Dallas ? Kevin Bookout, who grew up a University of Oklahoma football fan, nearly spurned the Sooners four years ago in recruiting.

“I almost went to Kansas. If I lived in Kansas, I think I’d have gone to Kansas,” said Bookout, OU’s 6-foot-8, 275-pound pivot from Stroud, Okla.

Bookout, who also puts the shot and throws the discus and has his designs on the 2008 Olympic Games, said KU’s attraction was strong.

“Doug Reynolds, the weight coach, is a great guy. He is one of the best,” Bookout said of Reynolds, who now works at Kentucky. “It’s a good school.

“Kansas is going to have a good (basketball) team this year, a lot of talent,” Bookout said.

Bookout, who is battling back from elbow surgery after undergoing shoulder surgery earlier in his college career, is working with an ex-Jayhawk this year at OU: Former KU assistant Jerry Green is OU’s first-year director of basketball operations.

“Coach Green is a great guy. He brings a lot to the table being a head coach,” Bookout said of Green, who worked for Roy Williams at KU from 1988 to 1992 then was head coach at Oregon and Tennessee.

Since being canned at Tennessee in 2001, Green had been retired and mostly golfing at his home in South Carolina.

“Coach Green? That’s my boy, my man,” said OU senior Taj Gray, the Big 12 Conference’s preseason player of the year from Wichita. “He’s a laid-back guy, but gets on you when he needs to. He’s told us a lot of little stories already.”