A Kevin Durant and Kelvin Sampson Road Trip — Hall Of Fame Leadership Lessons, Calling Home and Uncommon Journeys

Kelvin Sampson knows plenty about road trips. Tough, long, grueling road trips that test almost everything you know about yourself. Thrust into a head coaching role at age 25, Sampson quickly become acquainted with them at Montana Tech, sometimes having to drive one of the vans his team occasionally took through snow, ice, sleet, whatever. His wife Karen, then a nursing student with a heavy course load, remembers the team bus stopping to pick her up in random parking lots on the way to road games in Billings, a mere three hour and 22 minute drive away with only a few mountains climbs. One of the easy jaunts in the Frontier Conference.

No matter how endless the trip, Kelvin Sampson always remembered to call home. He’d find a payphone, often on the side of the road, and dial his parents’ number. He always found a phone, knowing his dad would be waiting for his call.

“I think about him everyday,” Sampson tells PaperCity of his father John W. “Ned” Sampson. “When I was a young coach in Montana and Washington, even Oklahoma. Because in Montana, Washington in the early eighties, late eighties and early nineties, there wasn’t cellphones. But I knew that he was not going to go to sleep until he heard from me. So I’d have to find a payphone.

“We looked for lights. Because I was in some pretty sparse states. Play games in Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Canada. So I’d look for a light in the distance hoping we’d be somewhere that would have a payphone. I would get out and. . . I always called him collect. Because I never had any dimes or quarters. Probably couldn’t have afforded it anyway.

“A lot of times my mother (Eva Sampson) would answer the phone and she didn’t talk so much about basketball. She just wanted to know how I was doing and our family. But my father would want to go over the game. ‘How’d the game go? What was the score at halftime?’ He knew all the players, knew all their names. But I did that after every single game for all those years. . .

“That’s how I started.”

Sometimes a road trip is only as good as the call home. This is the story of a road trip right into the heart of basketball in Texas.

Mile Number 452: Boos, Bill Simmons and Backing Up

OKLAHOMA CITY — More than eight hours remain till the opening tip of the NBA season and five college-aged guys are hanging out on the grass outside of Paycom Center already. These dudes cannot wait to see their Thunder get their championship rings and they cannot wait to boo Kevin Durant like mad. Not necessarily in that order. “He’s a traitor man,” Andrew Lane says when a reporter stops to ask their feelings about the best player to ever put on a Oklahoma City uniform.

It is mile number 452 of my Kevin Durant and Kelvin Sampson Basketball Road Trip and some nonsensical vitriol is already in the air. The idea for this trip started simply enough with the Rockets playing the opening game of the entire NBA season in Oklahoma City one night and Sampson, the coach of the No. 2 ranked college basketball team in the entire country, representing Houston at Big 12 Media Day the next afternoon in Kansas City, it’s the chance to see two future Hall of Famers back-to-back on a big stage. Extending the trip to include the Rockets’ home opener return to Toyota Center on Friday night, University of Houston’s exhibition game against Mississippi State on Sunday night in some place called the Fort Bend Epicenter in Rosenberg and the Rockets’ emphatic first W of the season on Monday and the journey becomes a week-long basketball odyssey of four games, four different arenas, backstage insights and numerous interviews at the start of two seasons.

It ends up entailing 1774 miles of driving, including a five-hour overnight trek to Kansas City after a two overtime game. But this journey isn’t about the miles traveled. It’s about the moments. Like any good (or bad) road trip.

This one just happens to be about basketball in Texas.

Kevin Durant and Kelvin Sampson are arguably two of the three most important figures in basketball in the entire Lone Star State today. With Victor Wembanyama, the San Antonio Spurs’ 7-foot-4 extraterrestrial wonder of a hoops game bender, being the other. Don’t even try to bring up Cooper Flagg, who couldn’t score against J’Wan Roberts’ relentless fight and Kelvin Sampson’s defensive schemes when Duke needed him most in a classic Final Four game and looks as out of it as one of those kids in Weapons forced to play point guard full time for the Mavs.

In Durant, you have smoothest scorer of this generation, a 7-foot basketball obsessive who sees the game (and often life) like no one else. Sampson may be the best coach in basketball operating today, somehow still peaking now at age 70. These two have plenty to teach. In many ways, the trip and the week become lessons in leadership.

Durant shows his after the reimagined Rockets bring their All Towers Lineup into Oklahoma City and do everything but beat the defending NBA champions, controlling the game for the first three quarters, fighting back from six points down in overtime, showing the resolve and determination of a raging horde of zombies. The Thunder’s 125-124 win shows more about the Rockets in many ways, causing one Bill Simmons to abandon his absurd take that Ime Udoka’s team could struggle to be a Top 6 team in the West without Fred VanVleet before opening night is even four hours old.

Still, it ends with Durant blaming himself for the loss in a game that still could be felt in April. In the visitors locker room at the arena he made matter, a 37-year-old in his 18th NBA season brings up his missed free throw with 9.5 seconds in regulation and his reach in while defending Shai Gilgeous-Alexander one-on-one that sends the reigning league MVP to the free throw line with 2.3 seconds left in double OT.

“I think those two plays are the reason we lost,” Durant says. “I’ve got to be better. . . I’ve got to stay down. . .

“Those opportunities to get a stop to seal a game, they don’t come around often.”

In his first game as Rocket, the man with more than 30,000 points to his name will show his younger teammates what being accountable looks like. Durant’s long been one of the most real and standup players in basketball, even if it’s often lost in idiotic discussions about burner accounts and knocking him for daring to create one of the greatest teams in NBA history.

Durant is booed every time he touches the ball on NBA opening night, as if eight seasons of beyond exceptional service for this Thunder franchise means nothing. Oklahoma City is still not over it — and that is its loss. He made those college kids who think they should hate him fall in love with basketball when they first started watching Thunder games.

“Man, it’s not real,” Durant says of the booing. Mr. Accountability gets the game around the games better than almost anyone.

Mile Number 825: Jet Jokes, NBA Toughening Up and the Right Noise

KANSAS CITY — Kelvin Sampson travels differently these days, taking jets worthy of one of the very best college basketball programs in the land. He starts lamenting how his players get locked into looking at their phones almost as soon as they get on board, but then quickly notes that’s just how it is these days. No one in the University of Houston basketball universe receives more texts than Kelvin Sampson, a true basketball lifer whose connections in the games are endless. This is a man who adjusts to everything, refusing to let anything steal his hoops joy.

Besides the Houston players with Kelvin on this unconventional basketball road trip to Kansas City (no game to be locked in on) — seniors Emanuel Sharp, Milos Uzan and Ramon Walker Jr. — will tell you it’s not really like that. That there is plenty of joking on that plane, a good amount of it initiated by Kelvin Sampson.

“I think this is kind of just how we are off the court,” Uzan says. “I feel like this whole team is kind of just joking around. It’s kind of funny, like off the court and on the court, it’s kind of like two different personalities. I think this trip has just been us being ourselves.”

“We all take after Coach,” Sharp breaks in. “If you see Coach off the floor, he’s the nicest person in the world. But once we step in between those lines, it’s war. And he’s ready to go. That’s how it should be. When you’re off the floor, Coach wants you to be yourself. But on the floor, you’d better bring it.”

Sampson’s Houston historic Fantastic Four freshmen class of Chris Cenac Jr., Kingston Flemings, Isiah Harwell and Bryce Jackson is still learning how to bring it with Kelvin-approved intensity. But Fran Fraschilla, the respected coach turned longtime ESPN analyst who spends more time around Sampson’s program than any other national voice, finds himself thinking of them in Kansas City, even though none of the four are at Big 12 Media Day.

The big name freshmen from other programs are in KC — BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa, Kansas guard Darryn Peterson, Arizona’s Koa Peat and Baylor’s Tounde Yessoufou. Which makes UH’s talented freshmen stand out in their own way.

“What says more about Cenac to me than seeing him play is that as a Top 5 or 10 player in high school, the fact that he chose to play at Houston,” Fraschilla tells PaperCity in one of the rare quiet corridors in Brett Yormark’s TikTok digestible Willy Wonka factory Big 12 Media Day world (which supposedly old school Kelvin Sampson raves about). “Along with Isiah and Kingston. As talented as all three of them are, they all wanted to be coached hard. Knowing that it will make their transition to the NBA easier.

“I think Bryce Jackson is going to be a typical culture warrior in the J’Wan Roberts mode, Emanuel Sharp mode, over time. But those three guys are all headed to the NBA soon. A couple of them maybe after this year. But the fact that they all chose Houston knowing they’d be coached as hard as anywhere in the country says a lot about their character.”

It’s time to leave Kansas City now before another misinformed fool tries to claim its barbecue is the equal of Texas ‘cue, which is like comparing a Toyota Camry to a McLaren 750S Spider.

Kansas coach Bill Self jokes to Lauren Sampson, UH’s handle-everything-and-anything (including championship ring design) chief of staff, about his group’s own arduous journey to Big 12 Media Day. “It was 40 minutes,” Self cracks with a smile. “It took forever. Forever.”

“I think about him everyday. When I was a young coach. . . in the early eighties, late eighties and early nineties, there wasn’t cellphones. But I knew that he was not going to go to sleep until he heard from me. So I’d have to find a payphone.” — Kelvin Sampson on his father John W. “Ned” Sampson

Mile Number 1697: The Greatness Reunion

Rudy Tomjanovich and Bill Worrell are waiting for their cars in the loading dock, having just watched Kevin Durant put up a smooth 37 points in his first home game with the Rockets. There may be no one who has seen more Rockets games live than Worrell and he never imagined seeing Durant in Rockets red. Still having Yao Ming back in Toyota Center for the first time since the retirement of his No. 11 in 2017 means more to this all-time old timer.

Especially since Yao’s sitting next to Hakeem Olajuwon and Elvin Hayes, who Kelvin Sampson touts as one of the most underrated great players in basketball history.

“Wonderful,” Worrell says of the Hall of Fame reunion scene. “And Rudy. Very important. Probably arguably the four best players to ever play for the Rockets. And they won two championships. Elvin won a championship in Washington, but he would have won one here. It’s just great to always see ’em.”

Durant, who really believes basketball perfection is reachable and something to always strive for, leaves this 37-point game lamenting how he missed what he considered nine very makable shots. “I really feel like I could have been 18 for 18,” Durant says as serious as a scientist.

These Rockets will be more than fine with this Hall of Famer as their new player leader.

 Mile Number 1731: Young Dunks

ROSENBERG — The highlight is Kingston Flemings’ steal and breakaway slam. Or it’s Flemings finding Milos Uzan for a wide-open three, UH’s new Double Point Guard Lineup already working in harmony. Or it’s Chris Cenac flying out of nowhere to slam down a put-back dunk, one of the 18-year-old’s seven rebounds in the second half (and 10 overall for the game, with Sampson correcting the exhibition game stats crew who try to create Cenac with only nine).

Unless you’re Houston’s Hall of Fame coach to be. Then the highlight is undoubtably seeing the two freshmen who will open the season starting — Flemings and Cenac — be part of an opening defensive statement, holding a Mississippi State program that made the NCAA Tournament last season without a basket for the first 7:31 of the game.

The light on creature comforts setting of the Fort Bend Epicenter (with 4100 tickets sold for this The Preview CBB Exhibition) only hides the reality of this tuneup game from those who don’t really appreciate basketball. Then again, some people would even bail on an 18 inning World Series game. This Mississippi State team is the most talented team UH will play until that matchup with Auburn in Birmingham in the fourth game of the regular season.

No wonder why Kelvin Sampson is in a good mood, cracking jokes about how far away the media is seated from the raised interview table in a long ballroom, when it’s over. Houston 61, Mississippi State 52 isn’t bad for his first healthy look at his team.

“The freshmen doing that defensively,” Sampson says. “Mississippi State doesn’t play freshmen in their starting lineup. All those guys are SEC guys. So for the freshmen to do that in the first half, that’s a step in the right direction.”

Plus having just a short 40-minute drive back to campus never hurts either. The Rockets’ own early run at home results in victory No. 1 , a Monday night blowout of hapless, hopeless Brooklyn fueled by getting the ball swinging to the tune of 33 assists. Amen Thompson (eight assists), Alperen Şengün (six assists), Tari Eason (five assists in a 22-5-5 game) and Reed Sheppard (eight assists) all get in on act.

But basketball teams are often made on the road. Kelvin Sampson has a few favorite road trips. But it’s hard to beat the first big one he took his parents on.

“We the NCAA Tournament my first time in ’93-94 season I think,” Sampson tells PaperCity of his Washington State breakthrough. “And I had mom and dad came out and fly with the team on the NCAA plane. And they thought that was the greatest thing ever. I got ’em a room on the same floor as the players. So after I’d get done with my duties, I knew they were waiting for me to come by to the room and talk to them. So they could ask me questions and stuff.

“That’s where I started.”

Sampson is one win from becoming the 17th coach in Division 1 men’s college basketball history to reach 800 wins now, having raced to this milestone less than three years after winning his 700th game. But even when you’re moving quickly on a golden road of your own making, you still sometimes wish you could just call home again.

“I’ve been doing this so long,” Kelvin Sampson says. “My mom passed away when she was 81. My dad passed away when he was 84. They were five weeks apart (in death) actually. My mom was January 11, my dad was February 18 (2014). You get into moments and I always have a pang of ‘God, I wish they could be here and see this.’ I have great memories of them and those times.”

Any trip is really always about those who made the journey possible in the first place. Especially the greatest ones you take.