LAWRENCE, Kan. — Bill Self walked into a media room inside Allen Fieldhouse, scanned a few rows of onlookers and then took a seat behind a single microphone.
“Well, this goes without saying,” he said, as though he planned to immediately jump to the reason we sat there, waiting, “but to get this many media people here in one room, there has to be a free lunch. That’d be the only way.”
The truth is we listened for the next 35 minutes, the first time Self has spoken with the media since a heart catheterization forced him to miss Kansas’ postseason, anticipating to learn more about what he would classify as a “health scare.”
To learn more about how difficult it might have been for a Hall of Fame coach to watch his team get bounced from the postseason days before he says he would’ve been cleared to join the party. And to, of course, gauge what effect all of it might have on his future.
We got all that, for the most part. But more notably, we learned more about Bill Self.
Actually, come to think of it, Bill Self learned more about Bill Self.
The past five weeks have altered the long-term thinking of KU’s leader, and to be clear, an education does not always have to prove a hypothesis incorrect. It can reinforce a prior belief, or, in this case, it can stretch one to new territory.
Because weeks later, as rumors that he could be pondering retirement broached the very hour before he sat down behind that microphone, he went the other way.
“I think it does prompt anybody to think about the end,” he said. “But my end, I don’t even see the oncoming train down the track right now. When (you) think of the end, you think of it getting closer. When I think of the end now, after sitting out and not doing this for awhile, I think of it being farther away.”
Whether that came during a walk on a Florida beach last week, in a hotel suite last month or more likely somewhere in between, what resonated with him is how forcefully that feeling did come.
Self, 60, is “100% positive” he will be coaching Kansas next season, and he seems just as sure he’d like to coach “many more” seasons afterward. There’s a recognition that following doctors’ guidance — more exercise, better diet — will play its role as much as his own wishes. Same as it does for all of us, right?
Granted, Self is quite media savvy and knows his words could be heard by recruits, but there was a straightforwardness to those words on Wednesday. A refreshing straightforwardness that you wouldn’t mind some of his peers adopting. None of those words popped out quicker than when I asked if he ever considered that he had perhaps coached his final game.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
Maybe Self sensed some skepticism. Maybe he had heard the rumors, though he said he hasn’t even yet had the time to scroll through the hundreds of texts to recently flood his phone, let alone check social media or some message boards.
But at several points Wednesday, it felt like we were listening to a coach trying to convince all of us that he wants to coach. Trying to persuade us that this “episode,” as he termed it, has only energized him.
Deep into the news conference, I asked him: Why? What is it about this job that you missed — that prompts you to say you want to do it several more years?
“You play golf?” he replied.
“I don’t.”
“What do you do as a hobby?”
“Play with the kids,” I replied.
“(If) you take away the kids from you for a month, would you miss your kids? Would you want to play with them more than you ever have?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s exactly how I feel.”
The most successful active coach in NCAA men’s basketball — he is already back to work, “living in the (transfer) portal,” he said — wants us to believe he has a new appreciation. A new motivation. Or perhaps renewed is a better word, because it’s not as though he didn’t appreciate the job before.
But he’d never before had it stripped from him at such an important time, without a clear timeline for the future. It’s bound to change him. It was not bound to change him in this way.
There’s some irony in that a late-night barstool game of who-might-one-day-succeed-Bill-Self is rendered less relevant after his hospitalization than before it.
That isn’t meant to downplay the nature of his “health scare,” which included two stents implanted to treat blocked arteries, though he said he never thought he was in serious danger. In retrospect, he knew for awhile that something wasn’t quiet right, backdating beyond the couple of days in which he felt some disorientation and tightness in his chest.
He left for the hospital shortly after talking with reporters following KU’s final practice before the Big 12 Tournament. Maybe this is one more reminder to the rest of us to not let those kinds of things linger.
In any event, assistant coach Norm Roberts took over as the Jayhawks’ interim head coach for the remainder of the season, though it wasn’t intended to be for the remainder of the season. Self said doctors had informed him he would have coached a Sweet 16 matchup barring any setback.
KU did not make it that far. That could have fueled the feeling that something was stripped from him.
In any event, it extended his break. Extended his time to consider some perspective.
At one point during his news conference Wednesday morning, Self took us through a typical day of his vision of retirement: Wake up. Breakfast. TV. Maybe read a book.
“I realized that, no, this is not what I need to be doing,” he said, and then he turned his attention to KU’s roster for 2023-24.
We didn’t hear a man simply committing to remain KU’s coach in the immediacy, but rather a man who himself had come to realize he wants to remain in Lawrence as long as possible.
Even as he’s encountered at least some pull the other way. As recently retired coaches mentioned that, hey, life on the other side ain’t so bad, Self was processing an emotion leading him in the opposite direction.
Well, in the end, it’s leading him in the same direction as the past 20 seasons.
It had just never before been tested to this degree.
The other side of this? The future doesn’t look much different.
Only more distant.
