Post by MizzouTiger on Feb 18, 2008 12:22:42 GMT -5
www.kansascity.com/167/story/493232.html
Allure of nightclubs can be strong for athletes
BY KENT BABB |
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
COLUMBIA | The neon lights are off at the Athena Night Club.
Snow falls on the pavement out front, and a few people eat at the restaurants connected to the bar. Athena is closed. Missouri students had to find a new hangout after Jan. 27 because of an incident no one here wants to talk about. The incident left Tigers guard Stefhon Hannah with a career full of question marks and this voicemail greeting on his cell phone:
“For all who don’t know,” Hannah says quietly, “I got my jaw broke. So I really can’t talk that well.”
In this downtown building, trouble started in the early-morning hours of Jan. 27.
Hannah allegedly started a fight with Athena employees, and one of the employees broke Hannah’s jaw. The injury sent him to the hospital in serious condition. His involvement led to his arrest and an assault charge. This past Tuesday, MU coach Mike Anderson kicked Hannah off the team, 16 days after the bar fight.
Like Columbia, most college towns have a bar district. Many have a place that appears often on the police ledger. Sometimes it is for underage drinking or fights. Other times it is for stabbings or shootings. Last year, police were called to Athena about 150 times, many of them because of gunshots or violence. Athena is one of Columbia’s most notorious bars — but one whose temptations college athletes cannot resist.
“It’s been on our radar screen for some time now,” Columbia police Sgt. Ken Hammond says. “Some bars attract a rougher crowd, and sometimes it gets out of hand. This is a college town.”
College coaches have learned to identify dangerous bars but must reinvent plans each year to keep players away from them and enforce curfew rules.
Some coaches forbid players from going to any bar. Others think of-age players should be free to go to bars but must avoid certain ones. But when temptation is too powerful for coaches’ warnings, players go there anyway — even at the risk of winding up in hospital beds or handcuffs.
“It’s something you have to worry about 24-7,” says Rice University basketball coach Willis Wilson, whose worst worries were realized last April when Owls guard Jonathan Bailey was stabbed to death in a bar near the Texas A&M campus.
Hannah is the latest example of why coaches plead with players to avoid bars with violent reputations. Anderson has invited speakers and former players to talk to the Tigers about some nightspots. But he has had little luck in finding a foolproof method to keep players out of certain bars and in by midnight.
For now, Athena is doing the work for Anderson. It is shuttered. An employee says it is closed for remodeling, but there is no sign of construction. After Jan. 27, no one is saying when or if Athena will reopen. It is quiet and dark and empty.
It is time to go find a new place.
•••
It’s a Wednesday night in Lawrence, Kan. The place to be is Club Axis, where on this night the drink specials are $2 beers and $1 shots. The dance floor is packed. Burly security guards stand in doorways and watch for stare downs, an early sign of a night going bad. The youngsters on the dance floor pay the guards no attention. The music keeps pumping, and the drinks keep flowing.
Look at them go. Even on a school or work night, KU students tip the drinks and hit the floor, all of them looking for something or someone to ease them through the night. The music is loud, and alcohol numbs the senses. They come for the music and the drinks and the girls.
Something brought former KU basketball player J.R. Giddens here three years ago. Back then, in May 2005, the club was known as the Moon Bar. It was popular, but fights broke out often and underage visitors occasionally slipped through the front door.
Giddens came in with a few friends. He was a former McDonald’s All-American with NBA talent. He did not mind when other people at bars reminded him of his greatness. In here, he was a celebrity. He rarely passed on an opportunity to spend a few nighttime hours at the Moon Bar.
“I was out quite frequently,” Giddens says now.
On that Wednesday night in 2005, the music was loud, and girls packed the dance floor. As always, drinks were cheap and available, especially to a 20-year-old star shooting guard. Then tempers flared. Shoves turned into a fight in the Moon Bar parking lot between Giddens and an Olathe man named Jeremiah Creswell. Creswell told investigators at the time that about a dozen men, including Giddens, attacked him with fists, bricks and bottles. Creswell stabbed Giddens in his right leg, severing an artery. Four others were stabbed at the Moon Bar that night.
Police said Creswell acted in self-defense outside the bar. However, for striking Giddens inside the bar 30 minutes earlier, Creswell pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery.
Giddens needed 23 stitches to close the wound and seven more to repair the artery, but even then he was uncertain he would play again. His teammates abandoned him. Coach Bill Self told Giddens it might be best if the 6-foot-5 sophomore left KU; start over at a place where nobody had heard of the Moon Bar.
Two months after the stabbing, Giddens announced plans to transfer to New Mexico. He was later found guilty of misdemeanor battery and sentenced to one year of probation.
He has since put the night behind him and says he prefers not to speak about it in detail.
“That night is just a night I try to forget and get past,” he says. “I think I will be scarred for life.”
After Giddens’ stabbing, the Moon Bar became known as the infamous Moon Bar. Police spent more time there. Students didn’t want that kind of trouble. Part-owner Sonny Liu closed the Moon Bar five months after the stabbing. He tried to sell it, but it stayed on the market two years before Liu and his partners gave up; they rented it last April. The Moon Bar and its reputation had to die before Club Axis could be born. That death took nearly two years.
“Yeah, it used to be bad,” a bartender at Axis says. “J.R. Giddens got stabbed, a couple people got shot. But it’s not like that anymore.”
Giddens is a senior at New Mexico. His friends still call him and ask him to join them for drinks. Giddens says he has been to a bar only a handful of times since May 2005 and that he has not been inside a bar in more than a year.
“I just came to learn that being in places like that, there’s a high probability that something bad will happen,” he says. “Now, I just stay in the house and just watch TV because it’s a lot safer. It’s better that way if you’re an athlete.
“It’s a lesson learned in life.”
•••
Athletes have gone to bars for decades, but in recent years the number of nights in college towns ending with violence has been on the rise.
Nolen Ellison is 67 years old. He and his teammates went to bars when he played basketball at KU in the 1960s. The place with the worst reputation was a bar called the Green Door, where drugs and prostitutes were sold on the cheap.
Sure, Ellison went into the Green Door. Twice. He was curious. That’s where other young, black students went. The girls there showed skin and did the twist, and it was next to the barbershop in the area of Lawrence that Ellison calls the “hood.” He peeked inside a couple of times and decided the Green Door was no place for an athlete with his future in mind.
Ellison says he avoided the Green Door because fights occasionally broke out. Killings, though, were rare. He satisfied his curiosity a few times and moved on.
“Yeah, I went to some of those places,” Ellison says. “And I was lucky as hell I didn’t get trapped in any of them.”
Bars such as the Green Door in the 1960s and the Moon Bar in the 1990s and Athena in the 2000s, they have a certain appeal. They have a certain clientele and a certain way of satisfying vices.
Ellison says black athletes, then and now, have difficulty turning down invitations to places such as Athena because they think they are turning down reminders of their upbringings. Others are drawn in by the entertainment.
“No black player would want to be accused of turning his back on the hood,” Ellison says.
A woman who has studied athletes’ behavior agrees with Ellison. Sharon Stoll is a professor at the University of Idaho. She examines athletes’ behavior and their ethics. She spent 17 years studying questionnaires filled out by more than 70,000 athletes and concluded their moral reasoning is behind that of non-athletes. She says it is because of coaches’ pampering, narcissism and, sometimes, poverty and race. Some athletes, she says, have no idea certain situations are dangerous because they have not been properly introduced to conflict. College athletes’ lives are carefully controlled by others, by schedules and rules and games played within clearly defined boundaries. When they have a chance to burst through those boundaries, common sense sometimes stands no chance.
“They spend their whole lives being told what to do,” Stoll says. “Coaches want to keep things under control, so they think, ‘Hey, this is a cool thing to do.’ ”
Stoll says athletes are attracted to certain bars partly because of feelings of invincibility and the adrenaline rush they get from breaking rules. She says football players are drawn to violence because their sport encourages it.
“They like hitting each other,” she says. “That’s the whole nature of who they are.”
Bars with infamous reputations — Athena in Columbia, Club Axis and Last Call in Lawrence, Rusty’s in Manhattan, Kan. — are, according to Stoll, “where the action is.” The action consists of cheap beer, willing women, a crowded dance floor and the intriguing notion of proving your manhood.
“They like things being on the edge,” Stoll says of athletes. “Plus, they’re young. They just do really dumb things. They never think they’re the one who is going to get in trouble.”
Greg Gurley liked things on the edge. When the former KU basketball player wanted to relax, he went to a Lawrence bar called the Wheel. When he wanted to turn loose, he went to a place called the Yacht Club. He spent a lot of time at the Yacht Club.
“I was out more than most,” he says.
Fans noticed. Some wanted to talk with Gurley, pick his brain about the life and playing for Roy Williams. Others wanted to do more than talk; they wanted to poke Gurley in the ribs, tell him they played ball in high school and, by God, had a better jumper than the 6-5 guard.
“Guys get a few in them and start talking trash,” says Gurley, who now is 36 and lives in the Kansas City area. “If you don’t respond in a friendly manner, ‘Hey, screw that guy; he won’t talk to me.’ Then it just escalates from there.”
Gurley says he accommodated the curious but admits he was in the minority among athletes. Others, he says, dismissed challenges or overbearing fans — or got angry if the fans did not leave them alone.
Gurley says he preferred to avoid conflicts, particularly if a short conversation defused a potentially violent situation. He says the culture at some bars has changed even in the 13 years since he played; consequences of fights now are more volatile than in the past. Stoll says she thinks the popularity of a “gangster mentality” has contributed to the rise of young men carrying deadly weapons and using them to end brawls.
A University of Minnesota football player was shot to death near a bar in 2002. A Texas Tech defensive back was stabbed at a bar in 2006. A Tulane player was arrested last year in connection with a stabbing outside a New Orleans nightclub.
The incidents keep coming. Sometimes, they hit closer to home: MU forward DeMarre Carroll, who is Anderson’s nephew, was shot in the ankle last July 5 in the parking lot of the Columbia bar Club Tropicana.
“Nowadays,” Gurley says, “it just seems like a whole different ballgame.”
•••
Warnings and examples and rules be d**ned, some players cannot stay out of bars after midnight.
The latest group to ignore the signs entered basketball season as athletes. Now, two of them face legal issues. Anderson installed a “zero-tolerance” policy for players’ misbehavior after Carroll was shot, but that did not stop five MU players from being at Athena after midnight Jan. 27. It did not stop Hannah and former teammate Jason Horton from allegedly fighting with employees, which led to Hannah and Horton being charged Friday with third-degree assault.
The group was at Columbia’s Nikai Mediterranean Grill, a restaurant attached to Athena. According to a probable cause statement, Hannah was angry about poor service by a restaurant employee and shoved the employee from behind around 1 a.m. According to the report, Hannah punched the employee in the face, and Horton hit the employee in the neck.
Another employee broke up the fight and allegedly broke Hannah’s jaw. A prosecutor said Friday the employee who injured Hannah was defending his co-worker and would not be charged.
Neither restaurant employee has been identified.
Anderson dismissed Hannah on Tuesday. He said it was for a lack of academic commitment. He already had suspended the four former teammates, Horton, Leo Lyons, Marshall Brown and Darryl Butterfield. Anderson said it was for violating curfew.
“We’re not going to have that in our program,” Anderson says. “I know kids are going to make mistakes, but this isn’t something we’re going to tolerate.”
•••
The music is blaring. This bar, at the eastern edge of KU’s campus, is more crowded than Club Axis. It is called The Hawk.
Four Jayhawks basketball players are here. It is the same Wednesday night in Lawrence, and KU has no game. All four players, this time at least, are of-age. But they are out past Self’s curfew.
It is nearly 1 a.m. Darnell Jackson, a senior forward, is on the dance floor, and he can’t stop smiling. His hands are in the air, both of them moving to the beat.
Another player, Brady Morningstar, is laughing with friends near the bar’s entrance. The other two players, Rodrick Stewart and Brad Withersthingy, have blended somewhere into the crowd of about 200.
It was a night like this in College Station, Texas, last April that Jonathan and Janson Bailey, twin brothers, celebrated their 22nd birthdays. Jonathan Bailey was a basketball player at Rice University. The brothers went to a place called V-bar, where the twins drank and toasted each other’s birthdays.
Later, according to reports citing court documents, a 23-year-old man named Ronald Johnson shoved Janson Bailey because Bailey was “humping up on his leg” while they waited to order drinks. Janson Bailey then punched Johnson in the face, the reports state. Later, the men fought outside the bar in a nearby alley. It was there that, according to the reports, Johnson stabbed both the Bailey brothers in the chest. Jonathan Bailey, a walk-on guard at Rice, died. Janson Bailey was stabbed twice but survived. Johnson later was charged with murder.
Jonathan Bailey’s death left a hole on Owls coach Wilson’s team and raised concerns Wilson never confronted in more than 20 years as a coach.
“It’s numbing and sobering,” Wilson says.
He says the incident forced him to remind players of their mortality and that they might face threats at certain bars, at certain hours, after a certain number of drinks. Unlike Memphis coach John Calipari and UAB’s Mike Davis, Wilson has not banned players from bars. He says he expects players to learn from the Bailey incident and use common sense.
“The problem is,” Wilson says, “you just never know when something like that is going to happen.”
But, he said, the odds of an incident go up in the hours after midnight.
Looking at the faces of the four KU players on this Wednesday night, they appear oblivious a threat could emerge. The Hawk was investigated in 2005 after it was cited 18 times in three years for serving alcohol to minors, but it has skirted the violent crowd that hangs out at Last Call, where a Kansas City man was shot in the back last weekend. The owner of the club has said he’s closing the business.
Self says of-age KU players are allowed to enter bars but are forbidden from entering certain ones. He refused to say which bars are off limits.
“When you recruit guys, you have to trust them to make good decisions,” he says. “They are going to be put in situations to make decisions.”
After the Giddens incident in 2005, Self says players were not allowed to be in bars through that summer. The stabbing intensified rules for KU players, including the implementation of a curfew. Self says players usually are not allowed to be out past 11 p.m. on a weeknight during the season, and “not ever after midnight.”
On this night, midnight was nearly an hour ago.
After Self learned Friday the four KU players at The Hawk were there after midnight, he changed his earlier statement to say players’ curfew Wednesday was 1 a.m. Then he said it was 1:15 a.m. He finally said players had no curfew because the Jayhawks had no game.
“I’m not positive we had one or not,” Self said.
•••
Stefhon Hannah is at a crossroads.
His college basketball career likely is finished. His future might also be in jeopardy now that his reputation has gone from being a college athlete to being a man with violence in his background. His first mistake might not have been going to a bar hours after a game; it might have been choosing the wrong one.
“A bad decision can affect a lot of people,” Anderson says.
Then Anderson changes the subject. He says he wants to focus on the season, on basketball, on anything but the bar fight that ended with his point guard on the ground with a broken jaw.
“It’s time for him to move on and time for us to move on,” he says. “Stef still has a life in front of him. Sometimes things happen, but you get a chance to move on.”
The Tigers basketball team has moved forward. Hannah is an afterthought. So is the bar where he got himself into such a mess. Just as MU students found Athena after the infamous Lou’s Palace closed last March, they already have found a new place. They have moved along to DaLena’s, a restaurant and bar about 3 1/2 miles south of Athena. DaLena’s opened last summer and turns into a nightclub that stays open until 1 a.m. each Thursday through Saturday.
Two weeks ago, an 18-year-old man was shot at DaLena’s.
Hannah has so far refused to address why he was at Athena and why he was at the center of a fight. Only a handful of people close to Hannah know his side. Even Anderson spoke in person with the player for the first time since the incident Tuesday, the day Hannah was dismissed.
Hannah exchanged text messages last week with The Star but would not agree to be interviewed. He would not answer questions about his career at MU or the incident that led to his dismissal. For now, he has let others speak for him. He has few defenders, one of whom is a nervous woman in Chicago who insists her son is not a bad man.
“The truth will come out later,” says Hannah’s mother, Stephanie. “Everybody that knows Stefhon knows he’s a very good kid, knows he’s not a troublemaker.”
Then she pauses.
“Only Columbia thinks that,” she says.
She says that is enough. Stephanie says she has shared too much. She says she cannot risk further tarnishing her son’s reputation or his legal standing by speaking to a newspaper reporter. But there is one more thing, one more thought she must get off her chest before she hangs up.
“I know he’s a good boy,” she says, and the line goes silent.
Allure of nightclubs can be strong for athletes
BY KENT BABB |
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
COLUMBIA | The neon lights are off at the Athena Night Club.
Snow falls on the pavement out front, and a few people eat at the restaurants connected to the bar. Athena is closed. Missouri students had to find a new hangout after Jan. 27 because of an incident no one here wants to talk about. The incident left Tigers guard Stefhon Hannah with a career full of question marks and this voicemail greeting on his cell phone:
“For all who don’t know,” Hannah says quietly, “I got my jaw broke. So I really can’t talk that well.”
In this downtown building, trouble started in the early-morning hours of Jan. 27.
Hannah allegedly started a fight with Athena employees, and one of the employees broke Hannah’s jaw. The injury sent him to the hospital in serious condition. His involvement led to his arrest and an assault charge. This past Tuesday, MU coach Mike Anderson kicked Hannah off the team, 16 days after the bar fight.
Like Columbia, most college towns have a bar district. Many have a place that appears often on the police ledger. Sometimes it is for underage drinking or fights. Other times it is for stabbings or shootings. Last year, police were called to Athena about 150 times, many of them because of gunshots or violence. Athena is one of Columbia’s most notorious bars — but one whose temptations college athletes cannot resist.
“It’s been on our radar screen for some time now,” Columbia police Sgt. Ken Hammond says. “Some bars attract a rougher crowd, and sometimes it gets out of hand. This is a college town.”
College coaches have learned to identify dangerous bars but must reinvent plans each year to keep players away from them and enforce curfew rules.
Some coaches forbid players from going to any bar. Others think of-age players should be free to go to bars but must avoid certain ones. But when temptation is too powerful for coaches’ warnings, players go there anyway — even at the risk of winding up in hospital beds or handcuffs.
“It’s something you have to worry about 24-7,” says Rice University basketball coach Willis Wilson, whose worst worries were realized last April when Owls guard Jonathan Bailey was stabbed to death in a bar near the Texas A&M campus.
Hannah is the latest example of why coaches plead with players to avoid bars with violent reputations. Anderson has invited speakers and former players to talk to the Tigers about some nightspots. But he has had little luck in finding a foolproof method to keep players out of certain bars and in by midnight.
For now, Athena is doing the work for Anderson. It is shuttered. An employee says it is closed for remodeling, but there is no sign of construction. After Jan. 27, no one is saying when or if Athena will reopen. It is quiet and dark and empty.
It is time to go find a new place.
•••
It’s a Wednesday night in Lawrence, Kan. The place to be is Club Axis, where on this night the drink specials are $2 beers and $1 shots. The dance floor is packed. Burly security guards stand in doorways and watch for stare downs, an early sign of a night going bad. The youngsters on the dance floor pay the guards no attention. The music keeps pumping, and the drinks keep flowing.
Look at them go. Even on a school or work night, KU students tip the drinks and hit the floor, all of them looking for something or someone to ease them through the night. The music is loud, and alcohol numbs the senses. They come for the music and the drinks and the girls.
Something brought former KU basketball player J.R. Giddens here three years ago. Back then, in May 2005, the club was known as the Moon Bar. It was popular, but fights broke out often and underage visitors occasionally slipped through the front door.
Giddens came in with a few friends. He was a former McDonald’s All-American with NBA talent. He did not mind when other people at bars reminded him of his greatness. In here, he was a celebrity. He rarely passed on an opportunity to spend a few nighttime hours at the Moon Bar.
“I was out quite frequently,” Giddens says now.
On that Wednesday night in 2005, the music was loud, and girls packed the dance floor. As always, drinks were cheap and available, especially to a 20-year-old star shooting guard. Then tempers flared. Shoves turned into a fight in the Moon Bar parking lot between Giddens and an Olathe man named Jeremiah Creswell. Creswell told investigators at the time that about a dozen men, including Giddens, attacked him with fists, bricks and bottles. Creswell stabbed Giddens in his right leg, severing an artery. Four others were stabbed at the Moon Bar that night.
Police said Creswell acted in self-defense outside the bar. However, for striking Giddens inside the bar 30 minutes earlier, Creswell pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery.
Giddens needed 23 stitches to close the wound and seven more to repair the artery, but even then he was uncertain he would play again. His teammates abandoned him. Coach Bill Self told Giddens it might be best if the 6-foot-5 sophomore left KU; start over at a place where nobody had heard of the Moon Bar.
Two months after the stabbing, Giddens announced plans to transfer to New Mexico. He was later found guilty of misdemeanor battery and sentenced to one year of probation.
He has since put the night behind him and says he prefers not to speak about it in detail.
“That night is just a night I try to forget and get past,” he says. “I think I will be scarred for life.”
After Giddens’ stabbing, the Moon Bar became known as the infamous Moon Bar. Police spent more time there. Students didn’t want that kind of trouble. Part-owner Sonny Liu closed the Moon Bar five months after the stabbing. He tried to sell it, but it stayed on the market two years before Liu and his partners gave up; they rented it last April. The Moon Bar and its reputation had to die before Club Axis could be born. That death took nearly two years.
“Yeah, it used to be bad,” a bartender at Axis says. “J.R. Giddens got stabbed, a couple people got shot. But it’s not like that anymore.”
Giddens is a senior at New Mexico. His friends still call him and ask him to join them for drinks. Giddens says he has been to a bar only a handful of times since May 2005 and that he has not been inside a bar in more than a year.
“I just came to learn that being in places like that, there’s a high probability that something bad will happen,” he says. “Now, I just stay in the house and just watch TV because it’s a lot safer. It’s better that way if you’re an athlete.
“It’s a lesson learned in life.”
•••
Athletes have gone to bars for decades, but in recent years the number of nights in college towns ending with violence has been on the rise.
Nolen Ellison is 67 years old. He and his teammates went to bars when he played basketball at KU in the 1960s. The place with the worst reputation was a bar called the Green Door, where drugs and prostitutes were sold on the cheap.
Sure, Ellison went into the Green Door. Twice. He was curious. That’s where other young, black students went. The girls there showed skin and did the twist, and it was next to the barbershop in the area of Lawrence that Ellison calls the “hood.” He peeked inside a couple of times and decided the Green Door was no place for an athlete with his future in mind.
Ellison says he avoided the Green Door because fights occasionally broke out. Killings, though, were rare. He satisfied his curiosity a few times and moved on.
“Yeah, I went to some of those places,” Ellison says. “And I was lucky as hell I didn’t get trapped in any of them.”
Bars such as the Green Door in the 1960s and the Moon Bar in the 1990s and Athena in the 2000s, they have a certain appeal. They have a certain clientele and a certain way of satisfying vices.
Ellison says black athletes, then and now, have difficulty turning down invitations to places such as Athena because they think they are turning down reminders of their upbringings. Others are drawn in by the entertainment.
“No black player would want to be accused of turning his back on the hood,” Ellison says.
A woman who has studied athletes’ behavior agrees with Ellison. Sharon Stoll is a professor at the University of Idaho. She examines athletes’ behavior and their ethics. She spent 17 years studying questionnaires filled out by more than 70,000 athletes and concluded their moral reasoning is behind that of non-athletes. She says it is because of coaches’ pampering, narcissism and, sometimes, poverty and race. Some athletes, she says, have no idea certain situations are dangerous because they have not been properly introduced to conflict. College athletes’ lives are carefully controlled by others, by schedules and rules and games played within clearly defined boundaries. When they have a chance to burst through those boundaries, common sense sometimes stands no chance.
“They spend their whole lives being told what to do,” Stoll says. “Coaches want to keep things under control, so they think, ‘Hey, this is a cool thing to do.’ ”
Stoll says athletes are attracted to certain bars partly because of feelings of invincibility and the adrenaline rush they get from breaking rules. She says football players are drawn to violence because their sport encourages it.
“They like hitting each other,” she says. “That’s the whole nature of who they are.”
Bars with infamous reputations — Athena in Columbia, Club Axis and Last Call in Lawrence, Rusty’s in Manhattan, Kan. — are, according to Stoll, “where the action is.” The action consists of cheap beer, willing women, a crowded dance floor and the intriguing notion of proving your manhood.
“They like things being on the edge,” Stoll says of athletes. “Plus, they’re young. They just do really dumb things. They never think they’re the one who is going to get in trouble.”
Greg Gurley liked things on the edge. When the former KU basketball player wanted to relax, he went to a Lawrence bar called the Wheel. When he wanted to turn loose, he went to a place called the Yacht Club. He spent a lot of time at the Yacht Club.
“I was out more than most,” he says.
Fans noticed. Some wanted to talk with Gurley, pick his brain about the life and playing for Roy Williams. Others wanted to do more than talk; they wanted to poke Gurley in the ribs, tell him they played ball in high school and, by God, had a better jumper than the 6-5 guard.
“Guys get a few in them and start talking trash,” says Gurley, who now is 36 and lives in the Kansas City area. “If you don’t respond in a friendly manner, ‘Hey, screw that guy; he won’t talk to me.’ Then it just escalates from there.”
Gurley says he accommodated the curious but admits he was in the minority among athletes. Others, he says, dismissed challenges or overbearing fans — or got angry if the fans did not leave them alone.
Gurley says he preferred to avoid conflicts, particularly if a short conversation defused a potentially violent situation. He says the culture at some bars has changed even in the 13 years since he played; consequences of fights now are more volatile than in the past. Stoll says she thinks the popularity of a “gangster mentality” has contributed to the rise of young men carrying deadly weapons and using them to end brawls.
A University of Minnesota football player was shot to death near a bar in 2002. A Texas Tech defensive back was stabbed at a bar in 2006. A Tulane player was arrested last year in connection with a stabbing outside a New Orleans nightclub.
The incidents keep coming. Sometimes, they hit closer to home: MU forward DeMarre Carroll, who is Anderson’s nephew, was shot in the ankle last July 5 in the parking lot of the Columbia bar Club Tropicana.
“Nowadays,” Gurley says, “it just seems like a whole different ballgame.”
•••
Warnings and examples and rules be d**ned, some players cannot stay out of bars after midnight.
The latest group to ignore the signs entered basketball season as athletes. Now, two of them face legal issues. Anderson installed a “zero-tolerance” policy for players’ misbehavior after Carroll was shot, but that did not stop five MU players from being at Athena after midnight Jan. 27. It did not stop Hannah and former teammate Jason Horton from allegedly fighting with employees, which led to Hannah and Horton being charged Friday with third-degree assault.
The group was at Columbia’s Nikai Mediterranean Grill, a restaurant attached to Athena. According to a probable cause statement, Hannah was angry about poor service by a restaurant employee and shoved the employee from behind around 1 a.m. According to the report, Hannah punched the employee in the face, and Horton hit the employee in the neck.
Another employee broke up the fight and allegedly broke Hannah’s jaw. A prosecutor said Friday the employee who injured Hannah was defending his co-worker and would not be charged.
Neither restaurant employee has been identified.
Anderson dismissed Hannah on Tuesday. He said it was for a lack of academic commitment. He already had suspended the four former teammates, Horton, Leo Lyons, Marshall Brown and Darryl Butterfield. Anderson said it was for violating curfew.
“We’re not going to have that in our program,” Anderson says. “I know kids are going to make mistakes, but this isn’t something we’re going to tolerate.”
•••
The music is blaring. This bar, at the eastern edge of KU’s campus, is more crowded than Club Axis. It is called The Hawk.
Four Jayhawks basketball players are here. It is the same Wednesday night in Lawrence, and KU has no game. All four players, this time at least, are of-age. But they are out past Self’s curfew.
It is nearly 1 a.m. Darnell Jackson, a senior forward, is on the dance floor, and he can’t stop smiling. His hands are in the air, both of them moving to the beat.
Another player, Brady Morningstar, is laughing with friends near the bar’s entrance. The other two players, Rodrick Stewart and Brad Withersthingy, have blended somewhere into the crowd of about 200.
It was a night like this in College Station, Texas, last April that Jonathan and Janson Bailey, twin brothers, celebrated their 22nd birthdays. Jonathan Bailey was a basketball player at Rice University. The brothers went to a place called V-bar, where the twins drank and toasted each other’s birthdays.
Later, according to reports citing court documents, a 23-year-old man named Ronald Johnson shoved Janson Bailey because Bailey was “humping up on his leg” while they waited to order drinks. Janson Bailey then punched Johnson in the face, the reports state. Later, the men fought outside the bar in a nearby alley. It was there that, according to the reports, Johnson stabbed both the Bailey brothers in the chest. Jonathan Bailey, a walk-on guard at Rice, died. Janson Bailey was stabbed twice but survived. Johnson later was charged with murder.
Jonathan Bailey’s death left a hole on Owls coach Wilson’s team and raised concerns Wilson never confronted in more than 20 years as a coach.
“It’s numbing and sobering,” Wilson says.
He says the incident forced him to remind players of their mortality and that they might face threats at certain bars, at certain hours, after a certain number of drinks. Unlike Memphis coach John Calipari and UAB’s Mike Davis, Wilson has not banned players from bars. He says he expects players to learn from the Bailey incident and use common sense.
“The problem is,” Wilson says, “you just never know when something like that is going to happen.”
But, he said, the odds of an incident go up in the hours after midnight.
Looking at the faces of the four KU players on this Wednesday night, they appear oblivious a threat could emerge. The Hawk was investigated in 2005 after it was cited 18 times in three years for serving alcohol to minors, but it has skirted the violent crowd that hangs out at Last Call, where a Kansas City man was shot in the back last weekend. The owner of the club has said he’s closing the business.
Self says of-age KU players are allowed to enter bars but are forbidden from entering certain ones. He refused to say which bars are off limits.
“When you recruit guys, you have to trust them to make good decisions,” he says. “They are going to be put in situations to make decisions.”
After the Giddens incident in 2005, Self says players were not allowed to be in bars through that summer. The stabbing intensified rules for KU players, including the implementation of a curfew. Self says players usually are not allowed to be out past 11 p.m. on a weeknight during the season, and “not ever after midnight.”
On this night, midnight was nearly an hour ago.
After Self learned Friday the four KU players at The Hawk were there after midnight, he changed his earlier statement to say players’ curfew Wednesday was 1 a.m. Then he said it was 1:15 a.m. He finally said players had no curfew because the Jayhawks had no game.
“I’m not positive we had one or not,” Self said.
•••
Stefhon Hannah is at a crossroads.
His college basketball career likely is finished. His future might also be in jeopardy now that his reputation has gone from being a college athlete to being a man with violence in his background. His first mistake might not have been going to a bar hours after a game; it might have been choosing the wrong one.
“A bad decision can affect a lot of people,” Anderson says.
Then Anderson changes the subject. He says he wants to focus on the season, on basketball, on anything but the bar fight that ended with his point guard on the ground with a broken jaw.
“It’s time for him to move on and time for us to move on,” he says. “Stef still has a life in front of him. Sometimes things happen, but you get a chance to move on.”
The Tigers basketball team has moved forward. Hannah is an afterthought. So is the bar where he got himself into such a mess. Just as MU students found Athena after the infamous Lou’s Palace closed last March, they already have found a new place. They have moved along to DaLena’s, a restaurant and bar about 3 1/2 miles south of Athena. DaLena’s opened last summer and turns into a nightclub that stays open until 1 a.m. each Thursday through Saturday.
Two weeks ago, an 18-year-old man was shot at DaLena’s.
Hannah has so far refused to address why he was at Athena and why he was at the center of a fight. Only a handful of people close to Hannah know his side. Even Anderson spoke in person with the player for the first time since the incident Tuesday, the day Hannah was dismissed.
Hannah exchanged text messages last week with The Star but would not agree to be interviewed. He would not answer questions about his career at MU or the incident that led to his dismissal. For now, he has let others speak for him. He has few defenders, one of whom is a nervous woman in Chicago who insists her son is not a bad man.
“The truth will come out later,” says Hannah’s mother, Stephanie. “Everybody that knows Stefhon knows he’s a very good kid, knows he’s not a troublemaker.”
Then she pauses.
“Only Columbia thinks that,” she says.
She says that is enough. Stephanie says she has shared too much. She says she cannot risk further tarnishing her son’s reputation or his legal standing by speaking to a newspaper reporter. But there is one more thing, one more thought she must get off her chest before she hangs up.
“I know he’s a good boy,” she says, and the line goes silent.