A reader copped one of the infamous yellow jerseys and you gotta hear the whole story
When a new subscriber signs up for Streak Talk, I do my best to write them and thank them for that. This is how I got in touch with Austin Gray, a Nashville-based graphic designer. In our e-mail exchange, he casually mentioned that he had a game-worn yellow jersey—a colorway which that Jayhawks only wore once, ever.
I had to know more.
Fortunately for me, and for you, Austin had an unpublished piece of writing available about the topic, which unravels the story of how this infamous jersey came into his possession. It’s also a love letter to aesthetic failure, which I’m always game for.
Here’s what Austin wrote. I’ve made a donation on his behalf to Conexión, a Nashville-based organization that creates educational and entrepreneurship opportunities for Latino families in the area.
As one of basketball’s bluebloods, the University of Kansas uniform typically tacks closely to a traditional aesthetic. Home whites. Road blues. Occasionally, they’ll don an alternate set with varyingdegrees of aestheticsuccess. Sure, the look changed significantly when the school switched from the traditional “circus” font to a bland serif better suited for a résumé, and they may not keep their aesthetic as consistent as Indiana or UCLA. But by and large, Kansas keeps it simpler than most other schools.
If one were asked to envision the signature style of the Kansas basketball uniform, basketball fans will likely conjure the beautiful 1988 blue uniforms, adorned with the vertically-arched circus font and the solitary K on the shorts. It is the look that gets thrown back to with great fanfare and it is a feature of any March Madness montage worth its salt. It has particular significance for me because the 1988 Championship - featuring Danny and the Miracles’ magical journey from underachieving six seed to plucky national champions—is the first sporting event I vividly remember. It’s why I’m a sports fan. Those uniforms are why I’m a uniform aficionado. They may even be why I decided to become a graphic designer.
It’s not these legendary blues, though, that best encapsulate my love of uniforms. Gorgeous though they may be, I love a story that adds context to a uniform’s aesthetic appeal, and I especially love when that story is one of spectacular failure. The Kansas uniforms I love most happen to be the most spectacular failures of all.
This is the story about the time Kansas wore yellow.
All images via Austin Gray
For context, know that the legendary 1988 blue uniforms were themselves a bit of an oddity. The use of yellow as a trim color was—and remains—pretty unusual. All Kansas uniforms adhere closely to a simple red, white and blue palette with yellow only appearing as the color of the Jayhawk’s beak. The typography of the 1988 uniforms might best illustrate the circus font, but even this version of the font is a bit of an outlier, as it is significantly thicker than both the version that preceded it and the versions that succeeded it.
Stranger still is that the blue uniforms the team wore to end the season are not the uniforms they wore when the season first tipped. Kansas took the court at the 1987 Maui invitational wearing a version of the blue uniforms that featured red type outlined in yellow. If this incredibly-poor-quality screen shot is any indication, they were an illegible nightmare. Whether it was always the plan to shelve them after Maui or if it was a change mandated by the NCAA, moving on was the right decision. These oddball uniforms, along with the yellow trim that would persist throughout the season foreshadowed one of the darkest (and brightest?) moments in the history of the Kansas basketball uniform.
On December 3, 1987, the champions-to-be Kansas Jayhawks took the floor for the first and only time in yellow uniforms. The game itself was a peculiar choice—a road game against Western Carolina in which the Jayhawks held on for a 68-63 win. The game wasn’t televised, and pictures of the game were not widely available. It wasn’t until the university put up for auction—in 2011, nearly 25 years later!—a complete yellow uniform set that the general public really knew what they looked like. Smitten upon seeing them for the first time, I tried—and failed—to win the auction.
Despite the lack of visual media coverage, the word about the yellow unis got out. The reception was lead-balloon poor. For you see, yellow is the color of Kansas’s archrivals, the Missouri Tigers. There may be no easier way to annoy alumni and fanatical supporters than to trot out the school’s most beloved institution in the colors of their mortal enemies.
Why, exactly, did they go with yellow? The story goes that after Kansas lost to Duke in the 1986 Final Four wearing red alternate uniforms, Larry Brown vowed never to wear red again. The team’s uniform supplier approached him about alternates for the 1987 season and Brown, ever a man of his word, bristled at the idea of seeing his team in red again. Why yellow? Why not yellow? It is, after all, as much a part of the mascot as red.
The poor fan reception, probably sufficient for shelving the uniforms for good, was compounded by the fact that the team didn’t play particularly well and had a fair amount of trouble getting to and from Cullowhee, North Carolina. Then-sophomore shooting guard Jeff Gueldner (who was nice enough to respond to my unsolicited messages) said, “I had no problems with [the yellow uniforms], but Coach Brown was superstitious and that was that.” The same superstitious nature that mothballed the red uniforms subsequently closed this infamous chapter as well.
These are all perfectly good reasons to scrap a particular uniform, but I love them. They include many of the same things that make the blue uniforms so iconic, and the yellow really does work as the base color. It was a bold choice to go with yellow to begin with—seriously, there is no such thing as “yellow for yellow’s sake”—and that boldness deserved greater rewards. Here we are in 2020, having lived through a series of adidas-centric one-offs, gray forgray’s sake unis and underwhelming red alternates. Additionally, Missouri and Kansas haven’t played each other in years. There’s a generation of Kansas fans for whom the hatred isn’t the same as it was in 1987. It is the opinion of this Jayhawk hoops devotee that we’d be lucky to see the look reprised. At the very least, they need to be more than just legend - they need to be seen, acknowledged and even adored.
I see it as my role, then, to keep the fire alive. I am here to single-handedly keep these oft-forgotten, occasionally maligned uniforms in the college hoops zeitgeist. It is for this reason that, when another auction opportunity arose last winter, I bought a whole uniform set. “Now what?” I can hear you asking. Rather than let this purchase become a foolhardy example of conspicuous consumption, I am here to let the powers that be at the University of Kansas know that I have a set available to loan out for any potential “history of the Kansas uniform” museum exhibitions or if they need an example on which to base throwbacks in the years to come. There’s a place in all of our histories for the spectacular failures.—Austin Gray
That was my senior year at Western Carolina and I was at that game. I covered it and wrote stories for two newspapers. I asked Coach Brown before the game why they were wearing gold if it was not one of their colors, and he told me it was an unofficial color. I too liked the uniforms and looked for them the rest of the season but they never appeared again.
Western Carolina's coach had just resigned and an interim coach was on board. Western got down big but rallied at the end to make it close before Kansas pulled away in the final minute. Western Carolina's showing inspired the fans about the season to come, but it was a mirage. Western finished last in the Southern Conference that season and so it was the only team that did not make the conference tournament. Kansas, of course, went on to win the national championship. Western hired a new coach, who promptly ordered a set of Laker gold uniforms for the next season been though Western had not worn gold for about a decade. The school colors are purple and gold.
Austin, you stated in your article that the game wasn't televised but that's not true because I watched the game with my family. My uncle called us during the game because he saw it too. Something wasn't right with his TV and asked us if we were watching it because on his TV, the unis looked orange. We confirmed that they were indeed wearing yellow.