Forty Minutes of Hell (21 page)

 

Tensions between Broyles and
Richardson had reached the boiling point. With the Razorbacks playing their worst ball in a decade in February of 2000, Broyles felt that he had the upper hand. He could have removed Richardson before the SEC Tournament but likely figured the coach would fall on his face—and prove to everyone in Arkansas that he had lost his touch. Just like in 1987, Broyles began quiet preparations to dump the coach, although this time Richardson was acutely aware going into the SEC Tournament that Broyles wanted him gone.

The Razorbacks played Georgia first, but even if they won, they'd have to get by three teams, including powerhouse Kentucky. Despite winning an NCAA title and three Final Four births to his credit, Richardson had never won the SEC Tournament title.

Arkansas rolled over Georgia, then the nationally ranked Kentucky and LSU. In the SEC finals they beat Auburn, and the Razorbacks were the 2000 SEC Tournament champions. The state was awash again in praise for Richardson. Sophomore guard Brandon Dean was voted the tournament MVP, and the team was back in the NCAAs. Despite losing to University of Miami in the first round the following week, Richardson's renewed popularity kept Broyles from firing him.

Broyles likely learned a lesson. With Richardson on the sideline, even a weak Razorback team could not be counted out of the SEC Tournament. He wouldn't make that mistake again. For now, he was stuck with Richardson and forced to sign him to a six-year rollover contract for a million dollars a year just before the next season began. Despite the big money, the tumultuous year had left Richardson cautious, angry, and resentful. His relationship with Broyles—America's most powerful athletics director—was now beyond repair.

 

Jim Haney, who authored
the column that rattled Richardson, has directed the NABC for years. Although championing the cause of minority coaches is not part of the NABC's mission, Haney and
his top aide Reggie Minton have helped initiate change, especially within the NCAA's own offices. Haney has witnessed a new emphasis. “In the 1970s there was a big issue as to whether you just had an African-American on your staff in football and basketball,” he says.

Haney actually worries about what college basketball players think. “It would have benefited Arkansas and minorities both if there were contributing minority athletics directors at the school,” he says. “In the college setting, if I'm an African-American player I might be thinking, ‘What will I do, how can I stay involved in athletics?' But when it comes time to make decisions to see about the future, they think, ‘I don't see anyone like me within the athletics department.'”

 

The new breed of
young black coaches who were not politically inclined irked Richardson. Within the BCA, there was a fundamental disagreement about the group's purpose. Did the BCA exist to help young black assistant coaches? Or did it exist to use its influence in helping black kids get more scholarship opportunities?

Much of the debate likely stemmed from the background of the group's big three. Neither Richardson, nor John Thompson, nor John Chaney had ever been assistant coaches. The trio never used the BCA to secure job interviews or boost their own standing. Richardson and Chaney had taken the long road at unknown schools. Thompson, while a former Boston Celtic, had landed the Georgetown job when it was considered a graveyard for coaches. None of the three, when they were younger, had heard their names trumpeted on ESPN as deserving of a college job.

John Chaney asked the BCA to take his name off the group's letterhead. Richardson, Thompson, and George Raveling followed suit. Chaney said, “The organization has really deserted the kids as far as I'm concerned.”

 

In February of 2000,
sportswriter Orville Henry was hospitalized to have his gall bladder removed. Doctors found a malignant tumor on his pancreas. Richardson began checking on Henry every day. It was the most time he had spent around hospitals since Yvonne had passed away.

While Orville Henry was the godfather of sportswriters in Arkansas, some insiders criticize him, calling him a “mouthpiece” for Frank Broyles. Richardson never felt that way about Henry, though, and had great admiration for him.

Until his illness, Orville Henry sat in the middle of the Broyles-Richardson feud, keeping in touch with both men. Richardson claims that Henry told him Broyles had complained about the basketball coach's whopping salary. “That nigger is making too much money,” is the way Richardson recalls Henry's account.

Regardless, Henry was another in a long line of older men on whom Richardson leaned for advice and friendship. This seems to dispel another theory heard from time to time in Arkansas, that Nolan Richardson was a racist who hated white people. What person who hated whites would hang around with crusty old guys like Don Haskins, Sid Simpson, Ed Beshara, and Orville Henry? The ways they became friends and the nature of the relationships were varied. They were Richardson's coach, boss, lunch buddy, and scribe.

Even the players noticed the pattern after a few years. Clint McDaniel, whose ball-hawking defense earned him a brief NBA career, says it's ridiculous to insinuate that Richardson is racist. “Nolan hardly had any black friends,” he says. “The people who traveled with him and his genuine friends, they were mostly white.”

“These are authentic friendships,” longtime Arkansas judge Wendell Griffen says. “This notion that Nolan is racist, it's all part of the disinformation campaign. The tendency to believe what isn't true is easier,” Griffen adds, “when you don't care what the truth is.”

 

The new millennium brought
harder times for Razorback basketball, at least by the standards that Nolan Richardson had set.

During the 2001 regular season, the Razorbacks lost their first three SEC games, but turned things around to finish 10-6 in league play. While they were waiting for the postseason SEC Tournament, a strange thing happened.

Richardson continued to enjoy his scenic ranch. The rolling hills and gorgeous views were a tonic for him and Rose, and he relied on the ranch the way other coaches depended on a drink. When the usual pressures of a college season piled up, Richardson resorted to finding solace there. “When I'm worried about things, I get on my horse and clear my brain,” he says.

With the SEC Tournament looming that March, Richardson went for a walk. He noticed a path of blood. With sweat pooling in his palms, Richardson tiptoed along the trail until he came upon his beloved horse, Tulula, moaning in the grass. She had been shot with a high-powered rifle.

“Whoever did this knows who I am and where my farm is,” Richardson said.

No arrests were ever made after Tulula's shooting. The horse survived, but the incident rattled Richardson, and he made comments to the effect that he would reevaluate his career at Arkansas.

 

Arkansas was awarded an
NCAA bid in 2001, but again lost in the first round, this time in a shocker to Georgetown. The score was tied 63-63 when a Hoyas's substitute barely beat both buzzers—shot clock and game clock—to sink the winning shot. After officials watched replays, the basket was allowed. Arkansas ended the season 20-11. A few weeks later, Richardson's best player, sophomore Joe Johnson, announced he was leaving Arkansas early for the NBA.

A record of 20-11 is a fine season for most coaches, but Richardson was now seven years past his NCAA championship. Chancellor John
White noticed the change in Richardson's demeanor that season, and he met with Richardson privately.

“Nolan would make these statements,” White recalls “that in northwest Arkansas there was nothing for black students to do.” In an era where a prospective student's social-life options were increasingly important, Richardson's statements irritated the football coaches—and Frank Broyles—as well as the university administration. “I don't think he realized what a negative impact that was having on everybody's ability to try to recruit,” White adds, “including our ability to recruit students.”

In fact, according to White, football coach Houston Nutt went to Frank Broyles to complain about the statements. Broyles, in turn, discussed Richardson's comments with White. White then met with Richardson and asked him a single question: “What can I do to help you?”

Richardson cited general concerns on the challenges ahead, both for the basketball team and for the entire university.

Then Richardson asked White, “What can I do for you?”

The two men held each other's gaze for a moment. White, more than most administrators, could occasionally step away from his job and shed his suit and job title—the propriety of being an administrator sometimes seemed a burden to White. He leaned across the table, straining for Richardson, although the coach's hand was beyond reach.

“I need you to be
happy
,” White said. “I need that to be obvious to the people you come in contact with. I don't think you realize that how you come across has far-reaching implications for what I am trying to accomplish here at the university.”

Richardson assured White that he would try to be happy. “I came back and put it in a memo to him,” White recalls.

W
ith Joe Johnson
leaving for the NBA, the Razorbacks were bound to struggle throughout the 2001–02 season. Their schedule was rated the most difficult in the country by some experts, and included Wake Forest, Oklahoma, Illinois, Tulsa, Memphis—and Eddie Sutton's Oklahoma State team, which beat Arkansas just before Christmas.

As the season progressed, Richardson's frustration festered. In January of 2002, the Razorbacks lost four SEC games in a row for the first and only time in Richardson's tenure. Soon after, the coach was told by administrators that he had to control his comments on his own weekly television show. “Arkansas attempted to muzzle Richardson,”
Sports Illustrated
wrote later, “prohibiting him from speaking out on matters of racial discrimination.” The school wanted Richardson to sign a contract stressing that he would “…not directly or indirectly, disparage the Producer, the University of Arkansas, the [Razorback] Foundation, or any sponsor of the show for any reason.” Such con
tracts and language are not uncommon, but Richardson took it as a direct attack. “It is this issue that seems to have pushed Richardson over the top,”
Sports Illustrated
claimed.

 

On February 23, 2002,
after a loss at Kentucky, Richardson was quoted nationally as saying, “If they go ahead and pay me my money, they can take the job tomorrow. I'm glad I don't have to answer to anyone but myself and my god upstairs. That's the only people I answer to, for real. I'll answer to the chancellor and the athletics director, but fans and things of that nature, I don't answer to those people.”

The comments were interpreted by the media as several things—venting frustration, a challenge, a genuine offer to Arkansas administrators, and Richardson's interest in retiring.

Richardson's press conference in Kentucky happened to be the same weekend that the university was hosting the SEC track meet in Fayetteville. When Chancellor John White walked into the hospitality tent on Sunday, the press cornered him.

White said he was not yet aware of Richardson's comments. Newsmen relayed Richardson's claim: “If they go ahead and pay me my money, they can take the job tomorrow.”

“It must have been just out of the frustration of the moment,” White says, “and losing at Kentucky. I couldn't figure out what it was about. I left the track meet, went to the basketball arena where our women were playing, and saw the arena manager, Fred Vorsanger.”

Vorsanger said, “There goes Nolan again. He said the same thing to me before he left for Kentucky.”

“You're kidding,” White said.

Vorsanger was not, although he himself had joked with Nolan to “take me with you. I'll carry the money.”

White now concluded that Nolan's comments were premeditated and that he had not simply reacted in anger. “I had a lot of time to think about it,” White says, “and what I came around to was this. If I
had a dean or vice chancellor who made that statement, they wouldn't hold their position another week.”

With two games to go in the SEC, the critical league tournament was just around the corner. White believed that he and Frank Broyles needed to meet with Richardson in a hurry—the coach was returning from Kentucky that very day—to find out the source of the trouble, and either allow Richardson to resign or get him pointed back in the right direction.

The meeting with Richardson that Sunday never took place. “Here's where I made a mistake,” White says. “I said to Frank Broyles, okay, let's meet with Nolan tomorrow morning and tell him we're going to go ahead and do what he says, we're going to pay him his money and he can leave.” Barring an all-out apology from Richardson, White says, they were going to accept his resignation.

Broyles told White, “I can't do it. I'm leaving early in the morning to Augusta to play golf.”

Broyles was scheduled to return Wednesday night, the same night Richardson would be playing at Mississippi State. Richardson would be back Thursday. They agreed to delay meeting with Richardson until then.

“That was a huge mistake,” White says of the missed opportunity for him and Broyles to meet with Richardson. The meeting that never took place, however, would have likely been for damage control. By the end of the evening on that Sunday, nearly all of the board of trustees had been notified. Frank Broyles, John White, and University of Arkansas system president Alan Sugg had decided to end Richardson's tenure. His contract had a clause that allowed the university to terminate Richardson “at the convenience of the University.”

 

Pressure leads to bad
decisions, Richardson had told his teams for years. The pressure of losing, his horse being shot, his deteriorated relationship with Frank Broyles, and simple exhaustion culminated in
Richardson's outburst. When Arkansas lost to Kentucky that weekend, they had lost nine of their last twelve games.

“I've earned the right to have the type of season I'm having,” Richardson was often quoted as saying that month. Broyles must have disagreed.

Could John White have put out the fire if he had gotten Nolan Richardson alone? Perhaps he could have persuaded him to clarify his comments after the Kentucky game, or even apologize, to admit he was blowing off steam. At the very least, White believes he could have helped to avoid the disastrous press conference yet to come, on Monday.

White adds, “I think John Chaney and a civil rights attorney, lots of people got to Nolan and got him cranked up, frankly. Had we met on Monday, I think it would have been a much calmer kind of discussion and there would have been all kinds of movement on our part to try to negotiate something that Nolan would feel comfortable with.” Instead, White huddled with university attorneys. “I just knew that if we didn't handle it well, we'd all be heading to court,” he says.

With Broyles on a golf holiday at the historically all-white Augusta National Golf Club, things went from bad to worse.

“That's why I said I made a huge mistake,” White says, a rare admission for a college administrator. “Frank [Broyles] had a number of major donors he was taking to Augusta for golf, so I thought, okay, let's just do it on Thursday. But as I look back, I just beat myself up over it. We should have done it on Monday. We should have had the discussion then. It was a contentious relationship all the time that I was here, between Frank and Nolan, and I kind of got tired of it. After a while you just say, my goodness, this obviously doesn't seem like it's going to work out.”

Broyles had attempted to remove Richardson in 1987, then again in 2000, after White's arrival at the university—and those seasons went better for the Razorbacks than the 2002 season. As the losses mounted, Richardson knew Broyles would be pushing to
fire him once again. The chancellor was a decent and caring man, but that would be of little consequence when it came to controlling Broyles.

 

On Monday, February 25,
with no word from either the chancellor or the athletics director, Richardson hosted the rambling Monday press conference, and his comments were broadcast nationally, as he directed. The vast majority of viewers would have had no sense of Richardson's history, his battles to bust through a segregated profession, that his grandmother's parents had been slaves, or that his director of athletics preferred he fail. Without that perspective, it appeared that Richardson had simply lost his way.

Democrat-Gazette
's sports editor Wally Hall wrote, “This season no one in the UA administration or on the board of trustees has been anything but supportive of Richardson.” The ensuing trial during Richardson's lawsuit would prove Hall's claim to be spurious—depending on your sense of humor and what your idea of “supportive” was. Yet Hall also added, “Not long ago I wrote in this space that Richardson deserves this as a grace season. That sentiment still holds
.
If Nolan Richardson really still wants the job.”

 

Wednesday, the Razorbacks played
at Mississippi State, where they lost, 89-83. Afterward, Richardson's tone was much more sedate at the customary postgame press conference. He apologized to “99 percent of the fans” and some of the media for his statements on Monday. He admitted he was guilty of stereotyping in the same way he had been stereotyped for years. Richardson was quoted in the
Democrat-Gazette
as saying, “…Arkansas fans are the greatest fans in America…. If there's an apology, I give that. Because the fans and the people that I've lived around in Fayetteville are great, wonderful people…”

Even so, the coach would not retreat from his claim that he was regarded differently as the Arkansas coach because of his skin color. “I'm not treated differently from a fan standpoint,” he said. “But everybody who follows college basketball or follows the Razorbacks or are being honest with themselves know that what I have said is a true fact. It's absolutely true. When you think about what I really said, you need to ask the question, is it true? Some will say, ‘But he didn't have to say it.'”

Americans are notorious for lacking any sense of history, and white Americans are particularly forgetful—intentionally or not—about issues of race. Should Richardson have kept silent while his team struggled in 2002? While much of Arkansas white power-structure, both at the university and around the state, had heard enough over the years, most of that state's black population and a surprising number of closeted white progressives thought Richardson was both invigorating and important. Richardson could no more change his blunt honesty than he could begin ordering his teams to slow down and play more conservatively.

Would Richardson have been fired if he had been white? This simple question begs asking, but the answer is complicated. The kind of support and patience Richardson would have been given by Broyles, the media, and the fans in the state over the years would have been altered. How would his teams have performed if the coach could have focused his energies on winning, rather than believing that his boss preferred for him to fail? Defenders of Frank Broyles, ironically, like to point out that Broyles fired every football coach over the years—why should the basketball coach be any different?

After that Wednesday's Mississippi State game, Richardson told the press that he had addressed the Razorbacks on the subject of who would be their coach in the future. “I tell my players, don't fret for me, baby. If I get to leave the University of Arkansas, I graduated, and I did it my way.”

He also said he believed his tenure at Tulsa and Arkansas “made
it a better place for people to live and to have respect, because they know that I wasn't no Uncle Tom and I'm not politically going to tell you what you want to hear all the time.” The coach was again both defiant and conciliatory. He mentioned having to answer to the school's president and to Frank Broyles. “I do apologize for things I've done wrong…. I'm not above that, and I've done that tonight.”

Richardson was looking back, not looking forward. “If it comes to pass they're going to buy out my contract, I'm not going to be disappointed. Not at all,” he said. “Because, see, the Good Lord brought me to Arkansas. When I was a kid growing up, I was afraid of Arkansas, Mississippi—where I am right now—and Alabama…I'm very proud of the fact that I started with five or six black coaches in the country, and now there's more than thirty-nine.”

 

March 1, 2002. Less
than a week had passed since the Kentucky game. Chancellor John White and Frank Broyles came to Richardson's office and gave him a choice. White suggested that Richardson could resign and coach the final home game against Vanderbilt, enjoy the adulation of the crowd one last time. Richardson was defiant. “You're going to have to fire my ass,” he said.

White informed Richardson that the university would then be buying out his contract and paying him for six more years. After the meeting, White jotted down pages of notes, and his lengthy transcription was later published, wholly intact
.
The notes included Richardson saying that if he were fired, blacks would take the UA campus back to 1957—presumably to the Little Rock crisis—and that there would need to be tanks on campus because of picketing.

White denied that the meeting had been tape-recorded. “If you had been there in that meeting, you would have remembered it, too.” White told the
Democrat-Gazette
that he didn't take any notes while the meeting was in progress.

White's transcription of the meeting would haunt Richardson
publicly and White privately. “For several days, when I would close my eyes and try to go to sleep at night, it was like it was a videotape, it would just start replaying that whole meeting,” White said.

Richardson spent a lot of time during the ninety-minute meeting asking what would happen to longtime assistant coach Mike Anderson. The administrators promised Richardson that Anderson would be interviewed for the now-open job. Richardson knew that this meant a courtesy interview only.

When the meeting was nearly over, White said to Broyles, “Coach, would you mind if I had some time alone with Coach Richardson?”

Broyles complied, leaving the chancellor and the coach alone.

According to both White and Richardson, the chancellor reached out and put his hand on Richardson's. “Nolan,” he asked, “would you pray with me?”

Richardson says, “I was surprised. I didn't know what to do.” But he bowed his head. Richardson was cognizant of the historical implications of this gesture—the Bible had been used to sedate blacks in the Old South for centuries. And today, Richardson grudgingly admits that there is much to admire about John White. He's caring, smart, and sensitive.

What White was not, however, was more powerful than Broyles. Richardson knew it was difficult to hold that against White. By all accounts, White had attempted to wrestle control of the university away from Broyles, and he was rebuffed by the board of trustees.