Tonight's NCAA championship game is the twentieth anniversary of one of the most traumatic experiences in my sports-watching life. It was in 1988 when the Kansas Jayhawks defeated the Oklahoma Sooners in the national title game. The Final Four was being staged in my hometown of Kansas City that year. It's hard to describe how excited the city was...especially since nearby KU was in the semifinals.To make it worse both my parents are Jayhawk alums. All my friends, teachers and enemies were Jayhawk fans. I was one of a few sparse Sooners in K.C. it seemed. I was feeling pretty confident...cocky actually. OU had the highest scoring team in NCAA history. They had defeated Kansas three times that season (twice in the regular season and once by 23 points in the Big Eight Tournament). Kansas was lucky to get into the tournament that year.
My Dad and I attended the final Final Four practice session at Kemper Arena which was free to the public and jammed packed. It was exciting to be ten rows from the floor to watch Duke, Arizona, Kansas and Oklahoma do their last practice sessons. That night I videotaped the game (which my parents confiscated after I wished to delete it from existence) and almost had a stroke when KU pulled off the upset. It only got worse.
The next day everybody in the high school raked me over the freakin' coals. My KU Alum high school band director forced me and another OU fan to lead the clapping to the Jayhawk fight song in front of 120 jeering band students. Pretty traumatic stuff for a freshman. By the end of the day I lost my cool and when a guy named Harry jeered me in the hallway before sixth period going up the staircase I punched him in the head. The jeering went on for months. Months! Even football season didn't bring the normal respite because nobody cared about football in Kansas at the time.
The shame was that OU had one of the greatest college basketball teams of all time that year. Mookie Blaylock, Stacy "Sky" King, Ricky "Amazing" Grace, David Sieger and Harvey "General" Grant...one of the best line-ups of all time. But that is all forgotten since stupid Danny Manning and his cast-offs got lucky the fourth time they played the Sooners.
Yes, I'm over it. That was 20 years ago. Especially when my band director emailed me to apologize two years ago. But I tell you this...getting over it doesn't mean I won't be rooting hard for the Memphis Tigers tonight. Sorry Mom and Dad. With all due respect I hope the Jayhawks go down hard. That's the beauty of sports...love for a team doesn't go away easily (go Royals!). But neither does hatred for a team go away that easily as well. Go Memphis!
