KU Flashback: Jayhawks post first-ever win over Kentucky in 1973

With Kentucky’s victory over Kansas in the national championship game on April 2, the Wildcats now hold a 21-6 all-time series lead. However, before UK's last two wins over KU (the Wildcats also beat KU early this season in November), Kansas had won three straight with five of its six wins coming in the last eight meetings.

In the aftermath of the national title game, I began thinking of KU’s six wins over Kentucky, the players that made the plays and the specifics of each game. In this blog entry, I travel back in time to Dec. 3, 1973 when KU beat the mighty Wildcats for the first time in school history.

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With KU still winless in the overall series to Kentucky (0-5), the Jayhawks looked to get their first victory over the Wildcats in Allen Fieldhouse on Dec. 3, 1973, three days after crushing Murray State, 103-79, in the season opener. KU hit its first 12 shots after halftime in that game and finished the contest with 49 field goals, a school and fieldhouse record.

Now, KU was looking to keep the hot shooting cooking against the Wildcats, who won their opening game against Miami of Ohio, 81-68.

Even though it was just the second game this season, after going just 8-18 last year, this was a game KU needed to win to get its confidence boosted for the long season ahead.

And they did.

Behind 20 points from junior college transfer Roger Morningstar and strong inside play (KU’s frontline scored 62 points), the Jayhawks notched their first-ever win against UK, 72-61. Kentucky forward Kevin Grevey was game-high scorer with 23 points, though the Lawrence Journal-World reported that Morningstar “did a sticky first-half defensive job” on the Wildcats’ star player.

KU led just 31-28 at halftime, but hit 19 of 31 shots in the second half to build its lead. Meanwhile, the Jayhawks held the Wildcats to just 39 percent shooting for the game.

Morningstar was the star — “This is the biggest game I’ve ever played in my life,” he told the Lawrence Journal-World — but he had help this night from post players Danny Knight (17 points) and Rick Suttle (12 points), who hit shots and also put the clamps on Kentucky’s 6-8 big man Bob Guyotte (1 of 7 shots for just four points), UK’s sixth man last year who was pressed into pivot duty this season.

Coach Ted Owens’ game plan was to get the ball inside to test Guyotte.

“Inside was the place we felt we could hurt them,” Owens said.

KU was now 2-0 and riding high after beating the nationally ranked and defending SEC champs.

"I think we beat a good team Saturday in Murray State, but I think it was important for us to beat a ranked basketball team,” Owens said. “I’m very pleased. We were doing the things necessary to win. This team is more and more beginning to understand the things necessary to succeed. Some of the guys have had all the losing they need. We don’t have to lose anymore to learn lessons. They’ve worked awfully hard to become a team so they don’t want to let it slip away.”

KU marched to the Final Four that season with a 23-7 record, the best turnaround in school history and one of the best comebacks in NCAA history after finishing just 8-18 in 1972-73.

A Tribute to Delvy Lewis

The Kansas Athletics family and Jayhawk Nation suffered a huge blow this past season with the passing of Aubrey Nash (starting point guard on the 1971 Final Four team), Charlie Hoag (four-sport standout who was a member of the 1952 NCAA championship basketball team), Al Correll (first African-American basketball captain and holder of school's single-season free-throw mark with 90 percent in 1964) and Delvy Lewis, a three-year starter and first-team All-Big Eight performer on the 1966 basketball team, one of the best KU squads of all time.

The news that Lewis died last month on March 5 at age 68 at about 4:30 p.m. after a courageous nine-year battle with cancer hit me the hardest. You see, one evening in March 2003, I called up Delvy to interview him for a Where Are They Now? story for Jayhawk Insider. We spent about the next 90 minutes having a wonderful conversation, as Delvy entertained me with his crystal sharp memory of his recruitment to KU, specific Jayhawk games, his unwavering support of his wife, Karen, and daughters — Kristi, Kerri, and Mindi — and what he’d been up to since leaving KU in 1966. It was a special interview, and one I’ve always remembered with great fondness.

Unfortunately, Lewis must have been diagnosed with cancer shortly thereafter, the beginning of a rough nine years for this very spiritual and religious man. He told me during our interview that he hoped to get into coaching full time in the next year, but cancer has a cruel and painful way of changing our life’s plans, our life’s work.

He called me once and left a message on my cell phone thanking me for sending him the article I wrote on him. Delvy said he hoped to see me at a KU game. And then, as he always said at the end of our conversations, he finished the message with these two words: “God bless.”

I believe I ran into him at a KU game in Allen Fieldhouse two times since then, the last on Dec.  3, 2011 when Lewis and the 1966 team were honored at halftime during the South Florida game. I went up to him afterwards and said hello. He said he was still battling his disease and I told him I was pulling and thinking of him.

“Thank you,” this humble man said quietly. “God bless.”

Then he slowly walked away heading north across one of the famed hallways of Allen Fieldhouse.

Three months later, I learned he had passed away. While I didn’t know him well, I felt a loss of someone who patiently took his time with me on that night in 2003 to recall his KU experiences and just what KU basketball meant to him, and also remember so well how gracious Delvy was the few times we met. I think it was Roy Williams who once said that your “time” is the greatest “gift” you can ever bestow an individual, and Delvy always had time for me ... and everyone he came in contact with.

I am not a very religious person, but I truly admired Delvy’s unwavering faith, which no doubt helped him through his battle with bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma). During our interview in 2003, he told me times were tough and the economy was slow, but he and his wife continued to persevere.

“My wife and I are both Christians, and we know the Lord has a plan for our lives,” Delvy said. “I’m very thankful for all I’ve been blessed with. We’re just trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

I was so happy he was able to attend the 1966 reunion last December before he died, and also thrilled he was inducted into the Topeka Shawnee County Sports Council Hall of Fame in June 2010.

"It's nice to get this while you're alive," Lewis told the Topeka Capital-Journal at the time of his induction. "They gave me three to five years to live and that was seven years ago, so I'm two years on the good side. I've had two bone marrow transplants and my numbers are continually rising, but hey, I still play golf."

The Capital-Journal reported that “with the health battles that both Delvy and his wife, Karen (she is a cancer survivor) have fought, Lewis said he's increasingly appreciative of all the good things that have come his way, including Wednesday's honor.”

"This is really for God's glory because I wouldn't be here," Lewis said. "We're all on borrowed time, we just don't know it.”

Delvy certainly made the most of his time on earth. While I never saw him play at KU (I did see him play an exhibition game in the early 1990s), I’m a Jayhawk sports history buff and know what a great contributor he was to those teams under Dick Harp and Ted Owens from 1963-66.

Delvy, a former standout at Washburn Rural High School whose team won the state championship in 1960 with his dear friend and the late shooting star Ron Paradis, was maybe the unsung hero of the 1966 KU team, which went 23-4 and advanced to the Midwest Regional Finals before losing to eventual NCAA champs Texas Western.

Playing alongside stars like Walt Wesley and Jo Jo White, Lewis was the team’s co-captain, playmaker and leader who got the Jayhawks into their offensive and defensive sets. He was the tenacious defender who never backed down. And he was a terrific free-throw shooter with an 82.5 percentage as a senior. Delvy, quite simply, endeared himself to his teammates, coaches, and Jayhawk Nation.

"Delvy was a great leader and a great competitor,” Owens said in a statement after Lewis’ death. “By sheer force of hard work he made himself an all-league player. His courage and his faith are what I'll remember about him. I'm so glad he was able to come to our (1965-66 team) reunion at Allen Fieldhouse in December.”

Delvy Lewis, who played with boundless courage, faith and heart, died with boundless courage, faith and heart on March 5.

Delvy, “God bless” and R.I.P.