RIP Bob Frederick

Former Kansas athletic director Bob Frederick, the man who hired Roy Williams to coach the Jayhawks, dies at age 69 after suffering injuries in a bike accident Thursday.

 

Read about the accident last night on the Lawrence Journal-World Web site -- though they never mentioned whether he was wearing a helmet, a glaring omission to me with that story. I've been at the intersection where that accident happened many, many times. Guess he has a history of accidents and always came out OK.

RIP to a fine AD. He will be missed in Lawrence.

 

I read somewhere that he was wearing a helmet. Considering how much he cycled, can't imagine he wasn't wearing a helmet. Maybe even with a helmet, blunt force trauma of head on concrete can be lethal.

 

He was in an accident 15 years ago and has since been a staunch supporter of wearing helmets. I can't picture a scenario where he wouldn't have been wearing one.

 

Came really close to being the AD at Michigan in the early 90s... RIP.

 

Also was a finalist to become Big 12's first commissioner.

 

I think Frederick had the first athletic department to win a bowl game, go to the Final Four and College World Series in the same academic year (1992-1993).

I was a pup when Frederick was wrapping up his tenure. The first time I tried calling him, I was doing a throw-together space-filler story for a special section. He wasn't in, so I left my name and newsroom number. I left after a couple hours of waiting, and the instant I got home, my phone rang. It was Dr. Frederick. That told me a lot about the kind of person he was, that he would go out of his way to call back a reporter-in-training he had never met at his home.

RIP.

 

Frederick deserves all the praise he gets for hiring a no-name assistant Roy Williams and he deserves the criticism for where the overall athletic department at KU was when his tenure ended.

But, most of all, he should be remembered as great human being. I used to have a class near his office when I was a student at KU and he was teaching a class or two in his post-AD days.. After seeing me waiting outside his door a few times he'd come out and chat me up. We'd talk about sports and my classes. He'd ask about my family, if I was having a good experience at KU and all kinds of other things. He was just one of the nicest guys I ever met.