Sutton brings impressive résumé to unlikeliest of schools
SAN FRANCISCO -- Is this heaven? It sure doesn't look like heaven. Over in the far corner of a 50-year-old college gymnasium small enough that "Gym" is still part of its official name, a man sits in a plastic chair watching a basketball team work through the third of eight or nine practices scheduled for the week.
Every minute or so, the man, dressed in brown corduroy pants, a navy windbreaker and tasseled loafers, shifts uncomfortably. Every other minute, he bolts up out of the chair, as if stuck from behind by something sharp, and ambles onto the court.
"Lemme tell you something," Eddie Sutton says to Myron Strong, a freshman guard from Memphis, the palm of his hand pressed against Strong's chest. "You gotta quit going into that lane out of control. Get under control!"
Strong nods. Sutton remains on the court, standing with his assistant coaches, and the University of San Francisco players get ready to run the offensive set again. They get about three seconds in before Sutton stops the action.
"Wait! Wait! Wait!" Sutton shouts. "Where are you? Where are you on this play? You're already not where you need to be. I'm gonna give you guys a quiz on this tomorrow. Bring your playbooks."
Again.
And then …
"I've told you guys at least two dozen times. If I go and set a screen, what's the first thing I'm gonna do after I set the screen? What? No. The first thing I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna look to see where my defensive man is."
Again.
And then …
"Hey! Hey! HEY! Perfect."
So it goes, for two or three hours every morning and two or three hours every afternoon, a schedule that Sutton will be allowed to keep only until the university's new semester begins this week. He will take every hour allotted. There just isn't much time, not for Sutton or for the USF team that he has come west to coach. It feels like everybody is on the clock.
If he had consciously tried, it seems Sutton couldn't have landed in a place further removed from the NCAA college hoops mainstream and still be in Division I, and in some ways that could be viewed as a good thing. After a career filled with achievement, controversy, disappointment and even tragedy, the man with one of the winningest résumés in the sport's history has opted to play out the string (or extend it; choose your point of view) in a 5,300-seat building just off the main campus of a private university set on a hill above Golden Gate Park.
I think [800 is] a good number, a significant number. And more than that, I was for him coming back to coaching from the start, because it gives him a chance to end his career on his own terms. No one wants to end his career the way my dad's ended in Stillwater. Now he has a chance to do that.
--Scott Sutton
And barely two months from now, barring a change of heart, the 71-year-old Sutton's tenure at San Francisco will end almost as abruptly as it began. He will perhaps have cleaned up the mess he left two seasons ago in Stillwater, Okla., when a drunken driving episode derailed his career as he stood on the cusp of NCAA history at 798 coaching victories. He assuredly will have demonstrated for the USF players some ways of thinking about basketball that most of them hadn't previously considered.
But he won't likely have won much; the team Sutton took over from Jessie Evans was sputtering and shorthanded before he arrived, trying in vain to hang with the Gonzagas and the Saint Mary's of the West Coast Conference. It is now 5-13 (1-2 WCC) after Monday night's 72-64 loss to Gonzaga in Spokane.
And ultimately, Sutton may have raised more questions than he answered by jetting from his Oklahoma home to the coast to spend three months living in a Holiday Inn by Fisherman's Wharf, deflecting suggestions about the mercenary aspect of coming back to stalk victory No. 800, and taking over a squad that he has judged, once at a news conference and again in a private interview, to have "the least amount of talent of any team I've coached."
So why is this man smiling?
Better question: How often does Eddie Sutton even smile?
The day after Christmas, USF forward Dior Lowhorn realized he didn't know exactly when the Dons' next practice was scheduled. When he couldn't reach assistant coach Chris Farr on his phone, Lowhorn punched up Jessie Evans' number in the basketball office. Evans answered.
"Coach said, 'I don't know what time practice is,'" Lowhorn said. "And I was like, 'What do you mean, you don't know?' And he said, 'I just don't know.' And then he told me that the AD had basically called him in that morning and told him that he had to either resign, or he was going to be terminated later that day. That's how I found out what was happening."
Officially, Evans took a leave of absence on Dec. 26, the same day Sutton was announced as the man who would replace him on an interim basis. The irony of the situation did not escape Sutton: He, too, once was granted a "leave of absence," in the wake of his fall from sobriety in 2006, the one that cost him the Oklahoma State job his son Sean now commands.
San Francisco athletic director Debra Gore-Mann, a former Stanford basketball player and athletics administrator, had become acquainted with Sutton through intermediaries while considering the future of the program, and she had been in conversation with Sutton enough to know what she wanted to do. Sutton had been spotted at a USF game in Long Beach the week before Evans' leave of absence was announced, leading to conjecture (which Sutton sidestepped in interviews) that Evans was indeed pushed out by Gore-Mann rather than requesting the leave, as the university maintained.
"She said, 'We have a little bit of a situation here,'" Sutton said, recalling Gore-Mann's first conversation with him about the job. "I said, 'Are they good kids?' She said they were. I said, 'Are they talented?' She said, 'They're so-so. They're not as good as Gonzaga or Saint Mary's, but they're as good as some other schools in our conference.'"
Evans' team was 4-8 and going nowhere; Sutton was willing to come out on short notice. Who knew where it might lead?
In truth, though, it was this resulting mini-season, even with its inherent complications, that appealed to Sutton. There was no long-term commitment. There was just enough time for him to discover whether the rigors of coaching were still for him. There had to be at least a couple of wins in there somewhere.
"And I think that situation would be virtually impossible for somebody else, who doesn't have the reputation that my father has," said Oral Roberts coach Scott Sutton, one of Eddie Sutton's three sons. "It would be hard to walk into a scene like that if you couldn't instantly command that respect.
"I was surprised the situation presented itself, because it doesn't usually happen in the middle of the year. But I wasn't surprised that he took it. He doesn't have that many hobbies. Some guys love to golf; some guys love to travel. He loves to teach basketball and be around the coaches and the players."
Scott never wavered in his opinion; he lobbied hard for his father to take the job and get to 800 wins. He knew Eddie would be interested: Last summer, the old man had flirted for more than a month with a head coaching job at a school he declines to identify, other than to say it was in the Midwest. In other words, it wasn't as though the desire to coach had left. It was no voluntary separation. It was simply that, back in February 2006, there was no room to go on.
Sutton won't use the occasion of the USF job to declare himself redeemed; he doesn't believe in such. As a practicing member of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, he considers himself constantly in the process. He fell off the wagon that final season at Oklahoma State despite knowing, intellectually, that what he was doing was epically wrong. He had endured excruciating back pain for more than two years, with surgery postponed until his bones could be strengthened enough to handle it. The pain finally reached a point at which he failed abjectly to cope and tried to manage it himself.
"I'm very open and honest about being a recovering alcoholic," said Sutton, who had acknowledged as much back in 1990 when he took the OSU job. "It was a dumb thing to do. I got to where I was hurtin' so damn bad, I just succumbed to temptation and reached for a bottle. It sure isn't the way anyone wants to leave their profession."
That was early February 2006. Sutton tried to drive his SUV that night; it struck another SUV. There were no serious injuries, but the idea of Sutton continuing to coach was out of the question. Among other things, he had been seen stumbling to his car, falling down and striking his head -- and then proceeding to get behind the wheel and drive into an accident.
Sean Sutton took over, and the four games that OSU won the rest of the season were added to Eddie's total, under the NCAA rule that covers such things. That put the number at 798, behind only Bob Knight, Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp and Jim Phelan on the all-time list in Division I. There Sutton remained, with no intimation of tracking down the remaining two wins. Until now.
While Sutton sometimes downplays the point of getting to 800 -- he said last week that, other than having something nice for the grandkids to say, he doesn't think he'll be thought of any differently as a coach either way -- others have suggested that there aren't too many alternate explanations for his presence on the USF campus. Knight, in answer to a question about Sutton's return, said, "If I would have been him, I would have found something better to do." And Scott Sutton makes it clear that, in terms of the family's vision of Eddie's career, 800 is the kind of milestone everyone considered perfectly worth pursuing.
"I think it's a good number, a significant number," Scott Sutton said. "And more than that, I was for him coming back to coaching from the start, because it gives him a chance to end his career on his own terms. No one wants to end his career the way my dad's ended in Stillwater. Now he has a chance to do that."
Eddie Sutton threw that notion into bold relief two weeks ago, making a public announcement (after informing Gore-Mann) that he would not be coaching USF beyond this season -- in other words, he's going to teach a little basketball, get to 800 and get out.
When asked about that, Sutton says he would have considered trying to stay on for three, four or even five seasons in San Francisco -- but he is needed elsewhere. He cited two projects waiting for him back in Oklahoma, projects in which he has taken the lead role in fund-raising: an addiction center being planned for Stillwater, and a multimillion-dollar athletic complex in Tulsa that will provide room for 16 basketball courts, volleyball courts and a hockey and ice-skating venue, but will also educate its customers about drug, alcohol and gambling abuse.
"I've got a 15-year-old grandson, and he tells me about the drug situations at the high schools in Stillwater," said Sutton, who still lives in Stillwater but is pondering a move with his wife to Tulsa. "You can't wait until they get to high school. You've got to get to them early."
Or, failing that, stay with them when the hour grows late. Sutton said every week he counsels six or seven young people with substance abuse problems in Oklahoma. Being around youth, he said, keeps him on track and in the program. It keeps his focus.
Much like basketball.
"He's definitely the most detailed coach I've played for, and that's why he's been so successful," said Danny Cavic, USF's 6-foot-6 forward and the lone senior remaining on a team that is down three players -- an academic washout, a student who withdrew from school for reasons unrelated to basketball and one who received an NCAA suspension stemming from a European league appearance -- since the beginning of the season.
"Every little detail, every little thing, you think he doesn't see it, but he does," Cavic said. "Everything needs to work: how to screen, how you block out. It all needs to work together. It's so intricate in how he wants us to play."
For Lowhorn, a Bay Area native who played for Knight at Texas Tech for one season before transferring, the concept of detail is familiar; it's the volume that is mostly different. Like Knight, Sutton is nobody's grandfather on the court. He can be gruff and curt, even if he doesn't ratchet up to Knight-like amplitude. Sutton applies the same standards he carried through his years coaching Creighton, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma State.
"He likes to play structured [offense] a lot, and to take advantage of the mismatches," said Lowhorn, the WCC's scoring leader at 20.6 points per game heading into Monday. "We're still in the process of seeing that as a team, seeing how to play it. We're only doing it in stretches right now. But we'll get it."
It had better be soon. As Cavic noted, "Time is not our friend." The same might be said for the coaching career of Sutton, a thing of remarkable endurance that has produced three Final Four appearances and 26 NCAA tournament berths -- and dark moments along the way. There was the recruiting scandal that drove him out at Kentucky, the 2001 airplane crash that killed two Oklahoma State players and six members of the staff, and the drunken driving incident that essentially wrote his ticket out of Stillwater.
Now, Sutton sits in War Memorial Gym, a throwback of a place despite two renovations, on the campus of a school whose glory years in basketball are so removed from today they hearken back to the years of Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. The game is the same, but Sutton is older. Even in an active practice, the coach can stand still for only so long at a stretch. Back surgery has relieved enough of his pain to allow him to function perfectly well getting around, but he'll never be totally in the clear. He walks with a pronounced limp and gets stiff very quickly.
As he leaves the court and pads down a green-carpeted hallway, Sutton leads a visitor to his office, the one that still says "Jessie Evans" on the placard on the door. Inside the smallish space, the room is sparsely furnished. A beach vacation photo of Sutton, his wife Patsy and their family, including the six grandchildren, adorns his desk.
"It's teaching the fundamentals of the game," he says, his mind returning to basketball, describing the current job. "And we're really doing it with these guys. They have tested my patience. But they're good kids. If they weren't, it wouldn't be any fun.
"To me, in coaching, the most fun has always been in teaching and watching players grow. They're very eager to learn. They're getting better. They've just got so much to learn. I don't know. I don't want to criticize past coaches, but on so many things, they're just not sound fundamentally."
There is much work to be done -- and that, of course, brings the story back to the part about Sutton smiling. He smiles when discussing the USF players, the ones he rides so hard in practice. They still aren't terribly good, and, playing the WCC powers, they may not look better immediately. ("Don't watch us against Gonzaga on ESPN on Monday," Sutton jokingly said. "Those guys are pretty good.")
But they are improving -- both Cavic and Lowhorn swear it -- and Scott Sutton says it isn't too late for something great to happen.
"They're going to show themselves as a better team within a couple of weeks here," Sutton said. "And who knows? If they win some games and keep on getting better, who knows [about the future]? I would never shut the door completely."
Eddie Sutton chuckles when that notion is put to him.
"Well, if I didn't have these projects, that might be true," he says. "But I made a commitment, especially that one in Tulsa. So I think this'll probably be my last go-round. But I don't know. …
"I've been having a good time. I don't like losing, but they're getting better, and it's always fun watching kids get better. I'm convinced that by the first of February, we can be a decent ballclub and start beatin' some people."
With that, he is up and out, in motion again, headed to watch some film. It's only a little while until the next practice. There is some work to get done, and Eddie Sutton has sat long enough.
Mark Kreidler's book "Four Days to Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland", has been optioned for film/TV development by ESPN Original Entertainment. His book "Six Good Innings", about one town's ability to consistently produce Little League champions, will be released in July 2008. A regular contributor to ESPN.com, he can be reached at mark@markkreidler.com.
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