Why KU basketball fans visit two gravesites in Lawrence for luck during March Madness
A few days ago, a KU basketball fan made his traditional pilgrimage to the gravesites of two basketball legends buried on the east side of Lawrence.
As he does every year after Selection Sunday in March, he placed copies of his NCAA bracket picks on the graves of James Naismith and Phog Allen.
Naismith, the inventor of basketball and KU’s first basketball coach, is buried in Lawrence’s sprawling, park-like Memorial Park Cemetery.
Just across the road in Oak Hill Cemetery lies Allen, until last year KU’s winningest basketball coach — Naismith’s successor — considered the “father of basketball coaching.”
The fan shared a photo on Facebook of his semi-complete bracket sitting on the marker at Naismith’s grave. He doesn’t have many traditions in life, he wrote, but this is one he hasn’t missed since his first year as a KU student.
This is hallowed ground for basketball fans, especially KU diehards at tournament time. Hoping to conjure luck for the hometown team, fans over the years have left KU gear like stocking caps and basketballs, game tickets and other mementos at the two graves.
On Wednesday, pennies left by visitors were scattered atop Allen’s grave marker and a baby-sized basketball sat on the ground beside it.
Earlier this month one KU fan posted a black-and-white photograph of Naismith’s grave marker that he shares every March on Facebook.
Before the 2009 NCAA tournament began, one KU fan placed a peach basket with an old basketball inside on Naismith’s grave. He did it the year before, too, an homage to how the game, when Naismith invented it, was first played using peach baskets for nets.
In 2013, when KU lost by two points to Michigan in overtime in the South Regional semifinals, someone taped a copy of KU’s basketball schedule to the Allen family headstone and wrote: “RCJH! Thank you!”
“Basketball and local history are two topics of great interest in Lawrence, so it is only natural that our community is interested in visiting the resting places of Naismith and Allen,” said Andrew Stockmann, curator of exhibits at Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence, who moved to town two-and-a-half years ago. “I did so myself during my first months in Lawrence.
“It is telling that both men remained in Lawrence in their later years as vital members of the community and are buried in a city that honors them by naming streets and buildings after their legacy.”
It is well-known KU lore that former basketball coach Roy Williams and his jogging buddies would run from campus to Naismith’s grave on game days, especially before big matchups. According to one media account, they felt the grave visits resulted in good luck for the team about 90% of the time.
(They would sometimes spit in the Kansas River for luck, too. Yep, they did that.)
“Game day, I would go by Dr. Naismith and Doc Allen’s gravesites,” Williams told the Raleigh News & Observer in 2013, 10 years after leaving KU for North Carolina.
“We would run from Allen Fieldhouse to one cemetery and pat Dr. Naismith’s grave and then over to the other one and get Dr. Allen’s. The history there was really important to me.”
Naismith died in 1939. A stone memorial to him stands at the entrance to Memorial Park Cemetery, though his actual gravesite is at the back of the grounds.
Allen died in Lawrence in 1974. He was KU’s winningest coach when he retired in 1956. Right before he surpassed that record in November, KU’s current coach, Bill Self, said, “Phog Allen is still going to be the all-time best coach at Kansas.”
Ted Owens, who coached the Jayhawks from 1964 to 1983, spoke fondly of Kansas basketball in a 2005 interview with the Tampa Bay Times.
The Oklahoma native even spoke of the possibility that someday, he too, would choose to spend his afterlife in Memorial Park Cemetery where Naismith is buried.
The headline on the story: “KU: It’s a tradition to die for.”
“People who have cared all their life about Kansas basketball want to be buried around Kansas basketball,” Owens, who is 95 now, told the Florida paper. “That’s where I want to be. My wife and I have talked about it and there’s every likelihood that’s where I’ll be.”
A local tourism official in 2009 told the Lawrence Journal-World the city is proud that Naismith lived and died there.
She knew of one group of fans planning to visit his grave the morning before the Final Four game that year if KU made it that far. They planned to raise their cups of coffee and give him a cheer.
Alas, there was no reason for KU fans to cheer that year. The Jayhawks fell to Michigan State in the Sweet 16.
This year might be another one of those years.
KU heads into the tournament as a No. 7 seed after an inconsistent season. The Jayhawks play No. 10 seed Arkansas in the first round at 6:10 p.m. Thursday in Providence, Rhode Island.
None of which matters to the fan who left his brackets at the cemeteries this week. He only filled out the Kansas side of the bracket and picked the Jayhawks to win it all.
He always picks Kansas to win it all.
“I’ll leave brackets with Kansas written-in all the way,” he wrote on Facebook. “Much like life, we don’t win every year and deep down everyone knows that some things are just out of our control, but I gotta keep the faith that victory is in sight.
“Just knowing that every now and again we come out on top brings me peace.
“Don’t worry about the mules, JUST LOAD THE WAGON.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Why KU basketball fans visit two gravesites in Lawrence for luck during March Madness."
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