Danny Manning had impressive NBA career and persevered through three ACL surgeries

Danny Manning, who won a bronze medal with the U.S. Olympic team in the summer of 1988, was expected to make an indelible mark in the NBA after being selected No. 1 in the 1988 June NBA Draft by the Los Angeles Clippers. Immediately after winning the lottery the previous month, L.A. general manager Elgin Baylor proclaimed on national television that Manning was the Clippers’ franchise player, a team searching for greatness and salvation after missing the playoffs for 12 years.

"This is the happiest moment I've had since I've been associated with basketball,” the Hall of Famer Baylor told the Los Angeles Times. “It's a great moment for the L.A. Clippers. My prayers worked. I had everyone praying every day and night. This is terrific."

Manning started from day one for head coach Mike Schuler and averaged 16.7 points and 6.6 rebounds before he tore his ACL after just 26 games.

“The doctors told us that he would never play again and that his career was over,” Manning’s wife, Julie, told Jazz HomeCourt Magazine in 2001.

But Manning defied the odds knowing that his former KU teammate Archie Marshall underwent the same surgery and returned to action. The former KU All-American was a solid player the next two seasons, averaging 16.3 points in 1989-90 and 15.9 points in 1990-91. Still, he was not 100 percent and battled tendinitis in his knee.

Manning’s career underwent a dramatic transformation during the 1991-92 season when he regained his health and his former KU coach Larry Brown replaced Schuler as Clippers’ head coach. With Brown directing the offense Manning’s way, he averaged a career-high 19.3 points per game. He also averaged career bests in rebounds (6.9 rpg), steals (1.65 spg), blocks (1.49 bpg) and field goal percentage (.542, No. 8 in NBA) while finally leading the Clippers to the playoffs.

Manning’s best was yet to come.

The following year in 1992-93, Manning was the talk of the NBA, becoming the first Clipper since Marques Johnson (1986) to play in the All-Star game. He led L.A. in scoring (22.8 ppg) and set a club record for total points with 1,800 as the Clippers advanced to the playoffs again before being ousted in the first round for the second-straight year.

“(Manning’s) the closest thing in this league to Magic Johnson,” New York Knicks coach Pat Riley said.

But Manning and Brown had their problems. It was difficult for Manning to play for the same demanding coach twice in his life, and he insisted on a trade after one game when Brown harped on him for not crashing the boards.

Brown left the Clippers after the season to become the Indiana Pacers head coach, while Manning continued to shine in Los Angeles. He was selected as an All-Star again in 1994 and averaged 23.7 points in 42 games.

However, the Clippers feared they’d lose Manning to free agency next season so shipped the franchise’s all-time leading scorer to Atlanta in February of 1994 for future Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins. Manning led the Hawks to the best record in the Eastern Conference and paced the team with 20.0 points per game in Atlanta’s first-round playoff loss to Brown’s Pacers.

He then landed in Phoenix the next season in hopes of winning an NBA championship, while selflessly taking a paycut to achieve that dream

As the team’s No. 2 option behind Charles Barkley, Manning was more comfortable in that role and excelled in the Suns’ freewheeling attack. He helped lead Phoenix to the best record in the NBA (36-10) before disaster struck again when Manning tore his right ACL in practice on Feb. 6, 1995. Phoenix was eventually eliminated in the second round of the playoffs.

Danny Schayes, a member of that Suns’ team, believes Phoenix would have won the championship with Manning in the lineup.

“I think so,” Schayes told me. “We were a dominant team that year. But those were the breaks of the game. He had a terrific year for us. It’s certainly a shame that it (injury) happened.”

“He was just a key part of our team,” Schayes added. “He was one of those guys that played every position well. He made everything happen from wherever he was on the court.”

Schayes commented that Manning fit in great with Phoenix's free-flowing offense.

“He was certainly athletic, (but) he was not a guy who relied on his athletic ability to get the job done,” Schayes said. “He was always the guy who thought the game and why he was so good for us is because we played a freelance style, which allowed guys like me and him and Danny Ainge, guys who knew how to play, to really excel together. And those of us who had that same kind of individual style, we could kind of read each other’s thoughts. It was very cool.”

Ten months later, Manning became the first player in NBA history to return to action after blowing out ACL’s in both knees. However, he was never the same and labeled a role player for the first time in his career.

Still, he earned the NBA Sixth Man Award with the Suns in 1998 after averaging 13.5 points and 5.2 rebounds. But Manning suffered heartache when he blew out his knee again near the end of the season. He could have easily retired, but returned to play four and a half more seasons with Phoenix, Milwaukee, Dallas and Detroit.

“He wasn’t ready to quit,” Julie Manning told HomeCourt Magazine. “He was just determined to do it. Besides, basketball is in his blood, he has to do it.”

Without fanfare, his agent Mark Bartelstein of Priority Sports released a statement announcing Manning’s official retirement from the NBA on Sept. 12, 2003.

"It has been a pleasure and a honor to represent Danny Manning,” Bartelstein said. “He exemplifies everything you look for in a professional athlete.”

Manning answered questions that day on nba.com about his playing career. He wrote that his top professional highlight “was winning the Sixth Man Award or being named an All-Star. But probably most of all, it was being able to play for so long after three knee surgeries. ... I was blessed with great doctors, medical staff and trainers. It's just a lot of repetition. You want to get your muscles to fire up like they are supposed to. You need a little stubbornness to get through it all.”

And then Manning gave his farewell:

“Thanks to all my friends for having kind words for me. To my wife and two children for their support. And to the fans, the few Danny Manning fans out there (laughs), I really appreciate all your support.”

Manning retired after 15 years and 883 regular-season games with career averages of 14.0 points and 5.2 rebounds per game, while shooting 51.1 percent from the field. No, certainly not Hall of Fame numbers, but Manning left an indelible mark as one of the greatest competitors in sports history, one of the few athletes to come back from three reconstructive knee surgeries. 

“I give him tons of credit, ” Schayes said. “He still had a great career for undergoing three major knee (surgeries). There aren’t many guys that can say that.”

Ted Juneau, Manning's coach at Lawrence High School and one of his best friends, agrees.

“You blow your knee out three times. I don’t think any of us can really imagine what that’s like,” Juneau told me in 1998. “It speaks a lot about courage and a lot about pride and the work it takes and his ability to do that. That’s probably the one thing that amazes me about him.

“No one understands how hard he worked to be as good as he was,” Juneau added. “People don’t understand the amount of work that he put into being a very good player, and the pride he took in doing that. He has pride in everything he does, and I think he’s always going to be successful because he’s very, very competitive. He doesn’t want to lose. He’s always willing to work very hard to achieve his goals.”

Manning’s career will perhaps be remembered most for his all-around game and versatility. So says Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, Manning’s teammate with Phoenix.

“If you go back and think about his game,” Barkley said, “the biggest advantage he had, he was so versatile. I don’t even know what position (he had). He was one of those guys who didn’t have a position. That’s pretty remarkable to be in that situation. Was he a power forward? Was he a small forward? He was just a very unique player.”

Hall of Famer and TV analyst Bill Walton called Manning “one of the most graceful players of his era.”

He was a “graceful” and “unique player” who never felt comfortable as the go-to scorer. Juneau said it just wasn’t in Manning’s makeup to dominate games consistently with his scoring.

“I think when it’s crunch time, no one wants to win more than he,” Juneau said. “He’ll do what it takes, but he’s not going to ever be someone that demands the attention.”

Lafayette Norwood, the former KU assistant coach under Ted Owens, agrees.

“Danny didn’t take over as a senior in high school here (Lawrence High in 1983-84),” Norwood said. “In fact, with the talent he had, he could have shot even additional shots he didn’t take. But he rather played (team) ball. It takes a special person to play like that. Kids today, you got some kids, coach says shoot the ball, they’ll just shoot it anytime without in regard of his teammates.”  

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On Nov. 23, 2008 at Sprint Center, Manning was the center of attention and headline act at his College Basketball Hall of Fame induction. Some of his former Jayhawk teammates were here, including Jeff Gueldner, Mike Maddox and Chris Piper.

“We were taking bets on whether he’d show up tonight,” Gueldner cracked about the private Manning. “We thought he might do this thing via teleconference.”

Seriously, Gueldner said:

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Danny is a class act from a players’ standpoint, from a fans’ standpoint.”

Ed Manning, Danny’s dad and assistant coach at Kansas during the Brown era, was overwhelmed with emotion.

“It’s just great,” Ed said with a huge smile. “I’m thrilled to death. I’m happy for him. It’s just a great honor for him to be up there with these super guys. I’m almost lost for words.”

Ask anybody in the basketball “know” about Manning’s pro career, and they usually say the same statement: he likely would have been an NBA Hall of Famer if not for the injuries.

“Knee injuries prevented him from probably being a 10-time type All-Star,”KU coach Bill Self said. “He scored (over 12,000) points as a pro and was never healthy. He would (have gone) down as one of the best.

“But to me, collegiately, he does go down as one of the best. We think of Bird, Jordan or Magic and the greatest players of what they accomplished in the pros, but when you break down what they accomplished in college, Danny’s career is up there with all those guys.”

Former NBA player Brad Lohaus thought Manning would be a Hall of Famer, if not for the injuries.

“(That) kind of really curtailed what he could have done,”  Lohaus said. “We had the same agent so I’ve known Danny for a lot of years, one of the great college basketball players ever and he would have been one of the all-time pros but the knees just don’t hold up.

“He had a great NBA career. Compared to his college career, it kind of takes a back seat. But he’s very special. He was really quick. He’s so big, you don’t realize how quick he was. That’s why he was so good. He could handle the ball at 6-10, shoot the ball, smart player. He had it all.”

Former Suns’ teammate A.C. Green said Manning was a joy to play with and the consummate teammate.

“Some guys over the years, you just really enjoy being around,” Green told me in 1999. “He’s kind of one of those off the court guys that you can hang out with because he’s real down to earth, a real person. So I’ve always enjoyed being around Danny, and I really enjoyed playing with him on a daily basis because he’s a battler. He’s got a license to battle and likes to go to work and win games. I have nothing but really admiration for Danny.”

Even today and in recent years, Manning’s name comes up among NBA coaches and fans.

“Manning was a phenomenal player, until his knees took over,” a Suns’ fan posted on azcentral.com in 2009. “It's a shame to think about how great he could've been.”

Manning, though, doesn’t dwell on the past or all the “what-ifs?” He’s at peace with himself.

“I guess at times they’re nice to hear,” Manning said about Brown predicting he’d once become one of the all-time greats.

“But the bottom line is things happen for a reason. I’m very happy with my career. Everybody has obstacles, everybody has journeys that have different turns. I enjoyed my journey. It’s just time for another phase in my life, which is coaching and moving forward.”

Brown always said during Manning’s KU career that he was the “best player I ever been associated with.” 

“He’s what college athletics is all about,” Brown once told the Lawrence Journal-World. “He deserves every single thing he’s gotten.”

Including induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

“It’s a pretty special thing,” Brown said two months before Manning was enshrined. “If you look at our team (in 1988), you realize how special a player he was because he carried a lot of us. He had a great career with a lot of adversity in the pros.”

“He had a great IQ,” Brown added. “He grew up with his dad, who was a pretty bright basketball player and the ultimate team guy. He taught Danny early on how to respect the game and how to play the right way. For a guy his size, in a lot of ways he played like a guard. 

“Everybody used to compare him to Magic, which is probably the highest compliment you can have. I think when they were doing that, they were talking about the fact how he made players better, just by doing the little things.”

Brown smiled.

“I can’t imagine a college player ever being better than him or accomplishing more than he did,” Brown said. “He’s as good a college player as I ever saw.”

Danny Manning and Larry Brown's "tradeoff" led Jayhawks to national title in 1988

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.”

Recalling Danny Manning's College Basketball Hall of Fame induction

These have certainly been better days for Jayhawk legend Danny Manning. He was fired as head coach in April by Wake Forest after three straight losing seasons and compiling a dismal 78–111 (.413) record in six years, including a more woeful 30-80 (.273) record in ACC play. This was not the plan Manning, AD Ron Wellman, who hired him, and all Wake fans envisioned when he began his tenure in Winston Salem in 2014 after leading Tulsa to its first NCAA Tournament that year since 2003. Manning guided the Golden Hurricane to a 21-13 record, including a 13-3 mark in Conference USA (tied for regular-season title), and then capturing the C-USA postseason tournament.

But the ACC proved to be too mighty for Manning to handle, and he suffered with many transfers and players who opted to pursue professional careers. He had only one winning season at Wake in 2016-17, posting a 19-14 record and an NCAA Tournament berth with future NBA lottery pick John Collins, where the Demon Deacons lost in the First Four to K-State.

Manning, who reportedly received a 15M buyout from Wake, will likely land on his feet again and receive another head-coaching job, although it might be at low-major school. He developed a reputation as KU assistant coach as arguably the best-big man coach in the college game, helping send countless Jayhawks into the NBA, including the Morris twins, Darrell Arthur, Cole Aldrich and Jeff Withey.

This fact, along with winning at Tulsa, might be enough for some college to take a chance on Manning again or for an NBA team to hire him as an assistant.

In this three-part series, here’s a look back on better fortunes for Manning, as I write about my high school classmate's induction into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and his college and NBA career.

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Danny Manning once said the four players in basketball history he’d most like to play with were Elgin Baylor, Earl Monroe, Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson.

Those four are among the all-time hoops greats and enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

When Manning was just a freshman at the University of Kansas in 1985, KU coach Larry Brown destined his prodigy for immortality and an indelible place reserved with the legends like Russell and Baylor in Springfield.

“This kid has a chance to be thought of in light of the best when his career is over,” Brown said. “He is the most complete young player I’ve ever seen. He is unlike any player I’ve ever been around. 

 

“He’ll be the best.”

Thirty-five years later, Manning is not considered “the best” or one of the all-time NBA greats. Three ACL injuries in the pros robbed him of stardom, yet he still had an impressive 15-year career, finishing with 12,367 points, 4,615 rebounds, 2,063 assists, 1,000 steals and 753 blocks. Manning was a two-time All-Star (1993 and ‘94) and won the NBA Sixth Man Award with the Phoenix Suns in 1998 before retiring in 2003 with the Detroit Pistons.

On the collegiate level, though, Manning had few peers. The Sporting News ranked Manning the 12th best college player of all time in 2002 in Mike DeCourcy’s book, Legends of College Basketball,while in Dick Vitale’s 2008 book, Fabulous 50 Players and Moments in College Basketball, the celebrated announcer pegged Manning as the fifth-best player during his 30 years of covering college basketball for ESPN.

The 12th all-time leading scorer in NCAA history (2,951 points), Manning was a two-time All-American and the consensus National Player of the Year in 1988. He led KU to the Final Four in 1986 and national title in '88 while named Most Outstanding Player. Manning was later named the Big Eight Player of the Decade.

So how fitting and deserving that this Jayhawk legend be honored at Sprint Center in Kansas City in 2008 with his induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

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Twenty years after leading KU to one of its greatest moments in school history in Kemper Arena with a commanding 31 point, 18-rebound performance against Oklahoma in the national title game, Manning was back home in Kansas City to receive college basketball’s greatest individual honor.

KU coach Bill Self had the privilege of introducing Manning for induction that memorable evening. 

Self called “Coach Danny Manning one of the greatest ambassadors the University of Kansas has ever known.” 

He recalled Manning burning his Oklahoma State Cowboys for 35 points as a freshman in 1985 with Self playing the back of the two-three zone, and how he used to “towel him off and fetch water for him” as a KU graduate assistant in 1985-86.

“Everybody talks about Danny and the Miracles and him going for 31 and 18 in the national championship game and how he put that team on his back,” Self said. “That totally embarrasses Danny. Danny is so proud of his teammates, so proud of the contributions of everybody. He’s very humble, deflects praise.”

Dazzling highlights of Manning’s college career soon showed on the big screen before Self announced: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Kansas’ finest, Danny Manning.”

The crowd gave a roaring ovation as Self put a Hall of Fame medal around Manning’s neck. Manning walked over to emcees Dan Shulman and Seth Davis and took a seat on the stage.

Shulman praised Manning immediately.

“Danny, I think when this Hall of Fame came into being and people thought of the kind of place this Hall of Fame was meant for,” Shulman said, “you were the first guy people thought of, because if you had not had injuries, we all know how differently things could have been on the pro level.

“But on the collegiate level, you were the first guy (on everybody’s minds).”

Manning was humbled by the love.

 “I had a lot of wonderful people in my life pushing me, my parents and my high school coach, my family,” he said. “I got some teammates sitting up there and I’m glad they’re here. I’m just very fortunate and very blessed to be in this situation.”

Two months before his induction, the selfless Manning first told me he could not accomplish this great honor alone.

“I’m honored, privileged, humbled,” Manning said. “I had a chance to play for a great coach (Brown). We had wonderful staffs. I played in front of the best fans in the country. I had the best teammates anyone could ask for. I received a lot of attention, but my teammates were the guys that put me in position to do what I what I could do. They were very unselfish in their thoughts and their actions. I just want them to know that I appreciate all their efforts and all the battles that we’ve gone through.

“This is something that hopefully we can all cherish together.”

Cedric Hunter was one of the most underrated and best point guards in KU history

In this three-part series on former KU standout point guard Cedric Hunter, I reflect on his high school, college and pro career and his life after professional basketball.

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Cedric Hunter was a high school star out of Omaha South who led the state in scoring his junior and senior years, including 27.3 points per game as a senior. He was named all-metro and all-state, while honored as a Converse All-American. However, he played center in high school and was lightly recruited due to his small stature at just 6-foot.

Despite manning the center position in high school, Hunter’s prep coach Bob Whitehouse had no doubts Hunter could become a great point guard in college.

“There won’t be any trouble with him making the transition to point guard,” Whitehouse said in the KU Media Guide before Hunter’s freshman season in 1983-84.

In one of the smartest decisions of then-KU coach Larry Brown’s coaching career, he offered Ced a scholarship after a track and field meet in Omaha, without ever seeing him play basketball in person. Brown was impressed with Hunter’s supreme athleticism, and thought he could impact the KU program. Hunter was part of Brown's first recruiting class, along with Mark Turgeon and Chris Piper.

Boy, was Brown right about Hunter! All he did in four years at KU (1983-87) was become the school’s all-time and Big Eight assist leader with 684 dimes, a record that stood for 10 years until KU’s Jacque Vaughn broke it in 1997.

Hunter averaged 5.8 assists per game for his career with an impressive 2.14 assist-to-turnover ratio. He also averaged 1.3 steals and 8.5 points per game (career-high 11.6 ppg his senior year in 1986-87) and recorded 1,022 career points in 118 games while averaging 30.2 minutes per contest.

For many people who said he couldn’t shoot, including KU coach Bill Self, who was a graduate assistant during Hunter’s sophomore year, Ced shot a scorching 53.5 field goal percentage for his career, including an eye-popping career-best 56.2 field goal percentage his sophomore season in 1985-86, where the unsung hero helped lead KU to the Final Four and most wins at the time in school history (35-4). That team remains one of the best in KU annals with Hunter at point guard, Ron Kellogg and Calvin Thompson at the wings, Danny Manning at power forward, and Greg Dreiling at center. The team went eight deep with Archie Marshall, Mark Turgeon and Chris Piper serving as instrumental reserves.

Self told the Kansas City Star in January 2019 that Hunter “couldn’t shoot a lick.” No offense to Self and many other detractors who felt the same way, but just look at the stats. No, Cedric didn’t have very good range (1-7 from three-point range his senior year), but he could simply knock down the wide-open 15-to-17 foot jumper. Opponents dared him to shoot, and Ced made them pay. Time and time again. I saw virtually all of Ced’s home games in Allen Fieldhouse in person and watched whenever KU was on TV, and he could shoot it from medium distance. So Self and others were completely wrong.

Hunter actually set a Big Eight record in 1986 by shooting an incredible 73.1 percent from the field in league games and was 8-of-8 from the field against Oklahoma that year, when he scored a season-high 19 points. He also shot 7-of-7 from the field versus Missouri in 1985. Beginning with his senior year, Hunter remarkably shot better than 70 percent from the field in 20 different games during his career.

His only weakness, besides his lack of perimeter range, was his free throw shooting. Hunter shot just 52.1 percent for his career, a very poor percentage, especially for a point guard. Brown said that Hunter looked at the ball while he shot, a no-no for a shooter. However, Brown believed in Hunter so much that he often had him shoot technicals to boost his confidence. More often than not, as I recall, Hunter made his free throws then. What a joy it must have been for Hunter to play for a coach who believed in him to shoot technicals, despite his poor free throw shooting.

Despite Self’s remarks about Ced’s shooting, he had tremendous respect for Hunter’s game. Hunter guarded Self during the KU coach’s career at Oklahoma State.

“I loved Cedric,” Self told the Kansas City Star on Dec. 23, 2019. “Coach (Larry) Brown did as well. He could guard anybody, had unbelievable length (39-inch arms), was explosive. He was not a great shooter, but maybe as good a point guard this place has seen, as good a point guard who doesn’t score the ball. Talk about a pure defender and setup guy, he was as good as anybody. You did not want him guarding you. You’d rather have anybody guard you than Cedric. He could lock you up.”

Self then further gushed about Hunter to the Omaha World Herald:

"Cedric probably was the best non-shooting player I've ever been around."

Self added to the Star on Jan. 28, 2019:

“Gosh was he great. Long arms, best on the ball defender, guys loved playing with him.”

Indeed, Hunter’s teammates deeply “loved playing with him.” 

Just ask Piper.

“Cedric Hunter was probably one of the most underrated point guards, I think, that KU has ever had. He was phenomenal and could really break everything down,” Piper told Mark Stallard in his 2005 book, Tales from the Jayhawks Hardwood.

Hunter drew great respect and admiration from his coaches, teammates and opponents alike. Brown talked on his Hawk Talk radio show during the 1985-86 season about Hunter’s defense against Duke All-American guard Johnny Dawkins in the preseason Big Apple NIT on Dec. 1, 1985.

“He got 20 I believe against us,” Brown said. “He came up to me after the game and said Cedric did the best job as any guard he’s played against since he’s been at Duke, and I thought that was a heck of a testimony. He got a lot on the break against us, and he’s just a tremendous athlete.”

Hunter improved each year, averaging 4.2 points his freshman season (he was declared academically ineligible after semester break), 6.7 points his sophomore year, 9.1 points as a junior, then 11.6 points his senior season. He also averaged a career-high 5.1 rebounds per game as a senior, pretty good numbers for a 6-foot point guard.

The KU Basketball Media Guide wrote in 1985-86 that “Brown feels Hunter is one of the most improved players he has ever coached.”

Hunter, who had a career-high 16 assists versus Oklahoma in the Big Eight postseason tournament in 1986, was the consummate point guard who ran the break as well as any guard in the country. My dad, who played hockey growing up in Toronto, was a huge fan of Ced’s, and said he reminded him of a hockey player on skates with the way he ran and orchestrated the break. Hunter always got the ball in the scorers’ best shooting position, and made the game so much easier for all his teammates.

Indeed, Piper was right. I’ve always thought “Electric” Cedric Hunter was one of the most underrated and best point guards KU has ever seen. He deserves all credit that is due for his remarkable career playing under the shadows of such stars as Manning, Kellogg, Dreiling and Thompson.

Recalling when Danny Manning landed his first head-coaching job at Tulsa

Times have been tough on Danny Manning since he was named Wake Forest head basketball coach on April 4, 2014. While he won at Tulsa in his first head-coaching job and led the Golden Hurricane to the NCAA Tournament in his second year in 2014 for the first time since 2003 (21-13, 13-3 in league play, tied for first), where they lost to UCLA in the second round, the Jayhawk legend hasn’t been very competitive in the monster ACC. He’s coming off back-to-back 11-20 seasons, and there was speculation he might be fired after this season. Manning, who also went 11-20 in 2015-16, has posted just a 65–93 (.411) record at Wake in five seasons, including a dismal 24-66 record  (.267) in conference play.

Manning has only had one winning season at Wake in 2016-17 with future NBA lottery pick John Collins the team’s star. Wake went 19-14 that year and lost in the NCAA First Four to K-State. That’s when Wake AD Mike Wellman gave Manning a big contract extension.

In March, Wellman, the outgoing Wake AD, gave Manning a vote of confidence and said he would be back for another season. John Currie took over as new athletic director in May, so if Manning doesn’t show significant improvement next year, Currie could let him go. Manning’s contract reportedly runs through 2025 with a reported 18 million buyout, one reason sources say Wellman was reluctant to fire Manning.

Both Wellman and Manning spoke at their March press conference knowing the Wake basketball program needed to improve.

According to the Winston Salem-Journal, Wellman said the future with Manning is “bright with him at the helm.”

“Our fans and everyone associated with this program expects us to have a championship-caliber program and we believe we are capable of doing that, we have done that in the past and we will do it in the future,” Wellman said.

Wellman was encouraged how more competitive the Demon Deacons were at the end of the season.

“So often, in a situation like that, you can lose a team. You don’t have their attention, you don’t have their full commitment,” Wellman said. “When I would go to practice, I never saw that. I saw them working hard, I saw them absorbing what the coaches were saying and trying to execute it.

“And that carried over into the games. The grit and the determination and the chemistry, I thought, was evident during the games, even though we didn’t win some of the games.”

Like Wellman, Manning was also optimistic.

“I’m excited about this team. I think the young men that we have in this program represent us well on the court and off the court,” Manning said. “I think we — in a challenging situation, they did some really good things in terms of competing and battling and improving and wanting to improve and continuing to stay the course and be supportive of the whole program, especially of each other.”

Before his struggles at Wake, Manning was set to begin his first head-coaching job at Tulsa in 2012 after nine years on staff at Kansas, serving as an assistant coach his last five years. He was seen as a rising coaching star and expectations were high at Tulsa with his hiring. I wrote this article on Manning’s new job at Tulsa in Jayhawk Illustrated'a 2012 summer issue. I also included information on my former Lawrence High School classmate’s career at LHS and his loyalty to his high school coach Ted Juneau, and how he wanted to bring a family atmosphere to Tulsa and win championships.

Here is that story.

***

By David Garfield

Flash back to Dec. 13, 1983. It was my senior year at Lawrence High School, and the ballyhooed star senior on the LHS basketball team was playing his second game of the season in a highly anticipated battle against powerhouse Wyandotte High after transferring from Page High School in Greensboro, N.C., where he led his team to a state championship the previous season as a pivotal force on one of the greatest teams in North Carolina prep history.

Danny Manning, the 6-10 do-it-all forward who scouts were already comparing to Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, dribbled the ball upcourt on the game’s first possession, stopped on a dime just behind the free-throw line and released the jumper.

It hit nothing but net as the LHS gym rocked like never before.

On Lawrence High’s next possession, Manning dribbled the ball upcourt, pulled up at the same spot behind the free-throw line and shot the ball. 

Swish. The crowd came to their feet again and roared even louder.

Those were some of my first memories of Daniel Ricardo Manning.

Now, after leading LHS to one of its best seasons in school history, carving an All-American career at Kansas and spearheading the Jayhawks to the 1988 NCAA title, playing 15 years in the NBA (two-time All-Star) and then serving the past nine seasons on the KU basketball staff (the last five as as assistant coach), where he received due credit as one of the best big man coaches in the college game, Manning is looking to bring crowds to their feet once more as the new head coach of the Tulsa Golden Hurricane.

This once bright-eyed Lawrence High teenager can’t wait to begin the next chapter in his life as a wise 45-year-old Basketball Jones who could be the best thing to happen to Tulsa basketball since Bill Self led the Golden Hurricane to the Elite Eight in 2000.

Manning, who was introduced as head coach on April 4, is ready to get started at a job he calls a “tremendous opportunity.”

“We look forward to becoming a part of the fabric of the TU family. I'm so excited,” Manning said. “It's going to be a lot of fun. It will be a lot of hard work. We're willing to put in the hard work and we will put in the hard work. (At the) end of the day we'll stack up the wins and losses, but more importantly we want to make sure when people leave here they're quality young men ready to take the world on and make someone else's life better. That's how we're going to build our foundation, from the ground up. “

After failing to make the NCAA tournament since 2003 and seeing a 35-percent decrease in season ticket sales since 2005, TU athletics director Ross Parmley believes Manning is the man to take the program to the next level. He replaces the fired Doug Wojcik, who spent seven seasons at Tulsa and guided the Golden Hurricane to a 17-14 record this past year.

"We are extremely excited to have Danny join The University of Tulsa as our new head basketball coach,” Parmley said. “He epitomizes everything our university stands for. His impact on young people will extend far beyond the TU basketball program and reach well into our campus and community. His 15 years in the NBA combined with the last nine years under one of the best coaches (Self) in the country, have helped mold him into a great teacher and coach of basketball. He most definitely brings the excitement, the style of basketball, and character that we were looking for in our head coach."

It had to be a special job to lure Manning away from Kansas, and the former Jayhawk star said Tulsa was the perfect fit. He was blown away by the “beautiful campus,” outstanding facilities and rich basketball history. Three former Tulsa coaches (Self, Nolan Richardson and Tubby Smith) had great success with the Golden Hurricane before moving on to win a national championship at other schools. 

“We were comfortable there (at KU),” Manning said. “But the more I spoke with coach Self, the more I spoke with coach (Larry) Brown about the opportunity of coming to TU and being a part of this rich tradition, it became a no-brainer. To get a job of this magnitude as my first job is unbelievable.”

Manning said he got great feedback from Self about the Tulsa job. Self was head coach at TU from 1997-2000.

“Coach Self and his wife rave about Tulsa,” Manning said. “They rave about TU, the athletic side of it, the community, the university. They had nothing but love. That has really made the transition easier mentally for me and I think for my wife and our kids, as well.”

While Self knows losing Manning is a great blow for KU, he couldn’t be happier for him landing his first head-coaching gig.

"Danny Manning is one of the most accomplished, humble people you'll ever meet,” Self said. “He's done more in his life through the athletic world than just about anybody, but you would never know it in visiting with him as he never ever talks about himself. His focus on deciding to be a basketball coach was to try to share some of his knowledge and make others better. He's certainly done that at a very high level with us here at Kansas. He's been around basketball his whole life, played for so many coaches, been able to steal from everybody and has developed a vast knowledge that will certainly play a huge role in his success as a head coach. 

"Although 45 years old, he's well beyond those in basketball years as far as experience. The University of Tulsa has not only hired a great person and a great ambassador, but also a man that will lead Tulsa to great heights athletically and be competing for championships in a very short amount of time."

Manning has already assembled a quality coaching staff, hiring former Jayhawk players Brett Ballard and Steve Woodberry as his assistants, as well as former KU manager and student assistant Justin Bauman as director of basketball operations. Wendell Moore, who served the last four years as an assistant at UMKC, will also be joining Manning’s staff as a full-time assistant coach.

Manning, who’s been around basketball his entire life, said he always knew he wanted to coach. After all, he grew up being mentored by his dad, who was a former NBA and ABA player and an assistant under Brown during Danny’s collegiate career. Even at age 4 or 5, Manning could be seen dribbling the ball on the sidelines during Ed’s practices with the Brown-coached ABA’s Carolina Cougars.

Manning spoke glowingly of his late father at his introductory press conference. Ed died in March 2011.

“I believe he'd be proud,” Manning said. “He got me into the game, showed me how to do things. He was someone in his professional career that was a journeyman, played on a lot of different teams. He had to do the dirty work, play the defense, dive on the floor, do all those small things that make teams work. I learned to appreciate that at a very early age. That's one of the biggest compliments I ever heard given a player was someone told my dad, ‘I enjoy playing with you because you made the game easier for me.’ I think that's a wonderful compliment. That's something we want to have as a team.”

You can bet Manning’s Tulsa teams will play unselfish, team basketball. Manning certainly was the consummate team player and learned from his dad and Brown about the importance of team ball. Brown preached the mantra: “Good ones do for themselves. Great ones do for others.”

“There’s not a day that goes by in practice that I don’t think of coach Brown,” Manning said at his induction into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008. “Coach Brown always used to tell us, ‘Go out and play hard. You play together and you play unselfishly.’ Those are the big things that I’ve always carried with me.”

Manning’s coaching style will also include playing “up-tempo” basketball. 

“We want to be a team that plays pressure man-to-man defense without giving up easy buckets, scores in transition, gets down the court, gets into some type of motion offense where the ball goes from one side of the court to the other, give the defenses a chance to break down, then attack,” Manning said. "We'll incorporate a lot of ball screens and give our ball handlers a chance of getting into the paint and create.”

***

After first arriving in Lawrence at age 17, Manning leaves the city and KU as an institution, the best player in Lawrence High School history and one of the top two players in Jayhawk annals who made an indelible impact on and off the court.

It all began after Brown hired Ed Manning as his assistant coach and the family moved to Lawrence after Labor Day in 1983. Juneau fondly remembers visiting the Holidome with senior captain Jeff Johnson to introduce themselves to Danny and his family. 

After knocking on the door, Ed answered.

“Danny was lying on the bed watching TV and he got up, and it was just like seeing all legs come up,” Juneau once recalled to me. “He didn’t weigh a lot. He was pretty skinny. But boy, you looked up and said, ‘Oh, my god, this is for real. So the ride began.”

It was a great ride with Manning leading the Lions to a 22-2 record and a berth in the state championship game against Wyandotte in Allen Fieldhouse, the same team which had defeated LHS in the second game of the season. Manning, who could dominate when needed all season, hit two big free throws to put LHS up by one point in the final minute.

“There was no hesitation (by me) or thought he was going to miss those free throws,” Juneau said. “He’s such a competitor.”

Then, with LHS down by one point (50-49), it was Manning who heaved up a shot near midcourt at the buzzer. The ball hit the back of the rim, rattled around the goal and bounced harmlessly to the floor.

While it was a painful loss for Manning and the Lions, Danny’s career was about to begin at Kansas, where he would make a lifetime of magical memories in Allen Fieldhouse.

Juneau remembers when Manning first decided to become a Jayhawk in the fall of 1983. While everybody in the college hoops world believed Manning would soon become a Jayhawk and join his dad at KU after arriving in Lawrence for his senior year of high school — that it was a “package deal” — Juneau said Manning wavered at first.

“He told me he didn’t think he was going to sign early (in November), that there were five or six places he thought he wanted to visit even though his dad was an assistant at KU,” Juneau recalled. “Obviously, North Carolina had been on him since he was young (and living in Greensboro, N.C.). Dean Smith (then-head coach at UNC) was from Topeka (and came to visit Danny at LHS).

“I remember telling (Smith), ‘Danny tells me that he doesn’t think he’ll sign early.’ One of the great lines, Dean looked at me and said, ‘Well, he better not because his dad might be a head coach by the end of the season.’

“Quite honestly, after he (Smith) left, Danny told me the next Monday he was going to KU. 

Evidently, he thought he needed to talk to Dean Smith and let him know what was going on.”

While Juneau said he and Manning had never talked about where he would have attended college had Ed not been hired at KU, the former Lawrence High School head coach said he heard “some speculation that N.C. State had the inside track and that Dean pushed him to go to KU because he knew he wasn’t going to get him. I heard that story, but I don’t know.”

North Carolina’s and N.C. State’s loss was KU’s gain as Manning would blossom the next four years at Kansas under Brown’s tutelage and demanding presence. Manning saved his best season for last as a senior in 1987-88. He was a consensus first-team All-American, led KU to the national championship, and left KU as the school’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder, which still stands.

Manning not only carved his name in KU basketball history, but is recognized as one of the best college players to ever play the game.

***

Everyone knows about Manning’s greatness on the court. But Juneau is one of those unique people who knows how special his former player is off the court and what kind of true ambassador and loyal person Tulsa is getting to run its program.

Juneau recalls the story of what happened after Manning was selected as the top overall pick in the 1988 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers and ready to compete in the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.

Juneau said Manning had helped him run his summer basketball camp at Lawrence High School while he was a at KU, but with his hectic schedule that summer of 1988, had no intention of asking Manning to assist with his camp again.

But after flying to Boston the previous night to sign a Reebok contract, Manning showed up unannounced at the LHS gym on the first day of camp around 9 a.m. ready to work with the campers.

“Here comes Danny from the parking lot,” Juneau said. “He said, ‘Coach, you didn’t even call me to let me know camp was starting.’ Here’s a kid who had been Player of the Year, first-round draft choice, going to the Olympics, the last thing I want to do is say, ‘Hey, Danny, my is camp is coming, aren’t you going to come up and work?’ 

“He calls my wife that morning and says, ‘Isn’t camp pretty soon.” She said, ‘Yes, it’s today.’ That’s the kind of man he is, that’s the kind of loyalty he has. He had to fly that Thursday night to Boston to sign a huge Reebok contract, but here he was to work the Lions basketball camp for his coach in the midst of all this stuff. That says something about him and maybe the relationship we have.”

Stardom at Lawrence High, KU and in the NBA never changed him, it only made him more giving, more appreciative of his roots, and more humble.

Manning’s former agent, the late Ron Grinker, said in January 1996 that he gave more to charity than he received in salary (after taxes) the previous year.

“Some people think that’s weird,” Grinker said.  “He’s very modest, maybe to a fault.”

Juneau elaborates more on Manning’s giving nature.

“The next year (after he signed the Reebok contract), he makes sure the Lions’ basketball teams has Reebok shoes,” Juneau said. “The first year he’s an NBA All-Star (with the Los Angeles Clippers in 1993), he flies me out, all expense paid. I’m hanging out with Magic Johnson and everybody else. (Manning’s) ‘entourage’ is the ball boy from the Clippers, two college roommates, the trainer of the Clippers. Those are the people he’s taking care of, that he wants to experience that. ... Those are the kind of things he does. He’s a very loyal person and obviously very thoughtful.

“He’s always asking about the other kids (from the 1984 Lions’ team), where they are, if I’ve seen them. I think there will always be a special place for (him) with all those kids he played with.”

***

Twenty-eight years after graduating from Lawrence High School, Manning wants to build that same kind of family community with the Tulsa program.

Manning, who basketball experts once predicted would revolutionize the forward position, now looks to revolutionize Tulsa hoops, where he’ll continue to fulfill his life’s work and help shape young men into leaders.

“I enjoy the game of college basketball. It's a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, a lot of fun,” he said. "I also enjoy the off-the-court side of it, spending time with the young men in terms of helping them grow up, sharing experiences. I think that's pretty much what life is all about. I've been very fortunate and blessed to have the experiences that I have. A lot of people helped me out along the way. I feel I need to share some of my experiences, the different things I've learned with the next generation. Hopefully they can do that and it just moves on down the road.”

Manning, who was on the road many times during his 15-year NBA career playing for seven different teams, said he hopes Tulsa is his last stop.

He dreams of making it a very memorable one and win national championships like former Tulsa coaches Richardson, Smith and Self did at Arkansas, Kentucky and Kansas, respectively.

“We look forward to hanging some banners of our own,” Manning said.

Josh Jackson ranks as one of KU’s all-time great freshman players

Josh Jackson had a superlative freshman season for Kansas in 2016-17 before jumping to the NBA as the No. 4 overall pick by the Phoenix Suns.

The 6-8 swingman ranks third in points for a KU freshman (572) behind Andrew Wiggins (597) and Ben McLemore (589) and second in scoring average (16.3) behind Wiggins (17.1).

Jackson also tied Danny Manning for No. 1 in rebounding with 258 boards, was fifth in rebounding average (7.4) and sixth in blocks (37).

He helped lead KU to a 31-5 record, Big 12 championship, an Elite Eight appearance, and a No. 3 AP ranking, while named Big 12 Rookie of the Year and first-team All-Big 12.

However, his NBA career hasn’t lived up to expectations these past two seasons for the struggling Suns, who finished tied for the second-worst record (19-63) in the league in 2018-19. Head coach Igor Kokoskov was just fired after one season.

After averaging 13.1 points in his rookie season (35 starts in 77 games), Jackson regressed in Year 2, only averaging 11.5 points per game on 41.3 field goal shooting and just 32.4 percent from three-point range and 67.1 percent at the charity stripe. The Detroit native started 29 of 79 games while averaging 25.2 minutes per contest. 

It will be worth following if the Suns continue giving Jackson a chance and room to improve, or if they wind up trading him under the new coaching staff.

While his NBA career is a still a work in progress, let’s look back at November 2016 when Jackson was a rising star as a KU freshman. Here is the story I wrote for that issue in Kansas City Sports & Fitness Magazine.

By David Garfield

Josh Jackson has heard all the hosannas and rave reviews since he began tearing up the AAU, USA Basketball, and high school scene. Jackson, a 6-8 swingman and now freshman phenom at Kansas, was rated the No. 1 player in the 2016 class and named co-MVP of the McDonald’s All-American game while averaging 26.9 points, 13.1 rebounds and 6.3 assists per game at Prolific Prep in Napa, California, in 2015-16.

KU coach Bill Self was the latest to magnify the hype when he signed Jackson last May after a long and intense recruiting battle in which the Detroit native chose the Jayhawks over Michigan State and Arizona while immediately lifting Kansas into the sexy pick as a Final Four and national championship contender.

"Josh has been a guy that is so respected in all high school circles the last four years. He is probably as highly thought of as any recent player to come out of high school because of his competitive nature,” Self said at the time. “He is very similar to Andrew Wiggins. He's a tall guard that can do a lot of everything. We feel his impact on our program next year will be as much as any freshman will have on any college program. He's extremely athletic but more importantly extremely competitive. We have a very competitive culture at Kansas but I think it just got improved with the signing of Josh. He's a guy that everybody enjoys playing with because he is so unselfish but also a guy that can take a game over."

Now that he’s a Jayhawk, Jackson remains thrilled with his decision to attend KU.

"I felt like this place was special,” he said. “I felt like I could get the most out of being here, on and off the court. I felt like coach Self really cared about me -- more than just a basketball player. I really felt a family feeling here and I still feel that today. I think that's one of the most amazing parts about the University of Kansas."

Jackson, who was named Big 12 Newcomer of the Week on Nov. 21 for his play in wins over No. 1 Duke and Siena (13.0 ppg, 80 percent field goal shooting, and scored 11 of 15 points in second half versus Blue Devils), has a chance to be an an “amazing” player like Wiggins, the former KU star and NBA Rookie of the Year for the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2015. He knows all about the comparisons to Wiggins from Self and other basketball gurus. After all, they both chose KU, both the same height, both the No. 1 player in their high school class, and both great athletes.

However, while Jackson is “extremely athletic,” he doesn’t possess the freak athleticism of Wiggins. They both shoot similar from the perimeter, though Jackson is a better ball handler, passer and playmaker, while Wiggins is the superior finisher at the rim.

Jackson, who played his junior and senior seasons at Prolific Prep, is flattered by the comparisons, but he’s not worried about being the second coming of Andrew Wiggins. He’s just trying to be the next Josh Jackson.

“It’s an honor to be compared to such a great player,” said Jackson, the Preseason Big 12 Freshman of the Year and a member of the Naismith National Player of the Year Watch List and John R. Wooden Award Watch List.

“I looked up to Andrew when he was in high school a little bit. Still talk to him here and there. He offers me advice all the time. But I think I’m my own player. (We) are similar in some ways, but I think we’re really different.” 

ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said Jackson doesn’t take a backseat to the possible future Hall of Famer.

“Josh Jackson is every bit as good as Andrew Wiggins,” Bilas said.

Three days after the Siena game on Nov. 21 against UAB at Sprint Center in Kansas City, Jackson had the best game of his young career. He scored 22 points and had seven rebounds, three assists and three steals in 33 minutes. Jackson also had some thunder dunks, including one show-stopping slam that got the crowd roaring.

He definitely punished the rim throughout the night.

“I’ve heard (Oklahoma City Thunder superstar guard) Russell Westbrook say, ‘I dunk the ball so hard that nobody challenges me when I go to the basket,’ so that’s what I’m trying to do," Jackson said.

UAB coach Robert Ehsan was extremely impressed with Jackson’s play.

“I saw him in high school, as most people did. But the more I’ve watched film on him, he’s an extremely talented player,” Ehsan said. “His versatility is what I’ve been surprised with. How many different things he can do on the floor: right hand, left hand, drive, post-up. Obviously, he is very athletic. I think he’s a tremendous player.”

So does Self.

“Certainly he’s an unbelievable talent that’s starting to get more and more comfortable all the time,” Self said. “There’s a lot of things he can work on to get better obviously, but he’s a talented kid. I don’t know if we’ve had anybody of that size, that good with the ball.”

Jackson’s road to greatness began as an 8-year-old playing one-on-one against his parents in their backyard. These were fun, yet incredibly intense games as Jackson’s competitive fire was born.

“They would never take it easy on me. They would always foul me kind of hard, block my shot all the time,” Jackson recalled. “They would beat me all the time. It really made me mad sometimes because I always wanted to win. I think that's where I really got it (competitiveness) from."

But Jackson learned from his parents’ lessons and grew as a basketball player and person. Every time he got knocked down, he got back up. Every time he got his shot blocked, he took the ball back hard to the rim. He improved his game and eventually beat his mom, Apples Jones, in a one-on-one game when he was 13 years old.

“She held her own,” Jackson said as the two finally stopped playing after Josh’s first big win over his mom, a defining moment for him and his career as he began to attract recruiting attention in the eighth grade.

Jones was a great basketball player and fierce competitor herself, competing for Allen County (Kan.) Community College and then UTEP. She played an instrumental role in teaching her son about the nuances of the game and also about life. Jackson, who calls her mom his “hero,” remains quite grateful the two are so close. Jones actually stayed in Lawrence when Jackson first arrived in town in June for summer school, helping her son get settled and acclimated to college life.

“I couldn’t even tell you how much,” Jackson told reporters then about what his mom means to him. “She’s just been an amazing woman in my life, amazing person. (She’s) helpful so much, always supportive. Obviously, she’s here right now. She doesn’t have to be here, but she loves me and wants to support me so that’s why she’s here. She has been really helpful to me around the campus. She’s been through her college years, and she tells me what to look out for, what to do, what not to do.”

Jones actually played a big role in helping Jackson with the recruiting process, but never pressured her son to choose Kansas or any other school.

"Her input was always the same; she wouldn't make the decision for me, but she wanted me to end up somewhere where she knew that they cared about me more than just basketball, more than just me dribbling the ball,” Jackson said. 

Jackson is embracing each moment of his college experience, one which could be a magical year for him and the No. 5 Jayhawks before he surely jumps to the NBA after this season as a possible No. 1 overall draft pick. He publicly stated before the season that his ultimate wish was to go 40-0. While that dream was dashed with an overtime loss to No. 11 Indiana in the season opener on Nov. 11, the fiery Jackson hopes KU can run the table the rest of the season.

Jackson will be a huge key if that goal is to become reality. He is multidimensional, has an incredible feel for the game, improving as a shooter, and is extremely mature and worldly for a freshman. Self realizes this is a truly special player who could go down in his one year at Kansas among the school’s all-time great freshmen like Wiggins and the legendary Danny Manning. 

“Josh is everything he’s advertised in our eyes,” Self said. “He’s got a chance to be one of the elite players in the country as a freshman. Very competitive, tough minded. He has a chance to be one of the special freshman the program has ever known.”

Emotional team meeting propelled KU to the 1986 Final Four

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.”