This story talks about a “tradeoff” Danny Manning and KU coach Larry Brown made, which former voice of the Jayhawks Tom Hedrick once told me about. Hedrick said this was a defining moment of the 1988 championship season and led KU to the title. Tom, as nice, genuine and positive a person as you’ll ever meet, always has great stories to share with me. This was one I had never heard, and am very surprised that Manning or his ‘88 teammates have never publicly talked about it. I wrote about this in an article in 2007 regarding a story on Brandon Rush.
I also go into detail about another defining moment that season involving a fight between Manning’s teammates Clint Normore and Mike Masucci in the locker room and Manning failing to break it up, as reported by John Feinstein in his New York Times bestselling 1988 book, A Season Inside.
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For Daniel Ricardo Manning, his College Basketball Hall of Fame induction in 2008 was a long time coming since he first arrived on the KU campus in fall of 1984. A great deal had changed since then. He was still the quiet, humble and genuine person he had always been, but now much more confident and at ease with the media.
Manning never asked for fame or adulation. But he’s handled it gracefully his entire basketball career. Not that being the star was ever simple.
“If Danny had his way, he would be able to play the way he does but no one but the other guys (players) would know about it,” his father and then-KU assistant coach Ed Manning told the Washington Post in 1988.
“But that’s not the way life is. Being the best isn’t always easy and it isn’t just playing the game. Danny has to learn that.”
For four years at KU, Brown and Ed Manning pushed him to be the best, to take responsibility for greatness, to live up to his potential, to believe in himself, to become a true leader and dominant player.
The fiery Brown constantly harped and yelled at Manning in practice.
“Danny and Larry probably had pretty much a love, hate relationship,” said Ted Juneau, Manning’s high school coach, one of his best friends, and godfather to his son, Evan.
“Danny’s a pretty sensitive kid, and Larry’s kind of in your face. I think in some ways, that was tough on Danny.”
But like Manning, Brown wanted to be liked. He had a soft side off the hardwood.
“You can be scared of Coach Brown for a while,” Manning told Kansas City Magazine in 1985. “I know I was. But then, you talk to him in his office and you feel like you’re part of his family.
“It’s a special feeling.”
“Special” was a word Brown and other hoops experts used frequently to describe Manning’s game. He was a multidimensional 6-10 forward who could dribble the ball like a point guard, lead the fast break, make wispy passes like Magic Johnson, while kill you in the post with his patented and soft jump hook.
Manning was expected to change the game and revolutionize the forward position.
“He does more than anybody since Bird and Magic,” then-Indiana Pacers scout Tom Newell told Sports Illustrated during Manning’s sophomore year in 1986.
"When he's 24, 25, people will just sit back and marvel at this guy. He's a whole new concept in basketball."
In his first college game against Maryland, Manning showed he could bang with All-American Len Bias and recorded a double-double (12 points and 12 rebounds). Manning finished second on the team in scoring that 1984-85 season at 14.6 points and led the team in rebounding with 7.6 boards per game. He was named Freshman of the Year by Basketball Times and NBC-TV.
As a sophomore, he still didn’t want to step on the toes of KU’s three star seniors — Ron Kellogg, Calvin Thompson and Greg Dreiling — but finally came alive in Big Eight play. Manning averaged 20 points per game in the conference and was selected as a consensus second-team All-American.
His play was making scouts, opposing coaches and writers shake their heads in wonder. The Dallas Morning News wrote this glowing assessment just before Manning played in his first Final Four in March of 1986:
“The game has gotten too good for its own good, one senses. If the sun always shines, then what makes a good day? If everyone can play this game, then where do we find our stars? Thankfully the game has been rescued from its drift toward a conformed excellence. It happens when one attends a Kansas basketball game and beholds an original. It happens when a 6-foot-11, 19-year-old catches the ball, turns towards the basket and shoots. It happens in the basketball world of Danny Manning.”
Unfortunately, in Manning’s worst game of his college career, he scored just four points and fouled out in KU’s loss to Duke in the national semifinals.
Still, it was a magical season for Manning (16.7 ppg, 6.3 rpg), who became the first Jayhawk ever to score more than 1,000 points after his sophomore season.
With Dreiling, Thompson and Kellogg completing their collegiate careers, Manning became KU’s go-to player his junior season, albeit a reluctant star and averaged 23.9 points per game. He was named a consensus first-team All-American and scored 30 points or more nine times, including a career-high 42 versus Southwest Missouri State in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
While KU lost in the Sweet 16 to Georgetown, many Jayhawk fans thought KU could win the national title in Manning’s senior year in 1987-88 with the addition of highly touted junior college transfer Marvin Branch, in addition to talented juco guards Otis Livingston and Lincoln Minor. Basketball Times predicted KU would win it all.
However, Manning’s farewell season began like a nightmare as Kansas struggled with chemistry, injuries and academic problems. KU was 12-8 and seemed headed towards the NIT instead of a national championship.
Manning and the Jayhawks made a remarkable turnaround with the insertion of sophomore guard Jeff Gueldner in the starting lineup at shooting guard and Kevin Pritchard at point guard after Livingston and Minor didn’t cut it at the point. After losing four straight in late January and early February, KU won nine of its next 11 games entering the NCAA Tournament.
But the defining moment in KU’s road to the national championship truly happened when former voice of the Jayhawks Tom Hedrick saw Manning at a barbershop in Lawrence on Feb. 1, 1988.
“Danny didn’t go to the hole until the last 10 games of his senior year,” Hedrick told me. “He did that with a tradeoff. The Jayhawks were 12-8 and 1-5 (1-4) in the conference, and I only said two things to him. I said, ‘How are you coming?’ He said, ‘I can’t wait for the season to end.’ I started to laugh. Then I said, ‘Does it bother Kevin Pritchard that Larry Brown yells at him a lot?’ He said, ‘It bothers him a lot. But I’m going to take care of that.’ So he went to see coach Brown that afternoon and made a tradeoff. He said, ‘OK coach, you quit yelling at Kevin and I’ll go to the hole. I’ll score more. That’s what you want. This is what I want.’ That’s again what a team leader Danny Manning was. Well, it made them a championship team.”
Hedrick calls Manning and Jo Jo White the “two best team players I ever saw here (KU).” He said Manning put the team first when he had that pivotal conversation with Brown.
Manning could be dominant, but Brown wanted more. After Manning burned Iowa State for 39 points in KU’s 82-72 victory at Allen Fieldhouse on Feb. 13, 1988, the perfectionist Brown wasn’t exactly satisfied.
“A great player would have had 50,” Brown said.
John Feinstein, the New York Times bestselling author of his 1988 book, A Season Inside, had full access to Manning and the KU basketball program during the 1987-88 season. He either didn’t know about the “tradeoff” between Manning and Brown regarding Pritchard, or ignorantly failed to mention it.
However, Feinstein wrote about another defining moment that season, which happened when Brown became “furious” at Manning for failing to break up a fight with punches thrown in the locker room after practice between teammates Clint Normore and Mike Masucci, a rumble which came before KU’s crucial 64-63 victory at Kansas State on Feb. 18.
Feinstein wrote that 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. “How many godamm times do I have to tell you that?!”
Manning had, indeed, heard that stern message from Brown many times, but the KU coach’s mood soon mellowed as he emotionally talked to Manning about David Thompson, his superstar player when he coached him with the Denver Nuggets.
“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.”
Thompson, who Feinstein wrote that “many who saw him play at North Carolina State still insist that ... (he was) the most gifted basketball player ever, “became a cocaine addict, hurt a knee, and was out of basketball before he turned thirty.”
Feinstein continued: “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. You won’t have any choice.”
Feinstein reported that “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 that he thought a little less yelling would be positive for the team. Each listened to each other. When it was over, each felt better.”
“I’ll tell you what, Danny,” Brown 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 heeded Brown’s call after that conversation and the one about the “tradeoff” regarding Pritchard. The KU star refused to let his team lose. When the Jayhawks entered the Big Dance, Manning and his teammates were on a mission with help and divine guidance from Fellowship of Christian Athletes president John Erickson.
“We had different people come speak to our team throughout the year,” Manning said. “Coach Erickson would speak (and) coined a little motto for us, ‘Life by an inch is a cinch. Life by the yard is hard.’ That is kind of what we took in the tournament.
“Survive and advance.”
The Jayhawks kept advancing with Manning leading KU to victories over Xavier, Murray State, Vanderbilt, Kansas State, Duke, and then Oklahoma in the national championship game. Manning averaged 27.2 points during that magical six-game run and finally became the true leader Brown always envisioned.
Brown couldn’t have been more thrilled with Manning’s evolution.
“Danny was a skinny kid the last time we played in the Final Four,” Brown said after the championship game. “He was a man tonight.”
Of course, Manning has great memories of his college swan song against OU, when he had one of the best national title games in history with 31 points and a career-high 18 rebounds. But he has even fonder memories of what transpired afterwards.
“It was just sitting in the locker room and enjoying each other’s company knowing for us seniors it was going to be the last time we were going to be able to hang out with these guys,” Manning said. “You know, give each other a hard time just one last time. That was the best part of the championship for me. It was a good time and a great run for us.”
Aside from the national title, Manning said not one game in particular stands out from his college career.
“I just remember running out from the tunnel,” he said about Allen Fieldhouse. “That’s probably the biggest thing that sticks out, the chills you got and how excited you were to play in the fieldhouse.”
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