By Aaron Beard Basketball editor AP
San Antonio – All Kelvin Sampson could do was held there, hand on the hips with an empty look at his face, while the ball bounced and Houston’s last chance in a national title has also rebounded.
The coach who ordered all the details during a 36-year career of victories, losses and a few Final Fours did nothing for this one. The last second error ended with a defeat of 65-63 against Florida on Monday evening.
It took the 69 -year -old coach for years to transform Houston into one of the best university basketball programs – a built on defense, tenacity, rebound and do things in a difficult and hard way. Sampson also rehabilitated his image, the pariah that no one understood becoming an almost available tag to know how to connect with players and do things in the “good” way.
But there was no escape from anxiety this time, to waste a 12-point lead in the second half to this final turnover which sent Sampson in the off-season trapped on victory n ° 799 in a career through the path.
“There will always be opponents and negative nodles and all that, but this is where your faith and family are much more important than anything that is,” said Sampson outside the Houston changing rooms in Alamodom.
“And protecting these children, I care about protecting them more at the moment to make sure they know what a great year they had. What a brilliant, brilliant and brilliant year they had.”
The match ended with Houston (35-5) even unable to be pulled on his last two property, a fact that Sampson called “incomprehensible”. The first, Emanuel Sharp led the right side, but made sure that the ball stripped it and lost it out of the limits with 26.6 seconds to do and Houston by one.
A few moments later, Houston had his second chance to move forward. The ball went to Sharp again, who tried to shoot a 3 -point shot on the catch only to see a hard closure of the Florida star, Walter Clayton Jr., to come.
Stuck in the air, he tried to dribble the ball to avoid turnover and was forced to let it bounce, the ballooning the ground with about 4.5 seconds to play, then continuing to bounce for more than 2 precious seconds. Finally, Alex Condon in Florida for the ball, sending Ja’Vier Francis de Houston to the ground and killing the last moments of the dream of the Cougars title.
A few moments later, when the confetti began to fall in love with Gators, Sampson walked with their heads to the edge of the courtyard as if he was trying to give meaning to what had just happened. He went down the steps, then started getting on the track through the heaviest concentration of Houston fans dressed in red in a painful walk in the locker room.
“I wanted him so much for him,” said the great Houston man, I Wan Roberts, who played five seasons for Sampson after a year of red shirt. “So, so badly. And it hurts.
“Coach Sampson, the role he played in my life, I can’t even put into words.”
It was almost the culmination of a coach career which includes stops in the state of Washington, Oklahoma – where he guided the Sooners to the Final Four 2002 – and Indiana. Raised from Indiana due to an NCAA survey on Sampson by making too many recruitment telephone calls, he received a penalty of five years of presentation in 2008 which held him away from the ranks of the college until his return to Houston in 2014.
Sampson found refuge there after having passed his exile in the NBA, while he offered the school the dream to reconnect with his history linked to the famous era of Phi Slama Jama in the 1980s – which before this year had marked the two trips of the program in the match for the title of the NCAA – behind a coach with a proven record for victory.
In his third season, Sampson had cougars in March Madness. They won 33 games in his fourth, then two years later, the cougars back in the Final Four in 2021 – the first in the program from Hakeem Olajuwon and coach Guy Lewis led them to the match for the 1984 title before falling to Patrick Ewing and Georgetown.
Four years ago, the Indianapolis bubble eliminated any persistent doubt on the complete arrival of Houston as a national power. Everything is rooted in the vision of Sampson, built in his image by demanding an inflexible struggle and a work ethics to return to his education in the eastern Carolina of the North.
His team had presented this all season, more recently with an improbable return in the last minute to darken Duke in the national semi-final on Saturday. Then came the final on Monday evening, leading almost the way and keeping Clayton under control after the Gators star has torn March Madness.
The cougars could simply not finish a night when they pulled only 34.8%, including 6 for 25 from the 3 -point range, which has too much weight on the defense to bring them home.
“I’m just proud of how we fought all season,” said the top scorer LJ Cryer.
And at the end, Sampson could not find the answer. Instead, he spent an additional 20 minutes after his post-match press conference to talk to the whole with journalists, an unusual show for the coach losing the last Monday evening of the season.
“Disappointing,” he said. “But we did not lose in the first round. We did not lose in the CBI. We lost in the national championship match, to the best team of the dry. We fought them until the end, and I am proud of my team.”
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
