From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for June 13, 1988:

Following nearly a week of speculation, Kansas University men’s basketball coach Larry Brown announced today that he was moving back to the NBA. Brown was accepting a lucrative offer from the San Antonio Spurs which would make him the highest-paid coach in the NBA, with a five-year contract for at least $3.5 million. (At KU, Brown would have received $85,000 in the coming fiscal year.) In a press statement, Brown said: “Kansas has been a very special place to me and it was a very difficult decision to leave. I can’t believe that any college coach in the country has a better situation than I did at KU…. The offer at San Antonio was simply a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which I couldn’t turn down.” Two months earlier, Brown had turned down an offer to return to UCLA as head basketball coach. Brown had recently completed his fifth season at KU and had taken the Jayhawks to the national championship.