On Feb. 6, 2010, Toby Keith performed a tribute to his friend Wayman Tisdale inside Lloyd Noble Center. Nearly 14 years later to the day, Keith’s death stirred memories of his close relationship with the Sooners’ all-time leader scorer.

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NORMAN — The Wayman Tisdale Band gathered at center court when halftime arrived inside Lloyd Noble Center on Feb. 6, 2010. The Sooners held a 48-30 lead over Texas, and it was time to honor perhaps the greatest men’s basketball player in school history. 

There was Mark Harper on guitar. Arthur Thompson played the bongo drums and sang backup vocals. Braylon Lacy held it down on bass and Arlington Jones played the keys with Tom Braxton, Tisdale’s longtime musical director, on the saxophone.

They had been some of Tisdale’s closest collaborators in the successful jazz career Oklahoma’s legendary All-American forward embarked on after basketball. But on this afternoon, in front of 12,000-plus basketball fans, the Wayman Tisdale Band had a new frontman: Toby Keith. 

The country music superstar sat behind a microphone and strummed his guitar. And over the next four-plus minutes, on the same court where Tisdale etched his place in OU history, the group delivered a rousing rendition of “Cryin’ for Me”, the song Keith wrote in the days after Tisdale passed away from bone cancer in May 2009.

“It was electric and it was emotional,” Harper recalled Tuesday afternoon. “It was a moment I’ll never forget.”

On Monday, nearly 14 years to the date, Keith said goodbye at the end of a two-year battle with stomach cancer. He was 62.

Keith became an international icon over a 30-year career that included 19 studio albums, 20 No. 1 hits and more than 40 million records sold worldwide. A son of Moore, his stardom never pulled Keith away from home, where he became one of OU’s most committed superfans; a fixture from Owen Field to Lloyd Noble Center to Marita Hynes Field and L. Dale Mitchell Park. 

Tributes rolled in Tuesday from the likes of Brent Venables, Bob Stoops, Patty Gasso and Porter Moser. Inside Lloyd Noble Center Tuesday night, Keith’s 2001 hit “I Wanna Talk About Me” played over pregame introductions before the Sooners 82-66 win over No. 21. 

“Our guys played their hearts out for Toby Keith tonight to get this win and I know he was looking down on us tonight,” Moser said afterward. 

The arena speakers blared “How Do You Like Me Now?” during a first-half timeout and “Beer for My Horses” at halftime. Along the baseline, athletic director Joe Castiglione sat next to a temporary memorial — complete with a guitar, an OU baseball hat and a red Solo cup — in the seat Keith often filled during men’s and women’s basketball games. 

“Toby was the consummate Sooner fan,” Castiglione said. “And he really stood for all the right things. Everything you would want in a human being.”

OU spent Tuesday night honoring Keith’s life in Norman. Across the state and all over the country, those who knew the deep relationship shared by Tisdale and Keith, including the musicians who performed alongside Keith on that February afternoon 14 years ago, were experiencing their own sense of loss and heartache. 

“Wayman and Toby had a really special relationship,” Harper, the guitarist, said. “Wayman and I were close. But they had a different kind of relationship.”

Toby Keith was more than a country music superstar; he was an OU superfan and a super person to those who knew him.

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The tune Keith penned just after Tisdale’s death in the spring of 2009 is officially titled “Cryin’ for Me (Wayman’s Song).” Weldon Tisdale, Wayman’s brother, found himself listening to it on his home sound system as he processed the news of Keith’s passing Tuesday afternoon.

“They were best buddies, almost brothers in many aspects,” Weldon said. “They bonded over music. But because of their friendship and their love for each other as friends, music was almost secondary.”

The bond between the singer-songwriter and the towering forward began in the early 1980s, nearly a decade before Keith dropped his debut album in 1993. While Keith spent his early 20s working in the oil fields and playing gigs in local bars, Tisdale spent his becoming a three-time consensus All-American and the Sooners’ all-time scoring leader from 1983-85. 

“The relationship started with Toby being a fan of Wayman,” said Dallas Richardson, who worked with Tisdale as a sound engineer. “And through the years it kind of reversed and it became Wayman being a huge fan of Toby.”

Keith came to know Tisdale on the basketball court. Later, he’d call the 6-foot-9 forward “the greatest basketball player” to ever suit up at OU. But if the foundation of their relationship began on a shared connection to sports, it flourished over their passion for music, the thing Tisdale considered his first love.

“He played in the NBA 12 years but he wanted to be a jazz musician,” Keith said in 2019.

According to Weldon, the friendship truly took off in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the final stretch of Tisdale’s NBA career that ended in 1997 and the beginning of his music career.

Tisdale released his debut album, “Power Forward” in 1995, two years before he retired. Around the same time, Keith was charting his meteoric rise with four hit albums during the 1990s. 

When Tisdale launched fully into his music, Keith was there to support him. 

“Toby had told him industry secrets and told him how things worked for him and how he was able to make it in the music business,” Richardson said. “It meant a lot to Wayman that Toby would take the time and help him with his music career. He kind of took Wayman under his wing.”

Keith helped in ways big and small and Tisdale ultimately recorded eight albums, including “Face to Face” which rose to No. 1 on Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart in 2001. In 2008, Tisdale released his final record, “Rebound” after he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma; Keith appeared on the record with a cover of Barry White’s “Never, Never Gonna Give You Up.”

It was in Tisdale’s final years that their relationship between the basketball player and the country star grew closest. 

“Wayman could connect Earth and Jupiter,” Harper said. “He had just had that type of charisma. Toby got bit by the Wayman bug, man. He had no choice but to surrender like all the rest of us.”

Thompson, Tisdale’s longtime drummer, saw it up close during Keith’s frequent visits that always seem to increase around the holidays each year. 

“I saw Wayman and Toby laughing and hanging out when he was in the hospital,” Thompson said. “We laughed, man. I cared about (Keith), man. I cared about him because he was good to my friend, Wayman.”

You’ve seen the video of Toby Keith singing in Eskimo Joe’s after Bedlam.

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Keith summed up the impact of Tisdale’s friendship this way in 2010: “He was one of the most special individuals that I ever met in my life. He changed the way that I view life.”

That was the sentiment Keith channeled into the song he wrote after Tisdale passed away. Days later, the lyrics were still too raw for him to perform at Tisdale’s celebration of life, so Keith sang Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” at the service instead.

Later that year, Keith sat down to record the song as the second single on his 2009 release, “American Ride.” He flew Thompson to Nashville to play drums on the recording. Marcus Miller and Dave Koz, two more of Tisdale’s frequent collaborators, joined on the song as well.

“Cryin’ for Me (Wayman’s Song)” eventually peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot Country chart. 

“It was a great tribute to Wayman,” Thompson said. “It was a great song Toby wrote. It was just all around a beautiful thing.”

In February 2010, less than a year after Tisdale’s death, OU chose to honor Tisdale during a Saturday afternoon visit from Texas. 

Keith and members of the Wayman Tisdale Band were invited to perform at halftime. Each of the band members arrived in one of Tisdale’s NBA jerseys; Keith wore OU’s home white with Tisdale’s No. 23 on it and battled nerves and his emotions in the tunnel inside Lloyd Noble Center. 

“He didn’t even want to play his guitar,” Harper recalled. “He just wanted to sing. He was like, ‘Man, I’m just going to hold my guitar and I’m just going to depend on you to play.’”

The arena was bouncing as the Sooners entered the locker room with an 18-point lead over the Longhorns. Minutes later, it fell silent as Keith and Tisdale’s old bandmates delivered the stirring performance Castiglione still remembers vividly.

“That song and (Toby’s) relationship with Wayman was so personal,” he said. “Playing for Wayman where he watched Wayman play basketball with family there — it was really an emotional moment. Everybody was just motionless; listening and hanging on every word. And it was beautiful.”

In 2010, the song spoke to the raw emotion of a friendship suddenly lost. Fourteen years later, it remains a testament to the friendship Keith and Tisdale shared. As Weldon contemplated Keith’s death Tuesday, his mind returned to one particular lyric uttered 25 seconds into the song Keith dedicated to his younger brother. 

“Part of the song that he wrote for Wayman goes, ‘You showed me how I’m supposed to live, now you show me how to die,’” Weldon said. “That always meant so much and I really believe that was true.”