I’ve got a signed copy for the person who best makes his or her case on why he or she deserves a book. Fire away!
And for those in search of a holiday gift for the Mizzou fan in your life, get those orders in now.
Here’s an excerpt from the book, from Joe Posnanski, who was kind enough to write the foreword:
But Kansas-Missouri is a different rivalry because no other traces back to such an ugly history, to Bleeding Kansas and John Brown and Osceola and Quantrill’s Raiders. It’s a different rivalry because the states themselves are so different — with Missouri a mix of rural and urban and long viewed as a purple swing state, while Kansas is flat, sparse, right in the middle and one of the reddest of red states in the Union. It’s a different rivalry because Kansans and Missourians are still divided by a street named “State Line” and they still look across that line at one another with doubt and distrust.
So it’s a rivalry with feeling … and every year, no matter how bad the teams were (and they were often bad), there was something emotional and fervid when the Tigers and the Jayhawks played. Year after year, those of us around Missouri and Kansas often wondered what would happen if their game ever actually meant anything. In 2007, we found out.
