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Manning finds a home on KU's bench
Danny Manning did not want to talk for this story. There’s a reason. He’s had enough fame. He’s had enough words written about him. He’s a Kansas assistant college basketball coach now. He’s just another guy.
Of course, he’s not just another assistant basketball coach. He’s Danny Manning. He’s one of the greatest college basketball players of them all. He’s Danny of Danny and the Miracles, the remarkable 1988 Kansas national championship team. He’s the first pick in the NBA draft. He’s a guy who scored more than 12,000 points in the NBA and made an All-Star team despite three ACL injuries. He’s a legend who …
“It’s two,” he said.
I’m sorry?
“It’s two,” and he pointed up at the scoreboard over the Sprint Center floor.
This was Friday, during the Kansas State-Texas A&M game. Manning pointed up, and on the screen they were showing one of those basketball shuffle games where three basketballs dribble around, and you are supposed to guess which basketball has the Big 12 logo on it.
“How do you know it’s two?” I ask.
“Because it was three during our game,” he says.
Before I could figure out the logic behind that, the shuffling ended. The basketballs turned. The logo was behind basketball number two. Danny Manning smiled. Something still bothered me, though. Manning made his prediction based on the winning basketball being number three during his Kansas game. But how did he know that? Was he watching the scoreboard during the game?
“Hey,” I asked, “how did you know it was three during your game, anyway?”
He smiled again. “Awareness,” he said.
•••
The question that sparked this story was simple: Why is Danny Manning an assistant basketball coach?
Look: Being an assistant basketball coach is hard work. It’s often thankless work. It’s constant travel. It’s mind-numbing video study. It’s intense, cutthroat recruiting. It’s long days, long nights, working with players, dealing with their problems, enjoying their triumphs, all of it when no one is watching. It’s a job for the young and ambitious, a job for the lifers who just want to be a part of the game.
Danny Manning doesn’t seem to fit. Manning could do anything. He could live the legend’s life of luxury. Here it is, 20 years after he carried his Kansas team to the national title in one of the great virtuoso performances in the history of American sports.
He scored 25 points against Murray State in the second round, but more than that, he willed the Jayhawks to victory in the final 38 seconds. Kansas was losing by one. Manning made a jump hook, then grabbed a rebound, then got fouled, then made two free throws, then knocked away the in-bounds pass. Kansas won by three.
Manning scored 38 against Vanderbilt in the Midwest semifinals.
“I was in his face all the time,” Vanderbilt’s Frank Kornet told reporters. “It truly was frustrating. It was like, ‘When is this man going to miss?’ ”
He scored 25 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, and had four steals and six blocked shots in Kansas’ upset victory over Duke in the semifinals. In the last few minutes of that game, he personally shut down the Blue Devils — the biggest play being a nasty block of Duke star Danny Ferry in the closing minutes.
“Coach looked at Danny in the huddle,” Kansas teammate Scooter Barry said after that game. “And he said, ‘We’ve got 6 minutes left. If you want to take control, now’s the time.’ … So he took control.”
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.
“He’s really knowledgeable,” Self says. “Of course, there are a lot of guys in coaching who are knowledgeable. The difference with Danny is, that when he says something, the players probably listen more than with anyone else because of the respect they have for him. … I mean, if you’re a young player, who would impress you more than Danny Manning? He has done everything that you hope to do someday.”
Manning has talked at times about becoming a head coach, and certainly that could happen. But he has also talked about just being happy, living in Lawrence, spending time with the family, working for his school, coaching basketball.
“Look at how easy he makes it look,” he said as he watched Beasley. “It’s beautiful to watch, isn’t it?”
•••
Sunday, lots of people at the Sprint Center were thinking about Danny Manning. He got a huge ovation when he was introduced before the Kansas-Texas Big 12 championship game.
“I told him: ‘Look at you. You got louder cheers than our players,’ ” Self would say. “He didn’t like that much.”
Then the game began, and it was an amazing game. The first half was as good as any college basketball game I could remember seeing. Texas led 46-45 at halftime, the teams made 17 of 26 three-point shots, Texas had only two turnovers, Kansas had 16 assists. It was absolutely beautiful.
And it reminded many of that other amazing first half, 20 years ago, when Kansas and Oklahoma played at Kemper Arena for the national title. The halftime score was 50-50.
So the way Self and players remembered it, in the locker room Self told his team: “That was probably the best half of basketball played in Kansas City since 1988.” And then he turned to Danny Manning and said, “What happened in that game?”
Manning said, “Things slowed down in the second half.”
Things slowed down again on Sunday. And, like in ’88, Kansas made some big plays late and won the game. That ’88 final score was 83-79. This final score was 84-74.
“That was something, wasn’t it?” Manning said when the game ended.
He looked happy. And then a couple of reporters started to work their way toward him, maybe to ask a couple of questions, maybe not. Manning was not taking any chances. He ducked into a side office. He had said enough. About six weeks ago, because the media requests had gotten so overwhelming, he agreed to talk for a few minutes — just this one time — about 1988 and his life and his feelings.
“My memories are fond enough,” he said.