Former AD Frederick, who presided over KU’s 1988 basketball title, dies after bike accident

Former Kansas AD dies after bike accident

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Bob Frederick, who took criticism for hiring an obscure assistant named Roy Williams as Kansas basketball coach and later helped create the Big 12 Conference, died Friday night following a bicycling accident. He was 69.

An accomplished cyclist, Frederick was riding on a city street in Lawrence, Kan., near the campus Thursday evening when he hit a pothole, flew over the handlebars and struck the pavement. He was taken by helicopter to the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kan., with massive head injuries.

He died at University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., according to family spokeswoman Kelly Hale.

“As fine a man as could possibly be, that was Bob Frederick,” Williams told The Associated Press from his home in North Carolina.

Frederick also served as chairman of the Division I men’s basketball committee and was one of the key figures in writing the rules and bylaws when the Big Eight Conference merged with four Texas schools in 1996 to form the Big 12.

“We would like to thank our family and friends for their love and support during this difficult time,” Frederick’s family said in a statement. “As an educator, coach and athletic director, our father touched many lives. He always wanted to live a life that mattered, and he did.”

A former Kansas basketball player, Frederick became Kansas athletic director in 1987, a year before the Jayhawks won the NCAA championship. When Larry Brown resigned as head coach shortly afterward, Dean Smith suggested that Frederick speak with the No. 2 assistant on his North Carolina staff. A few weeks later, even though dozens of successful, established head coaches were practically begging for a chance to join the defending national champions, Frederick opted for the unproven Williams.

Many fans and alumni were outraged. But Kansas was the winningest program in the decade of the 1990s and Williams was on his way to induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“I told him many times, ‘Bob, that was the biggest gamble I can remember any athletic director ever taking,’” said Williams, who has won two national championships at North Carolina since leaving Kansas in 2003. “I wasn’t even the consensus choice in my own household, probably, much less for the Kansas people.

“I know it changed my life. I don’t know where I would be right now, but I know I would not have experienced the great things that I’ve experienced if it hadn’t been for Bob Frederick and his resolve.”

Two years before Williams left Kansas, Frederick retired as athletic director to begin teaching at Kansas.

“Nobody ever enjoyed being the chairman (of the Division I men’s basketball committee) more than Bob,” said BCS administrator Bill Hancock, who was director of the NCAA tournament when Frederick served as chairman.

“He liked it because he loved the athletes. He loved everything about basketball — the game, the people, the tournament. He loved the mathematical symmetry of the bracket as it would unfold. He was a basketball guy to the core.”

Former Kansas athletic director Monte Johnson, who hired Frederick as an assistant, said Williams came under great pressure during the controversial hiring of Williams.

“It was natural for people to wonder why Bob would bring in an assistant coach to a program of such magnitude,” Johnson said.

“Just about every head coach who wanted to coach a team with the kind of tradition of Kansas would have snapped up the job. It showed courage for Bob to hire someone who was not necessarily famous. And what a favor Bob did us.”

Frederick proved a soothing voice and a quiet leader during often contentious meetings while Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and the other Big 12 schools worked out the details of what would be a new superconference.

Frederick retired as athletic director two years before Williams left for North Carolina, and Williams has said he might have stayed if Frederick had still been the AD.

“To me, when you think about an athletic director that has the complete imagination, the complete resolve every day to do things for the good of the student-athlete, I can’t imagine anybody being more concerned about doing things the right way than Bob,” Williams said. “He was the most ethical, the most moral person I’ve ever known.”

Frederick ran into more criticism in 2001 when he decided drop men’s tennis and swimming in a cost-cutting measure. Feeling the pressure from influential alumni, some of whom took part in a campus demonstration, Frederick resigned three months later.

“Sports-talk shows, the Internet, chat rooms — all those things have made it more difficult for head coaches and ADs and even for chancellors,” he said at the time. “I’m looking forward to being out on the farm and spending more time with my family.”

AP Sports Writer John Marshall in Kansas City contributed to this report.