Forty Minutes of Hell (16 page)

Dave England, the basketball trainer, says, “It's hard for people to understand. The players loved Nolan.
Loved
him.”

H
askins's hollering and
Ol' Mama's wisdom echoed constantly in Richardson's head—his speech, playing style, and career reflected his own history. While he'd play a lot faster than Haskins, and he'd host his players as though they were sons, the aggressive anger his teams played with seemed to be a modern descendant of both Haskins and Ol' Mama. Richardson's past clung to him like a hyped-up defender with plenty of fouls to give.

The same could be said for Frank Broyles, an icon of the Old South, but his past was very different from Richardson's.

Although Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the South—the white South—was not impressed. Professional sports teams had little or no influence there, even into the 1950s. Atlanta had no professional teams. St. Louis was the closest franchise to many Southern schools.

However, the Civil Rights movement was slowly creeping up on schools like the University of Arkansas and coaches like Frank
Broyles. At times, Broyles must have felt that modern America was encroaching on his tradition of all-white teams, but he clung to his system and his enormous success of the 1960s. As college sports integrated, Broyles became an outsider by the end of that decade. Pressure would even come from the mediocre basketball program on his own campus. In 1966, basketball coach Glen Rose announced to the media that he would be willing to recruit a black player. Broyles refused to endorse those sentiments.

Basketball was more difficult to desegregate simply because of the nature of the game. Football players are covered with helmets and padding, while basketball players have much more skin exposed. The proximity of the fans leaves no doubt as to a basketball player's race, and blacks were also easier to reach with racial taunts or hurled objects. Also, the number of football players—as many as one hundred on a team—should have made football's integration more viable.

 

Otto “Bud” Zinke was
a University of Arkansas physics professor for three decades. He arrived on the UA campus in 1959, a year after Frank Broyles. Although he was a diligent antiwar activist in the Vietnam War era, he does not consider himself to be a radical, especially along racial lines. “I came back from World War II, and it wasn't so much that I was involved with blacks,” he recalls, “I simply didn't want to live in a country that had second-class citizens.”

He's no dreamer. “I don't get into fights unless I think I can win them,” he says. He worked to quietly integrate the Fayetteville swimming pool, as well as the Ozark Theater.

He was a young member of the senate council, the ruling body elected by the faculty senate. Nearly everyone on the faculty was in favor of integration, according to Zinke, or at least the more modest concept of desegregation. Zinke says he will never forget a senate council meeting in the late 1960s.

The university had slowly begun making steps to change the face
of the campus, but Zinke and his colleagues knew that football and Frank Broyles were the symbolic center of the university. The senate council decided to confront Broyles.

“If Frank Broyles had said we were going to integrate, nobody would have challenged him,” Zinke says. “So we called Broyles in, and asked him to integrate his team.”

The room got quiet as Broyles stood. “The faculty was challenging his eminence,” Zinke says.

According to Zinke, Broyles said, “I'll go home to Georgia before I have any niggers on
my
team.”

A stunned silence followed. “I'll never forget the day,” Zinke says. “He just stood there very brazenly, and said that with his slow Southern drawl.”

 

Thomas “T. J.” Johnson
of all-black Menifee High School signed with the Arkansas basketball team in the spring of 1966, becoming the first black athlete to do so. Freshmen were not eligible to play, but when his sophomore year began in 1967, the coaches decided to “red-shirt” Johnson, holding him out of games while he continued to practice. When an older player on the varsity got hurt, Johnson figured the coaches would change his status. They did not, and Johnson, frustrated, transferred to Central Arkansas, where he led the team in scoring his final two seasons.

His time at UA was mostly without incident, although he told the
Democrat-Gazette
that he hated when the fans in Fayetteville waved Confederate flags. “That always took the wind out of my sails,” he said.

Another black player, Vernon Murphy, joined UA during the same semester, but was declared academically ineligible.

After T. J. Johnson and Vernon Murphy did not work out as planned, struggling new basketball coach Duddy Waller set his sights on Fort Smith native Almer Lee to buoy the program. Almer Lee
became the first black athlete to earn a varsity letter in any sport at Arkansas. The unassuming Lee had spent a year at Phillips Community College, then transferred to Fayetteville in 1969.

Lee's high school had already integrated, and Duddy Waller believed that would make his transition easier. So would the fact that Lee's high school coach was the highly regarded Gayle Kaundart. Lee had other important pluses. He was a flashy ball-handler, a great scorer, and fun to watch. Lee quickly became a star, pouring in 19.2 ppg in 1969–70. Unfortunately, the Razorbacks weren't very good, finishing 5-19 overall in Coach Waller's final season.

Lee rejects the idea that his first coach in Fayetteville was fired for integrating the team. “Duddy Waller didn't have a very good record,” Lee says.

The next year, Lee again paced the Razorbacks in scoring under a new coach, Lanny Van Eman. The team was not very good that year, either, finishing 5-21. As a senior, Lee blew out a knee and never really recovered. A tryout with the Chicago Bulls didn't last long. Lee had a superb, if brief, playing career in Holland.

Lee insists his time at Arkansas was fairly ordinary. No threats. No fights. No name-calling. His teammates liked him, and nearly every Southwest Conference team had a black basketball player by then.

“If there were racial slurs,” Lee says, “I didn't hear them. I was treated just like the white players. Of course there was some prejudice in Fayetteville,” he says, “but the team stuck together.” Instead, Lee took abuse for something he hadn't anticipated.

“The fans called me a hot dog,” he says. “They were shocked to see the things I could do with the ball. There was very little behind-the-back or between-the-legs dribble then. They would say ‘he's a Harlem Globetrotter!'”

“Almer's style was very suited to the present day,” Van Eman says. “He could really handle the ball and shoot, and was like Pete Maravich in some ways.”

Van Eman had five black players when his tenure ended in 1974. But it wasn't the challenges of integrating, or the remote location of the university, that presented the biggest struggle. “It was a laborious battle because football was so popular,” Van Eman says.

 

Frank Broyles and Arkansas
finally offered a scholarship to an African-American football player named Jon Richardson (no relation to Nolan), a speedster who played from 1970 to 1972. Broyles told the
Democrat-Gazette
, “We wanted to make sure the time was right.”

Jon Richardson was an instant sensation. In his debut, a nationally televised game against Stanford, Richardson grabbed a 37-yard touchdown pass for his first of eleven scores that season. But a broken leg in 1971 slowed him, and he became primarily a kick returner the rest of his career—a dangerous and nerve-wracking position.

Jon Richardson got heat from whites and blacks; whites who feared a wave of athletes of color, and blacks who called him an Uncle Tom.

Steve Narisi, an Arkansas native who was later named sports director for Channel 29 in Fort Smith, remembers attending radio-listening parties as a boy whenever the Razorbacks would play. No regional television existed then, and football tickets were gone years in advance. Jon Richardson's debut season still stands out to Narisi. “When Jon Richardson was first there, you'd hear the ‘N word' everywhere. He hurt his wrist and he was having trouble, so he fumbled a few times. You'd really hear it then.”

J
on Richardson was
the first black football player to
play
for the Razorbacks. The desegregating of Arkansas football is complicated by the incredible story of Darrell Brown.

Darrell Brown attended a tiny “training” school—a code word for Negro school with poor resources—in Lockesburg, Arkansas. Brown was the star of the track team, a sport that had little in the way of equipment. He practiced the shot put using a heavy stone; he hurdled over carpenter's wooden horses.

In 1965, his school consolidated with the local white school, and team sports like football were available to the Lockesburg kids for the first time. He wanted the chance to fully experience high school athletics, so he asked his schoolteacher father if he could delay his graduation for a year. But it was too late for Darrell Brown, already in his senior year. His father told him he had to go on to college. Brown was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would happen again.

Brown knew he had outstanding speed and quickness from his
success in track and field. But he longed to play organized football and got the peculiar idea that he could be the first black football player at the University of Arkansas.

When he arrived on campus, he went straight to the football coaches' offices and asked to try out as a “walk-on,” a non-scholarship player.

“I'm Darrell Brown,” he announced, “and I want to play football.”

No black kid had ever been that bold before. Brown informed the coaches that he was a running back. “After a long pause,” Brown recalls, “they finally brought me a uniform and some pants. ‘This is great!' I thought. I'm going to walk on.”

Darrell Brown was not aware of the 1964 Student Association endorsement of integrating the athletic teams in Fayetteville. He knew nothing about the college faculty or their senate council, which had also voted in favor of integration, or that the governor, the board of trustees, and the football coach resisted.

Darrell Brown just wanted to play football for Arkansas.

 

Being a college walk-on
in a major sport is a difficult road. Earning a scholarship—room, board, tuition, and books—is often the ultimate goal, but few reach that payoff. During the 1960s, some major college football coaches had the budget to award scholarships to as many players as they saw fit. Anyone whom the coaches truly wanted was usually awarded a full ride before even enrolling. Walk-ons who impressed the coaches might earn a full ride the next year.

Walk-ons are at the mercy of the coach's discretion and sense of fairness.

A coach can directly discourage or encourage walk-ons. In basketball, just sitting a player on the bench during scrimmages sends a message. Benching a player during, say, shooting drills can be even worse. There are plenty of perks that can be used to reward—or
withheld to punish—walk-ons. Free shoes, sweat suits, or travel gear go to the most appreciated walk-ons. There are other carrots, as well. Team meals, team pictures, a photo in the media guide, a seat on the airplane to road games, complimentary tickets, off-season weightlifting. Playing time in varsity games, or a full-ride scholarship, means a walk-on has arrived.

It doesn't take a walk-on in any sport very long to get the message “I'm wanted.” Or, “I'm not wanted.”

 

“Let me just sum
up my history with Arkansas football,” Darrell Brown says. “As a running back, I was simply a tackling dummy.”

There's nothing more dangerous in football than receiving a kickoff or punt, and Brown was often assigned that role in practice. The assignment was radically different from normal, though.

Brown became the target of a bizarre meanness, something as grotesque and obscene as the “Battle Royal” scene in the novel
Invisible Man
, where twelve black boys were blindfolded and pushed into a boxing ring. “There were times,” Brown says, “I'd be placed on the field to run the ball on a kickoff or punt without
any
offensive players in front of me to meet eleven defenders.” One player, with the ball, trying to get through an entire team sprinting directly at him.

Brown absorbed both the abuse and the obvious message from the coach. “I was a country bumpkin,” he says. “I just wanted to be at the University of Arkansas and break that color barrier, get what I missed out on in high school.”

Frank Broyles, of course, oversaw every practice. “He
wanted
them to do what they did,” Brown says. “It all came down from the power that Broyles possessed. I remember him being up in the stands when I was running back kicks against eleven of them, and he'd shout out, ‘Why is it that you can't catch that nigger?'”

Brown persevered through that hellish autumn despite feeling as though a bull's-eye was pinned on his jersey.

Sometimes he would have ten other players on his side during practice, but that wasn't a big help. “On the practice field and in the few [freshmen] games in which he played,” Richard Pennington wrote in his book about the desegregation of SWC football,
Breaking the Ice
, “his offensive teammates sometimes refused to block for him and even engaged in racist group chants.”

Brown never advanced beyond his role as the human punching bag, and never made the varsity. “But he might have if Frank Broyles had made it clear to everyone that Brown was to be treated fairly,” Pennington insists. Instead, Broyles's silence condoned the cruelty.

Brown says, “I never had a playbook, was never taught a play. I was placed on the field without knowing any part of the system.” That didn't stop Brown from working his way to the front of the line. “The coaches might say, ‘I need a defensive back!' and I'd just raise up my hand.”

No personal interaction took place between Brown and Broyles. “What I heard from Broyles came to me indirectly,” Darrell Brown says, “when he talked about me.”

Brown became a member of the Shoats, the UA version of the freshmen team, which featured walk-ons, transfers, and players waiting to earn eligibility or varsity action. “I'd get in and say, ‘Where am I supposed to run?' I wouldn't ask about hitting the one-hole, or the two-hole. They'd never taught me that. I was just asking if I was to run right or left.”

In
Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming
, Brown credits Wilson Matthews as being the running-back coach who encouraged him. Today, he's fuzzy on it, and not sure exactly who that coach was. Matthews was never the running backs' coach; he was usually in charge of linebackers. Matthews is quoted in Frei's book as saying that he has no recollection of any Darrell Brown. The Arkansas football media guide names Bill Pace as the running backs' coach that year. “Only one coach was encouraging to me,” Brown says today. “That particular one had responsibility over the running backs.”

In fact, Matthews would find himself in the Arkansas administration before Frank Broyles finally desegregated his team.

Lanny Van Eman was named Arkansas basketball coach in 1970 and watched as Broyles began signing black football players. Despite Van Eman's endorsement of Broyles (“a great athletics director”), he believes there was a specific reason Wilson Matthews wasn't on the field when integration took place.

“[Wilson Matthews] used the word ‘nigger' in his day-to-day conversation,” Van Eman says. “It made me totally uncomfortable.” Van Eman suspects the reason Broyles promoted Matthews, making him an assistant athletics director, was simple. “To get him away from the players,” Van Eman says, when Broyles was forced to desegregate.

As the vice chancellor at the University Medical Center, Charles Prigmore was often around the football team. Prigmore confirms the fact that Matthews used that kind of language. “Wilson Matthews was a crude guy,” Prigmore says. “He was on the staff when we played Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, and I was a part of the official travel party. He didn't have the polish that Frank Broyles had. Matthews would always be spouting off.”

One former Arkansas basketball coach before the Richardson era says, “Matthews talked like that, but his heart was better than Broyles's.” (Matthews died in 2002 at the age of eighty. Today the Arkansas football stadium has a 3,800-square-foot Wilson Matthews “A” Club room for the big-money boosters.)

 

Darrell Brown resided in
Humphrey Hall, one of the first integrated dorms, and he ate at Brough's Commons. The dining hall there closed at six p.m., which was when football practice usually ended. The scholarship players were half a block from their cafeteria, but Brown would have to run uphill for a half mile, then often find his cafeteria closed. He slept without eating the first few weeks. Later, he realized he needed to get to know the ladies in the lunchroom, and he
began doing what blacks in the South had known to do for years. “I'd knock on the kitchen door,” he says, “and ask if there was anything left to eat.” The cafeterias at that time were totally staffed by black help, and they were sympathetic to Brown's plight.

Being the first black football player took a terrible toll, yet in Brown's understated manner, he says, “I had reservations about continuing on the field. It wound up being a positive experience because it opened my eyes. There was a big shield of resistance to having a black player at Arkansas. Their [the players] words were, I heard some of them say, ‘Why do we need a black, we just won a national championship?'”

 

Any fairness on the
football field stood out to Brown. “David Hargis was one of the few players who never called me ‘nigger,' and he would stand up for me. I considered him to genuinely believe in the right thing. He'd say, ‘Give Brown a chance.'”

Hargis came from southern Arkansas and later was accepted to the UA law school, where he was named editor of the
Law Review
. Today Hargis is a successful trial lawyer in Little Rock. He declines to say “nigger,” even when quoting someone, always using the phrase “N word” instead.

Hargis recalls Brown's ordeal vividly. “Darrell Brown displayed a whole lot of courage in doing what he did,” he says. “The fact that he didn't have a scholarship, that made it even more daring on his part. They were sending a brutal message to Darrell. When the ball was snapped, it was like he was the only player left on his side. He'd come back in the locker room and he'd have been beaten up every day.”

Although it appeared a systematic ostracizing of Brown was in place, Hargis believes it was not orchestrated. “Darrell was never exactly singled out and mistreated in an organized manner,” he says.

It was often spontaneous, with the players chanting “Get the nigger.” “I heard it back then,” Hargis confirms. “It'd be when they
were trying to tackle Darrell, and sometimes his teammates wouldn't block for him.”

Hargis insists on pointing out cultural and historical differences and the danger of judging the past with today's more progressive mindset. He is also sensitive about Arkansas's portrayal in print. “I'd hate to contribute to Arkansas being viewed as backward,” he says. “I don't want to condemn anyone. This was a different era. I'm not blaming or faulting anyone, retrospectively. There were people who had not been confronted with these issues, who hadn't thought about these things. If confronted today, I think they'd regret what they had done.”

That may be true. Yet it's important to understand that this was the kingdom that Frank Broyles ruled, the athletics program where Nolan Richardson would arrive two decades after Darrell Brown.

It's also true that Elizabeth Eckford and her spit-drenched homemade dress represented enormous courage, regardless of any sociological analysis or historical context. She returned to Central High School the next day, and the next few years. Darrell Brown was the Elizabeth Eckford of college football.

Football, though, is only part of American society, Hargis notes. “Lots of blacks were exposed to far worse away from sports. They were brutalized,” he says. “There's a big difference between being called a name on the field and having a Coke bottle smashed against your head in the street. It's difficult to judge Frank Broyles or Adolph Rupp by today's standards. Our own fathers and grandfathers, some of them, without ill will, entertained racism.”

The old Razorback football coach has changed some over the years, Hargis says. “Broyles displayed a lot of racism, but he's softened, and he's done some things that are pretty commendable, especially with Alzheimer's research funding.” (Hargis also admired Wilson Matthews and defends him, too. “You could count on what Matthews said,” Hargis says, and he never heard Matthews use what he calls the “N word.” “Why would he? There weren't any black players around to speak of.”)

Hargis is quick to apply modern standards to Darrell Brown's situation in one regard, though: “Darrell had superb athletic ability, based on his speed and quickness,” he says. “He wasn't big, but he was very strong for his size. In today's world, Darrell Brown would have played for the Arkansas Razorbacks.”

 

“I made it through
the year in 1965,” Brown says, “then went out again the next fall.”

It is nearly beyond belief that Brown would return to the Razorbacks, but in some ways he was luckier the second year. “I got hurt in practice,” he says. That gave him time to reflect on the futility of his quest and make a decision. “I turned away, because of my dream being shattered,” he says. Brown's hope of being the first black scholarship player, or the first black to take the field in a Razorback uniform, was over.

Brown concentrated on academics. “I remained frustrated,” he says, “because I felt I was just as good and fast as anyone who was playing.”

Two years later, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down, politicizing Darrell Brown. He was accepted into the University of Arkansas law school. After a long career as a Little Rock attorney (he took President Bill Clinton's deposition at one time), he retired to a farm in Horatio, Arkansas, near his childhood home.