Jayhawks And Porn Stars?

Kansas Coach Gives Porn Star Courtside Seat

Updated: 13 hours 56 minutes ago

David Knowles, Writer

AOL News (March 5) -- You never know who you might end up sitting next to on a plane.

Just ask Kurtis Townsend, an assistant coach for the University of Kansas men's basketball team, who struck up a conversation with a 31-year-old Jayhawks fan on a flight from Los Angeles to Kansas City.

After chatting with the coach for much of the flight, the woman, who gave her name as Jamie, recounted how she'd slept outside to try to get tickets for Kansas games when she had been a student at the university.

As the passengers were departing, Townsend says he concluded the casual conversation with Jamie by offering his card.

"I was just being nice and gave her my card and told her to call me if she ever wanted to go to a game," Townsend told the Kansas City Star.

The woman took him up on the ticket offer, and, on her 32nd birthday, scored a courtside seat at perhaps the biggest game of the regular season, a showdown between second-ranked Kansas and its home state rival, fifth-ranked Kansas State.

At the game, the ecstatic woman, an adult film actress who performs under the name Samantha Ryan, started posting messages and photos to her Twitter account.

"So excited for my floor seats at the KU/KSU game!" Ryan tweeted. "Coach Townsend kicks major ass! Rock Chalk Jayhawk Go KU!"

Among the photos Ryan posted to Twitter, one shows her sharing a squeeze with the school mascot, Big Jay.

When asked how the star of more than 100 X-rated films had acquired such a coveted ticket, Townsend, who is married and the father of five children, said he'd never learned Ryan's profession.

"I had no idea she was a porn star," Townsend told the Kansas City Star. "She was Jamie, a former KU student who said she was a big fan of the Jayhawks."

Annoyed by the media response to what she sees as a harmless act of kindness by a stranger on a plane, Ryan has taken to Twitter once again to tweet her frustration.

"Much ado about nothin," Ryan wrote. "I meet the most interesting people and travel alone so sue me for being friendly and talking to my neighbor."

As for the game, Kansas won by a score of 82-65.