Some players will tell you that the 1987-88 Kansas Jayhawks had confidence going into the NCAA Tournament, that they believed anything could happen because of Danny Manning, that they had finally seen the light after making it through four dark months.
That’s not how Bill Pope remembers it at all.
Pope, the team manager, was viewed by the players as one of their own. So he was at Mark Randall and Jeff Gueldner’s place the night after the regular-season finale against Oklahoma State. Most of the guys were there, and to Pope, it felt more like an end-of-the-year gathering.
“We knew there wasn’t a whole lot of hope at that stage,” Pope says. “Nobody within the group foresaw us winning the championship.”
Pope was also there the night before KU’s first-round NCAA Tournament game against Xavier at the team hotel in Lincoln, Neb. He was rooming with assistant coach Alvin Gentry, and he overheard Gentry planning a recruiting trip with fellow assistant R.C. Buford for the day after the Xavier game.
“They were making plan B’s already,” Pope says.
It made sense.
Even Pope, a KU student, threw in the towel midway through the season. The Jayhawks were 12-8, for crying out loud, and oh, was there ever crying. Fans were so fed up, the buzz around Lawrence was that KU would be lucky to be host to an NIT game. Yet, there they were, a No. 6 seed, getting ready to play Xavier.
“I remember the last six games pretty well,” Manning says. “But anything before that time, I struggle with remembering.”
Selective amnesia like Manning’s should be the goal of every team that enters the Big Dance with double-digit losses.
Six games were all the Jayhawks needed to change everything.
Three golden weeks.
OCTOBER
Bill Pope’s friends convinced him to write a book. You see, in telling the story of the 1987-88 Kansas team, it’s easy to forget that the Jayhawks were a consensus preseason top-five team, picked by The Sporting News to win the whole thing.
Pope, a bright-eyed senior from Rose Hill, Kan., bought in. How could he not? He was on the bench in 1986 when the Jayhawks went to the Final Four and were widely considered the best team in the country. He saw how good a team the genius of Larry Brown and the talent of Danny Manning could be. When they both put off their respective NBA suitors for one more year, Pope was sold, and his book highlighting their run to the championship would be next.
It wasn’t just Manning either. Archie Marshall, the team’s sixth man in ’86, had fought his way back from a knee injury that he suffered against Duke in the Final Four defeat. He missed the ’87 season, but Marshall was ready to go. Then there was the addition of talented junior-college point guard Otis Livingston in the backcourt to go along with gutsy sophomore Kevin Pritchard.
Inside, 6-foot-10 giants Marvin Branch and Mike Masucci would provide enough backup for Manning that Brown could redshirt big men Sean Alvarado and Randall.
So once things got rolling in the fall of 1987, Pope was staying up late at night, scribbling down notes from each day’s events, using candles to keep himself awake.
CHRISTMAS
The holidays had arrived, and all was well for the Jayhawks as they traveled to New York City for a four-team tournament at Madison Square Garden. After they beat Memphis State in the first game, KU was 8-2.
But in the second game against St. John’s, Archie Marshall fell to the floor in pain halfway through the first half. Marshall knew immediately that he had torn up his knee, this time his other knee, for the second time in two years. The players and coaches were in shock. They’d watched Marshall will himself back to the court for his senior year. Now, his Kansas career was over. The Jayhawks lost 70-56, and their long winter had just begun.
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