Culture / Sporting Life

Kelvin Sampson Surprises Houston Players With Sweetest Squirt Gun Fight Celebration Ever

Behind the Scenes on UH's Historic Sweet 16 Night — How a Coaching Family, a 78-Year-old Bus Driver and a Senior Guard Woke Up Phi Slama Jama

BY // 03.25.19

TULSA, Okla. — Kelvin Sampson and Kellen Sampson burst into the locker room, toting squirt guns, spraying every Houston player in sight. This how you celebrate making the Sweet 16. This is how you shock your players with a little extra dose of unexpected joy.

It’s time to get a little crazy. Stuff like this doesn’t happen every day. It hasn’t happened for the University of Houston in 35 years.

Thirty five years.

You’d better believe it calls for a water fight. For the first time since Phi Slama Jama in 1984, the Cougars are in the Sweet 16. A program once left for dead is dancing into the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend, right along with Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, right along with college basketball’s true blue bloods.

And Houston didn’t need a miracle like Duke to do it. They throttle Ohio State 74-59 in a game that turns into a Cougars party late with the hundreds of Houston fans who made the trip to Tulsa chanting “Sweet 16! Sweet 16 Sweet 16!” with more than a minute remaining.

Houston is moving on to play storied Kentucky, the program many of its players grew up idolizing, on Friday night at 8:59 pm in Kansas City. The Final Four is suddenly two wins away.

You’d better believe that the Houston locker room at the BOK Center turns into a happy water world — with everyone spraying someone and the head coach and his assistant coach son coming in the most prepared of all.

“Very surprising,” Corey Davis Jr. tells PaperCity of the squirt gun celebration. “They came in there like a two-man militia. They were very ready for this.”

Sampson —the 63-year-old basketball lifer who’s been working to make this moment happen for five years, the coach who told players like Fabian White Jr. that they’d be part of a history making UH team when he recruited them —  gets doused with plenty of water himself. But he’s the one with the squirt gun.

He gets plenty of damage in.

“They must have bought those squirt guns here,” Houston senior center Breaon Brady says. “Because I sure didn’t see them packed. They were prepared. That’s next level.”

It is about the sweetest college basketball celebration you’ll ever see. Remember, champagne is out — a number of these players are under 21. And leave it to a Sampson to think of it.

After all, this remarkable basketball family’s planned everything else with this unfathomable Houston rise. For the record, Kellen Sampson picked up the squirt guns on a Target run.

To see their hard-line, scream-willing coach squirting them with water drives the magnitude of this Sweet 16 achievement home even more for these Houston players. This is the moment for University of Houston basketball, their moment.

“It was crazy to see coach like that,” White says. “But we know he’ll go right back to yelling at us tomorrow.”

White laughs, moves his shoes out of a puddle. Call it the Sweet Squish of Victory. Houston is dancing on to the Midwest Regional.

“When he told me we’d do this when he recruited me, I thought it was just talk,” White says. “But we’re here. We did it.”

Seizing the Sweet 16

Ohio State came into this tournament with only 19 wins, 12 less than Houston racked up during its dominant regular season. But that means little once the game tips. The Buckeyes, topplers of Big 12 tournament champion Iowa State, believe they are ready for everything the No. 3 seed Cougars have.

It turns out, they’re not even close to ready for Galen Robinson Jr.

After only taking one shot in the first round rout of Georgia State, Robinson gets to the basket again and again against Ohio State. The senior guard lived with the memory of Michigan’s miracle shot ending his season for a year ever since that Round of 32 game last March.

He will not let there be a repeat.

UH Cougars basketball team defeated the University of Cincinnati team at home (Photo by F. Carter Smith)

 

Robinson puts up 13 points, five assists and six steals, a steadyingly dominant performance on both ends of the floor. Ohio State prepared for Corey Davis Jr. The power conference Buckeyes could have maybe withstood Davis’ 21 points.

They had no chance once Robinson started playing a mad driving Robin to Davis’ Batman, getting to the rim again and again.

“I thought the first four minutes of the game, when Galen kept getting to the hoop, set the whole tone for the entire game,” Brady tells PaperCity.

“I just took what they gave me,” Robinson says. “If I saw an open gap, I attacked it. If I didn’t see a gap, I moved the ball. Another high IQ performance.”

Robinson grins. You’d better believe it’s time to have some fun. He more than almost anyone on this UH roster understands the depths from which this program’s come. He remembers the days at Hofheinz Pavilion when the players literally needed to beg their friends to come to the games so somebody would be in the stands.

Now, he’s the one coming through as the X-factor in the program’s biggest moment of all.

Robinson, a Houston kid who’s lived in the city his entire life, got some added inspiration from the Cougars’ 78-year-old bus driver the day before the game. When one of the buses Houston used in Tulsa needed to be repaired, its driver ended up taking a seat next to Robinson in another bus.

The man introduced himself as Mr. Kenny and he and Houston’s 21-year-0ld senior leader started talking. Just two “seniors” 57 years apart in age having an impromptu heart-to-heart.

“I asked him if there was anything in his life he’d do differently if he could go back,” Robinson says. “He said no. But he told me, ‘Son, you’d better grab every opportunity.’ I really took that to heart.”

Consider this Sweet 16 one grabbed — with the force of a pit bull’s jaw.

Winning the Houston Way

UH takes out Ohio State to move to 33-3 and break the school record for wins in a season the way it’s won all season. Four of Houston’s starters score double figure points, Brison Gresham adds nine in 14 impactful minutes off the bench.

Ohio State trims the Houston advantage to five points several times in the second half. Each time the Cougars have an answer.

At the end of the first half, Davis and Ohio State guard Keyshawn Woods have to be separated. Davis keeps shouting back towards Woods even as his teammates lead him away. The Buckeyes haven’t had any success guarding Davis. Despite sending two players at UH’s lifeline on several plays.

Maybe, they hope to talk him out of the game.

“We could tell they were getting a little frustrated by our defense,” Houston forward Nate Hinton says. “We never let up — and that can annoy teams.”

It can even take them completely out of their game plan. Ohio State’s supposed to have a huge advantage inside with hulking big man Kaleb Wesson. Instead Houston somehow outscores the Buckeyes 34-12 in the paint.

“Three centers are better than one,” Brady says. “We’ve got three guys busting their tail, picking each other up. They’ve got one.”

When it’s all about over, when chants of “Houston! Houston!” are the only thing that can be heard in Tulsa’s BOK Center, Davis and Robinson clasp hands on the court and just grin at each other.

“To be honest, I dreamed about this last night,” Robinson says.

“I feel like I won the lottery,” Brady says. “I don’t have any other way to describe it.”

It’s time for the squirt gun fight. “Watch your step, it’s very slippery in there,” an NCAA official calls out as people enter the Houston locker room.

It’s the Sweet Squish of Victory — and the Sweetest Sweet 16 of all. Puddles and all.

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