My lasting memory of Bob Frederick comes from the day he stepped down as the athletic director at the University of Kansas. It was a sad day, of course, sad because after 14 years of being athletic director at the school he loved, after almost 40 years of service to the University of Kansas, he was being run off. </p><p>&ldquo;I just wish,&rdquo; he said that day, &ldquo;we could have been as successful as everyone thought we should be.&rdquo;</p><p>It was a sad day, only it wasn&rsquo;t &hellip; because Bob Frederick would not let it be sad. That just wasn&rsquo;t in his makeup. He was a gentleman and a gentle man &mdash; he never really understood why there had to be so much fury surrounding college sports. He never understood why he received so many fierce and violent e-mails and why good people would call his home to scream at him over a football loss. </p><p>You don&rsquo;t meet too many people in big-time sports like Bob Frederick. It always seemed to me that he wanted to win, but he did not hate to lose, not in the way so many people expected. He believed: The thing about losing was how you handled it.</p><p>You probably have read his story by now. Bob Frederick grew up in Kirkwood, Mo., near St. Louis, and he was recruited to the Air Force Academy by an assistant coach named Dean Smith. He could not go to the Air Force though &mdash; he had an eye defect &mdash; and Smith suggested that he go instead to his alma mater, Kansas. </p><p>Frederick did go to Kansas, and he walked on the basketball team. And that began his lifelong passion for the school. He would get pulled in many different directions &mdash; he would coach briefly at Brigham Young and Stanford, he would teach high school chemistry and run the athletic department at Illinois State &mdash; but Frederick&rsquo;s life would mostly revolve around Kansas. He was an assistant coach at Kansas and a teacher and, of course, athletic director. He got his bachelor&rsquo;s degree at Kansas and his masters&rsquo; degree and also his doctorate in education at Kansas. He loved the place.</p><p>He was athletic director when Danny and the Miracles won the NCAA basketball championship in 1988. More, though, he was athletic director when Larry Brown left to coach the San Antonio Spurs, leaving behind a team in turmoil and, within months, a school on probation. The violations had occurred when Frederick was at Illinois State, but he had to find a basketball coach who could clean up the mess, win basketball games and bring integrity to the school. Dozens of people wanted the job &mdash; big names &mdash; but he went back to the man who had recruited him to Air Force. And Dean Smith recommended hiring his assistant coach Roy Williams.</p><p>Frederick did not hesitate. People will forget how controversial the Roy Williams hire was when Frederick made it &hellip; here he was hiring an unknown assistant coach at the school that had just won the national championship. But Frederick stood strong behind his choice. He and Williams had many of the same feelings about college sports &mdash; that these games were supposed to build character and shape lives and inspire loyalty and trust, bring people together. Williams has said that he never met a better man than Bob Frederick.</p><p>Roy Williams, of course, went on to become one of the best coaches in the country. But that wasn&rsquo;t exactly the point. The point was that Williams reflected what Bob Frederick believed about sports. In 1996, Frederick hired Terry Allen to coach the football team. And he made that hire for the same reason: Allen also believed in the power of college athletics to shape the lives of young men and women. Trouble was, Allen didn&rsquo;t win, and so there was all this rage directed at Frederick.