Kelvin Sampson The OU Basketball Story
by Steve Richardson
[Fertig Notes]

•	One of Coach’s favorite sayings is, “Don’t forget where you came from.”  That is one of his greatest assets.  And he carries that over to how he coaches his team.  When you cut into Kelvin Sampson after he is dead and gone, loyalty is going to run thick in his blood. Jason Rabedeaux
•	My father had this saying, “Nothing has ever been taught until it has been learned, and nothing has been learned until it has been taught.”
•	From his grandfather, Kelvin heeded this advice, “There’s two kinds of people in the world: the ones who do the work and the ones who take the credit for doing the work.  You’re better off in the first group; there’s a lot less competition.”
•	Heathcote didn’t like hangers-on (but) he figured a guy that persistent deserved a try.  “We needed another guy around like we needed a hole in the head, but I thought, maybe if he can’t help us, we can help him.  (Kelvin) was like a sponge.”
•	One of the things the assistant coaches learned from Jud was to respect the game.
•	If you can’t execute in the half court, you can’t be a big-time winning team.
•	I don’t think you can have a great team unless your best players are your hardest workers.
•	“Timing is everything,” said Joe Gallagher, Kelvin’s college coach at Pembroke State.  “He is the man who has taken advantage fully of the opportunities presented to him.  When it happened, I think he always was well prepared in everything.  I have known guys who were assistant coaches, when the head coach gets sick and those fifteen to sixteen inches they move over, they are just not ready.  He always has been.  He is very, very well prepared.”
•	It was apparent I was a stickler for detail.  I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t jump rope for five minutes without stopping.  I could.  Running suicides, why they didn’t touch the line.  When we ran sprints in college, I touched the line.  Kids cut corners.  I didn’t have any patience.  As the year progressed we got better in so many areas.  And I convinced the kids it was because we touched every line.
•	I think Kelvin night in and night out did a better job mentally, physically, and emotionally getting his team ready to play.  Some teams are not emotionally ready to play.  His kids were mentally tougher.  He exudes that toughness.  That is something you have or you don’t.  A lot of guys are good at Xs and Os, but their teams do not play tough.  He has the whole package. Marty Holly, College of Idaho
•	I don’t really think a team can be truly your team until you walk in that locker room and every kid is there because you recruited him and he wanted you to be his coach.
•	I have always coached out of fear.  That caused me to want to make our kids touch every line, not ever miss a jump rope turn, having conditioning at six in the morning.  The fear to me was a positive fear.  I had to work harder because I might be missing something.
•	“He didn’t just come out shouting orders,” Seaman said.  “He led by example.  There wasn’t one thing he would ask us to do that he wouldn’t get down and do himself.  That is the best teacher – by example.”
•	A lot of times players fail because they can’t handle successes.
•	He has the ability as a coach to make people feel great and bring out the most in them.
•	When you are losing and you have immature kids, it is a bad combination.
•	[Sampson] is really an outstanding communicator,” Smith said.  “When he wants somebody to understand something, he has the ability to convey the meaning.  There is absolutely no doubt what he has on his mind.  In coaching one of the problems is players become a little confused and don’t know what you want them to do.  He does an excellent job of making sure they know exactly what he wants them to do.”
•	“I recruited all over the country,” Raveling added.  “Somewhere in America there were twelve kids good enough for us to win.  We needed to find those twelve kids and get them to come to Pullman.”
•	You take yours and get them ready to play.  You let me take mine and let me get mine ready to play.  And now, let’s go play and see who can win.  I always felt that was my strength.  I could get my kids to play.
•	Recruiting good players wasn’t good enough.  If that was the case, then why doesn’t the team that has the best recruiting year every year win the national championship?  It is having a plan, something strategic.  How are we going to win this game?
•	The day after Washington State dropped a 69-63 decision to Washington, Kelvin received a letter from his father, Mr. Ned.  “Coaches who are coaches learn from their losses.  You can’t lose unless you quit, so keep on keeping on.”
•	Taking charges and diving for loose balls are the two most important things a kid can do for a program that require no talent.
•	Livengood said, “Kelvin can make a difference.  That is one of his strengths.”
•	At that time I had so much confidence in my ability to rehabilitate kids.  All coaches think they are big-time psychologists.  The most important thing coaches have is their reputation.  And if a coach takes a bad kid, he can ruin your reputation.  I had a tremendous support group of players around Neil.  But I also told him that I had a permanent bus ticket in my desk for him.
•	Sampson believes everybody should be given more than one chance.  “The first time you have a problem, it may be an accident.  The second time it may be a coincidence.  The third time it is a habit.  Every kid deserves to get three in terms of chances, as long as one of them is not a felony.  Your rewards don’t always come when you have more points on the scoreboard.”
•	Dale Reed from Wyoming said, “He expected us to win.  And he made us very physical, which, on the West Coast was a little different.  We would make our own breaks and make up for not having as much talent.”
•	“The thing Mark liked about Kelvin was he had a family unit, which he was so used to,” said Barb Hendrickson.  “Going to Kelvin’s house to review films – they need to see a coach has a family.”
•	“I get the feeling his players love him,” said (New Orleans Hornets) coach Tim Floyd.  “And with as much as he asks, I think that makes him an incredible communicator..”
•	Livengood added, “I don’t know that anybody gets his kids to play harder.  And this not necessarily a day and age when everybody plays hard.  He is hard on kids, in a positive way.  As hard as he is, he is fair and they know that.”
•	Sampson wanted to take the Cougars on a foreign trip during the summer of 1991 so they could bond.  He didn’t want the trip to be a vacation.  So, he lined up a seven-game tour of the Soviet Union.  “I wanted it where it would be a little bit tough.  It was important for us to grow and get tighter.  I think when you go through adversity you have better respect for people on your right and left.  They could complain all they wanted during the trip, but everyone around them was going through the same thing.  That trip brought us unbelievably closer together.”
•	We have a saying in our program.  It is not what you accomplish that is important, it is what you overcome.  And that is something we all overcame.  It helped people grow up.  We had some guys go over there as boys and come back as men.
•	The Russian trip paid off in a big way.  Washington State won its first twelve games to start the 1991-92 season.
•	But the fact of the matter is at Washington State, you are always going to have a down cycle.  You are going to go down before you go up.
•	September’s preseason conditioning was a time when Sampson weeded out the men from the boys.
•	“From you, I learned firsthand the influence that a college coach can have on his players,” wrote Eddie Hill in a 1995 letter to Sampson.  “You have taught me a great deal about what it takes to succeed.  The work ethic that you instill in your players carries on far past their playing days.  Your hard work and dedication continue to motivate me as I travel down this coaching road.  Than you for all the help.”
•	Sampson labeled some players “tuxedo players” because they looked pretty on the outside but had nothing on the inside.
•	Beating Michigan State and walking down the sideline and shaking Jud’s hand, that was hard.  He was not only my mentor, he was my idol.  I looked up to him so much.  The one thing I learned from Jud was his honesty.
•	Hill and Harris were seniors, but the freshmen were starting to pass them up.  That was not good for team chemistry.  That was something I was going to have to deal with.  I loved Eddie Hill.  But I loved my program more.  Harris can get to a certain point as my point guard.  But my leading scorer can’t be my point guard, not the way my system is set up.  Ellison at some point has to be my point guard.  And he was not going to learn by sitting next to me.
•	Arizona and UCLA are going to finish first and second or second and first every year.  And they should.  Whether it was weather, recruiting, or tradition, there were advantages with the southern schools in our league.  That’s why I liked that challenge.  I was supposed to coach the underdog because I was the underdog.  And it was a good fit.
•	“We convinced him we needed to get this deal done,” Underwood said.  “I think anytime during recruiting, when they say they want to come, it becomes an investment on everyone’s part to do it as quickly as possible.”
•	John Underwood, “Kids under Kelvin knew what was expected of them from the very beginning both on and off the floor.” 
•	Sampson said as the numbers dropped on the team, the chemistry became better.  Sampson said his biggest selling job was to get his new players to buy into their roles.  He calls it “surrendering.”
•	Sampson kicked the team out of practice very early in the fall.  And his rule is, if he kicks the team out of practice, it comes back at 6 a.m. the next day and practices as well as at the regularly scheduled time.
•	I knew I was walking on thin ice with some of these kids because I didn’t recruit them.  They didn’t trust me.  There was no loyalty factor.
•	Teams win when their best players are gracious.  If the best player is a jerk and he is a me-me-I guy, the team usually does not win.
•	The coaches’ biggest fear should always be pressure.  If you fear pressure, then you are always prepared for it.
•	Playing two sports was almost a detriment.  Because he was so good in both, he never made a commitment to one.
•	Stress is a major trigger for asthma.  And because of his personal drive and intensity, his work ethic, the intensity of late in the season and the early preseason seem to bother him.  The early preseason is the signing period.  And there is always the stress of whether a player is going to sign with you or not.
•	He usually checks himself in and out of the Norman hospital,” Karen said.  “Once he was in the admitting room, and a fan asked him for an autograph.”  Kelvin, lying with his face down on the table, could barely sign his name.  “My mom is such a fan of yours,” the fan told a groggy Sampson.
•	“Sampson was back in a week,” Abercrombie said.  “That comes through in his coaching.  He is such a mentally tough person.  His pain threshold must be way up there.  He had the asthma and IV in his hand.  Plus, he had back surgery.  Put all those together and the stress it takes to go through a season at a top program, and there you go.”
•	“I didn’t feel like I could afford to be away from that team.  Deep down in my heart I knew I couldn’t be away from this team because it was too fragile.
•	Trinity Valley’s Tyrone Foster, a 5-foot-11, 165-pounder from White Plains, NY, was more of a loner than Sampson liked.  And that was not a good characteristic for a point guard in Sampson’s system.
•	We had better players than we had at Washington State.  But we did not have better chemistry.  I learned a lot about recruiting that year.
•	Those were all hard games, and we were in a position to win all of those games.  But we were not close enough or tight enough to overcome adversity.
•	I kept thinking about Nate Erdmann.  He left Washington State to follow me to Oklahoma.  He spent a year of his life at a junior college before coming to Oklahoma.  And I would have to go back to tell him I was going to leave him a second time?  I had already done it once.  I couldn’t do it a second time.  
•	Sampson canceled a meeting with North Carolina State in New Orleans because he knew if he got on a plane to New Orleans he was going to take the North Carolina State job.  “But I couldn’t get on the plane to New Orleans because of timing.  I had only been at Oklahoma for two years.  Kellen and Lauren were a factor.  But the main factor was I could not leave Nate Erdmann.
•	Sometimes, it is hard to go home.  What is best for other people is not always best for you.
•	“Here’s what I have always thought about Kelvin,” said Kim Anderson, former Missouri assistant coach and current director of Big 12 Conference basketball operations.  “He does the best job of getting his best player in the best position to succeed.”
•	There was also an 82-55 loss at Iowa State.  There was a time out and Coach Sampson just went off on us.  We are down twenty-some-odd points, and he didn’t get on us for not shooting the ball well.  He got on us for not being good teammates.  He was the same guy all the time in practice or in a game.  As a player that was reassuring.  He may have been feeling more stress and excitement during a game, but he doesn’t show it.
•	One thing coaches coach against is recruiting mistakes.
•	I love those situations.  It is adversity.  It is on the road.  It is on the road at Texas.  It is on the road at Kansas.  What are you going to do in adversity?  You want me to bail you out here?  You figure it out.  One of my responsibilities in our practices was to create adversity for our players.  And I wanted them to be able to handle it.  I am never going to let anything get out of control.  And I have always been in control of all of our practices.  But at the same time, a lot of our practices, to the casual observer, would be who is in charge here?
•	Oklahoma stood for all the right things: hard work, dedication, hustle, the kind of blue-collar work ethic.
•	I don’t think you can improve toughness.  But I think you can teach courage.  I think that is a learned attribute.  You learn courage by battling through adversity.  We are trying to build teamwork and team chemistry in September.  The harder we push them in September, the easier October will become.
•	If he is being completely level, he would rather have a guy who doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and has played in a system,” (New Orleans Hornets) coach Tim Floyd said.  “He doesn’t like players who play cool.  If a player has a coolness coming into the program, he probably isn’t going to fit.  He asks guys to give that up.”
•	“The recruiting environment is almost a culture,” Sampson said.  “I am not sure it makes kids understand the importance of being a teammate.  So many kids are used to being the team, they don’t know how to be a teammate.  And in our system, it is important you be a good teammate.”
•	It is vital to look at your team’s weaknesses.  That’s how I have always tried to coach.  It is not our strengths as much as our weaknesses.  Because if we can find out what our weaknesses are, we can stay away from them.
•	The greatest ability you can have for us in our practices is dependability.
•	He just didn’t have a passion for the game.  Those kinds of kids are the biggest challenge for me because you want them to match your passion.
•	The best advice he gave me: I was going to miss it when it’s gone,” Brewer said of his OU career.  “And I miss everything…the people.  I miss walking down the tunnel.  He told us to put everything we could into it, otherwise you will miss out and you can’t get it back.  That’s why I would go hard every day.”
•	Why was our team so good on the road?  Our point guard and our best player were tough people.  Your team will reflect those two.  And if you are good in both those spots, you are going to be good on the road.
•	He had no weaknesses.  He didn’t have a lot of strengths, but no weaknesses.  And his greatest was his competitiveness.  Eduardo (Najera) was at his best when he was challenged.
•	It defined what he stood for.  He was not going to stand for mediocrity.  He was not going to stand for less than your best effort.  He changed that team.
•	When you are on the road and you are getting booed, use it to your advantage.  That’s when I found out who our toughest guys were.  Sometimes kids don’t understand the toughness and the competitive level you have to have to win on the road.  Talent alone doesn’t win on the road.
•	“He took all the chicken off the plane,” OU trainer Alex Brown said of the post-game meal.  “That was the only time we had lost to Texas A&M.  I felt like he was right.  We didn’t deserve to eat.  We weren’t hungry on the court.  Why should we be hungry now?”
•	He had continued to conduct interviews with the media and view film of Arizona.  “I can remember talking to James Worthy and Tim Brando [of CBS].  They asked me if we have to play our best game of the year to win the game.  I said no because they’re not.  Our greatest strength is we can make you not play your best game.  That’s what defense, toughness, and rebounding can do.  Tom Izzo of Michigan State has become a legend coaching like that.  I told our kids we could win this game.  This is not a game we are going to win because we are better.  This is a game we can win because we are going to be tougher.  We would out-scrap them.”  The announcers asked Sampson if both teams played their “A” game who would win?  “Nobody is going to play their “A” game against us.  I said we don’t have an “A” game.  I said if we play the best we can play, it’s going to be a B.  Our B is going to be good enough to beat you because we are pretty good at making you be a B team.”
•	Arizona had four shots at victory in the final seconds but missed them all.  Oklahoma won, 61-60.  Arizona athletics director Jim Livengood, who had been with Sampson at Washington State, watched the game from a CBS truck in Denver where he was serving as a NCAA Tournament Basketball Committee representative.  “It was bittersweet in a lot of ways,” Livengood said.  “I was sad for our team and Lute.  On the other side – and I know a lot of Wildcat fans wouldn’t understand it – but if you are going to get beat, I felt good it was Kelvin.  And it was strictly Kelvin, not the Sooners.  That’s the toughest of all games.  It’s not fun to play your friends, regardless of how your team does.”
•	“Lute was a role model for me,” Sampson said.  “He taught me the value of running a system and sticking to your guns.”
•	The biggest issue with Ryan was he didn’t want to play the role we had given him.  And there was pressure on him.  He was a high school All-American.  And I really understood him.  I had talked to his father a couple of times about his role.  His family wanted his role to be more offense.  And that never upset me.  It really didn’t.  But I had to do what was best for our team.  I always thought it was my job to develop the kids to the best of their best abilities, maximize strengths, and win games.  My father taught me a great lesson in my second year at Montana Tech.  I had to deal with a parent.  I called him for advice.  And I never will forget him saying this: “Most parents would rather their son make All-Conference than your team win the conference championship.”  And I have always used that as a foundation for kids now and dealing with their parents.
•	Rabedeaux wanted to be talked out of taking the UTEP job.  I told him this is why you coach, to run the show.  You can blow the whistle in practice and put your stuff in and make a difference.  That is what coaching is all about.
•	Eduardo could have the worst shooting percentage I have ever seen and be the best player on the floor.  That’s the thing I told the NBA guys.  They would say, “What about his shot?”  I would say, “What about it?  He doesn’t have one.  That’s not what his value is.  He knows how to win the game.  He knows how to influence the game.”
•	I was disappointed in everybody’s effort.  I am an effort guy.  I know some nights you are not going to play well.  But I cannot comprehend why a kid can’t give great effort.
•	They were stealing from the state.  They were getting $11,000 scholarships.  And it was just like highway robbery.  I said, “You guys need to reimburse the University of Oklahoma for what you did.”
•	Sampson finally had a player who matched his passion.  Najera had a great desire to play in the NBA.  “You look in Eduardo’s eyes you could see his passion.  He would never hide it.  Eduardo was always a factor in something, always.  He cared so much.”
•	I loved Eduardo and Renzi.  And they were loyal to this school and program.  When a recruit would come on campus, they would say, “He won’t fit us” or “He is one of us.”  I loved that because they took ownership in the program.  They wanted the right kind of kids to play with them.  They didn’t want jerks on their teams.  And I respected them for that.
•	“Road games are who he is,” Renzi Stone said of Sampson.  “He loves road games.  He loves keeping a group together, a small intimate group of guys who go into an arena that is loud.  And we are at our best as a team when we play road games against teams we are not supposed to beat.”
•	“Why do we win on the road?” Lopes hypothesized.  “We have great focus and preparation.  From a coach’s standpoint that’s why we win on the road.  We don’t change the way we play.  We play the same on the road as we do at home from an effort and intelligence standpoint.”
•	You can win big road games without veteran refs.  Inexperienced, weak referees will get influence by home crowds.
•	If you are a good kid and you work hard and you hang in there and you believe in your coaches and you believe in yourself, good things will happen.
•	J.R. was one of the best guards I have ever coached.  From three to six in the afternoon, he was phenomenal; from six p.m. to three a.m. you needed to have a beeper on his ankle.  You had no idea what he was going to do.  His biggest enemy was never the other team; it was always himself.  Sometimes we search and search and we get to the last peak of the highest mountain.  And there’s a mirror there and we look in it.  And it is us.  That was J.R.
•	Sampson had always been taught the foundation of any program was discipline.  “You have to have rules and do things right.  Here I am as a coach and arguably our best player has screwed up numerous times.  I have done everything in my heart to help this kid get better and do better.  Am I going to keep him because I want to win games?  Or, do I do what is right, because it is right?
•	“It is easy to have principles some of the time,” said John Nash, a former OU walk-on.  “It is hard all the time.  He has them all the time.”
•	In this profession, what you realize over time is some people will like you and some won’t.  There are some reporters who will either like you and your style of play.  And I think their writing will reflect whether they agree with any of that.
•	I think it is easy to coach against somebody whose coaching philosophy is entirely different from yours.  I think it is a lot more difficult to coach against like teams.
•	I told Donnie in this profession I think we have journey jobs and we have destination jobs.  A journey job is where you go and wait for a destination job.
•	We need a place to practice.  We need a trophy case.  We need a locker room.  That’s how you make a statement and make it a destination place.
•	When you get to the point where you are not depending on freshmen, your program is getting stronger.  Kids always improve the most between their freshmen and sophomore years because their summers are different.  They prepare differently.  They know what to expect.
•	Talent to me comes down to presence and impact.
•	I can tell a lot about what they will be like in January, February, and March by how they handle September.