(Author here--RIP/DFW: I reread this post this morning and realized it just didn't explain what I was trying to get at in this post, so I have considerably expanded it. To those that commented on the original version, I am sorry if this expanded version alters for the worse your prior assessment. But I just had to keep reaching for what I was trying to get at here.)
Remember that Withey sat for a couple years and it looked like he was done for. Scott Pollard seemed to have to intervene for Withey to knock off Self's blinders about weight gain.
Self fell into the muscle ball rut.
He had so much success bulking guys up and roughing up leaner teams that he lost sight of what he had in Withey.
It's also good to remember it was Self who was the first I recall referring to "the eye test." Because he was using it to defend a player, we liked it, but it betrays an identification, an understanding, of the eye test.
And it was Self that insulted Hunter with the book cover shallow assessment of Hunter being a poor man's Withey. What a crappy thing to say about a kid.
Self's language is peppered with judgemental, class loaded words. .
He also tries hard to be jock cool.
He's always in the right threads. He always is nattily dressed. He thinks he is cool. He likes cool plAyers that are characters with swag. The are a reflection of him. And we like him for being cool. Cool is good unless it obstructs seeing human potential.
U.K. had "long cats."
And so on.
Self also likes cracking and swagger.
Hunter is a lot of things, but cool and cracking swag do not describe him.
Self talks to people back east and says we shop in the same stores you do. He says it because he wants them to know he and his guys and his school and his fans are not hick. And we love him for it.
He doesn't need a 30,000 ft house for him and two kids. The house appears a demand to be taken as someone that matters, as expressed through the interplay of large salary and Federal tax code. The financial advisor defines the size of the house and lot up to a point, but beyond that, its all about how one wants to be perceived in other's eyes--not just recruits, but the faculty's and alum's and media's eyes. These are the eyes that matter. Its only to limited extent about entertaining. The richest persons in the world can have total privacy on two acres with a wall and a get away in the Caribbean they mostly don't mention except to their friends and families. Self probably has the getaway in the Caribbean that he doesn't discuss in the media, but the house is about as subtle as a Rollex on fork lift driver's arm at a warehouse in Lawrence. The house stands out. It is the expressionistic embodiment of a man's home is his castle in the Mannerist McMansion Era and now to in the Baroque 1% era of the American renaissance. Castles house kings and aristocrats, nouveau riches and Gatsbys, as Scott Fitzgerald understood, not tanners and hatters and pizza truck drivers. Drive by Tom Pendergast's old joint on Ward Parkway from a different age. It is exceptionally elegant--elegant in a way that Americans, even our biggest crooks today, just can't seem to bring themselves to be any more. Tom was a city boss--and the son of a city boss. He ran a Jackson county machine that was so powerful a President, FDR, and the city bosses that elected him, and FDR's Republican opponents, felt it all their best interests nationally to dismantle the Kansas City machine; that is, until they needed its remnants and Harry Truman and the usual number of dead persons' votes to assure FDRs last election. Tom's house stands out in my memory for its good taste and its paramount location on a processional gateway to and from Tom's town. And yet for all its timeless elegance, it appears a line shack in terms of size compared with Bill's hat hanger. Tom ran a county machine with national influence from the back of a small office. He knew who he was and what he was and so did everyone else, because he was his father's son--a boss descended from a boss. He needed only to please himself finally. Bill Self is the son of public school educators. He is first generation wealth in the age of the Income Tax. Bill Self has to prove himself in a way Tom Pendergast never had to--in a way Bill Self's children will not have to prove themselves. Cool in and of itself is not enough proof. But cool combined with bricks and mortar is a materialistic alchemy. It triggers lasting chops--the appearance of enduring formidability.
Appearances "appear" to count with Self. He "apparently" has an understanding of the superficialities that can be a part of success. Ambitious and successful Americans (and Europeans and every other kind of earthling it appears) have long understood the role of appearance in the attainment of reality behind its facade.
Just as a house is the appearance of socio-economic substance, cool is the appearance of competitive interpersonal substance.
It appears from a remote and virtual observation point that in Bill Self's fecund, hard working and often brilliant mind that talent in quantity X dressed in Cool in Quantity Y has some significant level of advantage over the same quantity of Talent wrapped in quantity X, but dressed in Cool in quantity Y-1.
Withey, whose high school feeds showed considerable volleyball deftness of footwork and reach from the start, apparently was apparently not only not heavy enough, but also not cool enough on the outside either for a long time. Its only a hypothesis, but one has little choice but to posit hypotheses regarding such mysterious phenomena, as Withey and Mickelson, not playing, when prior explanations seem inadequate and wanting.
Withey wasnt pretty, but he wasn't a homely either. I suspect his problem was he was, like Kaun, nice. Perhaps too nice. Perhaps as nice on the floor as he was off it, where as Kaun seemed to master the art of being nice enough off the floor for Self reputedly to find Kaun alone safe around his daughter, while being quite aggressive on the floor. Nice is nice. Its not cool--on or off the floor. Nice is keeps you out of trouble. Nice gets you in good with your friends mom. But nice doesn't man up and take the brace ring from a blue meanie. The only thing short of becoming a blue meanie that can stand up to a blue meanie trying to take your lunch money, or your shot at a national championship, or the Golden 80, appears to be in Self's POV to be COOL.
Everyone has to have talent to compete at a high level. John Gielgud had talent. Larry Oliver had talent. They had the old Shakespearean tradition, too. But it took the working class, hard edged, cool of Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson and now Daniel Craig to unseat the old order. Old orders die hard. They start out with everything on their side, not just the silver spoon and the trust fund. The entire system favors them.
Throughout history, cool is recurrent means of overturning the old order. And cool that says it connects better with the tradition than the old order does, is almost impossible to stop save by counter coup. Think of FDR, who was the definition of cool from the old order that had to leave the old order, after its rejection of him for polio, and so joined the revolution of the new order. Think of the late John F. Kennedy, who apparently pushed old order a bit too far beyond its comfort zone with his Praetorian Special Forces Guard reporting straight to him and his $4 Billion in Silver Certificates he alone controlled. Think of his late son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., who had the cool, but not the father, or grand father one apparently requires in contending for the kind of power that a succeeding generation seemed willing to bestow on him as well. Cool works. Cool can rule...if it doesn't move too far beyond the old order.
Cool is not a concept. Cool is real. Cool moves mountains. Cool leaves monuments to itself. The founders of the country were VERY cool. Monticello. Mt. Vernon. Not just houses, or palaces. They were monuments too what cool did and could do. A few great mansions of Hollywood. A few great mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. The cool of privateers and Triangle Traders stealing global maritime trade from the masters of global maritime privateering and piracy--the English. A few new mansions of Long Island. The monuments to the cool of currency traders. A few mansions in Grosse Pointe--monuments to what cool accomplished once in the auto industry once upon a time. A few mansions through out the big cities of American testifying to the cool of bosses and gangsters from the era of city machines and prohibition. A few monuments like Graceland. Residuals of what cool can do in music. Now we live in an age of sports dominance. It too is leaving behind its monuments to what cool in sport can do.
Not all talented people are cool.
Just as not all talentless people are uncool.
Cool, which has gone by many names through the millennia, and which seems always to include some helping of charisma, is its own variable--its own driver--its own attribute.
Cool is.
Hunter is peculiar, as they used to say. He may have some cool latent within him, as Withey turned out to have, but so far, as it was with Withey for a long time, it is latent. Hunter has a lot of talent, enough that Self would take him as sloppy seconds during the apparent recruiting embargo era. Look at the others Self has taken as sloppy seconds either as transfers (Withey, Tarrick, Hunter) or as second choices during recruiting (Xavier, Selby) and you can see a pattern of serious talent Self can't resist the challenge of coaching up in the mind/body package it comes in.
Still, just looking at the list of sloppy seconds mentioned above, you can see a pattern. The cool guys play immediately, whether they are ready or not. The uncool guys wait. The cool guys play now. The uncool guys, they have to wait till the cool guys are either gone, or the cool guys prove they just cannot produce at a high enough level for Self to touch what I now call "The Golden 80." In the 40 game era, .800 is the golden mean. Sustain .800 over time and you are golden. Your contract is golden. Your house is golden. Your trust funds for your kids are golden. Your stock and bond portfolio is golden. Your cars are golden. Your wife is golden. Fall short of it--experience too many up and down seasons--and your only hedge is NCs. And everyone knows NCs are a 1 in 6 dice roll with less than a 1 seed, and 1 in 4 dice roll with a 1 seed. Only suckers bet on going 6 of 6, or taking the first two rounds for granted, even just 4 in 4 against the best in the country with 5 positions where DOA mismatch could occur any game, a cold night of shooting could occur any game, and with fighting those odds with 17-23 year old, half-neural netted young males with as much interest in the wild thang as in balling. Only suckers bet on 6 in 6, or 4 in 4 without the right Big Shoe-Big Agency Complex alliance, and without the calls that apparently guaranties.
So; when a cool coach is pursuing The Golden 80, and he lives in the prison of his successful experience, and he has himself been a cool guy with no talent that in D1 and seen he could cut it on lots of cool and almost no talent, well, then who's he gonna start and who's he gonna call first, and who's he gonna let sit? Cool rules with Bill Self. Call it swag. Call it getter-done confidence. Call it cockiness. Call it a pair that slaps like bowling balls in a bull's scrotum. Call it broad shoulders. Call it whatever you want.
But both Jeff Withey and Hunter Mickelson shared the absence of it, when they came to KU.
And both ALWAYS had to sit, when the play was 50/50, while the cool guys played.
Why did Brady play? Was it Roger's money? No. Bill Self's house is probably three times the size of Roger's. Was it lack of talent? No. Behind the clownish, childlike face, Brady had the cool. Brady was "accepted" by the cool guys. Cool is NOT only the package. What we learn time and again from the Humphrey Bogart's of the world is that a man's cool comes through even an ugly face, once his cool is catalysed by the acid test of life. Brady had the cool. He didn't have enough talent to beat Xavier with the look of cool, but not the heart of it, out of starting in a system that requires a steady flow of OAD talent for a coach to chase the Golden 80, but the little bastard--and I mean that affectionately--had the inner cool and enough talent on defense and on the trigger, despite the sleepy eyed look, and short height, to take 20 mpg from him and, in retrospect, expose him for the wildly talented, but half cool guy that Xavier ultimately has turned out to be.
Therefore Hunter has to be quite a bit better to play even a little, until his Cool surfaces, if it ever does, and which it might, though time's a-wastin'.
Cool is not a fungible commodity. Ask any man comfortable in himself and possessing even an ounce of the right stuff. Cool is inseparable from the uniqueness of each man. Cary Grant was cool. But so was Humphrey Bogart. Marlon Brando was cool, but so were James Dean and Paul Newman and Al Pacino. Sean Connery was cool. But so was Jack Nicholson. Cool seems to distill in many cases to a man becoming what he is in full, to borrow from Tom Wolfe, who proved cool can even come in pencil necked, post modern dweebs. Cool seems to come from a man instinctively connecting with the deepest traditions of manhood in the midst of the current order. It makes them both familiar and dangerous, traditional and at odds with the status quo, cooperating and yet competing.
One more thing about cool. It is not always cool. Like a woman that goes to bed beautiful and wakes up rumpled, cool can indeed be awkward at times. It can make fun of itself at times. It makes mistakes. But in the final analysis it always weighs in and influences the outcome. It doesn't always win. Just ask John F. Kennedy. But it contributes unmistakably to the outcome.
And so here's the take away: the cool Mr. Self wants to win more than just be cool, because in his profession winning is the coolest thing of all--the real reasons for swagging in the for first place. And sooner or later, if you've got what the team needs, and Self finally despairs of finding it in the cool guys, Zeke from Cabin Creek gets to play. And sometimes that act of playing, as in the case of Withey, forges the latent cool into something manifest.
To combine cool and nice and money is apparently the ultimate cat nip in men for women. I am thinking here of Warren Beaty and George Clooney. Oh, my!
Jeff Withey surprisingly combines a lot of nice, with significant bones, and some quantity of cool forged by the furnace of basketball competition to be attractive to Kennedy Summers.
No one is perfect. No one is all cool all the time. No one always knows how to use the cool for everyone's best interests.
But the cool is there to be used.
And forged it is not yet there.
Cool is often wrongly assumed not to exist in country boys.
The silver screen is replete with country boys that had their share of cool. Gary Cooper and John Wayne grew up rural. In basketball, Jerry West--the original Zeke from Cabin Creek--and Larry Bird--the Hick from French Lick--seemed at first to have no cool, seemed at first to be stories of the fish out of water in the big cities. But Jerry West and his inherent cool became the sports King of the slickest of the slick--suede shoed Tinsel Town, USA, first as player and then as GM. And the Hick from French Lick? Larry and his cool finally brought America's most tradition and hide bound and proper town to its knees, too.
Cool, as I said, rules. despite its wrapping.
Hunter, baby, keep playing as hard as you can.
Destiny and the sports gods move in mysterious ways.
Keep learning everything the coaches have to teach you and as that learning is processed through the alchemical transformer of the deep self, the world may yet have to make way for the next Zeek from Cabin Creek.
The more unusual the talent, and the more idiosyncratic the package, the longer it takes the world recognize how much it needs and wants it.
