By: David Conde
The University of Kansas’ great win over the University of North Carolina for the NCAA College championship this year woke up some memories that embellished the time of my study at KU. There is nothing in basketball that can equal the game atmosphere of Allen Fieldhouse where the Jayhawks have won over 80 percent of their games.
Coming from the fields of migrant farm work and going to the city of Denver was a shocking experience. I heard people talk about Denver as a cow-town meaning that it was not a real urban center and could not figure out why they said that. To me, Denver was a gigantic and confusing place. To get to know the city, sometimes my dad would fill the gas tank and deliberately got lost so that he could find his way back and, at the same time, learn a little more about Denver’s geography.
When we finally settled near 48th and Acoma on the southern edge of Globeville, I was tall enough to become the center at my Garden Place Elementary School basketball team. Success followed our team in competition with other schools and later at Horace Mann Junior High where all the players attended after finishing Garden Place.
My interest and participation in basketball continued at North High and in the military. However, it was the offer of a graduate fellowship at KU that changed the direction of my journey not only academically but also introduced me to the excitement of championship level sports at a power
conference.
The 16-hour days of teaching, taking classes and research at my cubicle in the library were occasionally broken up by football and basketball games. Although Kansas is not known as a football power, it was, during the time I was there.
Pepper Rodgers, a football assistant coach at UCLA, was hired to revive the program and did just that. He took the team to the Orange Bowl on my second year at the university. I got to see quarterback Bobby Douglass lead the team with his rocket arm before being drafted by the Chicago Bears. I saw the great fullback John Riggins play alongside his older brother Junior before becoming an immortal star in the NFL.
But it was Jayhawk basketball at Allen Fieldhouse that captures the imagination of students and fans. There were moments during games that the crowd got so loud that one could not even think. In that stupendous and loud atmosphere it was hard for the team to lose. To go to every home game and watch the great guard Jo Jo White or the talented forward Bud Stallworth or the very special center Dave Robisch every night I came to a game was one of those lifetime treats that cannot be duplicated.
Later, I continued to enjoy the play of Jo Jo White as he added to the excellence of the Boston Celtic dynasty, Bud Stallworth who was drafted by the Seattle Supersonics and later traded to the Denver Rockets and the unforgettable Dave Robisch who was drafted and played for the Denver Rockets and continued to be featured when the Rockets became the Nuggets.
These were the things that came to mind as another University of Kansas basketball team made history by coming back from a 15-point deficit to win the national championship. I thought of how lucky I was for the opportunity to meet a difficult academic challenge while enjoying the best college basketball.
