In the Game of Life, Sutton Was a Winner

A good man has died, surrounded by friends and family and the fortune of having lived a full life.

Paul Sutton did not see the month of September because of the effects of malignant colon cancer, but in between his birth in Los Angeles and his death Thursday in the Simi Valley home he shared with his wife, Dana, his 9-year-old daughter, Alison, and 7-year-old son, Nate, he touched many.

Wins and losses were irrelevant to Sutton, who was more than just an athletic director and boys’ basketball coach at Providence High, a small private school in Burbank. His teams won 166 games and three league titles, but what happened off the court was infinitely more important to Sutton, who was 41.

When Ernie Godinez died in a car accident in 1996, Sutton organized a tribute night for the former Providence student, moving the girls’ and boys’ basketball games to a larger gym at nearby Bell-Jeff High and packing it with 800 students, nearly twice the number of students enrolled at Providence.

When the father of Andrew Bencze, one of his former players, died in 1995, Sutton was at the funeral, in the last pew of the church, wearing a neatly-tailored suit and sunglasses, going beyond the X’s and O’s, passing the point at which many coaches stop.

“He was telling me, ‘I’m here for you,’ ” Bencze said.

When Sutton was diagnosed with cancer in February of 1998, he underwent rigorous chemotherapy, beating the cancer for a while before suffering a relapse earlier this year. He ran out of sick days, but Providence teachers and coaches practically lined up outside the principal’s door, offering to donate their sick days--in effect, part of their paychecks--to Sutton.

“People who know him know how much mentoring he has done,” Dana Sutton said. “He became like a surrogate father to so many people there.”

After his condition worsened, Sutton could have opted to undergo chemotherapy again, but “he made a very hard choice to finally go his own way and be at home with his family,” Dana said. “It’s hard to imagine what he’s been through--tests, procedures, everything. He just wanted to be with his family and be comfortable.”

Bencze, who entered ninth grade in 1985, the same year Sutton started at Providence, will, perhaps fittingly, take over as athletic director.

Bencze played on a Providence basketball team that won six games his senior year. But Sutton “made us feel like that was the greatest season,” Bencze said.

While some private schools turned to recruiting, Sutton always kept the hand he was dealt.

“You never saw a big name going to Providence,” said Buckley Coach Dan Haasch, who was an assistant at Providence in 1990. “He just won with the talent he had. He did it the way it was supposed to be done--the right way, for the right reasons. He didn’t do it for the headlines. He did it for the players.”

Sutton’s lessons weren’t lost on Jeff Cirillo, a third baseman for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Cirillo graduated from Providence in 1987 and, while playing baseball at USC, returned to Providence in 1991 to become an assistant basketball coach under Sutton.

The friendship lasted, with Sutton rarely missing the chance to see Cirillo play in person. When the Brewers were in town, Sutton was at the ballpark.

If Cirillo was mired in a slump, he’d hear about it from Sutton.

“He’d say, ‘Jeff, you ever going to get another hit?’ ” Cirillo said. “He always joked around.”

Even Sutton’s rivals could not find fault with him.

“He was a masterful coach,” said Eric Walter, who will begin his 16th year as Oakwood’s athletic director.

“He was good to the young coaches, giving them advice after they’d all go to him and pick his brain. Veteran coaches were inspired by the fact that they had to do everything they could to beat him. He was so innovative, we all used him as a resource. And there really wasn’t an ego.”

Since his diagnosis, Sutton lost nearly 100 pounds, and weighed around 95 pounds when he died. But he remained strong mentally, often saying to his wife, “What am I going to do, sit around and cry about it?”

Monday afternoon, at the funeral service at St. Finbar Catholic Church in Burbank, one gets the feeling a lot of people will do just that.