KANSAS ROOTS : Larry Brown, No Longer Bouncing Around, Has Eye on One Short Trip--to the Final Four in Kansas City

“Larry, you’ve been at Kansas a long time now, and . . . “

“Thanks!” said Larry Brown.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Thanks for saying that.”

Oh, yeah.

Sorry about that.

Forgot. Forgot about Larry Brown’s reputation there for a minute.

Man for all basketball seasons, man for all coaching jobs.

Man who changes employers more often than a fugitive. Man who skips the front page and the funnies and heads straight for the help-wanted ads.

Man who was an assistant coach at North Carolina and an American Basketball Assn. head coach in North Carolina. Man who coached pro ball in Denver, then college ball at UCLA, then pro ball in New Jersey, then college ball at Kansas.

Man of whom the joke was told that his flight from Jersey to Kansas was snowed in at Chicago, so while he was there, he took the DePaul job.

“That reputation bother you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Brown said Saturday, before today’s championship game between Kansas and Kansas State at the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Midwest Regional. “Definitely. I don’t know when it will ever stop.

“It’s embarrassing and unfair. I wish people would just focus on whether I’m doing a good job at Kansas. I guess that’s something that will follow me forever.”

Asked why he supposed he couldn’t shake the reputation of being, oh, restless, Brown said: “I guess it’s because I’ve moved from jobs that other people thought were perfect. They weren’t the greatest jobs when I took them.”

UCLA, for one, was still suffering from John Wooden withdrawal when Brown took over the program in 1979. Brown’s teams there had records of 22-10 and 20-7, and the first one is a team he will never forget.

After a terrible start, those nine-time losers got hot and knocked off Old Dominion, DePaul, Ohio State, Clemson and Purdue before losing to Louisville, 59-54, in the NCAA championship game at Indianapolis.

Somebody suggested that his current Kansas club, a 24-11 team that at one point was 1-4 in the Big Eight Conference standings, was the comeback story of Brown’s career. He disagreed.

“When you consider what we went through at UCLA that year to get to the final game,” Brown said. “We were 8-6, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to get the chance to be 8-7.”

Just kidding.

“I knew what to expect there. I knew it was going to be tough,” he said. “That first year, I just was playing the wrong people for too long. I should have been playing the freshmen. Never in my wildest dreams, though, did I think we could make it to the national championship game.

“My whole time at UCLA was a great experience. One of my best ever.”

Brown took off in 1981 to coach the New Jersey Nets. His records there: 44-38 and 47-29.

Neither UCLA nor that National Basketball Assn. franchise has done much better since.

Vagabond Brown moved on, though, to Kansas, where in five seasons his teams have won 132 of 176 games. Today, they have a shot at reaching the Final Four for the second time in three years.

This team, too, has exceeded Brown’s greatest expectations. The original roster, led by All-America forward Danny Manning, certainly was promising, but injuries and academic problems decimated the squad. A season-ending injury in December to senior forward Archie Marshall left Brown with tears in his eyes afterward, in the disappointment he felt for one of his favorite players.

The coach said he watched the bodies going down and out, one by one, and got an eerie feeling.

“I’d look at our team picture, and it was like the movie ‘Back to the Future,’ where the heads of the kids in the class photo kept disappearing.”

Led by Manning, the Jayhawks kept plugging away. Brown, however, did not get his hopes up. When he saw the tournament pairings, he doubted Kansas would get very far. When he packed his suitcase, he said, he always packed for a few extra days because he counted on being free to do some recruiting.

Brown has even taken to teasing his team about all this. He talks about it sometimes as though Kansas is living on borrowed time.

When somebody wondered if it was an unfair assessment that Kansas could only beat Kansas State if Manning, who scored 38 points against Vanderbilt Friday night, had a great night, Brown quickly replied: “I think that’s a pretty good assessment. We need Danny to have a great night every night.”

When somebody else wondered why Kansas State’s students were cheering for Kansas to win Friday instead of rooting against their archrivals, the way, say, Purdue and Indiana students would have, Brown said: “The reason they’re cheering for us is they know they can kick our butts.”

The two schools already have met three times this season, Kansas State winning twice. The Wildcats won, 72-61, in the Kansas gym, and 69-54 in the Kemper Arena gym at Kansas City, Mo., where the Final Four will gather. Kansas won on Kansas State’s home court, 64-63.

Now, one of them will make the national semifinals, joining another Big Eight team, Oklahoma.

“When I saw the brackets, I never even put down the possibility of K-State playing Kansas again,” Brown said. “I saw Purdue coming through this regional, or my sleeper was DePaul. I didn’t have any disrespect for Kansas State. Other teams just seemed to be on more of a roll.

“Now, after this game’s over, I know one side’s going to be disappointed. But, we’re going to have a good representative in Kansas City.

“This is a good thing for the people of Kansas--especially with Senator Dole struggling like he is. I’m sorry about that, but at least he can take pride in this.”

Brown, too, is taking pride in this. And in something else.

“Hey, I’m one of the deans of the Big Eight,” he said.

When he packs his bags now, people really do believe it’s to go out recruiting.