minute. However, Kansas missed a box out and Danny Ferry grabbed the offensive rebound and scored a layup to give Duke a 69-67 lead with 22 seconds left.
Kansas had a final chance to tie the game with four seconds left when Kellogg pulled up from 25 feet and released a jumper that all Jayhawks prayed would hit nothing but net.
The shot bounced harmlessly off the rim, and KU’s national championship dreams were over.
Thompson called the setback a “devastating loss.” And he still can picture Ferry grab that critical offensive rebound and putback.
“How many times have I seen that over and over?” Thompson lamented.
Louisville went on to beat Duke in the national championship game. KU had beaten the Cardinals earlier that season, 71-69, on Jan. 25 in Allen Fieldhouse.
“We knew we were the best, but the best team really seldom wins it,” Thompson said of falling short of a national title.
While Thompson and the Jayhawks were devastated, Turgeon took the loss especially hard. A diehard KU fan growing up in Topeka, the 5-10 point guard was the only KU player seen crying in the locker room afterwards.
“I’ve been a KU fan all my life,” Turgeon told the Wichita Eagle at the time. “I guess I took it like a fan would.”
The Jayhawks’ spirits would be lifted soon afterwards as fans turned out to fete the team during a parade on campus along Jayhawk Boulevard. KU could also be consoled knowing it was one of the best teams in school history.
Brown, who led UCLA to the national title game in 1980 and guided Kansas to a national championship in 1988, has said time and again that 1985-86 team was the best squad he ever coached in college.
“From top to bottom, it was as talented as any team I’ve ever been around,” Brown told ESPN Regional Television’s “Kansas Basketball: A Century Of Tradition” in 1998. “Night in and night out, I think that team played up to its potential as much as any team I’ve ever been associated with.
“I think if any team deserved to win a national championship, that team probably deserved it as much as any.”
While the ‘Hawks fell short at Reunion Arena, that dream team put Kansas back on the national map to stay. KU’s continued to build off that squad’s success and reached eight more Final Fours since then, including winning the 1988 and 2008 national championships.
The 1985-86 team’s legacy lives on over 30 years later.
“That’s where we are where we are now,” Thompson said.
But to get to that Final Four in ‘86, the Jayhawks and Brown first had to resolve their issues after that turbulent 1984-85 season. Kellogg cried when Brown told him, Thompson and Manning to transfer.
“’This is my home, (Brown) will leave before me. Danny’s not going anywhere,’” Thompson told Kellogg. "(Kellogg asked), ‘But what about me?’"
Although Thompson said “we’d laugh about it,” the Jayhawks were hurting inside. Thompson stressed that he wasn’t going to sit back and let Brown “walk over us and treat us like crap.”
The KU players weren’t the only ones upset with Brown. Some alumni told Thompson that “until he apologizes, they wouldn’t be affiliated with the school anymore.”
Thompson said Brown “got caught up in his emotions. ... Maybe that was his way to get the fire lit under us.”
In any event, Brown apologized to his players during that emotional team meeting in the spring of 1985. That was, indeed, the defining moment which made the journey to Dallas and the Final Four all possible.
“You can ask anyone who played for Larry, and everybody thanks him for that,” said Thompson, who has since become good friends with Brown and laugh with each other about their old conflicts.
“We all learned from it and grew. Larry grew from it, and not only made us better players, but better people. We were blessed to have him.”
