'01 Mizzou. Most emotional game I ever have or ever will be a part of.
'02 Texas. Fight in the stands game.
'03 Bedlam. 48-46, Vic at the buzzer. Peak Eddie/Kelvin battle.
'04 Tech. Bobby Knight. Andre Emmett was a GAM. Would be a great one to watch if you could find it, it was a battle.
'04 Texas. Top ten matchup. I enjoyed beating those a-holes more than any other team that season (other than St. Joe’s, obviously), and it was for the Big 12.
'05 Kansas game in the Big 12 tournament.
Came here to post that this morning. Couldn’t do it last night. That really got me, far more than anything else.
“Always have faith in God, yourself, & the Cowboys!”
-Eddie Sutton
This is a must read from Kentucky’s beat writer for the Athletic. Copied in full below.
‘It’s going to be OK’: Eddie Sutton leaves behind a complicated legacy
By Kyle Tucker 7h ago8
LEXINGTON, Ky. — It was Jan. 31, 1988, at Freedom Hall in Louisville, and unranked Notre Dame was hanging around with ninth-ranked Kentucky. Eddie Sutton sent his players onto the court to warm up for the second half but hung back in the tunnel with his staff. He turned to his assistants and grinned.
“It’s going to be OK,” Jimmy Dykes, one of those assistants, recalled Sutton saying. “You gotta remember, I’m a better coach than Digger Phelps, so we’re going to win this game.”
And, of course, they did. Sutton won 806 of them in his Hall of Fame career. He guided four programs — Creighton, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma State — to a total of 26 NCAA Tournament appearances, including three Final Fours. There was no shortage of turmoil or tragedy in his life and career, but Sutton, who died at home in Oklahoma last Saturday at the age of 84, never wavered in his supreme self-confidence or his ability to infect everyone around him with that same belief. That is how Dykes will always remember his former coach (at Arkansas) and boss (at Kentucky) and friend (forever).
Dykes understands that a lifelong struggle with alcoholism is bound to be part of the remembrances about Sutton. He realizes that any discussion of Sutton in the Bluegrass will surely include the Emery Air package stuffed with cash and addressed to the father of prized recruit Chris Mills, the fraudulent ACT score of prized recruit Eric Manuel and the stolen gold chains pinned on prized recruit Shawn Kemp. So many prized recruits, so many scandals. It was a tangle of troubles that led to the coach’s resignation in 1989 and heavy NCAA sanctions that threatened to bury a proud program. Even after the triumph of leading his alma mater, Oklahoma State, to a pair of Final Four appearances came the shame of a DUI crash and another resignation in 2006.
His is a complicated legacy, and Dykes understands that, but he also hopes fans, especially of Kentucky, will think of Sutton the way he was that day at Freedom Hall.
“He made our staff believe in him, made our players believe in him, and we never, ever, ever thought one time that we were going to get out-coached — and we never thought after a game that we did get out-coached,” Dykes said this week. “That, and the fact that he was just such a resilient man is what I remember about Coach. He had a lot of highs in his life, but he had a lot of lows too. Think about what it takes to keep getting back up and keep going and keep learning and striving to be better. It’s inspirational. He had a bad breakup at Arkansas and we know how it ended at Kentucky and there was a very public battle with alcohol and later a tragic plane crash at Oklahoma State, but he just had an inner strength and a resiliency that he passed along to any of us who spent any time with him.”
When Sutton finally got into the Naismith Hall of Fame in April, it was more for taking Arkansas (1978) and Oklahoma State (1995 and 2004) to the Final Four. What transpired at Kentucky, in fact, almost certainly delayed his election. But Sutton very nearly got the Wildcats to a Final Four as well in his first year, 1986, which would’ve made him the first coach to take three programs to a Final Four and given him a Final Four appearance in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. He took over virtually the same roster that went 18-13 in Joe B. Hall’s final season and went 32-4 the next year. The Wildcats won the SEC regular-season and tournament titles, climbed to No. 3 in the polls and rode a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament to the Elite Eight.
But there, they faced LSU for a fourth time, having swept the first three meetings of the season. They also had to beat Alabama for a fourth time in the Sweet 16. The Tigers denied Kentucky a trip to the national semifinals — where the Wildcats would’ve faced rival Louisville, the eventual national champion, whom they’d already beaten in the regular season — with a two-point victory. Sutton’s former players and assistants say that loss haunted him, that he second-guessed coaching decisions from that game for years afterward. But Wildcats guard Roger Harden still believes the bracket was a set-up, retribution because the NCAA hadn’t been able to hammer Kentucky that year despite the Lexington Herald-Leader’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report exposing cash payments to players under Hall.
“The entire country was in an uproar thinking Kentucky got away with it,” Harden said, “but I knew there was no way they were just going to let us skate. So we end up having to play two SEC teams for a fourth time just to get to the Final Four. It’s tough to beat anybody four times.”
Kenny Walker, SEC Player of the Year in Sutton’s first season, remembers what a fuss Kentucky made about that after the fact and believes it led to changes in bracketing principles that now aim to prevent conference opponents from colliding until deep in the tournament.
“There is no question if we got past LSU, we had a legitimate chance to win a championship,” Walker said. “With Coach Sutton’s ability to lead us and all the experience we had on that team, I really think we win it. That LSU loss probably hurt me more personally than the Final Four loss to Georgetown in 1984, because Patrick Ewing and those guys were great and deserving champions, but when you beat a team three out of four times, you know you’re the better team. Just think about what that says about Eddie, though, that he could take a 13-loss team and turn us into one of the best teams in the country the next year. He implemented a three-guard offense with Roger Harden and James Blackmon and Ed Davender, and we took off. He could beat you with his players, or he could take somebody else’s and beat you with theirs too.”
Walker thought of himself as a Joe B. Hall guy all the way and had no intention of playing for any other coach at Kentucky. When Hall stepped down, Walker planned to enter the NBA Draft. But Sutton asked to meet with his family, during which time the coach promised not only to make Walker a better player and help him contend for a national title, but also make sure the Wildcats’ star got his degree. Check, check and check.
“He was a great leader of men and I hope he would be remembered for that, and the coach that he was, and people would not focus so much on the scandal,” Walker said. “Kentucky fans should remember him fondly. We know he made mistakes and he was flawed in his personal life just like everybody else, but what I loved about Coach is he always persevered.”
Sutton was never directly implicated in the NCAA violations that led to his resignation, and he always professed his innocence. His son Sean has openly questioned the veracity of the strange story about a package somehow tearing open in transit and revealing the cash payment for Mills. Harden, who coached on Sutton’s staff at Kentucky, also finds it all a little fishy.
“When I played under Coach Hall, at halftime and after games, we probably had 40 people in our locker room: politicians, financial supporters, etc., and they all had keys to Wildcat Lodge,” Harden said. “When Eddie got here, he was the guy who kind of had to unplug that. With the ‘establishment’ of Kentucky basketball, he had to draw some tighter boundaries around the program — and I think that hurt him. A lot of powerful people weren’t happy that their access had been cut back, so I think a lot of stories that got out about Eddie’s time there became greatly exaggerated. But I’ll tell you this: I really loved him, and I think it’s because he really loved us, and the personal relationships he developed with each of us really brought out the best in everybody. That part, nobody can argue.”
It’s also true that Sutton, who played for the legendary Henry Iba at Oklahoma State (and coached under him for a year), embraced the great tradition at Kentucky and prioritized signing in-state stars such as Rex Chapman and later Riche Farmer, John Pelphrey and Deron Feldhaus, three-fourths of The Unforgettables, who he left behind for Rick Pitino to rebuild the program around. Being tapped to follow in the footsteps of national championship coaches Adolph Rupp and Hall was the thrill of Sutton’s life.
“You have to realize that he loved Arkansas,” Dykes said. “He took Arkansas basketball from nothing — they played in an old arena with sawdust around the floor, a football practice facility where they just put a floor down in the winter months to have a basketball team — to a Final Four. He left that, a place that he built and he loved, to take the Kentucky job because he knew it was the job in all of college athletics. And he had a hold of it. Man, he was so proud to have that job. He understood the power and the tradition and the responsibility of Kentucky basketball. Being in Rupp and sitting on that bench, he realized not many people ever get that chance, and he really cherished it.”
Losing that dream job, then, broke his heart. Everyone could see it on his face the day in March 1989 he announced his resignation. But true to form, Sutton summoned the strength to deliver one more speech that day. Dykes remembers following Sutton out of the somber press conference, reeling as he wondered what was next for both of them. His boss paused, just as he had done in the tunnel at the Notre Dame game, and turned back to reassure him.
“I remember him saying, ‘It’s going to be OK,’ and then just walking away,” Dykes said. “I don’t know that he really believed it was going to be OK in that moment, but like all great leaders, he was going to speak it into existence. And not too much later, he was taking his alma mater to the Final Four. So I’ll never forget that moment, on the worst day of his life: It’s going to be OK. That was Eddie.”
(Photo of Eddie Sutton in 2005: Elsa / Getty)
I’ve ben having trouble with the Eddie news. Very much reminds me of when my grandfather passed away. He’d been gone for a few years before he actually passed… and you knew it was coming… but it didn’t make it easier.
In fact, my grandfather knew Eddie when they were at OSU as students at the same time. Grandpa did laundry for the athletes in Bennett to pay for his room, and he had some Eddie stories from their time as students.
I was obsessed with OSU basketball as a kid. Went to Eddie’s camps. Watched every game that we could get on TV. Went to games at UNT and SMU when they played there and on occasion got to go to see the team at GIA. Tickets were a lot harder to come by… and going to Stillwater was not easy and expensive for my folks. But I hung onto every Eddie Sutton scrap of info that I could get. I couldn’t wait to get to OSU and be one of those front row students… and then the accident happened the spring of my junior year in high school… So I didn’t get a chance to do it for Eddie’s teams, but did for Sean’s teams and Ford’s first teams… watching GIA slowly die was really, really hard.
March 12 of my freshman year in high school, two juniors on the football team, one that had taken me on as a bit of a mentee in the weight room, were murdered in a quadruple homicide in my home town. That next morning, my parents had received a call from the coaches letting them know… I don’t know if my dad knew how to deal with that kind of thing. How would he? How would anybody? So we hopped in the truck and drove into Dallas, bought a ticket off of a KU fan outside of the arena, and watched that great team beat Texas to win the Big 12 title, and then watched them go on to the Final Four while all of the stuff was going on with the funerals and grieving and shock.
I don’t know… It just felt like Eddie was always going to be there. He played a huge part in my life, and it makes me sad that he is gone, but happy that he’s with those he loved and has lost.
