Kansan file photo Jeff Boschee, who played guard for Kansas, shoots a jump shot in a game against Iowa State during the 2001-2002 season. Boschee was renowned as a sharpshooter from behind the three-point line. He took a reprieve from basketball after his last season with the Jayhawks. He returned to the game and after stints with several teams, he is finishing this season in Grindavik, Iceland.

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 fourth installment of the five-part series. Tomorrow, Tankard will profile former forward Drew Gooden.

“One day went like this,” Jeff Boschee wrote in an e-mail from Iceland. “I woke up about 11 a.m. It had been sunny all morning. I went to the grocery store about an hour after I woke up, and it started to get cloudy. By the time I got to the grocery store, it was windy as hell and sleeting. I came out of the grocery store and it was sunny again...”

The first thing Jeff Boschee noticed when he arrived in Grindavik, Iceland, in February was the wild weather, the latest peculiarity in a string of adventures and challenges he has faced since he finished his Kansas basketball career in 2002.

“...Then about two hours later, it started snowing and the wind picked up and it was a blizzard. Toward the end of the night, it was clear with a lot of snow on the ground. Then about two days later all the snow melted. Now it is very nice here. When I call home to my parents’ house it is nicer here than it is in North Dakota.”

‘Fearless’ shooter

The trophy that the Kansas Athletic Department made to commemorate Boschee’s Big 12 Conference all-time three-point record stands out in the trophy case inside the main entrance to Allen Fieldhouse.

It’s the only trophy in the collection for an individual player. Not even Danny Manning or Wilt Chamberlain has one.

People often forget just how dominating the 6-foot-1 guard could be. He finished his career with a 40.1 three-point percentage. Even good three-point shooters usually level off somewhere in the 30s when they take as many shots as he did. His senior year, he took more shots than ever and made 46.4 percent of them.

Former Kansas coach Roy Williams said he couldn’t remember a player who wanted the ball like Boschee did.

“The little rascal was willing to take — and made — a bunch of big shots,” Williams said. “He was fearless — he truly was fearless — with the basketball. Every time he cocked it and got ready to shoot, I always thought it was going in.”

Starting over

Boschee loved the University of Kansas. That’s part of why it was so hard for him to move on.

Soon after the Jayhawks bowed out in the Final Four with a loss to Maryland three years ago, he was supposed to board a plane for an NBA pre-draft camp in Portsmouth, Va. He didn’t go.

“I sat in my room and was just like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do this anymore,’” he said.

He told Williams to decline the offer for him. After returning to Lawrence in April 2002 from the senior barnstorming tour, for the first time in a very long time, he didn’t play any basketball for months. He said he was burnt out.

The first time he picked up a ball again, in an alumni pick-up game at the end of the summer, his first shot was a 10-foot jumper.

Airball.

After the game, Williams told him the Toronto Raptors wanted him to try out at their free agent camp.

“We both kind of looked at each other and started laughing,” he said. “We both knew that I was in no shape to compete at that level at that point.”

That fall he started practicing with the Jayhawks, running the point for the practice squad. He enrolled in some classes to finish his degree in sports management and had one of the best years of his life, living the careless college life he’d missed out on.

“There was really no stress for me,” he said. “If I wanted to go get a beer with some friends or stay out late, I didn’t have to worry about practice the next day.”

But when he graduated in Spring 2003, he was done living the life of the average Joe. It was time to get back to basketball.

He caught on with the Kansas Cagerz of the United States Basketball League, which had drafted him the previous year. He played the 10 games remaining on the team’s schedule.

The Cagerz put him up in a hotel in Salina and paid him $400 a week. He played OK, considering he hadn’t been on a team for a year, and averaged 9.2 points a game.

The next year, he played the full spring season with the Cagerz and did better, averaging 13.2 points a game. One game, he scored 38.

He drew the attention of Panellinios, a team from Athens, Greece. The team offered him a one-year deal reportedly worth $80,000. Boschee eagerly signed, and in August he landed in Europe full of hope.

Culture shock

Having never been outside of North America before, the small-town boy from Valley City, N.D., was excited to go to what some call one of the most beautiful cities in the world to play basketball.

But he was in for a culture shock. When he got to his apartment there was no TV, no phone and none of his appliances plugged into European outlets. He didn’t know anybody. Hardly anyone spoke English.

Homesick, he called his parents every day, racking up $5,000 in phone bills from T-Mobile.

The team left for a ski resort to train before the season started, and on the third day Boschee sprained his ankle. He couldn’t play the remaining three weeks the team spent there. Instead, they put him through a grueling workout regimen that included hours on the stationary bike and in the swimming pool with a heart monitor strapped on, beeping at him if his heart rate fell below 140 beats per minute.

“It was hell,” he said.

When the team returned to Athens, an old hip injury that had bothered him for years flared up. He thinks the team’s two-hour practices twice a day had something to do with it.

He went to the doctor, who discovered cysts growing on both his hip sockets, with the left one leaking fluid into his hip. When the coach and general manager found out, they scheduled a meeting with Boschee and told him he was off the team.

Before he left, they showed him a list of possible replacements and asked him to make a recommendation. He circled former Kansas guard Ryan Robertson and gladly flew back to America in October 2004.

Bad return

He was soon playing in Kansas City with the Knights of the American Basketball Association.

Boschee quickly grew tired of the team’s antics, which ranged from not paying him on time to having women pole dance behind each basket.

When the Icelandic team Grindavik asked him to play the remainder of the season with them, he decided he’d rather take another chance overseas than finish the year with the Knights.

He’s still mad about what happened next. He told the Knights he wouldn’t be playing in the Feb. 5 game, which was two days before he was leaving town. But they told him that if he didn’t play, they wouldn’t grant him his release. So he played.

Turned out he didn’t need a release from the Knights.

“That whole situation just really set me off,” he said.

Traveling man

So now he’s back overseas finishing the season with Grindavik as a hired hand. The team is in the middle of the Icelandic league playoffs now.

He’s having a much easier time than he had in Greece. Most people speak English, and his former Kansas teammate Nick Bradford is playing in the nearby town of Keflavik.

“It is very Americanized here,” he said.

He doesn’t have to worry about another outrageous phone bill. His girlfriend found a phone plan with AT&T; that only costs nine cents a minute. Out of curiosity, he looked up how much the plan costs in Greece, and it was seven cents a minute.

“You can only imagine how I felt after seeing how much money I could have saved,” he said.

When he comes back home, he plans to start a basketball academy for kids. He says he got the idea from former Kansas guard Rex Walters, who used to have one in Overland Park.

Beyond that, he’s just going to keep playing wherever he can.

“My long-term goals are to play as long as either my body can take it or as long as I don’t get sick of all the traveling,” he said.

Anyone who knows kids who might be interested in Boschee’s basketball academy can send him an e-mail at jboschee_13@yahoo.com.

Edited Kim Sweet Rubenstein