Kansas Basketball: It's Coming Home ©
Last weekend, friend of the newsletter Rustin Dodd and I watched the Euro 2020 final at a bar in Brooklyn. We all know the result of that event now—and I won’t get too far into it because we have a lot of ground to cover in this week’s email—and it represented the latest competition crash-out for England, football’s home country.
England got as close as they’ve gotten since 1966 and made some great hats, but still, the fact remains: It is not coming Home.
Anyway, in the aftermath of England’s loss to Italy, Rustin suggested that it was time for “It’s coming home” to be utilized by someone else, someone who had more chances to bring “It” Home.
He continued: Why not KU? After all, we literally have the rules of basketball—THE RULES ARE HOME declares the deBruce Center’s website’s front page—and we’ve built out AFH, a temple of the sport, to house them physically. The sport’s inventor, James Naismith, is buried in Lawrence. So many legends of the sport have direct ties to Lawrence and KU: Wilt Chamberlain, John McLendon, Phog Allen, Larry Brown, just to name a few. I’m going straight to Final Draft here, no need to even sell the pitch.
SOLD. I feel like, at this point, I hardly need to run down specific aspects of this, although I do invite some sort of feud with the Springfield, MA tourism board. Let’s move on anyway.
It’s coming home (to Allen Fieldhouse specifically)
Allen Fieldhouse is going to be bedlam all season. The student section hasn’t been full in over a year, and every home game this year is going to be a movie. Missouri @ home, UK @ home, literally any conference game at home (Baylor! Texas!) is going to go off.
The “Rock Chalk” chant is, itself, a port-over from the University Science Club, so I don’t feel bad co-opting the “It’s coming home” chant at all. I guess there’s a small rhythmic thing we’ll have to smooth out—”It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming! / BASKETBALL is coming home!” but I trust the wisdom of the crowd to do its thing.
We need to cut a hit song, pronto
As a music person, the pop element of this adventure is a sharp hook for me. So a piece of this, ideally, involves an RIAA-certified pop song with a corresponding video that KU fans can quickly push into millions of views. We will force this thing to become a huge hit.
This is something I’d love to see some comments about, but I’m thinking some kind of setpiece where the Lightning Seeds are sampled, but it’s updated into a modern sound by … someone. I’m a little bit stumped as to who my ideal singer is, though—it should either be some TikTok kid or Snoop Dogg. If you have a more targeted idea (I need one!) please fire in the comments.
OK, that’s all for today. I feel like this idea is a “tip of the iceberg” situation. I need to do some thinking.