Dallas ? David Lawhorn figures his trek to the Big 12 tournament is nothing more than the first stop on Kansas University’s road to the Final Four.
And well worth an hour and a half in the air.
“We’re thinking championship,” said Lawhorn, who came to Dallas with his son Christopher, a sixth-grader at Sunflower School in Lawrence. “We want this to be the start, so they continue on and we can follow them all the way down to New Orleans.”
The Lawhorns join hundreds of Jayhawk faithful flocking this week by car, bus and plane to Dallas for the men’s basketball tournament, the first time the conference event has bee contested away from Kansas City, Mo.
In Lawrence, the move meant no more cutting out of work early to catch the Jayhawks live and in person at Kemper Arena, a mere 40-minute shot down Interstate 70 to the West Bottoms.
This year, only the well-traveled Lawrencians — and those fortunate enough to score tickets — will take their place inside the sold-out, 19,100-seat American Airlines Center, the palatial sports complex built in 2001 for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and NHL’s Dallas Stars.
Its cost: $420 million, or enough to keep Coach Roy Williams on the KU bench for at least 400 more years.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Lawhorn, a physician who lives in Lawrence and works in the Kansas City area. “Not only is it unbelievable, but the area around it is amazing. Could Kansas City do something like this? Sure. But it would take a lot of effort.”
It’s not as if the city is unfamiliar territory for Jayhawks.
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More than 3,200 KU graduates call Dallas home — a number that swells to more than 6,000 when alumni in nearby Fort Worth and Austin are counted. Another 2,800 live in Houston.
While the numbers pale in comparison to the 69,000 alumni who live within an hour of Kemper arena, event organizers are putting together a Texas-sized welcome for those sporting crimson and blue.
The KU Alumni Association’s traditional rallies — born inside the Kemper basement, then shifted to a hall at Hale Arena and finally to a parking lot next to the Golden Ox restaurant — this week will be at the brand-new Kansas Pavilion in the popular West End dining and entertainment district.
Expect bands, cheers, food and drinks — along with several hundred fans shaking pompoms, sporting temporary Jayhawk tattoos and chanting Rock Chalk Jayhawk.
“They’re blocking off a street,” said Jennifer Sanner, an association senior vice president. “It’s an entirely new adventure for us. We have the Kansas City routine down pat, but this is a new chapter for us.”
