Anaheim, Calif. ? Don’t go looking for Nick Collison, Keith Langford or any other Kansas University basketball player in the Magic Kingdom this week.
Disneyland is for kids, not players aiming for a national championship.
“Disneyland is a great place, but we’re on a mission,” guard Aaron Miles said Wednesday before practice at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, Calif. “We don’t want to get tired.”
The Jayhawks had been scheduled to bus up Harbor Boulevard and into Disneyland about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, but the team’s seniors nixed the trip.
“I didn’t want to go,” said Jeff Graves, a junior forward. “It’s kiddie stuff. It’s too much a kiddie-like atmosphere. Plus, we’d have to wake up at 8:30.”
Langford, for his part, wanted to make his first-ever trip to Walt Disney’s land of enchantment. But he wasn’t complaining.
“It’s best we didn’t go,” he said. “I don’t want anybody saying we lost because we got tired at Disneyland, just like they said we lost in Maui because we went to the pool. We will be rested, not tired. …
“I’m not here to go to Disneyland. I’m trying to win and go to New Orleans.”
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The KU pep band is hoping to play a gig Friday at Disneyland.
A KU win tonight would give the band a day off before Saturday’s West Regional final. The students have an invitation to play KU fight songs in the land of Mickey Mouse.
Tom Stidham, associate director of bands, relishes the opportunity to play in the world of perpetual smiles. But he has a bit of a concern.
It would be nice to have something to play with.
“Our instruments are being shipped,” Stidham said Wednesday at the team hotel. “We hope they’re here in time for (today’s) pep rally.”
Danny Hernandez and his son, Nick, were among the dozens of fans soaking up the KU atmosphere at the Jayhawks’ open practice Wednesday.
And the residents of south Orange County were feeling some good vibes. Dad, sporting a Collison jersey, and son, wearing a Kirk Hinrich uniform top, watched the team intently as they waited for a chance to grab some autographs.
“I was born in ’52, when they won their first championship,” said Hernandez, a lifelong KU fan from Topeka. “Nick was born in ’88, when they won their second.”
No word yet on whether there’s another child on the way.
Anaheim, Calif. ? Several years have passed since the wife and I fulfilled our parental obligation by taking our two daughters to Disneyland. What kind of parents would we have been if we hadn’t shepherded our children through the Magic Kingdom?
Heck, the girls would have threatened to commit hara-kiri in the middle of the living room if we told them we were going to the Douglas County Fair instead.
Thus we experienced Walt Disney’s mid-20th Century dream firsthand. Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Concessionsland. We did them all.
Now I’m back in Anaheim and, instead of going to Disneyland, I’m headed for a place called the Arrowhead Pond which conjures visions of the home of the Kansas City Chiefs after a frog choker.
Mostly, the Pond’s floor is covered with ice because it is the home of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, a National Hockey League team. And that begs this question: Why does an area with year-round mild weather have two professional hockey teams (the Mighty Ducks and Los Angeles Kings) and not a single National Football League team?
If you can answer that, maybe you can tell me why everyone thinks Duke University, a four-year private school endowed by tobacco money — it is NOT named after John Wayne — is able to pick and choose its men’s basketball recruits.
Located in Durham, N.C., in an area called the Research Triangle, Duke does have an Ivy League-like campus replete with majestic trees and stately buildings. But you cannot see the campus until you are in it. You can embrace the vista of Kansas University’s campus from miles away on I-70, but at Duke you must follow the signs or you’ll wind up at a Krispy Kreme or in Kannapolis.
I’ve never seen a men’s basketball game in Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium, but I’ve been inside the unimposing structure and it’s basically non-descript — a floor, seats and banners … lots of banners signifying many, many championships. And although it is certainly steeped in tradition, I couldn’t envision Cameron Indoor Stadium as being in the same shrine-like category as Allen Fieldhouse.
Some people wonder why Duke basketball players don’t wear pinstripes. They are, after all, the New York Yankees of men’s college basketball.
Dispatched to Salt Lake City last weekend, Duke’s players learned even the Mormons don’t like them. When the Blue Devils played Colorado State, the locals heckled them. Later, when Duke met Central Michigan, the Utah folks derided them again.
Duke runs a classy program, yet is booed even at neutral venues. That’s what happens when you’re America’s Team and people are weary of you winning and winning and winning.
Kansas has just as classy a program as Duke, yet the Jayhawks are, like every other NCAA Division I program, Duke wannabes.
Asked this week about his relationship with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, KU’s Roy Williams said, “We’re good friends.” What did you expect him to say? Of course, they’re good friends. They don’t have to play each other all the time.
I remember when Williams and Texas Tech’s Bob Knight were good friends. That was before Williams started beating Knight’s teams like a drum. The relationship between Williams and Knight has cooled visibly over the years.
Williams is also apparently not all that popular among some other Big 12 Conference coaches. In coach-of-the-year balloting by the media, Williams won. Yet the coaches tapped Rick Barnes of conference runner-up Texas as their coach of the year. The Big 12 office did not reveal the ballot count in its canvass of coaches, but Barnes received exactly one vote in the media poll.
Who can make sense of awards anyway? The Big 12 media selected Oklahoma’s Hollis Price as player of the year, but the conference coaches opted for KU’s Nick Collison.
Then, in a surprise, the Naismith Award went this week to Texas guard T.J. Ford. Go figure. Ford doesn’t win his own league award, yet he earns a national prize.
Everybody talks about parity in college basketball, but postseason awards, it seems to me, are more about inscrutability.
OKLAHOMA CITY ? This “house divided” stuff is overrated.
So reports Brenda Sniezek, a Kansas University graduate whose husband, Bob, graduated from the University of Missouri.
You wouldn’t have known Saturday in Oklahoma City, where mom and the family’s five children — Madeline, 9; Mary, 7; Henry, 5; Martha, 3; and Helen, two months — made it to the KU pep rally in Bricktown with all the right equipment: KU pompoms, KU stickers, KU face paint.
Martha even sported a KU cheerleader outfit.
“We don’t have any Missouri clothes,” said Brenda Sniezek, a season-ticket holder who attends games at Allen Fieldhouse with another lucky member of the family. “The mother is the one that purchases the clothing. I cannot — I will not — buy MU things.”
Bob Sniezek, by the way, didn’t make the Oklahoma City trip. He was in Dallas on business, undoubtedly watching his beloved Tigers drop their second-round game to Marquette.
Just as Madeline predicted in her bracket.
“I don’t have them going very far,” she said with a sly smile. “I have the Jayhawks winning it all.”
More from “As the Hot Tub Swirls” …
Brittany Bedene and Amy Goodwin, on spring break from high school in Pittsburg, figure they’ve had a pretty good week. Saw a couple of basketball games. Scored some autographs from their favorite KU players. Shared a hot tub with Kirk Hinrich at the hotel.
But it couldn’t last forever.
Amy — the persistent Hinrich fan — managed to pose for a picture with her idol Saturday morning in the hallway at the Marriott Oklahoma City.
“He’d just woken up, I think,” said Amy, who once made a Hinrich “shrine” out of a pizza-box lid. “He still looked great.”
But Brittany missed out. Her man Nick Collison — object of her home-decorated “Nick’s Chick” sweatpants in the suitcase up in her room — spotted the KU forward outside the team meeting room and sidled up for a photo. It was a memory that would last a lifetime.
“But the camera didn’t work,” Brittany said, moping on a bench in the hallway. “It didn’t go off, and I started crying like an idiot. I had to go upstairs.
“It’s soooo embarrassing.”
She decided to wait for another chance. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty.
Finally, Collison emerged. Brittany and Amy converged, this time with a different camera. The folks stood by with backups, just in case.
“Sorry,” Collison said, passing them all by. “I think I’m late for the bus.”
State Rep. Barbara Ballard, D-Lawrence, enjoys taking a timeout from the Kansas Legislature by following her Jayhawks on the road.
Mixing in with 19,000 fans at Ford Center, she has found, offers a welcome respite from tussling with a few dozen legislators over a troublesome financial mess.
“Right now we’re working on the budget and finding money to fund all the things the state needs — education, K through 12, social services, what we’re going to do with highways. There’s just so many things,” said Ballard, attending Saturday’s game with her husband, Al.
The NCAA pushed back Saturday’s scheduled 4:30 p.m. tipoff of the Oklahoma-California game 30 minutes, and the move unintentionally may have helped hundreds of fans make it to their seats on time.
Thousands of ticketholders waited in line outside the Ford Center when the original game time arrived, as security personnel increased their checks of peoples’ bags and personal belongings compared to Thursday’s opening sessions.
Tim Allen, tournament manager and associate commissioner for the Big 12 Conference, said he didn’t know the reasons behind the time change or the stepped-up security.
“If that’s what they’re doing, we’re supportive,” Allen said.
OKLAHOMA CITY ? No game. Closed practice.
What are Kansas University men’s basketball fans to do?
If you’re preteens Jack, Max or Joe Faerber, or Charlie, Maggie or Katie Sloan, you stake out ballrooms A and B at the Marriott Oklahoma City and wait for hope — a turn of a knob, the crack of a door and a smile from Kirk Hinrich, Nick Collison, coach Roy Williams or anyone else eating breakfast and watching film inside.
There are autographs to be scored.
“I’ve got Collison. I’ve got Kirk. I’ve got Aaron Miles and Wayne Simien and Keith Langford,” reports Katie Sloan, hunkered down on the hallway floor and clutching a disposable camera with only two photos left.
Her strategy: “Picture, autograph. Picture, autograph.”
Charlie’s take: “Stay focused!”
For more than 30 minutes, the kids fill their notebooks with scribbled signatures from their favorite players.
After running the Sharpie gauntlet on his way to the elevators, Hinrich managed to crack a smile.
“After four years, I’m used to it,” he said. “It’s kinda cool.”
Turns out Brittany Bedene and Amy Goodwin — the overheated high schoolers who managed to land in a tub of hot water with Hinrich earlier this week — are playing it cool in their quest to mingle with their favorite Jayhawks
The latest encounter? Thursday night after the game on the hotel elevator.
“Kirk looked at us and smiled,” Amy reports. “The doors open, and he’s walking off, and he says, ‘You two are the ones in the newspaper, aren’t you?'”
You bet, they say. Billed as prospective brides-in-waiting and everything.
Another smile.
“Don’t tell Nick,” Hinrich says.
The girls giggle. They can’t believe all the quality time they’re scoring with the two “hunks,” as they savor the time away from school in Pittsburg and prepare for today’s game.
If you’re keeping score at home, Amy’s the Hinrich fan; Brittany favors Nick.
Maybe a little too much, judging by Brittany’s sweatpants.
“They say ‘Nick’s Chick’ on the butt, with a No. 4 and two basketballs,” Brittany says.
Don’t worry, guys: They promise they’re not too weird.
“We’re not in love,” Amy says.
Adds Brittany: “We just think they’re awesome!”
And, if KU wins tonight, the girls won’t be going to Anaheim, Calif., for the next round.
When the NCAA Selection Committee sent the Jayhawks to Oklahoma City, Don and Pat Green got more than a comfortable five-hour trip from Lawrence.
They also landed an excuse to visit their grandchildren, Erika and Tomas, in nearby Tulsa, Okla.
“This is a great place to be,” said Don Green, a KU professor of chemical and petroleum engineering and faculty representative to the NCAA and Big 12 Conference. “It’s close for our fans, and it’s close for us to visit our grandchildren.”