Jim Counce offered plenty of wonderful original thoughts about Eddie Sutton’s selection to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last week, but pointed to an older comment from Kentucky’s Kenny Walker.
“What Kenny Walker said may be the best of anything I’ve seen tweeted in the last few days,” Counce said. “The idea that he played all those years in the NBA and learned more in one year under Coach Sutton says a lot.”
In an interview two years ago, the man they dubbed Sky Walker offered high praise for his former Kentucky coach.
“He’ll go down as one of the great college coaches of all time,” Walker said. “I’d say outside of Hubie Brown, there’s no other coach I’d put above him, especially when it comes to man-to-man defense.”
Walker was a first-team All-American in 1985-86, the only season he played for Sutton at Kentucky. He later was an NBA star for over a decade, winning the NBA Slam Dunk title.
In the interview Counce read, Walker told Jerry Tipton of the Lexington Herald-Leader that Sutton might not have gotten his due because of his lack of offensive excitement.
“But, defense and knowing the game and knowing how to shut the opponent down, nobody did that better than Eddie Sutton,” Walker said. “He was the best I ever played for.”
Counce played (1975-78) and coached (1979-81) for Sutton at Arkansas. The 1978 Razorbacks went to the Final Four. Counce joined teammates Ron Brewer, Sidney Moncrief and Marvin Delph in the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame last month.
A heart surgeon in Springdale, Counce is a season ticket holder at Arkansas games where he often invites as his guest Pat Foster, long-time Sutton assistant.
While he’s long been a specialist on heart disease, Counce was a specialist on the basketball floor for many years. All on that fabulous 1978 team played solid defense, but Counce was always referred to as “our defensive specialist” by the Triplets - Moncrief, Brewer and Delph - and coaches.
Counce was the shutdown forward drawing the toughest wing assignment, but at 6-7 could cover guards, forwards or post players. He was a ferocious rebounder and never let his man touch the ball off the glass.
Most knew Counce was destined for medical school and he was accepted upon gaining his undergraduate degree in chemistry. However, Sutton convinced him to join him as a graduate assistant and quickly promoted him to a full-time post after one year.
“I had a three-year window to go to med school before I’d have to reapply,” Counce said. “Coach Sutton said I can always go to med school, and that I should try coaching.”
It was a wonderful three years.
“There are some great highs in sports,” he said. “There is nothing like the atmosphere in a winning locker room as a player or coach when you go on the road and beat someone you are not supposed to beat.
“It would be great medicine if you make a pill with that and bottle it.
“But there is nothing as bad as a three-game losing streak.”
There were few of the latter under Sutton. Counce raves about his former coach.
“I’m just like every other former player for Coach Sutton: I’m thrilled he’s been named by Naismith,” Counce said. “It’s well deserved, but it’s so long overdue.
“I wish I had been a fly on the wall in those meetings when the electors didn’t pick him all these years. What changed in the previous six years?
“How wonderful would it have been to hear what he had to say about this? It should have been Coach Sutton and Sidney (Moncrief) going in at the same time (in 2019). Wouldn’t that have been great?”
Walker’s comments were great, Counce said.
“The thing that stood out, he was not recruited by Coach Sutton,” Counce said. “He was already there when Coach Sutton got the Kentucky job. He had just that one season with him, then played for some great NBA coaches. He had great things to say about how Coach Sutton coached defense.”
So does Counce.
“Coach Sutton had a wonderful way to convey what he wanted you to do on defense, or anything,” Counce said. “He knew exactly how he wanted to play the game. And, he convinced you that if you did what he said, you were going to win.
“That’s the first thing you learned, that if you did it his way, you were going to be successful. He was confident in what he taught and that gave every player confidence.
“If you played his way – especially man-to-man defense – then you were going to be successful and we knew it. That was never questioned and he was so great at teaching defense.”
The confidence in the way Sutton coached in late-game situations was especially intense.
“Really, in every point in any game if we did what Coach Sutton asked where we thought it was correct,” Counce said. “We could look at the other bench and knew we had a decided advantage in coaching. It’s hard to describe what that feels like. We thought we would win.”
Counce said it was the same feeling when he looked at who was on the team bus with him.
“You have guys like Ron Brewer, Sidney Moncrief, Marvin Delph and Steve Schall with you, that’s pretty good,” he said. “And, we all knew there was no one better to coach us.
“We really felt good in the last two minutes. We knew we would win.
“What we knew, if we did what Coach Sutton had coached us to do in practice, we were not going to lose. There were no doubts.”
It was simple, too.
“You see those last two minutes in timeouts where a coach is furiously drawing up a play, that was never Coach Sutton,” Counce said. “That’s too late. Coach Sutton would just tell us, ‘Just go do the same things we do every day in practice.’ We had prepared for those situations. It wasn’t drawing up a play.”
The beauty in the Sutton system that the wrong player never took a key shot. He might not take any shot.
“How many times do you watch a game and see the wrong player take the last shot?” Counce said. “You take any crucial play, rate the players on the floor one through five on who should take the shot. With Coach Sutton, you knew that the one was taking the shot. The wrong player never took that shot with Coach Sutton.”
It didn’t happen because shot selection was preached in practice.
“Coach Sutton did a better job of defining roles than anyone,” he said. “He made players understand roles.
“Everyone was the best player on their team in high school. They got any shot they wanted. They probably took almost every shot.
“But for a young player to take a shot under Coach Sutton was unusual. He took care of that in practice.
“We’d scrimmage five on five in November, the first pass on a play would go to a freshman and up went a 25-footer.”
Practice came to a halt and Sutton fixed the problem.
“He’d tell that freshman, ‘We can get that shot at any time, but it does not go up on the first pass,’ and then it wouldn’t happen again,” Counce said. “Of course, there was no shot clock then.
“Our offense would always be four or five passes, just reverse the ball a couple of times and explore. You caught the pass and broke down to triple threat, face the basket and see what’s there. After a few passes, most teams got tired of playing defense and we’d get a layup. It happened over and over.
“The first time Coach Sutton had to explain all of that to a freshman, it would be calmly. The second time, it might not be so calmly explained. But we all eventually got it.”
Counce knows today’s game is different.
“Coach Sutton changed with the shot clock and the 3-point line, but there was no need to play differently when I played,” he said. “I will say that players changed, too. Even the 12th man at the end of the bench thinks he’s going to the NBA and needs to shoot to get there.
“Our team, we didn’t think that way, although maybe there were a couple who knew they were going to the NBA.”
Delph wasn’t one of them. Counce’s roommate always said he was going into ministry with Athletes In Action. Counce and Delph were always extremely close.
“We came on our visit together,” Counce said. “We sat together that night on our visit in our room at the old Holiday Inn on Township.”
Neither planned on being Razorbacks at that point.
“I asked him if he was coming to Arkansas and he said no,” Counce said. “I said I wasn’t either.
“But there was something interesting that Marvin said that night, about Ron Brewer. He asked if I’d heard of Ron. I had not. He started telling me how good of a player Ron was and just went on and on.”
When Counce returned to Memphis and was asked by his parents about his visit, he said, “I met a neat guy (in Delph) and what stood out in our talks was another player they might get, this Ron Brewer. I do know one thing, no one can be as good as what Marvin said.”
Fast forward to the time when all three were finally in a pick-up game at Barnhill Arena, Counce had something to tell Delph during the first break.
“What you said about Ron, you were exactly right,” Counce said. “He is that good. So Marvin was right.”
The memories of hanging out with Delph are incredible. They shared so much joy.
“One of my best memories of our team and with Marvin came after we won the SWC title at The Summit in Houston,” Counce said. “We beat Otis Birdsong and Houston for the second time. It was a great victory. We had hung around the locker room for quite some time, then walked back to the hotel in our warmups, where we’d dressed.”
Counce recalls leaving the arena, walking through a tunnel to the hotel on the other side of the freeway, then up three levels of escalators to a lobby filled with Arkansas fans.
“I was walking arm and arm with Marvin,” Counce said. “We started up those escalators and our fans knew we were coming and they started calling the Hogs. It was a roar that kept getting louder.
“It was wall-to-wall red. You could not move.”
Counce calls Delph “the most remarkable man of faith” that he ever met.
“He is a tremendous man,” Counce said. “From the first time I was around him, Marvin said he was not going to the NBA. He thought the best platform for telling the Gospel message was with AIA. I did go on one tour with them after college and I saw him play in a different setting.”
That was with more freedom to shoot.
“He was every bit as good as the NBA players I saw,” Counce said. “His range was limitless. He had the same shooting motion at 15 feet as he did at 25 feet. His motion propelled the basketball effortlessly.
“The thing about Marvin’s shot, his arms were so long and his extension so high, no one could block it. You combine that with his jumping ability, it didn’t matter if you thought you were on him or not, he could get off his shot.
“I never thought it mattered whether Marvin was wide open, or someone was right on him. He could get off his shot with a challenge and it didn’t matter the distance.
“There was never a question in my mind if Marvin could have been a great player in the NBA. I think he knew it, too, but his commitment to the Gospel was above that. That was his calling and when I saw him play for AIA, he just kept getting better – that effortless shot.”
Counce gave his coaching shot plenty of effort. He had the personality to recruit at a high level, but learned that not everything turned out perfectly.
Sutton and his staff picked Willie Cutts, then the nation’s top-ranked prospect, over Mark Price. Price became an All-American at Georgia Tech and Cutts quit the team.
Counce went after Jenks, Okla., star Steve Hale in an intense recruiting war with North Carolina. Dean Smith, as he often did, won that battle and Hale played with Michael Jordan and crew.
“Coach Sutton was leery of spending so much time on Hale,” Counce said. “I can’t tell you how many times I ran off the practice floor, showered and drove that 100 miles to Jenks to see Hale.
“I thought Steve fit our guard profile, a 6-4 guy, like the other big guards we were playing. I told him he’d be a two-year All-SWC guy for us. He had to sit on the bench on that North Carolina team. They had so many great players. We had great players, too, but he would have played sooner for us.
“Coach Sutton knew it would be tough to steal a player from North Carolina, but I thought I could. In the end, it was really disappointing.”
It was soon after that Counce knew it was time to go to medical school.
“Losing Hale didn’t do it,” he said. “I just knew I needed to go to med school. It was a lot of soul searching with (wife) Kathy. My three years of exempt status was about up and I’d have to reapply. I went in to see Coach Sutton and told him. He said, ‘Good, it’s the right decision.’
“Except when I got home, he called and wanted me and Kathy to go to dinner with Patsy (Sutton) and him. He said he wanted me to reconsider. He said it was a mistake to leave coaching.
“We went to the old Mountain Inn for dinner and he gave an organized argument for me to stay in coaching. He went on and on, but I told him my mind was made up.”
Most expected Counce would have eventually landed a good head coaching job, like Pat Foster and Gene Keady did from Sutton's staff.
“Maybe, but I figure I’d just be another one of those who would have gotten fired,” Counce said.
Instead of touching lives, Counce saves lives.
“That’s an interesting look at it,” he said. “Right now, I’m not doing as many surgeries. Everything is on hold (because of the coronavirus pandemic). We do some (heart surgeries). If you come in with chest pains, we will operate, but a lot can wait.”
It’s good that the Naismith electors decided no more waiting for Eddie Sutton.