Cold? Ex-Bedlam coach offers warm sentiments
Published: 2/4/2011 4:05 PM
Last Modified: 2/4/2011 4:05 PM
Chilled to the bone by a winter storm that won’t go away? How about a little Bedlam warmth?
The Bedlam basketball series will be renewed this weekend. I called former OU coach Kelvin Sampson for a story that will appear in Saturday editions of the Tulsa World.
After Sampson (now a Milwaukee Bucks assistant coach) answered my questions, he called back because he wanted to say this:
“When I first started coaching at Washington State, the coach that I learned the most from -- from coaching against him -- was Ralph Miller at Oregon State. He really influenced the way I approached x’s and o’s because of the way he coached his Oregon State teams.
“But Eddie Sutton did that for me in a way at Oklahoma State. There was no coach that I coached against in my 12 years at Oklahoma (that I gained more from coaching against than Sutton)....
“I wasn’t in that Iba tree, but there were a lot of similarities in the way we coached. I didn’t get as excited (about coaching against others). I got excited about coaching against Eddie because I thought he was such a great coach, just the way his teams played.
“It’s Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. You knew it was going to be tooth and nail. But if Eddie had been coaching Southwest Missouri State and I was coaching Wichita State, I think it would have been the same way. We just happened to have been coaching Bedlam games. And they certainly were Bedlam when we played. But I just want to make sure people know about the respect I had for Eddie as a coach. I never coached against a better coach. He was unique.”
--Jimmie Tramel.
Written by
Jimmie Tramel
Sports Writer
