Manning finds a home on KU's bench

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And then there was the final, the best performance of all: Manning scored 31 points, grabbed 18 rebounds, made five steals and blocked two shots in the national championship game against Oklahoma, a performance so otherworldly that Sooners coach Billy Tubbs says he still sees it “every night when I go to bed.”

It was an incredible run. Manning did many things before and after that — he was a two-time All-American, an NBA star and also an NBA survivor — but for so many, the memory of Danny Manning is reduced to those six games in 1988, when he carried an undermanned Kansas team to its first national title in 36 years.

And maybe that — the fact so many people remember him only for that run — gets us close to why he’s an assistant coach. Manning is much more than six games played 20 years ago.

“What you have to understand about Danny,” Kansas coach Bill Self says, “is that he couldn’t care less about any of that. He couldn’t care less about being recognized. He couldn’t care less about people knowing who he is or remembering what he did. He has no ego; I mean, none.”

Then Self tells a story — he flew up to Detroit when Manning was still playing in the NBA and talked to him about being a coach. Manning said he really wanted to do it. Self explained all that it would take, all the time he would have to be away from his young family, and he asked, “Do you really want to do all that now?”

Manning came back to him later and said, ‘No, I don’t. Not yet. But I want to be involved.”

And for five years, Manning served as the excessively titled “Director of Student-Athlete Development/Team Manager.” Basically this meant he was in charge of team travel, in charge of ordering equipment, in charge of creating basketball clinics, stuff like that. This year, when assistant Tim Jankovich left to become head coach at Illinois State, Self went back to Manning.

“I’m ready now,” Manning told him.

“He’s a basketball junkie,” Self says. “That’s what it’s about. He loves being a part of the game. He doesn’t care what’s involved. He just wants to be a part.”

•••

Danny Manning was scouting Kansas State — he was charting all the plays in his book — and he kept stopping every few minutes to talk excitedly about Michael Beasley.

“Look at his hands,” he said. “He has those huge hands.”

“He has the softest touch I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.

“I love the way he works around the basket,” he said. “He makes it looks so easy.”

I said: “I know someone else who made it look pretty easy.”

Manning did not smile at that. He did not seem to like his own game being brought into the conversation.

“Naw, man, not me,” he said. “Not like this guy. It’s like a different world. He can do things I couldn’t even dream about.”

The thing that was striking was how much he seemed to enjoy it – even this, even just scouting a team that the Jayhawks had already played twice. He liked it all — charting the game, breaking down players’ strengths and weaknesses, figuring out what was happening on the court. Manning has said it was really in the last couple of years as an NBA player that he started looking at the game from different angles, figuring out mismatches, playing coach while he watched games on television. That’s when he thought about getting into coaching.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.