”Right now, it`s the old ant-on-the-log deal. A log is going down the river with 10,000 ants on it, and each one thinks he`s guarding it. Right now, every coach in the league thinks he did it.”
The speaker was Missouri basketball coach Norm Stewart, and the subject was the catalyst behind the Big Eight`s new image. Oh, you say you know that conference? The one that made the Wishbone something other than a salad dressing? The one with Oklahoma and Nebraska and last fall`s surprise package in Colorado? What`s that? Uh, excuse me? That football conference, you say?
Whoa, Nellie. Stop right there. Do you still wear Nehru jackets? Do you still listen to the disco beat? Do you still believe, for heaven`s sake, that the Big Red Menace is out to crush us capitalist pigs? Football conference?
When Stewart`s own Tigers are right there atop the basketball rankings, and Kansas is looming just behind? When one of the weekend`s top games will be played in the Jayhawks` venerable Allen Field House, where on Saturday they host No. 9 Oklahoma? When, in 1988, it became the only league in history to have each and every member of its All-Conference team picked in the first round of the very next National Basketball Association draft?
Danny Manning, you remember him, don`t you? He went to Kansas and led them to that year`s national title. Mitch Richmond, last season`s NBA Rookie of the Year? He went to Kansas State. Derrick Chievous of the Rockets?
Missouri. Jeff Grayer of the Bucks? Iowa State. Harvey Grant of the Bullets?
Oklahoma.
And, hey! If it`s such a football conference, then why was current Sooner forward Tony Martin saying this in the preseason? ”This year,” he was saying, ”I think our fans are looking forward to the basketball season to get the bitter taste out of their mouths from what happened in the football season. Arizona, Texas, Colorado (who defeated the Sooners in football). We play all three teams again, and get another shot at them. Different season, different field, different sport, but we get a chance to prove them wrong.”
Now what more proof do you need than that? What more proof do you need than a basketball player`s talking about avenging football losses at a school like Oklahoma? Hey. The Big Eight`s a basketball conference now. The only conference that can currently claim three of the nation`s Top 10 teams.
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The ants. There are any number of candidates to fill the roles of those ants that caused this makeover, but the starting point was Columbia and Stewart`s successful recruitment of Steve Stipanovich in 1979. He and Sam Bowie and Ralph Sampson were then the top three big men choosing colleges, and when the St. Louis native decided to play near home, a corner was turned and the Big Eight`s face was indelibly changed.
It was, then, a conference with a storied tradition, but a stagnant present. Phog Allen, Henry Iba, Bruce Drake, Tex Winter, Ted Owens, Jack Hartman. Each of those legends labored (or had labored) in the Big Eight.
Their offenses were slow, their defenses were tough and their orientation was toward those guards who dominated the league as the `70s turned into the
`80s (Darnell Valentine, Rolando Blackman and Lary Drew, to name a few). But the big men needed to complement them regularly spurned the Big Eight, spurned them so avidly that its 1979 All-Conference team featured four guards and a single forward.
Stipanovich`s decision began to alter all of that, and his choice made the Big Eight a legitimate place to play for other top prospects in the heartland. Then, in 1980, other alterations were set in motion with Billy Tubbs` arrival at Oklahoma and Johnny Orr`s move from Michigan to Iowa State. Instant credibility, that is what Orr gave the conference, and with Tubbs it suddenly found itself with a brash newcomer who dared challenge its cherished tenet. We`re going to run and then run some more, he declared, and it`s just too bad if some folks don`t like it.
Not many folks then recognized just what these arrivals presaged, and as the conference`s makeover began, it was yet far from the spotlight and still cloaked in anonymity. Orr was known when he returned to recruit in Detroit, but there he found that the prospects could not name another coach in the Big Eight. ”But they knew the Big East coaches `cause they were on television,” he recalls. Stewart, recognizing the problem, responded by scheduling his Tigers to play Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in Washington and, a season later, Sampson and Virginia in the Meadowlands. ”We had very little chance to be successful, but we got exposure,” he remembers of those games, both losses.
The second of them came in February of 1983, and it was only months later that the nation`s spotlight swung once more back onto the Big Eight. This time it swung to Lawrence, which had just named a new coach, and settled on the peripatetic Larry Brown, who had decided to take on the challenge of guiding the Jayhawks.
For, now, all the major ants were in place, and their progeny were about to step forth. After Stipanovich came Oklahoma`s Wayman Tisdale and the heralded Manning and a bevy of talents who blessed the league with at least one Star player in every season during the `80s. ”Some people don`t like the star system, but it was really developed in the Big Eight,” claims Tubbs.
”You see a need for it, and you run with it. It`s what fills arenas, and TV and stars walk hand-in-hand.”
After Tubbs himself reaped success with his upbeat style, others chose to follow, and suddenly the Big Eight was no longer staid, it was instead one of the most-entertaining conferences in the country. ”What`s winning is what`s in style,” he now goes on.
And after all of this, as if to punctuate all of this, came the crescendo, the 1988 title game in Kansas City between Kansas and Oklahoma.
”The Big Eight Is Great,” read the button its supporters wore on their weekend of glory.
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Funny thing, glory. Why, entering this season, the league appeared bereft of a Star, and of a team capable of cracking the Top 10. Even conference officials admit they thought its best would be no better than, say, No. 15, but, remember, it`s a basketball conference now.
So there are Missouri and Kansas sitting 1-2, and throughout the heartland, a whole bunch of best-players-you`ve-never-heard-of-since -they`re-rarely-on-national TV. There are Anthony Peeler and Doug Smith and Nathan Buntin at Missouri, and Rick Calloway and Kevin Pritchard and the whole gang at Kansas. Skeeter Henry at Oklahoma fits the bill as well, as do centers Byron Houston of Oklahoma State and Victor Alexander of Iowa State and Shaun Vandiver of Colorado. ”I think we`re keeping up with other conferences,”
says Stewart phlegmatically.
”Any basketball fan,” says Orr more forcefully, ”knows the Big Eight is one of the best basketball conferences in the country. We`re as much basketball as anything. Hey, we fill this gym every game. We don`t fill the football stadium. Kansas. Same thing. Missouri. Same thing.
”Hey. I don`t know what else we could do.”