Rachel Seymour

Jeff Graves, KU graduate, slams the ball through the hoop as he warms up with his team, the Kansas City Knights, during their game at Johnson County Community College Friday night. Graves played for the University for two years, one year under Roy Williams when the Jayhawks went to the NCAA National Championship, where Graves shelled out 16 points and seized 16 rebounds. He now plays in the American Basketball Association with the Knights.

Editor’s Note: Kansan sportswriter Frank Tankard will profile a former Kansas men’s basketball player each day this week, leading up to the Jayhawks’ first game on Friday. Each player featured took the court for the Jayhawks sometime during the last four years. This is the third installment of the five-part series. Tomorrow, Tankard will profile former guard Jeff Boschee.

Jeff Graves showed up for the interview 30 minutes late. He apologized as he walked downstairs to the locker room at Johnson County Community College.

A junior college game had just ended, and as players from Labette Community College walked into the locker room fresh off a loss to Johnson County, they gawked at Graves sitting on the ground with his long legs stretched almost completely across the hall.

One player, apparently not remembering the team he just lost to, asked Graves if he played for Johnson County. His teammate gave him a smack on the back as he opened the door to the locker room.

“You fool, that’s Jeff Graves,” he said, turning to Graves. “Are you playing these days?”

“Yeah,” Graves said.

“Where at?”

“Right here,” Graves said. “For the Knights.”

“Who?”

Just then a player ran out of the locker room with his cell phone and snapped a picture of Graves. He was followed by a large group of players and the team’s coach.

“Everybody says this guy’s built just like you, so we wanted to see if he’s as big as you,” the coach said, pointing to a player who was standing sheepishly in the back of the group and grinning. Graves stood up and approached the player, standing a couple of inches taller than him at 6-foot-9.

“Yeah, we’re about the same,” Graves said.

Graves is used to the attention. For a man who played only two years at Kansas and averaged only 6.2 points per game, he has gotten a lot of it.

Under fire

Want to write a story on Jeff Graves? The standard method is simple and easy to follow.

Step one: Find someone, a coach or a player, doubting Graves’ work ethic — it’s not hard.

Step two: Apply these doubts to whatever Graves is doing now.

Everywhere Graves plays there are serious doubts about how hard he tries. Last year he earned the dubious honor of being the first player Kansas coach Bill Self suspended in 11 years of coaching. The year before, he received attention when former Kansas coach Roy Williams refused to officially recognize him as a member of the team until he got in shape.

Even his high school coach at Lee’s Summit, Mike Spiegel, has been quoted questioning Graves’ work ethic. So has Jim Morris, the coach at Iowa Western Community College, where Graves played before he came to Kansas.

Despite all the criticism, Graves hasn’t changed. He doesn’t think he needs to.

“Once people find out who I am and what I stand for, people really change their minds when talking about the ‘laziness’ and all this stuff,” he said.

Perhaps there’s an alternate story. It’s the story of a guy who shows up late, comes up with steals, fouls out way too much, racks up assists, harasses referees and spends hours in the gym. He does all these things, good and bad, without apology.

Jeff Graves is who he is.

Roadblocks

Graves got off to a bad start with the local media and Roy Williams when he reported overweight for preseason training after a serious car wreck two-and-a-half years ago.

Sharon Graves, Jeff’s mother, remembers picking up the phone in the middle of the night and hearing a hospital worker say that her boy’s head had been hurt in a highway accident.

It was early September 2002, about a month before practice would start, and Graves had been riding passenger side in his friend’s souped-up Chrysler 300M as they cruised at 110 mph on I-435.

He remembers his friend losing control of the car, which spun out of control, and banging into the median guard rail. When Graves woke up, the car lay on the median, and he was in the back seat. As he staggered out, a semi-truck whizzed by within inches of his body.

His head had been bumped during the accident, causing Graves to drift in and out of consciousness. He spent the next two weeks lying in bed at home in Lee’s Summit, Mo. His thoughts were unclear, and he kept having nightmares about the accident and waking upside-down in bed.

When he returned to Kansas, Roy Williams publicly criticized him for showing up out of shape, reportedly at 293 pounds, and refused to recognize him as an official member of the team until he could finish six and a half laps around a track in 12 minutes as his teammates had done.

Graves grew frustrated with the negative press Williams created. While the coach was telling reporters that Graves couldn’t keep up with his teammates, Graves was in the gym.

“He was asking me to lose like 50 or 60 pounds in a month,” he said. “I was working out six times a day, and eventually I did lose the weight. Why didn’t people look at that?”

Williams said at the time that he was being hard on Graves in order to motivate him. It must have worked.

“What drove me was the negative stuff,” Graves said. “It gave my engine a little more gas to it. I learned that everything’s not going to be given to you. I know who I am, and it was up to me to prove everybody wrong.”

But Graves also let Williams’ treatment hurt him.

“I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself,” he said. “I don’t think he believed in me like he believed in everyone else.”

In mid-February, Graves was shaken once again when one of his high school buddies shot himself in the head while playing with a gun.

“That was pretty depressing,” he said. “Especially for that to happen on top of the pressure of playing at a big-time program.”

Sharon Graves talked to her son every day after his friend’s accident, comforting him.

“It hit him to his core,” she said. “When you’re already kind of down, and you get something like that happen to you, unless you’ve got a lot a support going on, it’s tough.”

Graves rebounded in time for the NCAA Tournament and played some of the best basketball of his life, capped off with a commanding 16-point, 16-rebound performance in the national championship loss to Syracuse.

“All the adversity, all the booing, all the poo-pah about his appearance, his tats, hair, it was wild,” Sharon Graves said. “But I’m glad he stood his ground. He stayed Jeff. He was himself and he didn’t try to let everybody else mold him. And he still played ball well.”

Fortunately the next season went smoother outside of basketball. But on the team, Graves encountered more problems.

He first ran into trouble with new coach Bill Self when he overslept and missed a practice in December. Self suspended him from the team, forcing him to miss the Oregon game. Then in February, Self benched Graves again when the team traveled to Nebraska, saying that Graves hadn’t been practicing hard.

But Graves didn’t let the problems affect his confidence as he had before. And he respected the way Self handled the situation without publicly criticizing him, as Williams had.

“I liked coach Self a little more than Roy Williams,” he said. “Self was a real down-to-earth kind of guy.”

Graves finished the season with another strong performance in the NCAA Tournament, scoring in double-digits in two of the team’s four tournament games.

Moving forward

Today, aside from the occasional “where are they now” story, Graves is out of the limelight, just starting down the path many former college players have already traveled.

Whatever happens to those players who don’t make the NBA? Some become drifters, traveling from city to small town to play in front of a couple hundred fans, hoping someone will notice. There’s little glory in it.

This could be the reality Graves is starting to face. So far, less than a year after graduating from the Kansas basketball team, he’s already played for two teams in two leagues: the Salina Cagerz of the United States Basketball League and the Kansas City Knights of the American Basketball Association.

But Graves hopes things go a different way. After the Knights’ season ended with a playoff loss in Mississippi on Saturday, he decided to take some time off while he figures out what to do next. He’s looking for an agent and hoping for a late-season call-up from the NBA. He says the Toronto Raptors, Los Angeles Clippers and Orlando Magic have expressed interest in him.

If that doesn’t pan out, he says he might go overseas for a couple of months. Some of those teams pay pretty well, plus chilling in Europe for a while couldn’t be too bad, he said.

No apologies

Wherever Graves goes next, it will probably be far from his fan base in Kansas. When Knights fans paid $10 to have their picture taken with their favorite players after a recent game, Graves had more photo requests, mostly from kids decked out in KU gear, than the rest of the team combined.

After the line dissipated, the large group of family and friends who had come to watch him and his older brother, Robby, play for the Knights stuck around to congratulate him on the team’s victory. He said hello to his dad and picked up Robby’s two-year-old son, Jaden, lifting him high in the air.

A reporter interviewed Sharon Graves in the bleachers. Jeff had said he’d also answer a few questions after the game. After he disappeared to the locker room, the reporter waited on the court until the custodians came, but Graves never showed.

The reporter left and reeled off a story in which he tried to get inside Graves’ head, hoping to understand him. Earlier Graves had the media always doing that to him.

“I know people keep trying to put their worthless two cents in,” he said. “These people obviously don’t know me.”

Perhaps all that can really be said is that there’s something unique about him that makes people interested. Maybe it’s the cornrows. Or it could be the suspensions. Perhaps it’s the way he bangs his body on the court.

But it’s more than any of that. There’s something just plain likable about the guy, which is why it hurts when he messes up. Most the people who know him feel the same way Bill Self does.

“Jeff always had a good attitude. He was just a little irresponsible at times,” he said. “But I’ve always liked Jeff.”