Eddie Sutton stood on the stage at Gallagher-Iba Arena 19 years ago, putting a team and a school and a city and a state on his back.
I called him John Wayne after that memorial to honor the 10 men killed in the OSU basketball plane crash of 2001. Steve Buzzard, then the Cowboys’ sports information director, called Sutton OSU’s rock.
“Everyone around him was thinking, how in the world is he doing this?” Buzzard recalled Wednesday, four days after Sutton died at age 84. “Through that first week (after the crash), I remember every day, talking to him, thinking, ‘what a rock.