You can’t blame Kansas football coach Terry Allen if he occasionally feels like the kid chosen to lead the Children’s Crusade to the Holy Land in 1212.
You know, that feisty little ragamuffin the pope handed a slingshot with instructions not to come back until he had a sultan’s head on a snow cone. Three chances: Not much, very little and none at all.
Prospects are not quite that flimsy for Terry as far as posting a 6-5 or better record at KU this fall. But they’re far from glossy, and some wonder if KU can even duplicate its 4-7 of 2000. Terry may have his best collection of Big 12-level players yet for this pivotal campaign. But the schedule which last season was one of the nation’s toughest is just as bad.
There are non-league matches with Southwest Missouri, Wyoming and UCLA. Then come eight league foes, six of whom played in bowl games last season and several of which could be even better this time around. The bowl teams: Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Kansas State, Nebraska, Texas and Iowa State. Then there are rejuvenated Missouri and Colorado.
Who you gonna beat in that treacherous octet? No Baylor or Oklahoma State to help the cause. There’s horrendous pressure on Allen and athletics director Bob Frederick. The athletics department has absorbed a lot of lumps over past months; it’s going to take a whale of a football season to stop at least some of the rain.
With challenge, we’re told, comes opportunity. But that 11-game gauntlet offers a little more opportunity than Terry and Co. would prefer at this stage.
A rumor that won’t die is that Frederick may be moved into some administrative post on the staff of chancellor Robert Hemenway with a new athletics director in place by fall. Denials abound. But that would take heat off Frederick if the football coach he hired had to be removed by somebody else.
l
Pardon an old-timer. As much as I admire college basketball superstar Jackie Stiles from Claflin, I’d bet that at a given stage of development, Kansas’s Lynette Woodard would have eaten her for breakfast. We keep hearing about college stars such as Ann Meyers, Cheryl Miller, Cheryl Swoopes, Nancy Lieberman-Cline, et al, but one-on-one, Woodard is easily the best female basketeer I’ve ever witnessed.
First off, Lynette scored some 300 points more than Jackie in her 1978-81 career here even if the modern NCAA format doesn’t recognize that. Woodard was four inches taller (at 6-0), stronger, faster, just as quick and as competitive. As a collegian, she had 1,714 rebounds and 522 steals in a then-record 139 games.
My first intro to Woodard was in March of 1975 when as a sophomore she led Wichita North High to the state title and repeated that feat again in 1976 and 1977. Stablemate Chuck Woodling needed help and had me cover the ’75 women’s meet at Lawrence High. As a mere soph, Lynette could have started for most boys’ teams. She got steadily better and filled in countless impressive squares on her resume.
I’m likely to hear from one unidentified e-mailer who has reminded me that I’m old, fat, dumb, white and not an Ivy League grad like she is. This is news? I assume my correspondent is black because she loves to apply that “white guy” label to this ink-stained wretch. You can imagine she didn’t like my last piece that mentioned the demands of Title IX gender equity in modern college sports, and reminded me that I’m old-fashioned for emphasizing past heroes and heroines.
Wonder if she’ll take exception to my choice of Lynette Woodard over Jackie Stiles as a court whiz. If you never saw Lynette, don’t knock it, honey.
l
Just once I’d like to hear a college coach rip into a kid who gives him at best two years of endeavor before bolting to the pros. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo dutifully said of Zach Randolph’s defection after one season: “Even though it was one year, it was still a worthwhile year for me and the team.” Baloney! How do you sustain a program?
Three years, like Paul Pierce, now Drew Gooden, is reasonable. Guys like JaRon Rush and Korleone Young prove most kids need three or four years to do more than just “make the NBA.” Rosters keep getting loaded with kids, so why do so many keep dreaming and bolting?
Staying at KU another year is easily the wisest thing Gooden can do. He still has a lot to learn and he isn’t going to learn it as some NBA spear-carrier. Betcha a year from now Notre Dame’s Troy Murphy will feel the same.
l
Let’s hear it for tennis great Martina Navritolova and her disapproval of Richard Williams’s victory dance on the court following daughter Venus’s win in last year’s U.S. Open. “If Richard Williams had danced in front of me after I had lost to one of his daughters in a match, I probably would have hit him,” said Martina. She also bristles at Williams’s playing the race card. “In fact, I think, if anything, people have been treating them (Serena and Venus) with kid gloves because they are African Americans.”
Too bad the boorish father detracts so often from the terrific achievements of the talented daughters. Family business card: “Serena, Venus and Penus.”
