By Ken Davis, Special to SI.com
Written 11-23-07, a day before the big game
Former Kansas coach Don Fambrough has been around far too long to worry about being politically correct, especially when the topic is the athletic rivalry between Kansas and Missouri. Coach Fam has been playing, coaching and talking Kansas football since the 1940s. He walks like a coach, talks like a coach, swears like a coach, and he bleeds crimson and blue for his beloved Jayhawks.
When officials at Kansas and Missouri announced three years ago that the Border War moniker applied to this feud was being dropped and replaced by the Border Showdown, it came as no surprise Fambrough resisted. And with the stakes higher than ever for Saturday’s game between the No. 2 Jayhawks and the No. 3 Tigers, he isn’t about to compromise his standards now.
“I promise you one thing, it’s not any damn showdown,” says Fambrough, 85. “The people who call it a showdown are people who have never played in the Missouri-Kansas football game, because it is total war. Their people get up high for it and we get up high for it.
“The first thing I was told when I went into the coaching business was to be yourself. Well, it just so happens that I never have cared too much for the University of Missouri. And they don’t care a hell of a lot about me.”
Welcome to the oldest rivalry west of the Mississippi. When Kansas (11-0, 7-0 Big 12) and Missouri (10-1, 6-1) play Saturday night at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, the football issue at hand will be the Big 12 North title, a spot in the conference championship game one week later and a shot at playing in the national championship game.
But, the hostilities pouring into Arrowhead will involve more than a football and 100 yards of turf. The hatred each side feels for the other extends back to pre-Civil War days and is rooted in actual acts of violence waged by one state against the other. Slavery created the battleground; American history was shaped by brutal violence along the Kansas and Missouri borders.
The rivalry dates back to William Clarke Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla leader based in Missouri who, on the morning of Aug. 21, 1863, led his force of pro-slavery raiders into Lawrence, Kan. The Bushwackers killed 183 men and boys, dragging many from their homes and executing them before their families. After the massacre, Quantrill’s Raiders rode out of town, leaving most of Lawrence’s buildings burning.
The scars run deep and, one way or another, they still get passed from generation to generation. More than anything else, that is what sets KU-MU apart from all other college rivalries.
It’s even reflected in the T-shirts — worn mostly by students — that show up at games. While Kansas officials have been discouraging the proliferation of “Muck Fizzou” shirts (a popular item around Lawrence in recent years), some Missouri fans have been preparing a response for the Arrowhead game. Yellow and black T-shirts showed up on the Internet almost two weeks ago. The front bears an illustration of Lawrence burning with the word “Scoreboard” and a Missouri athletic log below. The back is emblazoned with Quantrill’s famous slogan — “Raise the Black Flag and Ride Hard Boys. Our Cause is Just and Our Enemies Many.”
Kansas fans responded with a T-shirt featuring Kansas abolitionist John Brown, another violent figure from America’s barbaric era, and the slogan “Keeping America Safe From Missouri Since 1854.”
“There’s a lot of bad blood, dating back to the Civil War, and I guess that’s what starts it,” says former Missouri quarterback Corby Jones, whose father, Curtis, played and coached for the Tigers. “Honestly, it’s just one of those things nobody’s forgotten. “I was born in Columbia (Mo.) but we moved around a lot when I was young. We had an unspoken rule in our house that you don’t talk about Kansas. We didn’t follow Missouri that much, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to like Kansas.”
For years, Kansas coaches have been calling on Fambrough to deliver a pep talk during Missouri week. The old coach gets pretty emotional. He refuses to let Quantrill rest in peace. And part of the tradition is that he doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.
“The first time I talked about Quantrill, I didn’t know who the hell he was,” Fambrough says. “But somebody had slipped me the book and I read it the night before. I read about him coming over here, killing all the men, raping all the women, and burning the town down. I just thought that would be a good way to end it up. For some strange reason, I’ll never know why, I ended up — and I get pretty excited when I do this — by saying, ‘And we found out two weeks later that Quantrill was a Missouri alumni.’
“Well, Quantrill hasn’t ever seen the University of Missouri or probably any other school. I had a wide-eyed freshman and he believed every damned thing I said. The following Monday, he had a history test on the Civil War. And lo and behold, one of the questions was, ‘Who was Quantrill?’ I’ll be damned if that freshman didn’t put down that he was a Missouri alumni.”
Fambrough says he knew the professor and everything worked out fine. “He called up and said he wanted to make a deal. He said, ‘I’ll let you coach football and you let me teach history.'”
Missouri and Kansas have met every year since 1891 and the first 115 meetings have supplied Missourians and Kansans with plenty more reasons to dislike each other. The competition is so nasty and so intense, the two schools can’t even agree on the series record. (Officially the series is tied 53-53-9 but Kansas still credits itself with a win from 1960 that was later nullified due to a player who had violated NCAA rules.)
The rivalry is accepted, anticipated, cultivated and treasured in America’s Heartland but largely remains a secret to the rest of the nation. That’s due, in large part, to the rather unsuccessful nature of both programs. Unlike Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn, or Florida State-Miami, national rankings and major bowl implications rarely come into play.
“The nation doesn’t realize what a big thing it is,” says John Kadlec, who played at Missouri, was an assistant coach for the Tigers, and now works as an analyst on the Missouri radio network. “To me, the only difference between this and Ohio State-Michigan is the population they’ve got in Ohio and Michigan. That and the Rose Bowl, of course.”
The Jayhawks, No. 2 in this week’s Bowl Championship Series standings, had never been ranked higher than No. 3 in the Associated Press poll until this week. Kansas was No. 3 for three consecutive weeks in 1968, the last time the Jayhawks won a conference (then the Big 8) title. This is only the third time both teams have been ranked coming into the Border War — and the first since 1973. It’s also the first time the Tigers and Jayhawks are both in the top 10.
Missouri’s highest ranking was No. 1 in 1960. But, wouldn’t you know, the Jayhawks ruined that. The Tigers won their first nine games that season but KU, led by John Hadl and Bert Coan, won the game 23-7. Coan later was ruled ineligible because he had accepted a plane ticket to attend a college all-star game.
“I think in the week or two weeks leading up to the game maybe we got caught up in the pre-game talk about possibly [finishing] No. 1 if we beat KU,” Kadlec said. “Sometimes teams get caught up in that publicity stuff and they forget to play the football game.”
Kansas coach Mark Mangino and Missouri coach Gary Pinkel are trying to guard against that this week. The game has already moved to a bigger stage after Kansas athletic director Lew Perkins proposed moving the game off campus and worked out the details at Arrowhead with Missouri and the Kansas City Chiefs at a time when any BCS ramifications would have been pure fantasy for these long-struggling programs.
Now the game will be played before a sellout crowd of more than 79,000, with a national TV audience and ESPN’s GameDay on hand. Mangino stresses focus and Pinkel talks about doing “the same we’ve been doing.” But that’s hard to do with the backdrop of the rivalry.
“Right after my press conference [after being hired at MU in 2000], I went to a reception at one of the hotels here,” Pinkel says. “I think the first 10 people came up to me and said, ‘Coach Pinkel, great to have you here, uh, but we better beat Kansas.’ I found out real, real quick that it’s a great rivalry.”
Mangino tells a similar story. “There’s no question this is an intense rivalry,” he said. “During my tenure here, it has been a clean rivalry. The players display sportsmanship. But with the fan base, it’s a heated competition.”
Over the years, coaches from both sides of the Border War have never been shy about expressing their disdain for their foes. The rivalry is just as intense in basketball, and former Missouri coach Norm Stewart made it clear he would never spend a cent in Kansas, even if it meant staying overnight and fueling the bus in Kansas City — on the Missouri side. And that’s what many Missouri coaches have done.
“When I was in school,” says former Missouri quarterback Terry McMillan, “[Coach] Dan Devine used to tell us about how it was the oldest rivalry west of the Mississippi. It was all about the recruiting wars, he would say, and if we’re going to do this, or we’re going to do that, we’ve got to beat Kansas.”
McMillan threw for four touchdowns and ran for two more in 1969 as the Tigers beat Kansas 69-21 on the way to their last Orange Bowl. Thanks to Devine and Kansas coach Pepper Rodgers, that contest is remembered as The Peace-Sign Game.
“There’s a lot of different takes on that story,” says former KU All-America quarterback Bobby Douglass, who led the Jayhawks to 21-19 victory over Mizzou and into the Orange Bowl a year earlier.
Max Falkenstien, who called Kansas games on radio and TV for 60 years, remembers it this way: “The game was getting out of hand and Pepper ostensibly flashes the peace sign to Dan Devine over on the other side. Let up a little bit, you know. And Devine returns only half of it over to Pepper. Devine gave him one finger back.”
Devine denied making any such gesture. And Kadlec remembers it the other way around. “Pepper Rodgers gave Dan Devine half a victory sign with his finger,” he says.
When Missouri lost 42-23 in Lawrence in 1995, Tigers coach Larry Smith got so angry about Kansas throwing a touchdown pass with 1:28 remaining that he served up a one-armed gesture to the sideline across the field. Kansas coach Glen Mason said he didn’t see it, but The Kansas City Star reported that Mason smiled when he heard about it.
“Hey, maybe this is getting to be a real, heated rivalry again,” Mason told The Star. “I know you guys would love that. It would make your day if we had rolled around on the field or something.”
*****
Corby Jones was a freshman and started at quarterback for Mizzou in that 1995 game. He says Perkins should “be kicking himself” for moving the game to Arrowhead this year and giving up a Kansas home game. Missouri will do the same next season, but that doesn’t bother Jones.
“They play a lot better in Columbia than we play in Lawrence,” Jones says. “To have a neutral site game in a year like this is crucial. We’re OK as long as we don’t have to go there. My junior year, we had the best team we had had in 14 or 15 years. We go there — and Kansas is terrible — but I throw an interception in the end zone and fumble twice. We lose [15-7] to a team that we were twice as good as. I’m telling you, that place is evil. I hate that place.”
Lawrence merchants were angry at Perkins when the move to Arrowhead Stadium was first announced. With so much hype about this game now, most of that debate has been swept away. Perkins, who left Connecticut in 2003 to restore “the swagger” to KU athletics, says 70 percent of the crowd Saturday will be pro-Kansas. He has no regrets.
“It’s our rivalry and we wanted to showcase it even bigger and better,” Perkins said. “Now it’s an even bigger stage than we thought it was going to be. People said there wouldn’t be an appetite for football here. There’s definitely an appetite for football and we are doing it without hurting basketball. I still can’t understand why it hadn’t happened here before.”
A sign in Lawrence’s Memorial Stadium last Saturday urged KU fans to “Party Like It’s 1899.” That’s when Fieldng H. Yost coached the Jayhawks to a 10-0 season. But the last time Kansas truly was playing football at this level in November, Douglass was the quarterback.
“We were the biggest thing going in ’68; kind of like this team is this year,” says Douglass, who loves the way quarterback Todd “Sparky” Reesing directs the KU offense. “Going to a major bowl was a big thing back then .. I don’t remember a lot of pep talks. We were very confident and we really thought we were as good as any team in the country. To this day, I think we probably were as good as anybody [despite losing to Penn State in the Orange Bowl].”
McMillan, who lives in Dallas now, is so enthralled with quarterback Chase Daniel he made a stop in Columbia two weeks ago and asked Pinkel if he could meet the Heisman Trophy candidate. “I’ve never done anything like that since I’ve been out of school,” McMillan said. “This is the first time this game has made a difference in years. We lost to them in ’68 and we felt like we should have beaten them. We had a very good team. A Model-T will get you to and from work. But a Lexus will get you there faster. That’s the difference between our team and this team.”
It’s a long way from Quantrill’s Raiders to Arrowhead Stadium. All the stories, all the memories, all the games, coaches and players have made this a special rivalry spanning three centuries. Saturday will be the 116th meeting, and this time the Jayhawkers and Tigers are willing to share their party with the rest of the nation.
The clock is counting toward kickoff, so it must be time for another pep talk. Cue the fight song and bring in Coach Fam.
“We’ve always preached around here, that if we could beat Missouri in the last game of the season, well the winter wouldn’t be quite as cold,” Fambrough says. “It’s just a football game and we have a lot of fun with it.
“But let’s keep it like it’s supposed to be. It’s the Border War.”
