Houston coach cites lessons from facing Lute Olson's 'monster' UA program at WSU

After all, it makes more sense to motivate your team about what’s ahead than, via any perceived disrespect, the opponent.

But during a pregame media conference in Houston earlier this week, Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson appeared to go much, much deeper than that. When asked a general question about Arizona’s addition to the Big 12, Sampson went on, unprompted, for a five-minute answer that suggested sincerity.

Sampson relayed how he became the 31-year-old coach of another Cougar team, in Washington State, back in 1987 at exactly the same time that Lute Olson had turned the Wildcats into a national power. Olson took the Wildcats to the Final Four during Sampson’s first season and never lost to the Cougars in 15 games when Sampson coached them.

“He created a monster,” Sampson said of Olson. “You know, it saddens me that there’s a generation of kids that will that will never know what Arizona basketball was with Lute. I was there with Sean Elliott, Steve Kerr, Anthony Cook, Tom Tolbert, Craig McMillan, Khalid Reeves, Damon Stoudamire, Chris Mills — they were the program.

“UCLA had the name but Arizona had the program. They were the preeminent program on the West Coast. I didn’t dare strive to be like them. I just wanted to get to where we could compete with them.”

Sampson recalled how UCLA and Stanford came close and, eventually, he did. Arizona won 14 of the 15 games by double digits, though just 70-64 in Pullman during the 1992-93 season.

But the way Sampson put it, there was more to Arizona than just the players and games. He said Lute and his wife Bobbi even showed Sampson and his wife, Karen “how to be professional” and were always nice.

Of course, it’s easy to be friendly with somebody you don’t have to really compete with. But Sampson rejected that notion, too.

“I get ‘Well, he beat you by 50 every game,’” Sampson said. “But it wasn’t that. He was just a nice man and Bobbi Olson was a class, class, class lady.”

Now bringing a national championship contender into McKale on Saturday, Sampson was in a different place back then as a coach. He knew Washington State was in a different place, too, having hired Sampson for a reported $42,000 per year because embattled coach Len Stevens left for Nevada.

Also: The contract was just for two years.

“I’m sure they thought that would give them time to go hire a real coach, because I certainly didn’t deserve to be a head coach in the Pac 10,” Sampson said. “I was just in the right place at the right time, going against guys like coach Olson in Arizona, coach (Ralph) Miller at Oregon State …

“I’ve just always respected Arizona because they were the program. When I started out coaching, they were our Duke, they were our North Carolina, they were our Kentucky. That’s the shelf that they were on. And there were so many hard lessons I had to learn as a coach. It wasn’t just Arizona who beat us. Everybody beat us. I had a year where we lost 18 in a row.

“If that was today’s climate, with all the platforms for cynicism and negativity and all that stuff that goes on, after my third year (when WSU was 7-22 in 1989-90) I probably would have been fired, and rightly so.”

Coincidentally, former Arizona AD Jim Livengood was Washington State’s AD after that season. Sampson stayed for four more seasons, and led the Cougars over .500 in all of them. In 1993-94, WSU reached the NCAA Tournament, and Sampson took off for Oklahoma.

Sampson took the Sooners to 11 NCAA Tournaments over 12 seasons in Oklahoma and, coincidentally again, was the guy whose team knocked Arizona out of the Sweet 16 in 2001-02, when the Wildcats were making a surprise second-weekend appearance after their roster was gutted following the 2001 Final Four.

From there, Sampson spent two years at Indiana, was fired for recruiting improprieties, then resurfaced at Houston in 2014-15. There, he led the Cougars to four ACC titles before moving to the Big 12 last season and promptly mowing it over with a conference record of 15-3.

This season, Sampson’s Cougars are 12-1, with the chance to go two games ahead with just six to go if they can beat Arizona.

But this time, he’ll have to face Tommy Lloyd, who says he’s gotten to know Sampson a bit in part because of their shared Pacific Northwest roots, even though Lloyd’s Gonzaga days started six years after Sampson left WSU.

“Got nothing but respect for him,” Lloyd said. “There’s just a little bit of familiarity there, (we’ve) both been in the business a long time.”

Maybe more than a little familiarity, the way Sampson put it.

“When Tommy got the job, my first response was, ‘What a great hire,’” Sampson said. “The Arizona people that didn’t know him, once they got to know him, I knew they would be thrilled because he, I just think he’s high level.

“The job he’s done at Arizona, if it was done in the Eastern Time Zone or east of the Mississippi, he would get more credit. But in the coaching profession, you know who the real ones are, and Tommy’s a real one.”