Manning Did What Bird Couldn’t Do in Title Game

Once, they compared Danny Manning to Magic Johnson. Now, after Monday’s national championship game, they will mention him in the same sentence with Larry Bird. That’s pretty fair company, especially when one considers this: Manning did what Bird could not do. He took an ordinary team and made it into a national champion.

In Kansas, when they talk about Monday’s scintillating 83-79 victory over Oklahoma in years to come, mention will be made -- and rightly so -- of Milt Newton’s six-for-six shooting; of the play of Kevin Pritchard and Chris Piper; the contributions of Jeff Gueldner, Clint Normore, Keith Harris, Lincoln Minor and Scooter Barry.

But this was Danny Manning’s national championship. Coach Larry Brown will get lots of credit for holding the team together when it could have been torn apart in February and for the coaching job he did throughout the tournament. He deserves all of it, and more. But the Jayhawks would not have won without the brilliance of Manning.

His statistics, though remarkable, do not begin to tell the story. In the Final Four, Manning had 56 points, 28 rebounds, nine blocks and nine steals. During the final minutes Monday, he dominated the game. During the last minute of Kansas’ closest game, the 61-58 second-round victory over Murray State, Manning hit the winning shot, made the key play on defense, got the crucial rebound, made the last two free throws and stole the last inbounds pass.

“We won this,” Brown said, “because Danny refused to lose.”

For that, more than anything, Brown deserves credit. For four years he has screamed at Manning about his potential. He has pleaded and begged, trying to make Manning understand that there is a line between unselfishness and failure to accept responsibility.

Manning is quiet by nature, not comfortable with the limelight his ability has forced on him. For more than three years Brown told him time and again, “The best player has to be the leader. It has to be his team.”

As recently as October, when practice began, Manning was still balking at the role. He knew he was the leader, but felt leading by example was good enough.

“I’m not going to shout at guys,” he said then. “Who am I to shout at my teammates? Coach can do the shouting. That’s his job.”

Manning played well from the start this season, but when his close friend Archie Marshall tore his knee up and when starting center Marvin Branch was declared academically ineligible, it seemed that this Kansas team would be little more than a vehicle to serve Manning’s accumulation of individual records.

But in February, with the Jayhawks 12-8 and wondering how they would piece together enough victories to get into the NCAA tournament, Brown called Manning in for one last talk. They have often had a stormy relationship.

“There’s probably never been a great player who has been yelled at in college as much as Danny,” Brown has said. “I know there were times he wanted to tell me to shut up. It got to the point where I wanted him to do that.”

Brown was blunt with Manning. He told him that only he could make this team great because only he was a great player. Stop feeling badly because of the injuries. Just play as if the end is near -- because it is.

This time Manning took the message to heart. He stopped being unselfish. He began to demand the ball. If it wasn’t coming to him, he went and got it. If a good shot wasn’t there, he figured out a way to get a not-so-good one. And, if necessary, he just took a bad one.

Around all that, Brown fit the rest of the pieces together. He moved Kevin Pritchard to point guard, because none of the junior-college guards he had recruited could play there with any conistency. He put Jeff Gueldner in the lineup because he knew Gueldner would play hard on defense and always look for Manning on offense.

The Jayhawks turned around. In late February, they went to Oklahoma and lost, 95-87. But they were right there until the last minute of the game. Manning had 28 points and broke Wayman Tisdale’s Big Eight career-scoring record in that game -- and was booed by the OU fans for doing it -- an omen perhaps of what was to come.

“If you don’t believe you can play with anybody in the country after that game you’re crazy,” Brown told his team after that loss. “If we just play a little bit smarter, we win tonight. Just a little bit.”

They found that little bit in the tournament. Their 15-point loss in the Big Eight tournament to Kansas State was an aberration brought on by an ankle injury to Pritchard. The Jayhawks got on a roll right away in the NCAA tournament, easily beating a Xavier team many thought would beat them.

Then they survived Murray State, the kind of game almost every title team has to get through. After that, they just got better. Vanderbilt was blown out -- with Manning getting 25 in the first half. Kansas State faded late, Duke was down two touchdowns in the first six minutes and the Oklahoma press was solved the third time around.

Winning a championship is part luck, part skill, part timing, part destiny. When an ex-football player (Normore) hits a three-point shot with the shot clock running down, you know destiny has become a factor.

But there must always be a special ingredient and, clearly, it was Manning. He did everything a player can do on the court. He became a buffer between his coach and his teammates. He even learned to talk back to Brown. He realized that what Brown had been telling him for four years was the truth.

Manning took the risk, put himself on the line and made himself a part of history with his performance.

In 1979 Bird took an ordinary Indiana State team to the national championship game. There, he ran into Magic Johnson and Michigan State and came up one game short. Manning had no Johnson to confront. But Oklahoma was an excellent basketball team, a better team than Kansas on most nights.

But Monday, Manning understood that The Night only comes once in a lifetime and he played the game of a lifetime. Now, after four difficult years he can savor the memories, knowing that he held nothing back. The old saying is right: Good players play well; great players win games.

And truly special ones win championships.