Kelvin Sampson strode down a sidewalk in the middle of campus flanked by a handful of pep band members playing the school fight song.
Every once in a while, they’d stop and Sampson, using a bullhorn, would tell any student within earshot that the Houston men’s basketball team had a game that night. Tickets would be handed out, fists would be bumped and Sampson would pied-piper the group to its next on-campus stop.
He did that regularly during his first few years at Houston.
“You know, half our students didn’t even know we had a basketball team,” Sampson told me last week.
A stretch?
Maybe.
But still.
“I mean, nobody showed up to the games,” the former OU coach said.
That isn’t the case anymore.
Sampson and the Cougars are playing for a national championship Monday night. On Saturday night when they upended mighty Duke with a late comeback for the ages, Houston fans made the Final Four roar and the Alamodome shake.
The Cougars’ student section?
Packed.
It was the kind of thing the program enjoyed in the 1960s with Elvin Hayes and the 1980s with Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler and Phi Slama Jama. But those days were long ago and far away when Sampson took over at Houston in 2014.
And they seemed even further when Sampson took stock of the program in those days.
The team had no practice facility, and the first ...
