Giddens not expected for first summer term

By Staff     Jun 7, 2005

All but two of Kansas University’s men’s basketball players will start summer school today.

Freshman Micah Downs will arrive in Lawrence the middle of next week following graduation ceremonies at Juanita High in Kirkland, Wash.

Junior J.R. Giddens, meanwhile, is not expected back for a while. He’s in Oklahoma City recovering from a slashed artery in the right calf sustained in a fight May 19 outside Lawrence’s Moon Bar.

“J.R. is definitely not coming first term. He’ll come back at some point to get checked by the doctors,” KU coach Bill Self said Monday. “It remains to be seen (if he’ll be back) any time after that.”

Self told the Journal-World last weekend he would decide whether to reinstate Giddens after a police investigation was complete. If allowed to return, Giddens must agree to stringent rules of behavior.

“The first deal is to get the facts and decide whether or not he will be a team member. I will not say if it will include or exclude basketball-game privileges. I have yet to decide,” Self said.

Self will not discuss team rules the players must live by. Everybody but West Coast natives C.J. Giles and Rodrick Stewart, who will be in town today, were briefed Monday.

“I don’t know if it’s rules as much as expectations,” Self said. “We have not had any issues that I’m aware of other than J.R., so I hate the program could be painted by this one incident.

“The guys understand more than ever they are in a glass house, and everybody will be monitoring everything. If you have used poor judgment, people will watch to see if you continue to exercise poor judgment. I stressed to them moreso than ever what it means to be a basketball player at Kansas. I had a good feeling that our guys understood that.

“We will have rules and things we’ll continue to go over, which will not be privy to the public. I don’t want to take the approach this team has misrepresented the University of Kansas. They haven’t. An individual did.”

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Golf on tap: Self today will participate in the Roberts Dairy Skins Game as part of Bayer Advantage Champions Tour golf week. Self and Tom Watson will play George Brett and Jim Colbert in a nine-hole match at 3 p.m. at Nicklaus Golf Club at LionsGate, 14225 Dearborn Street, Overland Park. A year ago, Watson and Self won $5,000 for charity; Brett and Jay Sigel won $14,000.

“The last two summers, it was the first time I picked up a club. I wasn’t very good. Hopefully I’ll represent the program a bit better,” Self quipped.

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Scoreboard coming: The Allen Fieldhouse ceiling is being cleaned in advance of installation of a new center videoboard. Self says the board will be “one the fans will love. It is cool, certainly not one of those videoboards that will look out of place. If it was possible to have such a thing in the 1950s and ’60s, this would be one of them, consistent with the fieldhouse.”

After the board is installed, a new floor will be put in, thus the fieldhouse is out of commission this summer.

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Larry TV: The Larry Brown Sports Century show, which features footage and interviews from his KU days, premieres at 1 p.m. Central Time, Thursday on ESPN (Sunflower Broadband Channel 33). It re-airs at 7 p.m. Friday on ESPN Classic (C142).

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