I wrote about my childhood hero Rick Suttle in a previous blog, but now include some candid and interesting information about his recruitment to Kansas. Many thanks to Sam Miranda, the late KU assistant, for sharing these great memories with me during our wonderful interview in 2000.
By David Garfield
Phog.net Senior Writer
Kansas basketball is one of the most storied programs in college basketball history blessed with great players who have displayed their magic in Allen Fieldhouse. But why did some of these former standouts choose Kansas? Who were some of the other schools involved? Who was the key person in their recruitment? All Jayhawk fans love recruiting stories, and so Phog.net will go down memory lane in this series and look at some former KU stars and how they wound up at Mount Oread.
Rick Suttle was turning heads and drawing rave reviews as a 6-10 scoring and rebounding machine at Assumption High School in East St. Louis, Ill., during his senior season in 1971. He averaged a whopping 26.6 points and 15 rebounds per game while dominating competition as a prep All-American.
Mike Kelly, a 6-4 center from Suttle’s rival school at Cahokia High, remembers the impossible task of guarding the big man.
“He ate my lunch and scored 29 against us and left a lasting impression on me,” Kelly wrote in an email. “To us in the St. Louis area, Rick was a giant in stature.”
Roger Morningstar, a native of Dundee, Ill., and future teammate of Suttle at Kansas, heard this “giant” was indeed something special.
“(He was a) legendary Illinois basketball player,” Morningstar said. “He was down just across the river from St. Louis. Those players, northern Illinois and southern Illinois were two different worlds from a basketball standpoint. They’d usually meet somewhere for a state tournament. I knew of Rick, how great he was, but I hadn’t watched him play.”
Sam Miranda, one of the best assistant coaches in KU history who was instrumental in recruiting many key players from the Illinois area during his tenure at Kansas, had certainly watched Suttle play in high school many times.
Miranda, who died in 2009 at age 78, was instrumental in convincing Suttle to choose KU after Suttle had his heart set on Jacksonville, which had just been to the national championship game in 1970.
“The key thing was his mother,” Miranda said in a November 2000 interview. “I went in and started talking to him and his mom when he was a sophomore and was able to gain the confidence of his mother. Finally, in the end, she said, ‘Hey, you’re going to go with Sam. That’s it.’ I recruited him hard for three years. I went to see him over and over.”
The eccentric Suttle, though, wanted to play up the recruiting game even though he had decided to attend KU.
“At the very end in recruiting Rick Suttle, it came down to the last night,” Miranda said. “It was either going to be Kansas, Saint Louis University or Jacksonville. He said, ‘Coach, here is want I want to do. I want you to come in. I’m going to get the Saint Louis coach and I’m going to get the Jacksonville coach, and I want you all to sit in the living room. We’re going to talk and then I’m going to go to the bedroom and I’m going to come out and decide where I’m going to come to school.’
“I said, ‘Rick, that’s fine with me because I know you’re going to come to Kansas, but I’ll be here. But I think you’re going to embarrass some coaches because you’re going to have the Jacksonville coach come all the way from Jacksonville and the Saint Louis coach is going to be there, and I know you’re going to come to Kansas, so it’s going to be a little embarrassing for them.’ He said, ‘Oh no, that’s what I’m going to do.’”
Miranda immediately told Suttle’s mother, Maddie, about his son’s plan.
“She said, ‘He’s not going to do that,’” Miranda recalled. “She kind of put the squelch on that, but that’s what he wanted to do.”
That was just Rick Suttle being Rick Suttle.
“He was a good kid down deep, just a little different, but a good person,” Miranda said.
Suttle had a great career and was a “Super Sub” on the 1974 Final Four team. He concluded his last year in 1974-75 as KU went 19-8 and won the Big Eight Championship before falling to Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Suttle, who paced the Jayhawks with 16.3 points as a sophomore, became a starter again that senior season, leading the squad with 14.6 points per game and earning first-team All-Big Eight honors. He ranks No. 38 in school history in career points (1,156), and is tied for fourth on the single-game blocked shots chart (eight against K-State in 1975). Suttle is also tied for No. 21 on the school’s all-time double-doubles chart with 11.
On and off the court, Suttle kept everybody loose.
“I roomed with Rick. He was funny,” former teammate Dale Greenlee once said. “I can still see Rick. He was late for a practice. To punish him, we had a pregame meal and Rick was supposed to sing his school song as the punishment. He didn’t know his school song. I remember him going, ‘I don’t know it.’ We said, ‘So pick a song.’ He leaves the room and came in singing ‘Hello Dolly.’ Here’s Rick, 6-11. He actually left the room, came in waving a handkerchief like Louis Armstrong. He had us roaring. Probably every one in the room remembers that. Things like that, he was always good for something.”
Donnie Von Moore agrees. He loved being around his former roommate.
“Rick Suttle was a character. He used to do crazy stuff,” Von Moore once told Rock Chalk Sports Talk. “The things he used to do that had me laughing so hard was the coaches used to come in and check your room for bed checks. Coach Miranda came to the door and said, ‘Where’s Rick?’ I’d say, ‘He’s in the back.’ He would have to go see him. So Rick being Rick, said, ‘Watch this.’ He took off all his clothes and was sitting in the bathroom (by) the mirror. He had all this hair, so he was playing with his hair. Coach comes back and says, ‘Rick, why whenever I come and see you, you never have any clothes on?’ That was just the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
After concluding his KU career, Suttle was drafted in the seventh round of the NBA Draft by the Los Angeles Lakers before embarking on an extremely long and successful basketball career in Argentina.
At last check, Suttle is now the assistant coach at East St. Louis High School.
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