The "hate" really cranked up for me in '84....

NMSooner'80

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This was the year that I moved back to Oklahoma for awhile. It was after the '83-84 basketball season, but I heard a lot about the charges of "no class" directed at the OU men's basketball team, led by the KU cheerleaders of the Kansas City area media.

It wasn't hard to get quotes, even after the fact, from the fluky '84 tourney title game in KC, when KU's players said they basically had more class than OU and wouldn't cut the nets down to celebrate as a result. I read an old Eschbach column in the Edmond Sun that said Billy wanted to write Saint Larry Brown and Co. a good-luck wish on the ride home from KC after that, then he saw the snarky KU quotes in the press and shredded his letter on the spot.

In this pre-internet age, it was still possible to read this crap when some rare "OU friendly" media person would find it and quote it. I also stumbled across a preseason issue of the KC Star that fall, and it was truly despicable. It made it sound like the whole '84-85 OU men's team was packed with criminals who'd beat you up and steal your wallet. And of course, this contrasted with their own image of the wonderful lads from Lawrence.

I don't even recall anyone on that particular '84-85 team doing anything controversial, but they were still the epitome of evil in the media triangle of KC/Topeka/Lawrence. It was so absurd that one of my brother's buds, a weak-willed OU alum from the KC area, believed everything bad that he was reading about OU and started repeating it as gospel (same guy has a son who's now at KU, which is no surprise, but I digress).

That weird KU mindset even invaded the southern Oklahoma media, but only for one year. The Daily Ardmoreite hired a news writer who was a KU grad, and he was someone who fancied himself as a college basketball expert. That clashed with the typical editorial stance at the time in Ardmore, where a hard-working guy named Ron Powell was all about covering the Oklahoma schools and not some rival school from over 350 miles up the interstate.

I wasn't living in Ardmore at the time, but I did pretty much have access to the paper on a daily basis anyway. I don't know what happened with the pro-Beaker dude, but I've guessed that he offended his readership to the point that he was politely urged to head north after that school year.

His crowning moment, though, was in this "New Year's Wish" column that started out about the local news scene, but digressed into typical Squawk drivel near the end. He took that opportunity to wish that "Wayman Tisdale would head for the NBA and forget about a national championship that is well out of reach," and then decided it would be a good idea to wish his KU boys "best of luck in their quest for a national title...." UGH!

If you know your history, OU came a lot closer to a national title in '85, although Tisdale did bolt for the league, and also won the Big 8 title. I'm still convinced one reason Waymand bolted was how he was always being pummeled by a wave of Brown's no-talent White stiffs in Norman on a day that OU won anyway. KU also didn't even win its own invitational, also known as the Big 8 postseason tournament. It was OU over ISU that day, although I'll never forget what my brother told me after going up there for the championship game. He said, "Man, you wouldn't believe how much they HATE us up there...." Luckily, he has more sense than his old OU pal and has hated KU with a passion ever since.

One other silver lining about the earlier time in '84. Mark Turgeon was one of the KU smart-alecks who took verbal jabs at OU after that alleged morality-play in KC when they won. The OU student body never let him forget it, and made it a point to ride him as unmercifully as what he deserved. That time period should have also cured most OU fans from ever "rooting for the conference" where KU is involved.
 
This was the year that I moved back to Oklahoma for awhile. It was after the '83-84 basketball season, but I heard a lot about the charges of "no class" directed at the OU men's basketball team, led by the KU cheerleaders of the Kansas City area media.

It wasn't hard to get quotes, even after the fact, from the fluky '84 tourney title game in KC, when KU's players said they basically had more class than OU and wouldn't cut the nets down to celebrate as a result. I read an old Eschbach column in the Edmond Sun that said Billy wanted to write Saint Larry Brown and Co. a good-luck wish on the ride home from KC after that, then he saw the snarky KU quotes in the press and shredded his letter on the spot.

In this pre-internet age, it was still possible to read this crap when some rare "OU friendly" media person would find it and quote it. I also stumbled across a preseason issue of the KC Star that fall, and it was truly despicable. It made it sound like the whole '84-85 OU men's team was packed with criminals who'd beat you up and steal your wallet. And of course, this contrasted with their own image of the wonderful lads from Lawrence.

I don't even recall anyone on that particular '84-85 team doing anything controversial, but they were still the epitome of evil in the media triangle of KC/Topeka/Lawrence. It was so absurd that one of my brother's buds, a weak-willed OU alum from the KC area, believed everything bad that he was reading about OU and started repeating it as gospel (same guy has a son who's now at KU, which is no surprise, but I digress).

That weird KU mindset even invaded the southern Oklahoma media, but only for one year. The Daily Ardmoreite hired a news writer who was a KU grad, and he was someone who fancied himself as a college basketball expert. That clashed with the typical editorial stance at the time in Ardmore, where a hard-working guy named Ron Powell was all about covering the Oklahoma schools and not some rival school from over 350 miles up the interstate.

I wasn't living in Ardmore at the time, but I did pretty much have access to the paper on a daily basis anyway. I don't know what happened with the pro-Beaker dude, but I've guessed that he offended his readership to the point that he was politely urged to head north after that school year.

His crowning moment, though, was in this "New Year's Wish" column that started out about the local news scene, but digressed into typical Squawk drivel near the end. He took that opportunity to wish that "Wayman Tisdale would head for the NBA and forget about a national championship that is well out of reach," and then decided it would be a good idea to wish his KU boys "best of luck in their quest for a national title...." UGH!

If you know your history, OU came a lot closer to a national title in '85, although Tisdale did bolt for the league, and also won the Big 8 title. I'm still convinced one reason Waymand bolted was how he was always being pummeled by a wave of Brown's no-talent White stiffs in Norman on a day that OU won anyway. KU also didn't even win its own invitational, also known as the Big 8 postseason tournament. It was OU over ISU that day, although I'll never forget what my brother told me after going up there for the championship game. He said, "Man, you wouldn't believe how much they HATE us up there...." Luckily, he has more sense than his old OU pal and has hated KU with a passion ever since.

One other silver lining about the earlier time in '84. Mark Turgeon was one of the KU smart-alecks who took verbal jabs at OU after that alleged morality-play in KC when they won. The OU student body never let him forget it, and made it a point to ride him as unmercifully as what he deserved. That time period should have also cured most OU fans from ever "rooting for the conference" where KU is involved.

We lost the 84 Big 8 tournament not so much because we played bad, which we did, but instead we got a good dose of home cooking which was customary back then for either KU or MU. I'll never forget KU had that lurch-like dude, Greg Dreiling, who was nothing but a big white stiff who played football on the hardwood. He was allowed to beat up Wayman and our other forwards that night. The game went into OT, and when it did, my dad didn't think we had any chance to win, and we didn't.

I understood after that season why my dad and brother hated KU so much.
 
Good stuff. I was at the '84 and '85 title games (as well as '88 NCAA) and I hate the Hawks with a passion. The whole Duke Jr. choirboy thing is so used and untrue. (JR Giddens anyone?)

KU loves to talk about how they set the standard in hoops, but their number of NCs don't quite back up the boasting. And they don't have the football history to match our hoops history. So F 'em.
 
Good stuff. I was at the '84 and '85 title games (as well as '88 NCAA) and I hate the Hawks with a passion. The whole Duke Jr. choirboy thing is so used and untrue. (JR Giddens anyone?)

KU loves to talk about how they set the standard in hoops, but their number of NCs don't quite back up the boasting. And they don't have the football history to match our hoops history. So F 'em.


I actually hated them quite a bit back in the 70's, and it didn't go away after I enrolled at OU in the fall of '76. You couldn't get OU basketball on the radio back then, more than 20 miles from Norman, at night, so you had to make-do with whatever station you could get. If it was an OU-KU game in that infernal Big 8 Holiday Tournament, you could get it on KSAL out of Salina. So you got two hours of good (KU) vs. the Evil Football School (OU) if you those that method of keeping up with the game.

Funny thing is, back then they were infamous for doing "less with more." They won the same number of outright Big 8 titles (1) as OU did, during my student days. KSU and Mizzou used to wear them out regularly, and we also worked them a time or two, especially in '79 (by 23 in Norman and by 15 in KC for the automatic NCAA bid in the postseason tourney). Terrible Ted Owens lived down to his nickname that year ('79), when they were picked to go 14-0 in the league but finished fourth.

And, my distaste for the Beakers hasn't wavered over time. I have no doubt that many of them thought Blake Griffin's injury, which kept him out of that game in '09 in Norman, was rather humorous and probably "deserved" because he didn't pick the almighty Hawks out of high school. And we've all been told about how in '02 they rooted hard against OU in the Final Four (but probably expected us to root for them after that anyway "for the good of the conference"). As much as I despise Syracuse also, I openly celebrated their title win in '03 over KU.

But, '84 is when it really got to be a passion for me where those sanctimonious twerps are concerned. My additional hope, without knowing the situation, was that the KU grad who thought he'd enlighten Carter County readers (Daily Ardmoreite) on the alleged merits of Beaker Ball got fired over it.
 
From the unspeakable Woodling article right after Wayman's death:


Big Old Booger said:
More than likely, it went back to when Wayman, Billy, and the boys cut down the nets in Allen Fieldhouse in 1984. KU fans all screamed it was a classless move, but what they forget is that KU cut down the nets in LNC after they beat us the previous year in Ted Owens (OU alum) last game in Norman.

Is that a fact, that KU fans cut down the nets in LNC in 1983? I wonder if there is any way to document the truth of that, so that I can shove it under a few KU fans noses in the future. Anyone know how to dig up a link or a recap of the game that would validate that?

I checked SoonerStats.com in 1983, and Ted Owens' biography in Wikipedia, we split the season games, each winning at home, then KU beating us 77-87 in Norman at what is called "(Conf-Post)".
Also 1983 was the last year that Owens coached at KU.

I wish that I could get an account of the game, verifying that the Hawk fans did that!


Anybody know where to go to get a link?
 
Does anyone remember the OU player who had a broken finger late in the season one year during Billy's era? I can't remember exactly who it was. I remember Stacey King having a broken finger one year, but this was someone else.

We had played KU in Lawrence and won. There was no injury during the game, but a day or two later it was announced that this player had a broken finger. There was no mention of how or when it happened.

My parents had season tickets to the games at that time and often went to the Interurban before or after games. After a game subsequent to the KU game, some of the players were at the Interurban, including the one with the broken finger. My Dad walked over to him and asked him how he hurt his finger. He said that as they were walking off the court in Lawrence, someone put his hand out as if he wanted to shaken hands. He put his hand out and the person grabbed his hand and bent his finger back.

I've never read any confirmation of this, but that's what the player told my Dad. All schools have their worthless fans. KU is no different.
 
From the unspeakable Woodling article right after Wayman's death:




Is that a fact, that KU fans cut down the nets in LNC in 1983? I wonder if there is any way to document the truth of that, so that I can shove it under a few KU fans noses in the future. Anyone know how to dig up a link or a recap of the game that would validate that?

I checked SoonerStats.com in 1983, and Ted Owens' biography in Wikipedia, we split the season games, each winning at home, then KU beating us 77-87 in Norman at what is called "(Conf-Post)".
Also 1983 was the last year that Owens coached at KU.

I wish that I could get an account of the game, verifying that the Hawk fans did that!


Anybody know where to go to get a link?


Too bad there are no internet accounts of the '83 postseason tournament game. I remember hearing second-hand about Teddy's bunch cutting down nets in Norman, but that's it.

Unfortunately, and I'm getting back to '84 again here out of necessity, the Oklahoman got really cheap and didn't staff road games (I was able to get the Sunday paper at a newsstand even though I lived in New Mexico then also). So anything "controversial" that happened on the road was never refuted. That includes both the "alleged finger" at Boulder (nevermind that the OU bench was getting pelted with cups beforehand) and the epic half-truth of OU @ KU.

This was also the time when the DOK loved to publish lots of negative letters to the editor, and that really started with an OU beatdown of OSU (one that was a 26-point lead that shrank to 15 in nothing flat, in the final 2:00). Some Aggies said Tubbs showed "no class" by not emptying the bench with seven or eight minutes left, and that of course went unchallenged. Then the stuff that happened in Lawrence was repeated as gospel, from the Beaker viewpoint only. And unfortunately, some of the letter-writers included gullible "OU fans" who were swayed by that biased nonsense that no one on the DOK staff wanted to investigate, lest they get hit with the dreaded "OU homers" label.

It is a shame that both sides of the story were never emphatically told, either in '83 or in February of '84.
 
Does anyone remember the OU player who had a broken finger late in the season one year during Billy's era? I can't remember exactly who it was. I remember Stacey King having a broken finger one year, but this was someone else.

We had played KU in Lawrence and won. There was no injury during the game, but a day or two later it was announced that this player had a broken finger. There was no mention of how or when it happened.

My parents had season tickets to the games at that time and often went to the Interurban before or after games. After a game subsequent to the KU game, some of the players were at the Interurban, including the one with the broken finger. My Dad walked over to him and asked him how he hurt his finger. He said that as they were walking off the court in Lawrence, someone put his hand out as if he wanted to shaken hands. He put his hand out and the person grabbed his hand and bent his finger back.

I've never read any confirmation of this, but that's what the player told my Dad. All schools have their worthless fans. KU is no different.


I don't know off-hand which game could have been, but I'll take an educated guess and assume it was that same '84 game that OU won to clinch the regular season title. I have the media guide for the next season, and I just noticed that Calvin Pierce didn't play in the game immediately following the OU-KU game. Could he have been the one who was injured by one of those "classy" fans they claim to have?
 
I don't know off-hand which game could have been, but I'll take an educated guess and assume it was that same '84 game that OU won to clinch the regular season title. I have the media guide for the next season, and I just noticed that Calvin Pierce didn't play in the game immediately following the OU-KU game. Could he have been the one who was injured by one of those "classy" fans they claim to have?

That sounds familiar, but I'm not 100% sure.
 
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