"The acorn never falls far from the tree and so it is best to first view Kelvin Sampson in Pembroke, the North Carolina town where the next Indiana coach was raised. It has but four stoplights and a population of approximately 2,400, 80 percent of whom belong to the Lumbee Nation.

He is a full-blooded member of that American Indian tribe, and when he was 9 he recalls thathe and his dad once sat down in a cafe for lunch in a nearby town and the waitress told them, "I can't serve you here. This is whites only."

At the time, he already knew about segregation. He saw it each time he was thirsty and had to choose from water fountains marked "white" and "colored" and "other."

He learned even more about prejudice and narrow thinking when he spent two years at a tony military academy, where he was toughened by fights on his way through the 8th and 9th grades.

When he was 15 and back in Pembroke, he was named a foreman at the same tobacco factory where his dad worked. There he was, the boss of men often twice his age, rough-hewn men who were poor and uneducated, making minimum wage, and often alcoholic.

But they often were too poor to afford even a $2 bottle of wine to feed their habits and so, at lunch, they bought a 15-cent Coke and a 69-cent bottle of Aqua Velva. They would drink half the Coke and replenish the bottle with the after-shave, which was 7� percent alcohol, and work through the afternoon with the buzz that it gave them."

Get the Story:
Skip Myslenski: 'Lone wolf' Sampson driven to succeed (The Chicago Tribune 3/29)
pwday

Relevant Links:
Kelvin Sampson, All Coach Network - http://www.allcoachnetwork.com/sampson/bio.html