Section:
B
The University Daily Kansan
Irony
Mike Tyson spent 45 minutes in a London jail last week — it was protecting him from a mob of 1,000 overzealous fans.
Sports
Inside: Former Kansas golfer Matt Gogel fights for the lead at the Hope Classic.
SEE STORY, PAGE 2B
SEE RESULTS, PAGE 4B
Inside: The Kansas track team took on Missouri last weekend.
SEE PAGE 3|
TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2000
KANSAN.COM/S
Missouri burns 'Hawks,81-59
Little goes right for Kansas men in upset defeat
By Shawn Hutchinsor sports@kanson.com Kansan sportswriter
COLUMBIA, Mo. — The smoke could almost be seen smoldering from Clarence Gilbert's fingertips.
Gilbert, the sophomore gunner for the Missouri basketball team, put on a three-point clinic on Saturday afternoon at the Hearnes Center, lifting the Tigers past No. 7 Kansas, 81-59.
Gilbert drained threes when he was wide open, he drained threes when he was off-balance, he drained threes with hands in his face.
"He was really on fire, and he is a great shooter," said Kansas guard Kirk Hinrich. "And when great shooters get going, stuff happens."
That stuff translated into 27 points and seven-for-10 shooting from behind the arc for Gilbert. It also translated into one demoralizing defeat for Kansas.
"I'm disappointed," said Kansas coach "Roy Williams, who suffered his worst loss since a 100-78 defeat against Oklahoma in 1900. "During the course of the game their speed and quickness us down, and they won the battle of size today."
The loss dropped Kansas (15-3, 4-1 B1
12 Conference) into a four-way tie with
Missouri (11-6 and 4-1 B1 12). Texas and
Iowa State for first place in the league.
Aside from Gilbert's heroes, nearly everything that could go wrong for Kansas did. Williams admitted that he didn't do a very good job of coaching. The Jayhawks were burned by the speed and penetration of Missouri's three-guard offense. They were outmuscled and outplayed by Missouri's smaller frontcourt. The Jayhawks were even subjected to chants of "Overrated" by the record crowd of 14,098 at the Hearnes Center.
And that, perhaps, is what hurt the mo
"They played better than we did," said Kansas forward Nick Collison. "Going into the game our size was supposedly to our advantage. But they outplayed our big guys."
And that, perhaps, is what hurt the most. Kansas was able to win the rebounding edge, 39-31, against a Missouri team that played only one player taller than 6-feet. B. none of that seemed to matter when the quicker Tigers took
Right: Missouri's Clarence Gilbert breaks the full-court press of Ashante Johnson and Marlon London during the first half. Gilbert led Missouri with 27 points, making 7-of-10 three-point attempts. Above: Jeff Boschie covers his head while assistant coach Joe Holladay looks at the scoreboard during the closing minutes of Saturday's 22-point loss. Photos by Jay Sheepard/KANSAN
awav Kansas' open looks inside.
"Their pressure on the perimeter hurt us, and they did a good job of taking our big guys away," said Kansas forward Nick Bradford. "They knew that they were small, and they knew that it would be to our advantage to get the ball inside and they didn't allow us to do it."
The Kansas players are already marking March 5 on their calendar. That's when the rematch with Missouri takes place in Allen Fieldhouse.
The Jayhawks will return to the fieldhouse tonight, when they play host to Colorado at 8:05 p.m.
Incident downplayed
An incident involving Missouri fans was downplayed by Williams after his team's 81-59 loss.
The fans reportedly came Friday night to Kansas' hotel in Columbia, stood in the lobby and taunted the Kansas players and coaches.
"It's no big deal," Williams said. "It really wasn't."
During the game, members of Missouri's student section held up posters with Jeff Boschee's and Eric Chenowith's phone numbers on them, which has been a tactic of Missouri fans for several years.
Jayhawk women shot down by No.15 Raiders
By Chris Fickett
sports@kansan.com
Kansan sportswriter
LUBBOCK, Texas — The Kansas women's basketball team got into a gunfight with Texas Tech on Saturday afternoon. And it ran out of ammo.
The No. 15 Red Raiders went on two huge first-half runs and held the No. 23 Jayhawks to less than 30 percent shooting in the second half of their 76-56 victory in front of 13,445 red-clad fans at the United Spirit Arena.
"I think that they simply did a great job," said Kansas coach Marian Washington. "They did a good job of disruption us."
Kansas had a 17-9 lead midway through the first half, but then the Raiders' defense clamped down and made things difficult for junior guard Jennifer Jackson, who posted a season-high seven turnovers.
Two of her turnovers led to easy transition baskets during an 11-0 Tech run that helped give the Raiders a 20-17 lead. Senior guard Suzi Raymant's score tied the game 29-29, but that would be Kansas' final hoop of the half.
A three-point basket by Tech senior guard Melinda Schmucker-Pharies, who hit three of four from behind the arc in the first half, started a 14-0 run that helped put the Raiders (15-2, 4-2 Big 12 Conference) up 43-29 at the half. That stretch had Tech's fans waving their guns in the air and Kansas waving the white flag.
"Melinda's threes broke their back," said Raiders coach Marsha Sharp. "We started playing really good defense. We got our hands on the ball and got our crowd into it."
Washington had a simpler explanation for Tech's first-half scoring bursts.
"We broke our concentration," she said. Senior guard Lynn Pride was unable to rescue Kansas in the second half. Pride.
While Pride was missing shots, Tech senior forward Aleah Johnson was hitting them. Johnson, who scored a game-high 21 points, hit five of her nine field goals in an 8-minute second-half span that helped push the Raiders' lead to 65-47 with 62:27 left.
who scored only eight points on four-of-16 shooting, was harassed by the Tech student section, whose members chanted "ball hog" whenever she had the ball. Pride fouled out with 2:47 remaining.
Raymant, who became the 14th Kansas women's player to score more than 1,000 points with a hoop at the 13:43 mark of the first half, was five-of-13 shooting and missed all three of her three-point attempts.
But the blame couldn't be placed entirely on Pride.
The Raiders starters were a total of 12 inches shorter than the Jayhawks' yet outscoored them in the frontcourt 36-26.
"I don't think they're any tougher than anyone else," Pride said of the Raiders. "We didn't come together as a team."
"KU did a pretty good job of taking care of the ball in the first few minutes," Tech's Sharp said. "You have to work hard all the time because they can get back into it."
But in the first 15 minutes of the game, Kansas (12-5, 3-2 Big 12) definitely was poised for an unset.
But the Jayhawks never could. Junior guard Brooke Reves, who had 12 points and 10 rebounds, said that her teammates believed they could come back when they were in tough situations earlier this season. Saturday, Reves said that hope was missed after Tech's 10-0 and 14-0 runs.
Tech's crowd, which ranks No.2 in the nation in average attendance, might have been partly responsible for dimming the 'Hawks' hopes.
"I don't think it helped," Reves said. "We didn't respond well."
The Jayhawks next will face Missouri at 7:05 p.m. Wednesday in the friendly confines of Allen Fieldhouse.
Chiefs' Thomas seriously injured after car rolls on icy road
The Associated Press
LIBERTY, Mo. — Derrick Thomas, a nine-time Pro Bowl linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, was seriously injured in a one-car accident on an icy road yesterday afternoon that killed one of his close friends.
Television reports said the 33-yearold Thomas, one of the NFL's most dominant defensive players, sustained a broken back. But a team representative and a representative at Liberty Hospital declined to confirm that.
Thomas and his companions were en route to Kansas City International Airport to fly to St. Louis for the Buccaneers-Rams NFC championship game when he carrolled several times on a snowy highway about 1:30 p.m.
The deceased was identified as Michael Tellis, 49, of Kansas City, Kan., the patrol said. A close friend of Thomas, Tellis helped him establish projects such as a charity golf tournament that had become an annual event in Kansas City.
Both Thomas and the man who died were thrown from the vehicle, the Missouri State Highway Patrol said.
Chiefs spokesman Bob Moore said team officials and doctors were en route to Liberty Hospital north of Kansas City. Chiefs president Carl Peterson was on his way back to Kansas City from St Louis.
Thomas, who became an immediate star after being taken in the first round of the 1969 draft, has spent all 11 years of his NFL career with the Chiefs and was an All-Pro in his first nine seasons. In just his second season, he set the NFL single-game record with seven sacks against Seattle.
Sports Columnist
Coaches designed their entire defense around the quick-hitting, 6-foot-3, 255-pound Thomas, and he was a mainstay in a consistently tough defense that helped the Chiefs become one of just three NFL teams to win 100 games in the decade of the '90s.
Thomas: injured in a one-car accident; passenger killed
Michael Rigg
"I take my hat off to No. 58. He is the most underrated football player right now on our football team," head coach Gunther Cunningham said in December.
sports@kansan.com
So, it's up to just me, the bad taste in my mouth left by the loss, and my beat-up radio to pass the time.
The only thing that could have eased the pain of this dismal two-hour car ride home from Tiger country would have been an emphatic Jayhawk victory. Instead, Kansas was hammered by its border war rival, 81-59, in a root canal of a game without Novocain.
Car radio tunes fan in to defeat of Jayhawks
SOMEWHERE WEST OF COLUMBIA, Mo. — Loneliness.
Not wanting to think about the sorry display of basketball the Jayhawks just put on at the Hearnes Center, I hit the power button on the radio. The first station I encountered was playing the classic rock song "Touch Enough."
Ironic, because the Jayhawks didn't show the toughness — mental or physical — against Missouri that all great teams need to win a national title. They were pushed around inside, barely outbounding a smaller, yet more determined Tiger squad by a slim eight-board margin. After the game, little-known Missouri forward T.J. Soyeo said that Kansas' Eric Chenowith wasn't quick or strong enough to cover him in the post.
Kansas folded under the wilting lights of Missouri's nasty Hearnes Center. The Jayhawks looked like a scared and timid team on Saturday, and lacked the arrogance and toughness that they had shown consistently throughout the season.
"I think we broke their hearts," said Missouri forward Johnnie Parker. "I was talking to a couple of their guys after the game and they were really down, and I've really never seen Kansas that way."
You or me, Johnnie
Tot of the routine.
A touch of the "seek" button led the radio numbers up the dial, straight to a religious station. I wondered if the Tigers' Clarence Gilbert was listening to this frequency before his divine performance against the Jayhawks. Gilbert hit a God-like seven three-pointers for the Tigers. His falling down, fouled-in-the-act bomb with 13:55 to both solidified the victory and demoralized Kansas
"We tried different people, we tried different defense, we tried everything we have," Kansas coach Roy Williams said. "Nothing seemed to work."
"That kind of made us mad because we looked at it like they did it to him on purpose. So we stuck it to them even harder," he said.
Except full-fledged assault. In the waning moments of Saturday's game, Gilbert fell to the floor because of an ankle injury — a move Parker later said Missouri thought was intentional.
A shift of the dial led me to the Cars' "Just What I Needed."
As shown by last season's Kansas team, losses in January and February mean success in March. I'll gladly trade a road loss to the Tigers in January for a Final Four appearance. Losses expose weaknesses, and Saturday's loss shows that the Jayhawks have plenty of trouble defending gifted guards on the perimeter. I mean, Gilbert wasn't the first this season to torch Kansas (does the name Cory Bradford of Illinois ring a bell?), and he certainly won't be the last. But the Jayhawks will have another chance tonight when they take on Colorado's feisy Jaquay Walls.
Was a loss just what the Jayhawks needed? I sav ves.
Another touch of the seek button led me to Eiffel 65's annoyingly catchy hit "Blue."
"Im Blue," repeatedly bellowed out as the main verse from the radio.
And then, in one dramatic moment, the uncanny similarities between the Jayhawks and my stereo became as clear as an FM radio signal on a crisp Saturday afternoon.
Rigg is a Greenwood Village, Cola,
sophomore in broadcast journalism.