On Jan. 3, Kansas University will play in its first Orange Bowl in 39 years. The last time the Jayhawks were in Miami for the big bowl game, the face value of a ticket (above left) was .50 - compared with 25 today - and the Jayhawks lost a thriller to Penn State when the Nittany Lions received another chance at a two-point conversion after officials called Kansas for 12 men on the field. PSU converted on the second try and defeated KU, 15-14.

All-American Bobby Douglass is one of several Jayhawks still harboring bad memories of the loss to Penn State in the 12th-man

Bobby Douglass wasn’t the first big, strapping quarterback to date the prettiest girl in the class.

“We went together the whole year,” Douglass reflected on the 1968-69 Kansas University school year via phone from his home in suburban Chicago. “She went to Miami for the Orange Bowl and that made the trip a little more fun. Just a wonderful girl. She was great for me. She was a little more mature than I was.”

Still, Douglass said, his girlfriend was the reason he was called into the equivalent of the principal’s office for a man-to-man talk with KU head coach, Pepper Rodgers.

“She was a little bit of a hippie, so to speak,” Douglass said. “When Pepper called me in he told me, ‘You’re going out with this girl and we heard she might have smoked some marijuana.’ I said: ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. If she has, I certainly wouldn’t get involved in anything like that.’ He was just kind of warning me, just letting me know they were watching me.”

Douglass looked back on the time when peace protests weren’t always so peaceful and the generation gap seemed wider than ever with fondness.

“Interesting time,” he said. “Lot of fun.”

Then he paused.

“Thirty-nine years ago,” he said. “I hate to think about it being that long ago. I guess we have to be realistic. It’s been that long.”

And it’s been that long since Kansas has participated in the Orange Bowl. In a very real way, this has been the toughest of Douglass’ last 39 years, and watching on television the revival of the KU football program has helped him to get through it. He was diagnosed with tongue cancer and underwent radiation treatments. He said his weight dropped from 260 pounds to less than 200 and is now up to 230. His treatments ended about the time KU’s football season started. He said about 80 percent of his energy is back.

“Things are going good,” he said. “They’ve pretty much cleared me of it. They got it all. Nothing’s showing up on the CT scans. They’ve got to watch it pretty close for the next couple of years. The chances of it coming back are pretty slim.”

Douglass said he went to the Missouri game at Arrowhead Stadium and plans to attend the Orange Bowl to watch his alma mater attempt to upset Virginia Tech.

When the Jayhawks last played in the Orange Bowl, led there by Douglass, a first-team All-American, they lost, 15-14, to Penn State, coached by a young Joe Paterno. History has remembered it as the “12th-man game” because Kansas was flagged for having 12 men on the field, which gave the Nittany Lions a second chance at the game-winning two-point conversion.

In the view of Douglass, it’s a shame history has made that the headline because it never should have come to that.

Leading 14-7 in the fourth quarter, Kansas drove to the Penn State 5-yard line. Rodgers was faced with a difficult decision: Either kick the field goal to take a 10-point lead or go for it in hopes of getting a touchdown that would put the game out of reach. Rodgers gambled against a defense that included two of the nation’s top players, Outland Trophy winner Mike Reid, a gifted pianist and Grammy Award-winning country music song writer who cut short his career with the Cincinnati Bengals to pursue his artistic passion, and linebacker Jack Ham, a centerpiece of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Steel Curtain defense that won four Super Bowls.

“If we were going to go for it, we probably should have done it with me running a quarterback sneak,” said Douglass, who set the NFL standard for running quarterbacks while playing for the Chicago Bears. “When you turn around and hand it to a fullback, they always have a chance of getting penetration. You talk about a great offensive guy, Pepper really knew what he was doing. But I thought we should have kicked the field goal.”

John Riggins, such a rare blend of strength, speed and toughness that he ran his way into the pro football Hall of Fame, had blasted into the end zone for KU’s second touchdown. But on this play he was stopped short. The KU lead remained seven points instead of the 10 it would have been had the Jayhawks kicked a field goal.

Douglass, 60, didn’t have much time to fret over the loss. He was off to play in a college all-star game.

“I don’t think I got back to school for another three weeks,” said Douglass, who never graduated. “I never watched a film of the game. Still haven’t.”

For that reason, Douglass offers no explanation for how Kansas could have ended up with 12 men on the field on the game’s deciding play.

Teammate Rick Abernethy said he didn’t watch the film until 1982 because he was “too distraught” to watch it after the game.

Abernethy lives in Kansas City and has carried the label “12th man” with him for the past 39 years. He is capable of laughing about it, but the more he talks about it, the more it’s clear he doesn’t consider it the least bit funny.

“We had 12 men on the field for four straight plays,” said Abernethy, retired from coaching football, including with the Kansas City Chiefs, and working in the dairy business. “Three people came running on the field and our hard-and-fast rule was you do not leave the field unless a man called your name twice and hit you on the shoulder pads. He had to say, ‘Abernethy! Abernethy!’ Nobody called my name and nobody tapped me on the shoulder.”

So for four plays, Kansas played with 12 players and didn’t get caught until the fourth play.

“Vernon Vanoy and I were jockeying for position, trying to get in the same place,” Abernethy said. “I’m putting my leg in front of his and he’s putting his leg in front of mine. I’ve thought thousands of times that I should have realized then that we had 12 players in and I should have run off the field.”

Who was the third player to run on the field before the first of four plays with an extra man? The late Orville Turgeon. The coach who would have been responsible for sending him in, Dave McClain, also died.

“They scored with 16 seconds left and after the ballgame’s over, I ran off the field devastated, down the tunnel and back into the locker room, very distraught,” Abernethy said. “I had my head in my hands, saying, ‘It’s all my fault. Blame me. It’s all my fault.’ The press was in there, walking around the locker room, trying to get the story, and two or three guys were comforting me, shielding me from the press. Someone from the Miami Herald overheard me and they wanted a picture of me the next day. That’s how the story came out. The next day they took a picture of me shrugging my shoulders with a ‘What, who me?’ pose.”

The next night at a party, players from both teams were presented with gifts in alphabetical order, Abernethy first.

“They call my name and the Penn State team gave me a standing ovation,” Abernethy said. “I don’t think Pepper ever saw any humor in it.”

Neither did the fans who came from Kansas hoping to taste a victory and warm Miami climate. They got neither.

Walt Houk of Lawrence-based Travellers Inc., which then operated under a different name, handled the travel for 3,000 Kansas fans and this year put together packages for 600 people making the trip.

“If my memory serves me, we had 13 charters and stayed at eight or nine different hotels,” Houk said. “We couldn’t get enough buses to get all the fans transferred to the stadium, so I looked on the maps, at the inland waterways, and the people from the hotels walked down to the canal where the inland waterway runs for sight-seeing boats. We called it ‘Kansas invades the Orange Bowl by sea.’ It was almost a two-hour ride. Miami had the coldest day on record that night. Here we are with a loss, deflated, and instead of wanting to get on the boat and party, it was a cold, silent boat ride back late at night.”

Fair or not, Abernethy pinned himself with the blame and gladly would have knitted a blanket for every one of those passengers.

“When you’re little and dreaming you always picture yourself making the play that wins the game,” Abernethy said. “You never picture yourself being involved in the play that loses the game. Sure it bothers you and it will always bother you. My only solace is I know what happened. I have always said I would rather be the 12th man on the field than the 11th man on the bench. What if I ran off the field and nobody went on and we lost with 10 men on the field?”

Douglass, whose year battling cancer has allowed him to put his football triumphs and failures in their proper place, doesn’t think Abernethy should punish himself any longer.

“That’s not why we lost the game,” Douglass said.