John Blanchette: Indiana’s Sampson, former WSU coach, relishes in all those local ties

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – He’s playing the team he once refused to play and spending most of his time talking up the team he used to coach.

And he’s really eating it up.

Here he is at the podium in the belly of Arco Arena, fencing questions as the maestro of basketball at Indiana University, where being just a coach is not nearly enough. He is the latest successor to the bully in the red sweater – the winningest, most combustible character in the history of college basketball, who combusted often enough in settings just like this to burnish his considerable legend.

“I’m not touching the moderator,” Kelvin Sampson teased, knowing we’d all get the Bobby Knight reference – and the hint that he doesn’t have to do it Knight’s way to make the Hoosiers the Hoosiers again.

If it wasn’t enough to have Washington State and Gonzaga both here for first-round games at the NCAA tournament, we have Sampson here as well to tie together all the loose ends.

Wazzu’s favorite basketball coach – well, between George Raveling and the current one, for sure.

Gonzaga’s favorite foil.

And Indiana’s … what? This has not yet been resolved. He fulfills the major requirement for all Hoosiers – he’s not Mike Davis, Knight’s reviled first heir. And if the baggage he brought from Oklahoma – NCAA violations for 577 improper phone calls to recruits – was embarrassing for a few (anytime) minutes, but the toughness and grit he has tried to restore to the program is not.

Tonight there will be another progress report when the Hoosiers meet Gonzaga somewhere near the 7 o’clock hour, the game Bulldogs’ cortege – modest then but mighty now – has been lusting for ever since Sampson pulled the plug on the WSU-GU series in 1989.

And how about that, Kelvin?

“How do I answer that?” he wondered, seeking a prompt from a Spokane writer.

Why not the same way you did back then?

“OK, they were too good,” Sampson allowed. “We wanted to play somebody we could beat.”

Remember, this was long before the Zags got really good – but also before Sampson had built the Cougars back up from nothing, too. The true irony is that while Gonzaga fans still seethe over it, Sampson’s snub did as much to legitimize Gonzaga as a basketball entity as playing the Zags would have.

And no one marvels at what the Zags have done in the last decade to further legitimize themselves than Sampson.

“Most people see them the same as they see a UCLA or an Arizona, because they’ve been shoulder to shoulder with any program in the country,” he said.

“Gonzaga is a culture now. It’s a brand. I hear Mark Few talk about ‘he’s a Zag’ or ‘the Zag way.’ That’s a tremendous compliment when you can take what people think of as a noun and turn it into an adjective.”

Yet if anything, Sampson’s admiration for Tony Bennett and this year’s Cougs – authors of the most fascinating turnaround in college basketball – runs even deeper.

“And I don’t know Tony,” he said, “but it seems like I do because he’s coaching at my old school.

“I found myself looking for their games this year. I had a chance to talk to Tony today and congratulate him on a phenomenal job, because when you win in a place like Pullman it’s so much appreciated and it’s such a big deal to those people there.”

Heck, it’s a big deal to the people no longer there. Sampson discovered as much on Selection Sunday, when his former players started to check in.

“The first call I got was Eddie Hill,” he said. “The second call I got was Mark Hendrickson. I spent the first hour after the selection show talking about the Cougs.

“We played Penn State a month ago and Mark lives in central Pennsylvania in the off-season now, and he came up and spent the night and went to the game with my wife Karen. And all we talked about was Washington State. And the first thing he said was, ‘Coach, you shouldn’t have left. I was so mad at you for the longest time.’ “

Coug fans, too.

Sampson had finally dragged Wazzu back into the NCAA tournament and would return seven of the 10 best players the next year. But when he jumped to coach Oklahoma, freshman guard Nate Erdmann followed and so did a recruit, Ernie Abercrombie. What looked like another NCAA team settled for NIT berths the next to years and slipped into disrepair. Fourteen years later, they Cougars are finally back in the NCAAs.

“Our best teams, arguably, would have come after I left,” he said. “That’s why it was so hard to leave. Sometimes, I’m just an emotional sap. You just get so tied into those kids.”

And watching on TV three time zones away, Sampson can see it again.

“You watch (Derrick) Low and (Kyle) Weaver and (Daven) Harmeling and Ivory (Clark) and you can see Tony’s heart in those kids,” he said. “That’s the key to coaching Washington State. You have to be dedicated to those players because you’re the reason they come there. You have to be totally committed to them night and day.”

Kelvin Sampson can go on and on about the Cougs – and the Zags, too.

It’s only practice that pulls him away.

To a new set of kids. He’s eating that up, too.