For all the great things Hall of Fame coach Eddie Sutton did, one of the greatest was not doing what he intended.
What the former Arkansas coach thought of doing would have been comparable to tinkering with the Mona Lisa.
Sutton was going to alter Marvin Delph’s shot!
Fortunately, the best shooter by far of Sutton’s fabled Triplets — who recently joined fellow Triplets Sidney Moncrief and Ron Brewer in the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame — stuck to his guns in his charmingly laconic way. Even noted stickler Sutton couldn’t resist.
“My freshman year, I had to remind him, ‘Hey, Coach, why would you want to change my shot when it’s going in?’” Delph said. “Coach said ‘Marvin, you know what? That’s a good point.’ I know cosmetically, it doesn’t look all that good. But it’s going in. After that, he never mentioned it again.”
Delph’s shot, sometimes launched from different area codes it seemed, could appear to be hoisted from nearly as far behind his head as from the basket.
“He thought I brought it back a little too far,” Delph said. “He wanted me to make an adjustment. But that was just my natural comfortable way that I shot the ball. When I was growing up, they used to say, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ He took note and he never mentioned it again.”
After all, upon leaving Creighton to become Arkansas’ coach in the spring of 1974, Sutton’s first priority was signing Delph out of Conway as the first Triplet.
Brewer of Fort Smith Northside first had to enroll in junior college at Westark in Fort Smith to meet eligibility requirements to be a Razorback sophomore in 1975-76. Moncrief was a senior at Little Rock Hall when Delph and Jimmy Counce joined Sutton’s first Razorbacks team as 1974-75 freshmen.
Those four, with the late Steve Stroud a senior and sophomore Steve Schall alternating at center, would form the core of Sutton’s 1976-77 Razorbacks, going 26-2 and going undefeated in league play to win the Southwest Conference championship.
In 1977-78, the Triplets — as retired Marquette coach and premier TV color man Al McGuire called them — Counce and Schall started for the 32-4 Razorbacks, reaching the Final Four and beating Notre Dame in the last Final Four consolation game ever played after losing 64-59 to eventual national champion Kentucky.
Sutton called Brewer among the most skilled he played with or against in college and the NBA. Ditto for Delph as a shooter, Moncrief said.
Who knows what Delph would have scored had the 3-point shot, not introduced NCAA-wide until 1985-86, been in vogue when he lettered for Sutton from 1974-75 through 1977-78? What if … ?
“I never did give it any thought but of course, I would meet people all the time that would bring it up,” Delph said. “It would have been fun, but hey. We didn’t have it, so we had to make the best of what we had.”
Besides, said Delph, “To me, it’s more fun because now they can’t say, ‘Marvin, he actually shot from here.’ Because all they can say now is, ‘He shot way out there.’ That’s all they know. The 3-point line, you can pinpoint where people shoot from. But I didn’t have the 3-point line. I may have shot 2 or 3 feet beyond the 3-point line. I may have shot right at the 3-point line. Who knows?”
So the legend grows.
Delph always smiled that Marvin smile, verbally altering Sutton’s three D’s — “Discipline, Dedication and Defense” — edict on Arkansas’ practice jerseys.
“Discipline, Dedication and Delph,” he would say, which even amused Sutton.
Delph said he also has no regrets about spurning NBA opportunities from the Buffalo Braves (now the Los Angeles Clippers) and the Boston Celtics.
Both times, Delph turned down the NBA to play with Athletes in Action, the touring team sponsored then by the Campus Crusade for Christ.
“I know that may come as a surprise to people,” Delph said. “But the thing that’s important for me is being obedient to the Lord. At that point in time in my life, the Lord was leading me to go in the direction of the Athletes in Action. To me, the only regret in my life would have have been if I had not obeyed God. The only times I remember that I was disappointed is when I knew I had done something that I knew was not in obedience to God. My decision to join Athletes in Action, I don’t have any regret because I knew that I was doing something in keeping what the Lord wanted me to do.”
Marvin recalled times when he wasn’t doing what he believed the Lord wanted.
“I got kicked off the junior high team seventh, eighth and ninth grade for a bad attitude,” Delph said. “Can you believe that about me? Well, it’s the truth. I wish I could change it, but I can’t.”
But someone did.
“My high school coach, C.D. Taylor, made a significant impact on my life,” Delph said. “He knew all the trouble I had been in in junior high, but he gave me an opportunity anyway. But he let me know that I was on my last leg, athletically speaking, That I really had to change my ways and change my attitude. That if I was going to participate on his team, that was going to be necessary. The important thing was he cared enough to give me an opportunity. I had a lot of baggage but in spite of all of that, he gave me a chance. I highlighted that at the Hall of Fame deal.”
Delph said the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame induction in Little Rock was “excellent” and he’s elated that Moncrief was inducted in the National Collegiate Hall of Fame. Delph recalled calling with congratulations, but their call quickly became a plan to visit Sutton in Tulsa soon.
Individual accolades among the Triplets always drew each’s approval, then on to new business for the team.
“We didn’t have any kind of dustups or anything,” Delph said. “All we wanted to do was win. We didn’t care about the accolades or who got the interviews. If we got the win, everybody was happy.”
Although the star recruit of Sutton’s first Arkansas team, Delph was far from the star of that team. That 1974-75 team went 17-9 but might well have been 9-17, Delph suggested, had senior forward Kent Allison not transferred in from Western Kentucky with immediate eligibity.
“My first year, it was Kent Allison,” Delph said. “He carried us. Him and Robert Birden and Rickey Medlock. But Kent was our go-to guy. Whenever we needed a basket, we went to Kent. And more often than not, he delivered for us.”
Medlock and Allison were gone when the Triplets, without their nickname yet, formed in a historic 1976 SWC debut. The Razorbacks shellacked coach Guy Lewis’ Houston Cougars 92-47 at Barnhill Arena in Houston’s first Southwest Conference game.
There were some ups and downs with that 19-9 team Delph’s sophomore year, but the 1976-77 26-2 season was storybook until the end. First-time NCAA Tournament inexperience and Wake Forest’s second-half press caught up to Arkansas at the Regional in Norman, Okla.
“Just one of those halves you just want to forget,” Delph said. “We had an 18-point lead. That was the only game I ever played at Arkansas where I felt we gave the gave the game away. In my heart of hearts, I believe we beat ourselves that game.”
On the 1978 road to the Final Four, nothing topped beating UCLA in the West Regional at Albuquerque, N.M., then edging Cal State Fullerton to go on to play eventual national champion Kentucky in St. Louis.
“UCLA was THE elite program as far as basketball was concerned. They were deep,” Delph said. “Their last championship was just three years from that. When we beat them, that’s when I knew that Razorback basketball was on the map nationally, when we won that game in Albuquerque.”
Delph said the Hogs just didn’t shoot well enough, losing the Final Four semifinal 64-59 to favored Kentucky and they became a footnote in history by beating Notre Dame in the consolation game.
After five years with Athletes in Action, Delph played one year for Harlem Globetrotters icon and born-again Christian Meadowlark Lemon on Lemon’s traveling all-star team formed after he left the Globetrotters.
“I had met him a year prior to that and he called me and said, ‘Marvin, I’m starting this team, man, and I’d love for you to be a part of it,” Delph said. “So I toured with him for almost a year. It was exactly like the Globetrotters and we had a traveling team we played against. They weren’t called the Generals, but they were the same thing. And of course, Meadowlark was the show. I was amazed at how many games and dates we had and the crowds. We were selling out places. Meadowlark was a huge, huge draw. I was just one of the guys. We shot threes and did some acrobatics around the basket. We had a lot of fun.”
Wed to Carla with four children, including one daughter at the UA and one at Central Arkansas, Delph came back to Conway in 1985.
By “divine providence,” Delph said, he got into the insurance business.
“I was speaking at a church in North Little Rock in ’85 and a guy heard me speak that was with State Farm and he interviewed me and offered me a job,” Marvin said. “I started out as a claims adjuster with State Farm. Everybody kept telling me, ‘Marvin, you don’t need to be in claims. You need to be in sales.’ So in ’92, I got in sales and I’ve been in sales ever since. I went with an independent company in ’92 and for the last 20 years, I’ve been with a company called Family Heritage. We specialize in providing coverage for cancer and heart disease and things like that. I’ve been extremely blessed in this business.”
Eddie Sutton last coached Arkansas in 1984-85, but Delph never ceased following the Hogs.
“Once a Hog, always a Hog,” Delph said. “I’ll be following the Hogs until the Lord comes or I die, whichever comes first.”
This story originally appeared in Hawgs Illustrated