KGphoto (anonymous) says...

What? No comments?

go robisch!!!

July 12, 2008 at 8:57 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jakejayhawk (anonymous) says...

I met Dave after the KU Legends game at Allen in 1999. He was most gracious and easy-going. I'm glad I had that opportunity. Dave certainly was, and I am sure still is, proud to be a Jayhawk.

July 12, 2008 at 10:42 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

FlaHawk (anonymous) says...

Dave Robisch was a stud. He was an All-TIme Jayhawk BB player. He was the go to guy on the KU teams of the early 70s. He had a nice long NBA career and was always a gentleman and a class act. I believe he came to KU from downstate Illinois and blossumed in Ted Owens system.

He was bulker than Raef LaFrientz and could bang much better. He also had a deft touch into what would have been 3 point land back then! He is ranked @#1 in ABA All-Time turnover ratio (lowest), which is quite a compliment for a big man. He was a very smooth player. One of th eAll-TIme grats at KU!

Go dave!!! go hawks!!

July 12, 2008 at 11:13 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

yates33333 (anonymous) says...

Why did it take so long for Knostman?

July 12, 2008 at 3:53 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

Robisch was a fine player. I am grateful for his induction. He has been too long underappreciated. No big ever had a more automatic turn around J on the baseline than him. And he could step out and shoot it, too.

But here is why Robisch has been underappreciated.

Though a gifted scorer, a capable defender and an above average rebounder for a scorer, Robisch came to emblemize plod ball coached by Ted Owens. It was a brand of ball that won a lot of games and conference titles in the Big Eight, and even went deep in the NCAA tourney a couple times. But KU seemed often to run into hugely quicker, faster and better jumping teams and get not just beaten, but made to look out of step with the times.

The national sports media sometimes reinforced the stereo type of KU playing big, slow players (big, slow farm boys if I recall one generalization in Sports Illustrated). And KU did seem several steps behind the athleticism and speed of play of UCLA and UNC and UK.

Robisch even came to be nicknamed Robo, which while a great nickname, also seemed to refer indirectly to the slow, methodical, "robotic" approach to the game KU followed in those days.

Had Robisch gone to ucla, unc, or UK, he would have flourished, also. He was that good. And at those schools his ability to run the floor would have become better recognized. He was a loper, because of a spinal deformity, but he could cover a lot of ground when he loped. No one could have played in the ABA who could not get up and down the floor at least a little. He ran the floor a bit like Sasha Kaun. He didn't seem near as fast as everyone else, but he was always down the floor with everyone else, just the same.

But you would have had to have seen UCLA's teams dominate college basketball back in those days to appreciate just how far behind KU's style of play appeared. And then there was UNC's fast ball and sudden, audacious shifts into the four corner stall and UK's race horse ball and they all seemed to have guys who could out quick and out jump many of KU's players.

And even when the early versions of butcher ball (Indiana) and thug ball (Marquette) ascended on the national stage and seemed certain to eclipse both Wooden's and Dean's more delicate styles of play, KU's "plod" ball seemed to get manhandled and intimidated by the butchering.

July 13, 2008 at 11 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

So: Self junked the state of Kansas logo at center court, as only a true midwesterner familiar with KU basketball would do, and replaced it with the biggest flipping Jayhawk he could fit at center court. And he picked the right Jayhawk, not one of the cockamamie attempts before and after it at creating a Jayhawk. The minute the huge mythical bird was painted on the floor, whether you thought Self was a good hire, or not, you knew the guy had grown up in the midwest, you knew he knew what KU was about, and you something good might happen, if he were as sharp as he had been promoted to be.

Self dusted off all the connections to the Allen, Harp and Owens years, as only a basketball junky his age and having grown up in neighboring Oklahoma would have known to do. And he invited Ted Owens and his teams and the fans memories of them back into the KU legacy, perhaps as only a fellow Oklahoman would have had the conviction and conscience to do for Ted, and in the process he healed and unified KU in a profound way.

KU needed LB and Roy to break KU out of its rut, to turn its back on a part of its own by then somewhat burdensome tradition in order to set out anew. LB and Roy obliged, but, not surprisingly, Roy, the adult child of an alchoholic, did it by denying a part of past.

As a result, KU needed someone who could remember that denied past constructively. Bill was that man.

He unified the legacy of Kansas basketball even before he won the ring, hell, the minute he pasted the Jayhawk back on center court. What was Roy thinking all those years? The state of Kansas? Lawrence and KU are no more the state of Kansas than Manhattan and KSU are, or Wichita and Wichita State are.

Kansas is a free state (quite unlike North Carolina), a rectilinear archipeligo on grass of ethnic small towns and widely differing cities. Roy never really grasped that underneath all the recent Christian fundamentalist conformity, Kansas is so fundamentally anarchic that even as a free state it had Lawrence and Lecompton as free and slave strongholds within spitting distance of each other and from where the eventual capital of Topeka would be. Why, real Kansans can't agree on anything but hating Missouri and those in Lecompton probably even liked Missouri. That Kansas state logo at center court was always a dead give away that Roy, despite being the good old boy and custom shirt collared red neck that he eventually became, just was not from the same gene pool of necks as those in Kansas, or in the Great Plains.

July 13, 2008 at 11:03 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

I have lived away from the Midwest most of my adult life now, but I am a third generation Kansan. It has taken me until late middle age, reading a ton of history, and a few trips to France where some of Kansas' earliest European inhabitants came from, to really understand the incredible historical complexity of Kansas at all. Trust me. Roy never got it. He's a good man. He could talk guns and dogs and go aw shucks with the boys at the cafe in Larned, just as easily as he could schmooze KU's rich alums in California, but Roy is a southerner. And southerners are not fundamentally anarchic. Southerners are fundamentally traditional. Southerners fight to preserve slavery, to preserve the South, to preserve their honor, to preserve the Constitution, to preserve Christian values, to preserve King Cotton, tobacco, grits and the Research Triangle. Kansans fight any tradition but basketball and they fight over what basketball tradtion ought to be traditional--KU, KSU, or WSU. Kansas, as William Allen White reminded often, is a bell weather state-- a place where trends, for worse and for better, emerge earliest.

In the civil war, Kansans sought to be a free state so they could have the freedom to have free AND slave towns, as nearly as I can tell. There is no evidence that a large majority of Kansans were ever for anything except Kansas.

In the Populist and Progressive eras, Kansas was staunchly for AND against populism and progressivism.

In Prohibition, Kansas was staunchly for prohibition while at the same time running the largest bootleg liquor trade in the world from the strip pits of southeastern Kansas.

Why, during the Great Depression, rank and file Kansans could embrace progressivism, socialism, and New Dealism and STILL run Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt. The Republican party in Kansas, despite its domination of Kansas politics, is just the best party Kansans have found to disagree within. Outsiders too often mistake the tendancy for Kansans not to be bellicose in their disagreements as bible belt conformism. Wrong. Kansans learned long ago that if you are anarchic enough to let all kinds of persons live in your state, even if you do prefer they live in their own towns, or their own neighbohoods, well, you've got to tone down the rhetoric a bit, or no one will ever get anything done. Kansas has as much ethnic diversity as California, where I live, but that ethnic diversity grew out of scattering immigrant towns across the plains, rather than cramming them into large cities, and into a few rail road towns. The Germans, and the Swedes, and the Norwegians, and English, and the Irish and Bohemian, and the Polish, and what have you towns of the 19th Century, plus the Mexican, the Guatemalan, the Nicaraguan, the Honduran, the Vietnamese, the Cambodian and so on communities of the 20th and 21st Centuries, these are all neighbors who came because they couldn't accept where they lived previously, but had to get along too.

July 13, 2008 at 11:03 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

Finally, one also has to remember that Larry Brown and Roy Williams made their names at KU in part by bringing their new brands of contemporary basketball to KU; that is, they made their names by bringing KU out of the supposed dark ages of Owens ball and into the contemporary game. Things are never that simple in reality, of course.

Owens later teams picked up the pace and athleticism considerably. And the problem with Owens teams was never so much the style of play, as that Owens often failed to get the best out of his players. KU's players were often not at their best when they needed their best either. Owens teams seemed to have to be way more talented to win. They did not seem to be able to rise to the occassion and play beyond themselves the way both LBs and Roy's and now Bill's teams sometimes seem able to do do.

Regardless, the "slow" label was hard for Owens to undo and would have taken time and a ring to erase fully, if ever.

When Owens was fired, he lost the chance at continuing to undo the image and LB gladly took credit for bringing KU into the present. He took full credit for the games Ted's maturing recruits won for him early on. He did not dwell on how much Ted left him (though he did not deny it either), nor that some of those recruits suddenly had enough "athleticism" to help produce one of KU's great teams (the '86 team). LB was loyal to Dean Smith, not to Ted Owens, and Dean Smith never seemed a friend of Ted Owens at all.

So: LB won a ring and everyone said, "See, Owens was the problem all along," rather than saying, "See, Ted was changing and he was getting more athletic players."

July 13, 2008 at 11:07 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

And Roy continued the Owens disconnect, because Roy was just fanatically loyal to Dean and to this day cannot see any other way to play the game than the Carolina way. Roy basically junked KU's legacy after Dean left and remade KU into Little Chapel Hill on the Prairie. Same kind of center court logo as UNC. Same kind of uniforms as UNC. Same kind of offense and defense as UNC. Heck, Roy's players from his days as a UNC assistant became extended KU family and more important in recruiting players to KU than any of KU's actual legacy players. Roy treated KU's basketball legacy as if it were moribund since Dean left. Maybe it was. It hadn't won a ring and was not very respected nationally by then. But then Roy never won a ring either in 15 years.

Reviling and/or forgetting the Owens years seemed to become the norm for KU basketball coaches and fans. I was and remain among those glad that Owens was replaced, but I have always been able to harbor the opposites of thinking Owens did a lot of good things at KU and thinking that he was not sufficiently skillful at getting the best out of his players. Too many other fans just reviled, or forgot Ted Owens.

Robisch was collateral damage to that reviling and forgetting. Of course Dave Robisch was as good or better than Raef LaFrentz, or Nick Collison, to name two players much like him. He lead KU to the Final Four just like they did. And he was a way better shooter than either one of them. But in the Roy Years, it was Dave who?

When Self came he seemed to make a conscious decision to say that there was more to the KU legacy than what LB and Roy chose to preserve. Self no doubt did this to help him transcend the giant shoes he was being asked to fill. How many new basketball coaches have had to follow not one but two consecutive hall of famers? Embracing the whole of the KU tradition helped get him out from under solely being compared with those two.

July 13, 2008 at 11:13 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

In the 1960s, Kansans could harbor one of the most progressive and eventually anarchic islands of the student and civil rights movements in Lawrence AND smash it with the National Guard and witch hunt purges of marxist sociology professors. Kansas, as usual could be both.

From the 1980s to present, Kansas, a state with heavily government subsidized oil, agriculture and aircraft industries, and with a tradition of every kind of ethnic settlement on the planet in its small towns, and in the midst of the greatest technological enlightenment in the history of the human race, why, Kansans naturally largely decided that religious fundamentalism and anti-big government Republicanism was the latest way to pick a fight among themselves and with the rest of the country in a free state. Freedom admits both the hair brained idea and the good idea and lets them slug it out. Freedom and slavery. republicanism and neoconservatism. religious tolerance and intolerant fundamentalism. Science and creationism. Civil rights and race bating. In a free state, it is all there and allowed to fight it out. Why? Because free people think the chaff will eventually be threshed out and the wheat will remain.

Roy, I doubt, got any of this. He just looked at the basketball lovers and bible thumpers and thought of the basketball fanatics and religious tents in Carolina where he grew up and said, well, its flat as a pancake, and the last high tide was back in the Cretaceous, but I can relate.

Bill Self, who grew up in a neighboring plains state, a state that was first wilderness, then a cattle trail to get from Texas to the rail head towns of Kansas, then a Federal prison territory for native Americans (euphemistically referred to as an Indian territory), then ruthlessly transformed into a state by the Mellon family to get at the Oklahoma crude by having a land rush, and then "civilized" by the Gores and so forth, well, Bill understood Kansas. Its not that Oklahoma is like Kansas. It isn't. It has its own unique legacy. It is that Oklahomans are next door neighbors of Kansans. They can hear the fighting and squabbling across the fence. They know what they hell Kansans are like, because they have had to trade with them. They know ALL about the Jayhawkers. They used to have to pay tolls. And Kansans talk and act enough like Oklahomans that, while different, they can relate to each other under the surface to some extent.

KU was very fortunate to find Oklahoman Bill Self, just as KU was once fortunate to find Missourian Phog Allen. Sometimes--but not always, no Kansan would admit to anything being always--our neighbors know us best.

So now is Dave Robisch.

July 13, 2008 at 11:14 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

jaybate (anonymous) says...

My apologies to those few who read my long posts. I got this one screwed up in the cut and paste process and lost the original. Such is life. Call it a collage. :-)

July 13, 2008 at 11:18 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

KU (anonymous) says...

Another masterful essay from Jaybate. A lot of though provoking comments about history....and basketball.

My favorite line was "the last high tide was back in the Cretaceous but I can relate."

July 14, 2008 at 8:50 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )