Oklahoman Photo
As the sporting media rightly sings the praises of Gonzaga’s dramatic Final Four, Hail Mary-shot semifinal victory over UCLA, future and once NCAA champions, respectively, my mind drifts to thoughts of Lon Kruger. He always has been unforgettable.
Not long after 31-0 Gonzaga dispatched Kruger’s Oklahoma Sooners from the NCAA Tournament, Kruger announced his retirement after 10 fruitful seasons at OU, his last stop on a winding trail and a far piece from the Kansas State University locker room where we sometimes talked. He was the Wildcats young assistant coach, learning from one the better mentors a person could have—Jack Hartman. I was a little older than Kruger but a comparatively young sports columnist for the Wichita Eagle-Beacon before the Beacon went to the afternoon newspaper graveyard and my Wichita days with it.
When Kruger was the two-time Big 8 Conference player of the year in the early-1970s, leading K-State to successive championships, I caught his act at Oklahoma and Oklahoma State universities as an even younger columnist at the Tulsa Tribune. He could control the court and a game like few small guards. And, as suggested by CBS’s Matt Norlander years later when as coach Kruger’s Sooners reached the Final Four, “he could make the women go wild.” “Slick” Kruger was the All-American boy come to life, when the All-American boy wore bell-bottom pants. He looked and was pretty good in short pants, too—as well as a baseball uniform, since he was a two-sport college idol.
Kruger, a three-sport star at Silver Lake, Kansas, near Topeka and east of Manhattan, was the first player Jack Hartman signed when he became coach. Of course, Kruger pitched and played quarterback. He was twice selected in the Major League Baseball draft, and though he did not play football at K-State, the Dallas Cowboys invited him to their 1974 rookie camp. But Kruger was a 5-foot-11 guard who could score, a coach on the floor and soon on the sideline, one I liked to listen to as he analyzed the game.
In the five seasons (1977-82) he learned at the right hand of Hartman, perhaps the best coach and among the kindest, most accommodating I ever knew. Hartman was patient, even with slow-minded columnists. Though I did not get to do so as often as I would have liked, there was little better than traveling to Manhattan to visit with him in his office. While I loved and admired the run-and-gun offense that Ken Trickey brought to Oral Roberts University during the years I worked in Tulsa, Hartman set a tone that Kruger seemed to embrace not only professionally but also personally.
When Kruger retired at the end of March, the accolades were as much for the man he is as for the outstanding coaching record he had compiled. He won 674 games while losing 432—195 and 128 at Oklahoma—and is the only person to have coached five programs to NCAA Tournament victories—K-State, Florida, Illinois, UNLV, and Oklahoma. His teams made the NCAA field 20 times, advancing to the Sweet 16 five times and to the Final Four twice (Florida in 1994 and Oklahoma in 2016).
His peripatetic career, however, also allowed critics—of which there were few—to question whether he suffered from professional wanderlust, always looking for something just a little bit better. Given the number of newspapers for which I worked during a career that spanned more than 40 years, I am familiar with the charge. A short try at NBA, coaching Atlanta, probably poured fuel on that Kruger fire, but as far as I’m concerned Kruger, now 68, doused it with his final run of a decade at Oklahoma, a job he resisted and resisted even as OU Athletics Director Joe Castiglione persisted and persisted in prying him out of Las Vegas—in no small part, I suspect, because of Kruger’s ability to turn around programs and do it the right way, meaning no cheating.
Kruger had only recently built a new home in Las Vegas to which he will now return, lo these 10 years later, to be near his son and his family, which includes Kruger’s 1-year-old granddaughter, Cameron. As Berry Tramel, columnist at The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, tells it, Kruger was in Indianapolis on Sunday, March 21, when participating on a facetime call with his son and granddaughter, Kevin Kruger informed his father that he had just accepted the job his father used to have—head coach of UNLV basketball. “If Lon Kruger ever raised his arm in triumph,” Tramel wrote, “I don’t remember it.” It was not the Hartman or Kruger way.
This time, however, Lon Kruger made an exception in salute to his son Kevin, whom he had coached at Las Vegas. “Kruger’s joy was clear,” Tramel wrote. “And it all came into focus. Kruger’s work was done.” He could go home—job well done—no matter what happened against Gonzaga, the team his Sooners were playing that day. “Kruger told his son that as sobering as it is to watch video of Gonzaga,” Tramel wrote, “it would be a lot more pleasant knowing the UNLV news.”
Kruger’s retirement must not have come as a much of a surprise in Norman. By Friday, April 3, Castiglione had hired 52-year-old Porter Moser, who for the past 10 years had been turning Loyola Chicago into the Little School That Could. He made the NCAA Tournament a playground of his mid-major team, a No. 11 seed in 2018, as it went all the way to the Final Four. This year, Loyola was back and reached the second weekend, and it was due to Moser’s coaching, especially defense, even if he did also have the benefit of the prayers of Sister Jean, the team’s famous 98-year-old chaplain.
Jenni Carlson, another columnist at The Oklahoman, noted the calm demeanor of Moser, a teacher more than a screamer, not unlike the approach of Kruger himself. She traced the common routes of the two coaches—Midwest guys, played college basketball close to home (Moser, from Naperville, Illinois, at Creighton), both guards. They became coaches who will do anything to help their program, including being accessible and—wait for it—nice to almost everyone, even those who could not shoot straight, rebound like Godzilla, or run a team as if conducting an orchestra, sans ball.
By the time Carlson completed her comparison, she was asking: Lon Kruger 2.0?
There’s a chance, but I would hold that designation in abeyance. Those are big, big sneakers to fill, and Lon Kruger 2.0 might just as likely turn out to be coaching UNLV.
