Fall from grace hard to fathom

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May 31, 2006

By Clay Horning The Tribune Star Wed May 31, 2006, 12:12 PM EDT

When it came down, there was a part of me that laughed.

I’m not exactly proud of it, but there you go.

Call it tragic comedy.

After all, this is a man’s life we’re talking about. Barring that, it is at least his profession, which is so close to being the life of so many men.

The day Kelvin Sampson was announced the next basketball coach at Indiana, he told everybody nothing he would ever do in the game would eclipse the pride and thrill he felt being a husband to his wife and a father to his children. That should make his year off the recruiting trail go down a little easier.

Still, for any coach, it has to be dicey.

This is the coach who did more with less for so long.

This is the coach most at home with players cut in his very mold.

Think Tim Heskett dove over all those scorer’s tables without a chip on his shoulder? Or how about Eduardo Najera returning to the court mere minutes after Mateen Cleaves’ headbutt caused a concussion? Even Hollis Price, with the smile on loan from Magic Johnson, was a cold blooded killer on the court. Indeed, Price might have been the ultimate overachiever.

So was Sampson.

From Montana Tech to Washington State was one great leap. From the Cougars to the Sooners was sideways by comparison. But then he was national coach of the year that first season and it’s hard to be better than that.

Then somewhere along the line, sometime after the Final Four, sometime after that first taste of running with the Dukes and North Carolinas and Kentuckys, the bluebloods of the sport, something happened.

Off the court, rules were broken. On the court, the old chemistry just wasn’t there.

So he leaves and takes one of those jobs everybody dreams about.

Think about it. Sampson now has more in common with Dan Gable than most wrestling coaches, or Herb Brooks than most hockey coaches. He is the coach at the university in the hotbed of the sport.

And he’s already in trouble.

Not for anything he did there, but for all he did here. All right, for a very small part of what he did here. It’s nothing he can run away from.

In retrospect, it could not be more stunning.

Try this question: Where does Sampson rank?

Not against Billy Tubbs or Eddie Sutton, and not against Dave Bliss, who will forever be the all-timer when it comes to off-the-court-misdeeds-by-basketball-coaches, but against Jim Harrick, who went from UCLA to Rhode Island to Georgia and into disgrace; or Clem Haskins, the longtime coach at Minnesota, until it was exposed somebody else was writing his players’ papers; or Mike Jarvis, whose St. John’s players started having legal problems like Bill McCartney’s Buffaloes and Tom Osborne’s Huskers?

Those coaches watched over bigger scandals.

But Sampson was his own scandal. He made the calls himself.

This from a once-believed paragon of virtue.

For all the chairs and flowerpots Bobby Knight ever threw at old IU, nobody ever accused him of cheating. And now, the guy who replaces the guy who replaced Knight, who once stood side-by-side with NCAA head Myles Brand at a time Knight wouldn’t acknowledge Brand’s existence or authority, is placed under virtual house arrest by the NCAA for cheating.

It’s too amazing.

Funny, too, but only in that bewildering how-could-this-ever-happen kind of way.

What does it mean?

With a little luck, it means Sampson will gain the humility that always came so hard to him; that, feeling challenged, he will simply take it, remain calm, give the question his best shot and move along; that he’ll lose the chip, but coach like it’s still there.

He does that, we’ll be writing about his renaissance soon enough.

It won’t be easy.

Clay Horning writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript. Contact him by e-mail at cfhorning@normantranscript.com