How health issue clarified Kansas coach Bill Self’s view of the future (and path to it)
One morning in 2016, Star photographer Rich Sugg and I spent a few hours with Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self talking about how he deals with stress by unplugging, exercising and otherwise getting away from it all.
Part of the idea was to accompany him on one of his 4.5-mile round-trip walks from Allen Fieldhouse to the Memorial Park Cemetery monument to basketball inventor James Naismith — whose actual grave is farther back in the park.
As tends to happen with the ever-engaging Self, we got talking in his office for so long that we audibled to walking briefly in the cemetery and then going to get some lunch. At a Panera Bread, where Self was somehow just another customer being asked for his name, he ordered the Green Passion Smoothie and a small French onion soup and spoke about everything from what he was reading to his favorite music to the need to lose weight and eat better.
Well-intentioned as he was about taking care of himself, facing no apparent imminent health issues beyond being cursed by balky knees, Self also was ambivalent about it in certain ways.
At a time he said he would be “ecstatic” to coach through the contract that then ended in 2022, he was just as apt to take a long walk 15 days in a row as he was to miss 15 straight. Playing for the tie, you could call that, certainly a familiar concept to me.
Flash forward to March 8 and Self’s sudden hospitalization — worrisome amid the scant initial public details — for a heart catheterization procedure at the University of Kansas Health System.
The process that forced Self to sit out the Big 12 Tournament and the NCAA Tournament also served as clarifying.
Even energizing, to hear Self tell it on Wednesday in his first public appearance since then.
What began as an “out of body-type experience” and the sense that “I just knew I wasn’t right” led to the most emphatic conviction Self has expressed about the future in years.
“I missed my job, I love my job and I want to do my job for a long time,” said Self, who now essentially has a lifetime contract.
The 60-year-old Hall of Fame coach with two national titles and 787 wins to his name later added: “So my goal is to take this place to a whole different level than we’ve ever been to before. And we’ve been to a really high level.”
Part of that reinvigoration comes from the timely and excellent care he received, including even the parts where he was told what he didn’t want to hear about when he could return to the sideline.
(He has no limitations now, he said, and feels so good he could even power lift. “If,” he said, pausing and grinning, “I wanted to.”)
Part of it was in the overwhelming outpouring of encouragement he received from peers and fans. And, most of all, family and the KU staff and players he felt did the team proud during what we can call a conspicuous absence that he tried to downplay.
But a pivotal part of it seemed to be from a feeling many of us might be able to relate to:
Sometimes you maybe don’t really know what you have or want until it’s taken away.
In Self’s case, that realization came in the aftermath of a parallel perception of health issues gradually creeping up on him in ways that didn’t really register in the moment.
He encountered some shortness of breath and other mild symptoms, for instance, weeks before experiencing tightness in his chest and balance issues that compelled him to seek medical attention.
“I think sometimes we don’t realize we don’t feel well,” he said, “until we actually feel well and know the difference.”
While Self said he never feared for his life after the episode that led to two stents being implanted to treat blocked arteries, he felt acute senses of loss and deprivation as the team played its last five games without him — bookending a season that began with him missing the first four games under a self-imposed suspension by KU.
Funny how different those scenarios were, though.
As he watched his team play Duke in Indianapolis from his hotel room in November, Self said he was yelling so loud that people down the hall were hollering at him to keep it down.
When he watched his team from a hotel in Des Moines during NCAA play, Self was instructed to keep a blood-pressure monitor next to him and check his pressure “when I would get a little bit animated or a little bit upset because I thought maybe we didn’t execute or officials didn’t give us a 50-50 call.”
Agitations notwithstanding, he suggested, somehow his body actually kept the readings below what he reckoned must have been “a ridiculously high” threshold. Especially for a coach whose on-court persona is the opposite of what he jokingly called a “Zen-type” approach.
The common denominator in each of those hotel experiences, as well as the hospital stay during the Big 12 tourney, was how much it struck him to “have no control.” And to not be with everyone in the locker rooms. Or to stand among them in the crucible of the final minutes of an even game, when his senses are pulsating off the charts on any scale.
“I love that moment,” he said.
That yearning was clear to him in the middle of his hospital stay, sure. And no doubt even as he was sitting and using a megaphone to conduct practices in Des Moines and anguishing from afar over the second-round loss to Arkansas.
But he didn’t truly consider it all until quiet time after the season, encapsulated in how he described his internal monologue one recent morning:
“‘OK, what are you going to do today? Well, you know, I tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to have breakfast. And then I’m going to sit around and go for a walk maybe, and then come back and watch TV. Or read. Or something like that.’”
Right about then, he said, he realized that was not at all what he needed to be doing. It was time to get on the phone, he figured, and get recruiting “by living in the (transfer) portal.”
But by living with a qualifier that Self now understands can no longer be treated as an afterthought or whim.
“I’ve always thought that stress affects everybody else, but it doesn’t affect me,” he said. “And I’ve always thought no matter what anybody’s got, you could put it on my shoulders and I can handle it. Whatever the situation would be.”
So he’ll need to reassess how he processes stress, Self said, and that will be its own intangible challenge.
But at least over the last few weeks he’s been more diligent about diet and exercise and seems committed to making those a priority after being “very, very, very inconsistent” with that his entire adult life.
As he pondered the support he’s gotten these last weeks, including the approximately 161 text messages he still intends to respond to, Self summed it up by saying, “It’s been nice, but it’s time to move forward.”
Just differently than he was moving before.