The end for Houston, but another step forward against the odds for Kelvin Sampson

Wherever he has coached, Kelvin Sampson’s biography has always listed Laurinburg as his birthplace. That’s not wrong, technically speaking. He was indeed born there. His roots are somewhere else, only a few miles away but a distance felt by generations.

“Pembroke hospital,” his son Kellen said, “sent all the Native American babies to Laurinburg.”

Sampson’s life began in the face of discrimination and disrespect. He has spent the rest of it fighting the former and disproving the latter.

Houston faced a 25-point halftime deficit Saturday night, one of the biggest in Final Four history, and yet how large is that, really, compared to the other great divides Sampson has crossed in his career? He has overcome more.

A member of the Lumbee Tribe, Sampson remains the only Native American basketball coach in Division I. He went two decades between Final Four appearances, with scandal and disgrace at Indiana between, only to rebuild first his reputation, and then a Houston program that had fallen off the radar entirely.

Getting throttled in a national semifinal by Baylor — the Cougars did narrow the gap in the second half, slightly, in a 78-59 loss — might not have been how he saw this season ending, but if Houston’s return to prominence was mildly miraculous, Sampson’s entire career remains an unlikely triumph over obstacles that would have derailed so many others and could easily have derailed him.

And it all starts back in Pembroke, not Laurinburg, the heart of the Lumbee tribe, on the other side of Fayetteville from Raleigh, where the Sampson name is long revered.

Sampson’s father coached the Pembroke High basketball team at a time when the water fountains in Robeson County were labeled for Black, white and other. The Lumbees were the other. John “Ned” Sampson was a massive figure, coaching basketball and famously battling the Ku Klux Klan. He was a charter member of the NCHSAA Hall of Fame, but when he went to clinics, the white coaches sat courtside. Sampson sat upstairs, with the Black coaches.

“It’s the way it was in the 1960s,” Kelvin Sampson said. “It was very divided. Very racist. But we survived. We achieved.”

The reminders of where the everyone else thought the Lumbees belonged — even today, their fight for Federal recognition continues after falling just short in December — were never far away.

“That’s always stuck in the back of our minds,” said Kellen Sampson, now a Houston assistant coach. “I think it’s certainly driven my dad. I’m blessed in that I was kind of removed from that but it has driven him. He needs very little excuse for a chip on his shoulder.”

Kelvin Sampson played basketball at what is now UNC Pembroke before catching his first real break: A job as a graduate assistant to Jud Heathcote at Michigan State … in 1979. At one of his first classes, all of the students had to stand up and say where they had been undergrads.

“I stand up and I say Pembroke State,” Sampson said. “Nobody looked at the other guys. They all looked at me. Where is this guy from? Pembroke State, what is that?”

As his coaching career took him from Montana to Washington to Oklahoma, his kids would spend their summers back in Pembroke, bouncing between their grandparents in July while Sampson went off recruiting. Coaches’ kids are by necessity nomads; Sampson’s son and daughter knew where their home always was. And still is: Sampson’s wife Karen is on UNC Pembroke’s Board of Governors.

Sampson rose through the coaching ranks until he was brought up on NCAA violations at Indiana that were generally technical in nature, making too many calls to recruits. It seems a little tame now, given that Bill Self and Sean Miller continue to coach — and get contract extensions — while facing more severe allegations, but it was enough to run Sampson out of college basketball.

He did his time in NBA purgatory, until Houston was willing to take a chance on him. The echoes of Phi Slama Jama had long faded. Seven seasons later, he was back in the Final Four for the first time since he took Oklahoma there in 2002.

The halftime deficit was too much to overcome against a team as talented as Baylor, but it’s just one game. Sampson knows which parts of the past can drive you, and which fade with time.

“The sting of this will leave them,” Sampson said. “Days will turn into weeks and weeks to months and months to years.”

Sampson has seen true challenges in life. He was born into some of them, entirely beyond his control. He lived through others of his own making. He was standing on the court at Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday, the pinnacle of the sport, with his son at his side, trying once again to prove everyone who doubted him wrong. Surviving. Achieving.