NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT: THE FINAL FOUR : Manning Has 25 Points to Lead Kansas

There were 21 seconds still to play, but the situation was clear enough to Danny Manning as he stood at the foul line. Manning wrapped his arms around Milt Newton in the sort of hug particular to a 6-foot 10-inch basketball player.

His Kansas team’s 66-59 victory over Duke in the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. semifinals Saturday was all but assured. It wasn’t going to make Manning forget Kansas’ loss to Duke in the 1986 NCAA semifinal game, in which he scored only four points, but it was salve enough for now.

“It feels nice,” Manning said, but no matter what happens in this tournament, I’ll always remember what happened in ’86.”

Others will remember much more clearly what Manning did Saturday at Kemper Arena before a crowd of 16,392, no small number of which were fans of the Kansas team that hails from Lawrence, Kan., a mere 38 miles away.

Manning, the centerpiece of a team that may be the nearest thing to a one-man team to make the final game since Larry Bird’s 1979 Indiana State team, scored 25 points and had 10 rebounds, 4 steals and 6 blocked shots in putting a team that was once 12-8 into the NCAA title game against Oklahoma Monday night.

One of Manning’s six blocks, a swipe from behind on Danny Ferry’s inside shot in the final minutes with Kansas leading by just six points, helped stave off an intense comeback by Duke, which got off to a terrible start but made it close late. One of those baskets, a putback with 2:08 left, was another of the keys to squelching Duke’s run. Throughout the game, Manning created defensive difficulties for Duke and, on defense himself, he got a hand on pass after pass.

It may be rather a one-man show--anyone, it seems, would recede from the forefront in the presence of Manning--but Kansas got a pretty good performance from other players, most prominently Newton, who scored 20 points on sharp outside shooting.

Kansas (26-11) will enter the championship game with more losses than any team since 1954, when Bradley, which had lost 12 games, was defeated by LaSalle.

No team with more than 10 losses has ever won the title.

The game began with a 14-0 run from which, in some ways, Duke never truly recovered.

“If it had kept going like it was, it probably would have been 82-20,” said Mike Krzyzewski, Duke’s coach. “We did turn it around but not enough.”

Duke missed its first five shots, and Kansas scored its first seven points off Duke turnovers. The Blue Devils didn’t score until nearly five minutes into the game, when Alaa Abdelnaby sank a half-hook. Kansas kept going, and led, 24-6, slightly more than seven minutes into the game.

But Duke came back in the second half. Greg Koubek cut Kansas’ lead to seven on a three-point shot, and Billy King’s layup off an inbounds pass, his only basket of the game, made it 51-46.

A driving layup by Chris Piper and a 12-foot baseline turnaround by Manning gave Kansas a nine-point lead, but Duke sliced into it again.

Duke cut the lead to five, then to three on a fast-break dunk by Danny Ferry that made it 55-52.

But Kevin Pritchard hit a turnaround shot that made it 57-52 with 3:34 remaining. Duke’s Quin Snyder cut it to three once more with 2:41 left, but that was about it. Kansas made seven of nine free throws down the stretch, and Coach Larry Brown took out his starters with 10 seconds left.

Kansas’ big lead in the first half wasn’t as demoralizing to Duke as one might think, nor so encouraging to Kansas.

Just six weeks ago, these teams played a game in Lawrence, and the Jayhawks jumped to a 23-8 lead. But Duke came back and won the game in overtime, 74-70.

“We just didn’t come out and play strong. We didn’t play smart,” said Ferry, who struggled through a 7-of-22 shooting performance Saturday, missing several layups but scoring a team-high 19 points. “We just didn’t play good basketball in the first 10 to 15 minutes of the game. Unlike the last game, we weren’t able to battle back. You can’t dig yourself a hole like that.”

The Duke-Kansas series dates back only to 1985, but until now, it had all ended in frustration for Kansas.

In late 1985, for instance, Duke beat Kansas in the final of the Big Apple NIT, the prelude to a season in which Duke would win 37 games and Kansas would win 35. The teams met again in an ’86 national semifinal, the game in which Manning, then a sophomore, played what he considered the worst game of his life.

Duke had great difficulty trying to defend Manning this time. Ferry, who is near Manning’s size, is much slower, and plays more of an outside game. Robert Brickey, Duke’s 6-5 “center,” tried to defend Manning most of the game, fronting him and getting help from his teammates. It was simply a near-impossible assignment.

But mainly for Duke, the end of the season for a great defensive team came because it never was a terribly good offensive team.

For Kansas, it was the latest in a remarkable run in which a sixth-seeded team has made it to the final, due in part to upsets of the top three seeded teams--Purdue, Pittsburgh and North Carolina State--by other teams along the way. Kansas had to beat Xavier, Murray State, Vanderbilt and Kansas State to reach the Final Four.

Yet, this team has gotten here despite the fact that only two players who started the first game of the season--Manning and Pritchard--started Saturday. The other three fell by the wayside for various reasons, the most serious loss being Archie Marshall, who was put out for the season by a knee injury in midseason.

Coincidentally, Marshall was coming back from a knee injury he originally suffered in the ’86 game against Duke.

Brown was very clear on the most important factor for Kansas in this game.

“That we were here,” he said. “The fact that our kids thought they could win. I had a feeling for the last week that our kids honestly thought they could win.”