If you're interested mainly in the coach's Arkansas years, "Eddie" might come up short. Otherwise, ESPN's documentary on the late Hall of Fame basketball coach is must-see TV.
A Little Rock man, for instance, said he was surprised they didn't interview Joe Kleine, a Notre Dame transfer who, like Floridian David Bazzel with Lou Holtz' football program, became a career Razorback. With two hours to tell the story of someone who won more than 800 college games and coached four teams to the NCAA tournament, some good stuff undoubtedly hit the cutting-room floor.
Be that as it may, the four ex-Razorbacks interviewed -- Triplets Ron Brewer, Marvin Depth and Sidney Moncrief huddled in a semicircle, Darrell Walker pictured separately -- and the highlights selected from Sutton's 11 Arkansas seasons say plenty. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones supply perspective to the Sutton era -- Arkansas playing in run-down Barnhill Fieldhouse when the coach arrived in 1974 and setting in motion a basketball frenzy statewide that would make Bud Walton Arena necessary for successor Nolan Richardson. Fayetteville-based sportswriters Nate Allen and Bob Holt represent the Arkansas media well.
For those who covered the Razorbacks in those days, in my case from afar, the highs and lows of Sutton's time at Arkansas -- and indeed those of his Kentucky and Oklahoma State years -- receive equal weight. I came away thinking that Sutton created a basketball "monster" at Arkansas that required constant feeding and that when confronted with a more imposing beast at Kentucky, Sutton fell in its clutches and was devoured.
Sutton began seeking comfort in a bottle -- so did Paul "Bear" Bryant, for that matter -- and the fallout, personally and professionally, was enormous.
Rumors of Sutton's drinking abounded long before he departed Arkansas in 1985. It was especially painful to hear Walker, one of Sutton's greatest reclamation projects (now the head coach at UALR), tell of Sutton seeking liquid refreshment on a flight to Little Rock after a Razorback win at Texas A&M. Sutton spun completely out of control at Kentucky, especially in his second of four seasons under the big top that is Big Blue basketball.
Sean Sutton's tale is especially harrowing. One of Eddie and Patsy's three sons, Sean wanted to play for his father -- who wouldn't? -- but was caught in the crossfire when his dad's personal and professional lives collided.
"It was much worse at home," Sean said on camera. "He became a different person altogether. He went from such a loving, caring guy to somebody that became easily frustrated, angry at times and would lash out.
"My mom and I got the worst of it. He was never a violent person. He never raised his hand to anybody. But his words, things were said because of his drinking that were hurtful."
If that weren't enough, native son Rex Chapman, whom Eddie squired away from Louisville, gives the insider's view as seen from practice.
"I've never told anybody this, but most of my freshman year he was drunk," Chapman said. "He didn't drink in public. At games there were times he was all right, but never great my freshman year."
A rehabbed Eddie got Kentucky back on track in the 1987-88 season for Big Blue's second Southeastern Conference title in three years. The SEC would strip those championships and the NCAA would levy sanctions at UK after the hometown Herald-Leader unveiled a cheating scandal on Sutton's watch. The Lexington newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize for its report -- and Sutton's Kentucky program crashed.
The case of Eric Manuel, a McDonald's All-American and an academic risk, was especially disturbing. Starting in his first season and making the all-SEC freshman team, Manuel gained unwanted attention when his ACT score improved 9 points from the last time he took the test. Then attending Lafayette High School in Lexington, Manuel was found to have 211 of a possible 219 answers as another Lafayette student. Manuel was banned from playing for an NCAA school, and Kentucky received three years' probation from the NCAA when it might have gotten the death penalty that buried SMU football.
Sean Sutton admits becoming a "scapegoat" for his father's program. Eddie resigned as the Wildcats' coach and Sean transferred to Oklahoma State after the 1988-89 season, in which his pop's program made the cover of Sports Illustrated for the wrong reasons. If anyone ever looked unemployable in college athletics, it was Eddie Sutton while out of coaching in the 1989-90 basketball season.
It's possible that outside forces contributed to Sutton's Kentucky downfall. Dating to Adolph Rupp's era, rogue boosters have associated with UK basketball, and there was some question whether Sutton, who won at Arkansas and Creighton with overachievers, could recruit top talent to Lexington. It didn't help that intrastate rival Louisville won its second NCAA title of the decade in Sutton's first year at UK, the latter ending with an upset loss to LSU in the NCAA Elite Eight.
Interviewed for the documentary in 2015 and 2016, Sutton said "leaving Arkansas was the worst mistake I ever made." Eddie burned bridges with his unfortunate comment that "I would have crawled all the way to Lexington." What no one remembers is what he said next: "Fortunately, I was already here for the Final Four."
Kentucky was then trying to replace Joe B. Hall, and it briefly appeared that the job would be open after all the big names left town. Villanova, which upset defending champion Georgetown with nearly perfect shooting in the national final, found itself in the coaching market also when Rollie Massimino retired. It may only have been to save face that Kentucky rolled out the blue carpet for Sutton.
"It's the only job I'd leave the University of Arkansas for," he said, although the folks back home quit listening after the "crawled all the way to Lexington" comment. Truth be told, Eddie said a lot of strange things that last season in Fayetteville, once leaving the Razorback bench to sit in the stands with his wife during a road loss at Rice. It became increasingly clear that Eddie was losing control.
It would be 1990, when Henry P. Iba, his college coach, brought him home to coach Oklahoma State, that Eddie would come clean about his drinking. Still, it was distressing to hear in 2006 that Sutton, two years after coaching OSU to the Final Four for a second time, was arrested after a DUI accident.
"It was a shock," daughter-in-law Trena Sutton (Sean's wife) said of the accident, "but not a surprise."
One by one, Sutton's support systems crumbled -- he never recovered from the 2001 crash of an OSU team plane that 10 were killed, then aggravated already existing hip and ankle injures when stumbling down an escalator months after the 2004 Final Four. In 2013, he lost beloved Patsy to a stroke, Eddie calling his wife of 54 years his "number 1 assistant."
In one of the documentary's especially poignant moments, Darrell Walker says, "Thank God for Henry Iba." For all that both meant to Cowboys basketball, OSU teams play on Eddie Sutton Court at Gallagher-Iba Arena in Stillwater.
Arkansas people should thankfully remember Sutton for transforming "a joke of a program" into one of the 10 best in college basketball. Sutton established a beachhead for Nolan Richardson to take what he called "Hawgball" to the very top of the sport with the 1994 NCAA title.
Announced to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in April on his seventh try, Eddie received one last game ball before dying in May at age 84. On or off the court -- even in a hot tub during a 1983 taping of his weekly TV show from a Fayetteville hotel -- Arkansas never had another coach like him. One may wince at times watching "Eddie," but consider it two hours well spent.