Bold, Those Tigers

Stewart could tell Peeler something about hassling with Kansas. A high school hero in Shelbyville, Mo., back in the early '50s, Stewart was wooed by Phog Allen of Kansas before choosing Missouri and captaining the Tigers in his junior and senior years. He remembers how before games with Kansas, his 1955-56 Missouri team would race down the runways at Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence to practice ducking the soda cans and other missiles that would invariably be thrown from the crowd. He also recalls the night in 1954 when a window was mysteriously opened in the visitors' locker room during a game at Kansas so that four inches of snow had piled up in time for Mizzou's halftime chalk talk.

That was the only regular-season game Stewart lost to Kansas as a player; coaching, he's 26-28 against the Jay-hawks. Though he has mellowed over the years, legend has it that Stewart still refuses to let his team spend the night before a game in Lawrence because he doesn't want to spend one nickel of Missouri money in Kansas. "Aww, I just say that to tick those folks off," he says.

Big Eight historians claim that Missouri-Kansas is the oldest athletic rivalry west of the Mississippi. Hostility between the states reached a tragic peak during Civil War days, when Quantrill's Raiders—now we're talkin' serious woofing—slam-dunked across the border from Missouri and burned Lawrence to the ground. Nothing of the kind has happened for more than a century, of course, but the athletic warfare between the states has been hot and heavy. Then there was the football incident in 1969: After Missouri beat Kansas 69-21, Jayhawk coach Pepper Rodgers gave Tiger coach Dan Devine the peace sign from across the field, and Devine gave half of it back. Gridiron fortunes at both institutions have gone the way of Quantrill's Raiders, but the rivalry thrives on the hardwood.

Going into last week's game, Kansas was 19-0 and Missouri 16-1 (the Tigers had lost another border dispute, to Illinois). But Jayhawk forward Ricky Calloway, a transfer from Indiana, echoed recent public opinion concerning his team when he said, "People don't respect us as a Number One team. They question our talent."

It didn't help when Jayhawk guard Kevin Pritchard confessed that Kansas "must look to people like a Saturday YMCA league team." Then a Miami reporter wrote that the Jayhawks "would have trouble jumping over a telephone directory."

"I believe we can jump over two telephone directories," said Williams, the � pleasant former North Carolina assistant whose system has blatantly out-Heeled the inconsistent Tar Heels this season. "This talent thing...I think talent also includes brains. We won't win most runnin', jumpin', dunkin' contests. But, now, we'll think with anybody."

The silly, hoary, racist stereotype may very well be at work here, inasmuch as Kansas starts four white players and, if Calloway had not come yipping in from Bob Knight's doghouse, would have started five. The Jayhawks' best defender, 6'10" center Pekka Markkanen of Jyvaskyla, Finland, is a good example of the uniqueness of Kansas's lineup. "The guys...they warn me of this rivalry, Missouri," Markkanen said in halting English last week. "It is absolutely different from Finland. But...maybe...like my club team, Honsu, when we play my former team, the Helsinki YMCA."

Kansas played the pre-Big Eight season with a quiet confidence and with what Stewart called a "looseness we all strive for." But as Jayhawk senior Pritchard pointed out, "This league is a different world, especially on the road. When we went in to play LSU at their place and up to New York for Vegas and St. John's [in the preseason NIT games], we just knew we could beat those teams. But going into Columbia for Missouri can be so different...."

The key to any Missouri game is the play of the Tigers' enigmatic 6'10" forward, Doug Smith, whose athletic abilities dwarf those of everyone else in the conference but whose performances in past years sometimes came up as ordinary as his name. Pritchard paid Smith probably the ultimate compliment, coming from a Jayhawk. "He reminds me of Danny Manning," Pritchard said.

But as Kansas took an early 13-4 lead, Smith reminded people more of Danny DeVito before disappearing completely, banished to the bench for more than 7� minutes in the middle of the first half. In his stead, 6'9" forward Nathan (Breeze) Buntin, Missouri's other question mark—a star as a freshman, Breeze had been virtually blown away by diminished minutes in the last two years—scored seven baskets without a miss and kept Missouri in the game. Kansas led at halftime, 46-43.