Mayer: History must be relished

You know the old bit, how those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it? Tweaking that, won’t athletes aware of the background in their sport be more inspired to match the excellence that got them where they are?

The topic came up during a recent conversation with Ray Wilbur, master teacher, local citizen par excellence and former coach. Ray and wife Marian have won zillions of awards for achievements in education and civic service and have deserved every one.

Ray recalled when Kansas City baseball star George Brett broke a record set by hall-of-famer Charlie Gehringer in the 1930s. Reminded of that, Brett had no idea who Gehringer was.

How quickly they forget, if they even know in the first place. Any coach with a program worth a damn should throw in history and salutes to past stars along with their other tutelage. Most don’t; too many don’t have the kind of basketball heritage of schools like Kansas University, North Carolina, Kentucky and UCLA.

Memphis basketball coach John Calipari, onetime Kansas assistant, recently took his team to New York to play UCLA. He boarded the bus with the guys and, trying to set a tone for the game, asked, “Anybody know who John Wooden is?” Dead silence.

“See what I mean,” Calipari told Diane Pucin of the Los Angeles Times. “That’s what I’m dealing with. It’s a different time now.” Later he asked about Sam Walton. One of the kids replied: “Wal-Mart, he owns Wal-Mart.” How about Bill Walton (UCLA immortal)? “TV announcer?” one kid asked. “Wears tie-dyed shirts,” offered another.

One beauty of the 15-year Roy Williams basketball regime at KU was that Old Roy was a zealot about reunions of former players and his current players’ familiarity with what they represented. Bill Self is trying to carry on, but he has so many fuzzy-cheeked moppets they’d be hard-pressed to tell you what half of those jerseys hanging in Allen Fieldhouse represent. Bill faces a humongous teaching job. The heritage fix will have to wait.

Football-wise, coach Mark Mangino has wondrous personalities and achievements to draw on to get kids plugged in to Jayhawk pride and prejudice. He’s blessed with the legendary Don Fambrough to help. KU probably does a better job than most schools with its backgrounding and should labor hard to improve it.

But athletes aren’t the only people in sports who need regular injections of historical significance. Fans often are worse off than the lowest walk-on. You read even a few of the items in Internet chat rooms and on message boards and you learn darn quickly how many cultural dolts there are among us, moaning about anyone who even attempts to cite past events to offer more perspective.

Yet there are remarkably knowledgeable and astute fans far better-versed than a majority of media people on what’s gone before and why things may be transpiring as they are. If most athletes were even remotely as plugged in to fact and fiction as some of these communicators, men AND women, jocks would have a far greater appreciation of who went before and why it helped them move from Point A to Point B or C.

Thousands of kids once grew up dreaming of following in the KU footsteps of a Ray Evans, Otto Schnellbacher, John Hadl, Gale Sayers, Clyde Lovellette, Danny Manning, Jo Jo White, et al. Sadly, too many come here nowadays with no clue about earlier stars’ accomplishments.