Background on Kelvin Sampson
From the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer
Published: Saturday, March 30, 2002 6:55 a.m. EST
Sampson strives to inspire
BY NED BARNETT, Staff Writer
ATLANTA -- North Carolina's Lumbee Indians have long struggled for federal recognition, but the tribe will get a huge dose of national attention tonight when one of their own leads the Oklahoma Sooners into the Final Four against Indiana in the Georgia Dome.
Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson, a native of Laurinburg, is a full-blooded Lumbee Indian, a member of the tribe of 50,000 concentrated in Robeson County. He grew up in Pembroke and played basketball for North Carolina's one-time Indian college, Pembroke State.
But Sampson, 46, said the Oklahoma-Indiana game will be about more than recognition for a Lumbee.
It will be about the significance of a national semifinal game in which both teams are coached by racial minorities. Indiana's second-year coach, Mike Davis, is black.
"There will be some minority kids sitting somewhere around the country who dream of being a head coach someday, and all they have to do is look at this Final Four and say, 'You know, I can do that,' " Sampson said. "That's a good feeling to be able to have that impact on kids."
Others may follow Sampson, but few will be able to duplicate the intense style that has built not only a winning team but a winning basketball program at a so-called football school. Since Sampson came from Washington State to take the Oklahoma job in 1994, his teams have gone to the NCAA Tournament every year.
The style he brings to Oklahoma is one forged in Pembroke. His father, John "Ned" Sampson, had him share hard summer work in tobacco warehouses and was Kelvin's high school coach. He says he rode his son hardest so no one would think he was playing favorites.
Kelvin Sampson makes it clear there are no favorites on his team by pushing every one beyond what he calls their "comfort zone."
Sampson, who walks briskly on a treadmill while watching game film, is a taskmaster who develops teams in his own image -- proud, tough, relentless on defense. In some practices, he puts a cover on the basket and declares there is no out of bounds.
"I think our practices are probably the most brutal in America," Aaron McGhee, a senior forward for the 31-4 Sooners said Friday.
The tough approach reflects a man who's confident about his own worth and who wants his players to realize their own.
"The easiest kids to motivate are the ones with self-esteem," Sampson said. "While I'm kicking them in the butt and telling why they have to do it better, I also have a way of telling them I love them, and it's important to me that they succeed."
Ned Sampson will be watching his son's game tonight. But he almost missed Kelvin Sampson's biggest day in the sport.
The elder Sampson suffered bleeding inside his head while following Oklahoma through the NCAA Tournament's West regional in San Jose. Doctors in California drained fluid from his head before he made the cross-country trip to join his son in Atlanta.
"I went and stayed with him this morning," Kelvin Sampson said. "He's tuckered out. He's really tired. But being at this game is really, really important to him."
The elder Sampson isn't easily put off. In the 1950s, he and other Lumbees made the cover of Life magazine after they broke up a Ku Klux Klan rally in a cornfield.
Tonight will be the high point of a coaching career that began after Sampson graduated from Pembroke State (now UNC-Pembroke) in 1978 with degrees in health, physical education and political science. Sampson went on to Michigan State to pursue a master's degree in coaching and administration. There he persuaded Michigan State basketball coach Jud Heathcote -- after three tries -- to let him be a graduate assistant.
Sampson went on to head coaching jobs at Montana Tech and Washington State, where he reversed losing traditions and drew the attention of Oklahoma.
There's irony that the coach from an unrecognized tribe ended up in a state whose name translates as "land of the red man." Oklahoma still is a state with a large population of Native Americans. For North Carolina's Cherokee indians, the state was the end of the Trail of Tears.
Alex Brown, the Sooners' trainer for 15 years, said Sampson is an inspiration in his adopted state, too.
"I see pride on Indians' faces when they see Kelvin," he said.
The important thing, Sampson preaches, is to be proud of who you are and how you've endured. That's the advice he gave his team going into the Final Four.
Jozsef Szendrei, a junior forward from Budapest, Hungary, said Sampson told the team something he may well have often told himself.
"Be Sooners. Be us. Don't forget where we came from," Szendrei recalled Sampson saying. "That is the biggest thing he emphasizes to us -- don't forget where we came from. And make sure that we all go back to those hard times in our lives that we went through, but we made it through and now we are here."
Staff writer Ned Barnett can be reached at 829-4555 or
nbarnett@newsobserver.com.
