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Eddie Sutton, Hall of Fame basketball coach, dies at 84

He had three Final Four teams and was the first to take four schools to the NCAA Tournament. But problems at Kentucky and his battle with alcoholism likely led to his Hall delay.
 
Oklahoma State basketball coach Eddie Sutton celebrates his team's victory in the Big 12 championship game against Texas Tech on March 13, 2005, in Kansas City, Mo.
Oklahoma State basketball coach Eddie Sutton celebrates his team's victory in the Big 12 championship game against Texas Tech on March 13, 2005, in Kansas City, Mo. [ RICH SUGG | TNS ]
Published May 24, 2020|Updated May 24, 2020

Eddie Sutton waited so long to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He couldn’t hang on long enough to make it to the ceremony.

The man who led three teams to the Final Four, won more than 800 games, and was the first coach to take four schools to the NCAA Tournament, died Saturday. He was 84.

Sutton’s family said in a statement that he died of natural causes at home in the Tulsa, Okla., area, surrounded by his three sons and their families. His wife, Patsy, died in 2013.

“Dad and Mom treated their players like family and always shared the belief that his teachings went beyond the basketball court,” the family wrote. “He cherished the time he spent at every school and appreciated the support of their loyal fans. He believed they deserved so much credit in the success of his programs.”

Elected to the Hall of Fame on April 3, Sutton fell short as a finalist six times before finally being selected. He had said he believed that a scandal that ended his stint at Kentucky was likely the culprit for his lengthy wait. The NCAA announced 18 allegations against the Wildcats program under Sutton in 1988, and he resigned in 1989.

Sutton will be posthumously inducted into the Hall in August, along with former Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in January.

Sutton certainly had a worthy resume for the Hall of Fame. He was 806-328 in 37 seasons as a Division I coach — not counting vacated victories or forfeited games — and made it to 25 NCAA Tournaments. He led Final Four squads at Arkansas in 1978 and Oklahoma State in 1995 and 2004. He took Creighton, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma State to the NCAA Tournament. He was Associated Press coach of the year in 1978 at Arkansas and in 1986 at Kentucky.

Former Kentucky star guard Rex Chapman appreciated his time under Sutton.

“Eddie Sutton was a fascinating and complicated person,” Chapman wrote in a tweet. “He also was an unbelievable teacher of the game of basketball. I was fortunate and lucky to have learned from him. Grateful.”

Sutton’s retirement at Oklahoma State in 2006 came roughly three months after he took a medical leave following a car crash that resulted in charges of aggravated DUI, speeding and driving on the wrong side of the road. He pleaded no contest to the charges, received a one-year deferred sentence and was ordered to pay a fine.

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Through it all, Sutton remained wildly popular at Oklahoma State, often attending games while confined to a wheelchair. He would receive loud cheers as the camera panned to him and Aloe Blacc’s The Man played over the sound system.

“Oklahoma State University is deeply saddened by the passing of Coach Eddie Sutton,” Oklahoma State president Burns Hargis said in a statement. “A Hall of Fame Coach with more than 800 wins, he revived our historic basketball program and will always be revered and loved by the Cowboy family. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Sutton family.”

Even rivals had the highest respect for Sutton.

“Seems like just a few days ago we were celebrating the news that Coach Eddie Sutton had been elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said in a Tweet. “Now this very sad news of his passing. So grateful I had a chance to get to know him & his family. Thinking about Steve, Sean & Scott. RIP Coach.”

Sutton was born in Bucklin, Kan., in 1936. He played at Oklahoma State under Hall of Fame coach Henry Iba, then stayed there to begin his coaching career as an assistant under Iba in 1958.

Sean Sutton, the middle of the three sons, said his father dreamed of playing for Hall of Famer Phog Allen at Kansas.

“Dr. Allen came in there and spent four hours on a Sunday,” Sean said of a trip the Jayhawks coach made to recruit Eddie Sutton. “He told them of bringing in a player from Philadelphia. ‘You’ll get a lot of great shots because of him.’”

That recruit was Wilt Chamberlain.

But Allen also said he would retire from coaching in two years, or after Sutton’s sophomore season, so he decided to sign with Oklahoma State to play for another legend in Iba.

Sutton got his first Division I head coaching job at Creighton. He led the Bluejays to an 82-50 mark in five seasons from 1969 to 1974.

He took over Arkansas in 1975, and the Razorbacks went 17-9 and 19-9 before beginning a nine-year stretch of 20-win seasons. Sutton finished his run in Fayetteville with nine straight trips to the NCAA Tournament. His 1978 Final Four squad featured versatile stars Sidney Moncrief, Marvin Delph and Ron Brewer.

Sutton left his mark at Arkansas — the practice gym there is named for him. Former President Bill Clinton, who was the governor of Arkansas for part of Sutton’s run with the Hogs, once sent a video message for a ceremony honoring Sutton at Arkansas in 2016.

“Your time as coach was a defining era in Razorback basketball,” Clinton said. “You put our program on the map. You helped mold a generation of student-athletes into winners on the court and after they left. You made us think we could win again.”

Sutton moved on and replaced Joe B. Hall at Kentucky in 1985. While there, he compiled a 90-40 record, including two Southeastern Conference titles. But he slumped at the end, and his program endured NCAA scrutiny.

He led Oklahoma State from 1991 to 2006. The Cowboys reached the Sweet 16 in Sutton’s first two seasons. In 1995, Bryant “Big Country” Reeves and Randy Rutherford led the Cowboys to the 1995 NCAA Final Four. They made it back to the Final Four in 2004, with Tony Allen and former Brandon High standout Joey Graham leading the way. Graham’s twin brother, Stephen, was a member of that Final Four team.

Sutton’s final coaching stint came in 2007-08 as interim coach at San Francisco, where he earned his 800th win.

His trouble-filled time at Kentucky and a subsequent acknowledgment that he was an alcoholic were cited as reasons it took so long for him to be elected to the Hall of Fame.

“Nobody in the history of the game has taught one-on-one team defense like Eddie Sutton,” one of his former Oklahoma State players, Doug Gottlieb, said in 2017 for a planned documentary on Sutton. “It’s awful we judge him basically upon one or two bad moments.

“The man is an alcoholic. The man is a great basketball coach. Those two things can coincide and be true.”

From the very start, controversy clouded Sutton’s four seasons with the Wildcats. He angered fans in Arkansas, where he was a coaching icon, by saying at his introductory news conference in 1985 that he would have “crawled all the way to Lexington” to become Kentucky coach.

Moreover, Sutton took over a program that had been the subject of a Lexington Herald-Leader series the previous fall that looked into rule breaking. The series would win a Pulitzer Prize.

“Eddie sort of walked into a buzz-saw,” iconic play-by-play announcer Cawood Ledford said in his memoir, Hello, Everybody, This is Cawood Ledford.

The Herald-Leader series led to increased scrutiny of the Kentucky program. Then only months after the NCAA reprimanded Kentucky for conducting an inadequate internal investigation of the newspaper’s findings, another scandal broke. The Los Angeles Daily News reported that $1,000 had been found in an Emery Air Freight package sent from UK to the father of prized recruit Chris Mills.

“When that happened, it was a setup,” Sutton told the Kansas City Star in 2011. “Who would send money like that? And an overnight package somehow opens up? You need a crowbar to open those things.”

The NCAA later charged Kentucky with academic fraud in connection to the college entrance exam taken by another recruit, Eric Manuel.

Meanwhile, rumors swirled of Sutton having a drinking problem.

In an interview for the documentary, Chapman recalled a harrowing moment. “Down at the very end of the hall, it looked like someone was dead,” Chapman said. “It was Coach. He was so drunk. We freaked out. We didn’t know what to do.”

Christopher Hunt, director of the documentary with the working title of EDDIE!, said he believed the rise-and-fall nature of Sutton’s career would make for a riveting story.

“He was a hell of a coach who wasn’t perfect,” Hunt said.

Dwane Casey, the Kentucky assistant coach whose name was on the Emery Air Freight envelope sent to Claud Mills, said Sutton was “one of the great college coaches in the history of the game.” That Sutton was not able to lead Kentucky to greatness was a matter of poor timing, Casey said.

“It was almost a I’m-going-to-get-you mentality,” he said of the environment during Sutton’s four seasons as Wildcats coach. “And I don’t care what program you are, you have someone chasing after you 24/7, watching over your shoulder, you’re going to make mistakes and stub your toe. I thought he was a victim of that more than anything else. More than it getting away from him or doing something outrageous or outlandish. ... If he had been 20 years later or 15 years later, I don’t think he would have had the scrutiny he coached under at Kentucky.”

In October 1988, the NCAA announced 18 charges of wrongdoing against Kentucky. With the reprimand of an inadequate investigation still fresh in mind, then-university president David Roselle hired a retired judge to investigate the program. Rumors of Sutton’s resignation or firing circulated.

That final season was a mess. Before the opening game, ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale called for Sutton to resign. That Sutton’s son Sean played point guard instead of Richie Farmer, an incoming freshman who had reached almost legendary status as a Kentucky high school player, fed fan disgruntlement.

The Wildcats finished 13-19, the program’s first losing season since 1926-27.

“The happiest moment of the season was when it was finally over,” Ledford said in his memoir. “The program seemed to be totally ashes.”

Sutton resigned on March 19, 1989. He told CBS that his resignation was not an admission of guilt. “Not at all,” he said. “I am innocent.”

He said he resigned “for one reason: the love I have for the University of Kentucky, for the Kentucky basketball program and the people of the commonwealth.

“I know how important basketball is to the people of the state. And I’ve decided for the good of the program, for the fans, for the players and most of all for my family, I should resign at this time.”

In 16 seasons, Sutton led Oklahoma State to 13 NCAA Tournament appearances and the two Final Fours. But tragedy struck in 2001 when 10 members of the OSU basketball program died in a plane crash on the flight home from a game at Colorado.

“I think Eddie was clean and sober for several years, then that plane crash,” said Wally Hall, longtime columnist and sports editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “He sat at the airport — and at 7 o’clock in the morning — he personally called every parent, every wife. He did all the phone calls, all the notifications that their loved one was dead.

“Then just a few months after that, he fell down an escalator in Los Angeles, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’"

On Feb. 10, 2006, Sutton was cited for driving under the influence. That effectively ended his coaching career with the Cowboys.

“He started out, like a lot of people, just a social drinker,” Sean Sutton said. “And over time he started to develop a habit. It started to get away from him his last couple years at Arkansas.”

After his second season at Kentucky, Sutton sought treatment for his alcoholism at the Betty Ford Clinic. Sean Sutton said that back pain contributed to his father’s relapse at Oklahoma State.

“I don’t know what possessed him to buy a bottle of vodka and decide it was time to start drinking again,” Sean Sutton said. “Because he’d never done that — ever — at Oklahoma State.

“I love my dad. But sometimes with a lot of guys, the success he had, they think they’re invincible and use poor judgment.”

The Lexington Herald-Leader contributed to this report.