SAN ANTONIO — In late October, Kelvin Sampson sat down on his couch in his office and the phone rang. It was an old buddy who used to sell insurance and served as Sampson’s volunteer assistant at Montana Tech. Sampson had a guest, so he didn’t answer, but the memories started flowing from his first head coaching job, in the Frontier Conference in the early 1980s.
For away games, his volunteer assistant didn’t travel when they’d take the van because there wasn’t enough room. But he did when they had access to the 1966 Trailways bus that the Orediggers shared with the Butte Copper Kings, a farm league team for the Milwaukee Brewers.
“They got it in the summer. We got it in the winter,” Sampson said. “But I remember the first championship, we beat College of Great Falls, and they were the best team in the league, and we were the worst team in the league. Then, by our second year, we were the best team, and we beat them at their place to win the conference championship. That was a big deal.”
Sampson smiles. He always thinks back to those days when his buddy calls every preseason. This game has given him a lot of great stories to tell.
Really, he’s only missing one.
On Monday night at the Alamodome, the final box to check was right there for the 69-year-old. What a perfect setup. Sitting on 799 wins, with a team that had lost only one game since the start of December. A team that, per tradition, visits the Sampson house every night before home games to eat dinner — with Karen Sampson’s famous chocolate chip cookies for dessert — and play UNO at the kitchen table before it’s time to go upstairs for film. This team was different, because it always hung around longer than the others.
This team different, all the way until the end.
That ending?
The Sampsons have been hiding from the possibility for weeks, Kellen Sampson admitting on the eve of his father’s first national championship game appearance that “there’s an unspoken bond between us about what we’re doing. Neither of us are dumb enough to speak on it yet.”
Neither had shed a tear last Sunday when they made the Final Four — something they very much did when they made it in 2021 — and that was because they didn’t want their players to think they’d arrived at the finish line. They wanted them to know those tears would be reserved for Monday night. Happy ones, ideally.
And until a ball bounced hopelessly at the feet of Emanuel Sharp, it felt like it was the only possible outcome.
Houston played a game on its terms in Monday night’s championship against Florida. Tough, rugged, hard to score. The type of game the Cougars always seem to win, with one of their program guys making a play when they need it most.
Houston led for all but 17 seconds in the first 39 minutes of the game, but two Alijah Martin free throws put the Gators on top with 46 seconds remaining. Sampson drew up a play his team had practiced hundreds of times before, setting up a scenario very similar to the one in the Sweet 16 against Purdue that would give us even more reason to celebrate the old ball coach.
As he had that night in Indy, Sampson used LJ Cryer as a decoy, running a play that looked like it was designed for the star guard, only to have it set up for Sharp, who had been the big shot maker throughout March. The hope was that it would draw a long closeout, giving Sharp a chance to either sidestep for a 3 or drive to the basket and send the game to overtime. Sharp thought he had enough of a window to get the shot off, but Walter Clayton Jr. recovered so quickly that when Sharp left his feet, he had nowhere to go and dropped the ball. It bounced cruelly four times in front of him while the seconds ticked, and the championship that was right there just slipped away.
Florida 65, Houston 63.
Sampson, hands on his hips, stared straight ahead at the spot on the floor where it all went wrong — saying later it was incomprehensible they couldn’t get a shot off — and then he turned to congratulate the Gators and walked straight off the floor blankly staring ahead.
It’s never easy to close the book on a season, especially when you’re so close you can almost feel the scissors in your hand.
“You know the pitfalls,” Sampson would say back in October about the chase. “You know how difficult it is. You know where the landmines are. And the distance between where you are and winning it, there’s so many landmines.”
Houston had sidestepped every one in the NCAA Tournament until that final minute, pulling off what seemed inconceivable by rallying from 14 down to beat Duke two nights earlier. In a cruel trust, the Cougars led the Gators by 12 in the second half in this one, nearly pushing it to 14 when sixth-year forward J’Wan Roberts missed a lefty jump hook he almost always makes.
“So much has just got to go right to get here,” Kellen Sampson said, “And it did. And then you’re up 12, and you’re generating some momentum. … Thought we were so close to getting it into the open water.”
Eventually, the Sampsons will watch the tape and wonder what they could have done differently.
But in the present, Kelvin Sampson had to immediately turn reflective in the right way. He has always said the hurt is for his players when the end finally arrives. For guys like Cryer, Roberts, Ja’Vier Francis and Mylik Wilson, who spent a combined 15 years at Houston, they don’t get another chance. Sampson does. And when the Cougars finally all arrived in the locker room, Sampson told them how proud he was, singling out Sharpe for the defense he’d played on Clayton, Florida’s star guard who had the worst shooting game of his season.
“This team had the character and the toughness and the leadership,” Sampson said. “This team is built to win this tournament. And that’s why it’s so disappointing we got here and had a chance and just didn’t get it done. It wasn’t for lack of effort, it wasn’t the lack of cohesion. The championship night can be a tough enemy sometimes. That was a tough loss.”
While Sampson addressed his team, his wife Karen waited outside the locker room with Galen Robinson, the point guard on the team that broke Houston through to its first NCAA Tournament under Sampson in 2018. Robinson had his arm around Karen, who leaned forward and watched “One Shining Moment” play on a small television. Near the end of the montage, when her husband popped on the screen, Karen closed her eyes.
Inside the locker room, daughter Lauren Sampson sat on the floor in a corner, pulling lanyards collected on this run from her purse and putting them in a pile.
“Florida’s good, but these kids are good,” Lauren said, a tear streaming down her left cheek. “These kids deserved it. They just did. My dad deserved it. He deserved it. He just did.”
Kellen was already replaying what could have been. If they’d just rebounded a little better or executed a little cleaner down the stretch or one of those Roberts hooks or Milos Uzan floaters or Cryer runners that almost always go in hadn’t rattled out.
“Win 35 games,” he said, “and you feel like s—.”
