March Madness was just about to hit full tilt in 1994 when I first met former KU coach Dick Harp.  We hadn’t even printed the first issued of Jayhawk Insider, yet, and I was at least a tad worried that Coach Harp might wonder just who the heck I was and why he ought to waste any of his time talking with me. I needn’t have been concerned.

My goal at the time was to talk Coach Harp into writing a guest column for one of our early issues. It was a device we used to try to introduce folks to the publication and lend ourselves some instant credibility at the same time.

Coach Harp tried at first to politely decline, saying he didn’t think folks would be interested in what he had to say and that he didn’t think writing was a strong point of his.  I talked him into it and traveled to Lawrence to sit down with hime and go over his first draft.

What an honor, and wha a completely pleasant afternoon it turned out to be.  We sat for more tha two hours, me listening intently to every work he had to say about what it had been like to coach and play at Kansas.  How the NCAA Tournament had grown from nothing to its all-consuming status.  What Phog Allen was like.  And Wilt Chamberlain.

It was incredible.  There on his sun porch, sipping some of his wife’s wonderful wassail, it became abundantly clear to me that this new venture – where I would actually be paid to cover Jayhawk sports – was just where I wanted to be.

This weekend, when word of Coach Harp’s death came on Saturday, I couldn’t help but hope that the current-day Jayhawks would somehow find a way to make him proud against Duke on Sunday.

Silly, really.  The KU players get plenty of Jayhawk tradition lessons, I’m sure, but there was no real reason to think they’d be inspired by the passing of a coach who had finished his tenure more than a dozen years before they were born.  And I don’t know that they were.  I only know that the gutsy performance they gave in the seond round of the NCAA East Regional must have left Coach Harp smiling.