Forty Minutes of Hell (24 page)

 

Carrol Williams (no relation
to Lonnie Williams) was Black Alumni Society president at Arkansas when Nolan Richardson was fired in 2002. “There was great discussion at that time about what had happened to Nolan Richardson,” Williams says, “especially when we heard about the testimony of the board of trustees.”

Specifically, it was the use of the “N word” in jokes and the realization that Frank Broyles might sit quietly and listen to those jokes. “At one time, we were going to go ahead and recommend, as a group, our BSA, that Frank Broyles be fired. But then we thought, ‘We have to get real, John White is not going to fire Frank Broyles.' So instead we asked Chancellor White to step up and make a commitment to the African-American faculty and staff.”

Bill Clark and Gary George, the members of the board of trustees at UA who used the word “nigger,” eventually left the board. Broyles remained as AD until his retirement in the spring of 2007. But the BSA was mortified that any board member would use that kind of language and not be instantly cut loose from the school.

 

Judge Wilson's final summary
makes it clear that he admires Richardson, not just for his obvious accomplishments but also for the coach's against-all-odds journey. In the end, Wilson sided with the University of Arkansas, but not before admonishing the administration for their clumsy collective management styles.

Judge Wilson was troubled regarding what he clearly saw to be a difficult decision, and his sympathy for Richardson's situation is obvious:

When Richardson's career crashed, the media almost invariably backed the University of Arkansas. Nearly always, his poor graduation rate from 1990 to 1994 was trotted out. When
Sports Illustrated
interviewed
SI
basketball writer Seth Davis, the title of the article was “Richardson Brought It Upon Himself”—although in the piece, Davis did conclude, “…it's clear from his behavior there was someone who didn't want him around.”

John Smallwood of the
Philadelphia Daily News
wrote, “The University of Arkansas, Razorbacks fans and even the media that
cover the athletics program didn't deserve what Nolan Richardson did to them…he was wrong to transport the image of Arkansas back to that of the racially intolerant 1950s and 1960s.”

Without understanding the context, the history of the state, the university, and Frank Broyles, by taking Richardson's comments from his confusing Monday press conference at face value, people like Smallwood might find Richardson an ungrateful millionaire.

The coach, who had spent his professional life in an often-lonely confrontation with college sports' racist past, primarily was blamed for
reminding
the public about racism. “Why can't Nolan just get over it?” was the typical take from college basketball insiders. Wasn't America beyond racism, the reasoning went, if a black man was making a million bucks a year?

Yet was racism “over in America,” as Newt Gingrich declared in 1995, if the board of trustees at a state's major university could put their feet up and ask, “Did you hear the one about the three niggers who went fishing?” How much of this racism was communicated, however subtly, to John White or Frank Broyles? Broyles claimed that in the 1960s, the board of trustees was the reason he was one of the last coaches in America to find qualified black players for his football team, and it's no stretch to think that, at the very least, the board's backwoods racism could influence Broyles again.

I
n October of
2004, Frank Broyles lost his wife, Barbara, to complications from Alzheimer's disease. The couple had been married for fifty-nine years. Broyles continued working tirelessly on fund-raising for Alzheimer's research and began writing a book about the disease.

Even with the lawsuit over, Chancellor John White felt like the Sisyphus of college administrators. In 2004, UA instituted a program where employees—on a voluntary basis—might learn to be more accepting of diversity. The program was called “Our Campus: Building a More Inclusive University of Arkansas.”

Cynics pointed out that his training program in tolerance was instituted around the same time Richardson's suit for racial discrimination was filed. Barbara Taylor told the
Democrat-Gazette
, “Chronologically, they certainly coincided. But before the Nolan Richardson controversy and conflict arose, the diversity task force had already made that recommendation.”

The university's enrollment today is still only 5 percent African-American, while the overall population of the state remains 16 percent. The faculty at UA is only 3 percent African-American. Yet it's undeniable that the school has attempted to diversify.

In January of 2005, the University of Arkansas hired an African-American woman named Carmen Coustaut as their first associate vice chancellor for diversity and education. In the spring of 2006, the University of Arkansas hired an African-American woman, Cynthia Nance, to be dean of the law school. Several key black university administrators and 43 percent of black faculty members have arrived since John White was hired in 1997. Of course, the ways in which an African-American championship basketball coach would have influenced that statistic are impossible to measure.

White said, when Richardson's removal was announced, “I'm strongly committed and I'm very concerned that the African-American community within the state not think that this is in any way a step back with respect to our commitment to that agenda.” If not progress, there has been movement at University of Arkansas, and it's movement in the right direction.

Val Gonzalez, who conducted the workshops for the National Conference for Community Justice, was much more direct. “Discrimination is a real problem, right here at the University of Arkansas. Some of what we learned is not very pretty.”

 

Nolan Richardson lost his
appeal in the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court during May of 2006, in St. Louis. Judge Arlen Beam wrote, “The record amply supports a conclusion that Richardson's statement had a detrimental impact on the effective functioning of the public employer's enterprise—namely, the university's total athletics program. This public interest clearly outweighs any First Amendment privilege Richardson may have allegedly had in the making of the comment.”

 

In February of 2007,
Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Illinois) hosted hearings involving the NCAA, Congress, and experts on the struggles faced by African-American coaches. Rush called Nolan Richardson back to the battle.

Other witnesses who participated were NCAA President Myles Brand, Jesse Jackson, new BCA boss Floyd Keith, and Richard Lapchick from the Institute for Ethics and Diversity in Sports.

Bobby Rush stressed that legislation to correct the shocking lack of black football coaches would be appropriate. But NCAA President Myles Brand begged off any direct responsibility, saying, “The colleges and universities will not cede to the NCAA the authority to dictate who to interview or hire in athletics.”

Richard Lapchick, one of the nation's foremost authorities on race and college sports, favors the NCAA using a policy similar to the “Rooney Rule,” which had been put in effect, to make certain that every NFL coaching search would include at least one candidate of color. In his written statement, Lapchick suggested that legislation and lawsuits should both be options. “It's pretty clear that embarrassment hasn't been enough,” he wrote.

The problem, Brand pointed out, was with the results of the searches.

Richardson cited the good ol' boy club of boosters who would almost certainly favor white coaches. The influence of well-heeled boosters over athletics departments—and thus entire universities—is a given today. The head coaching jobs in college football may be the last place where boosters can cling to white leadership.

At the time, fewer than 3 percent of head football coaches at all NCAA institutions were black, although more than half of the athletes were. Men's basketball, where over 60 percent of the players are black, was better, since nearly 30 percent of its head coaches were black.

Frankie Allen, now the basketball coach at historically black Maryland–Eastern Shore, knows the biggest reason that college basketball is decades ahead of football. “Basketball coaches
organized
a lot sooner, with the BCA,” Allen says. “The guys at the top of the profession were all doing great—Thompson, Chaney, and Richardson. We had big-name people behind us, and they weren't afraid to speak out.”

A
rkansas fired Stan
Heath in the spring of 2007, and the timing was obvious. With the conclusion of the Nolan Richardson lawsuit, Heath was expendable. His teams struggled his first three seasons, but in his fourth and fifth years, Arkansas finally qualified for the NCAA Tournament again. Heath's teams won over those five seasons, in order, nine, twelve, eighteen, twenty-two, then twenty-one games.

“Maybe I didn't do enough to protect myself,” Heath says. “It was set up to be a pacifying situation after Nolan. [Frank Broyles said] ticket sales were down. But I can read. In 2006–07, we had more fans than the year before.” Indeed, in 2006, the Razorbacks were twelfth in the nation—out of over three hundred schools—in overall attendance. In 2007, Heath's last season, they were ninth.

Arkansas would embarrass itself that spring by offering the job to a succession of five coaches—all white—who would consecutively turn down the job. Dana Altman left Creighton for a day before changing
his mind and returning to Omaha. Finally, after the fifth rejection, Broyles found Arkansas their white coach in John Pelphrey, who had
not
led South Alabama to the NCAA Tournament. (Pelphrey quickly hired Rob Evans, Richardson's longtime friend.)

Heath noticed the parade of white coaches Arkansas fawned over that April. “I have no problems with the new coach, but if you just look at [Pelphrey's] résumé, the measuring stick had changed. I was an Elite Eight coach, and they hired a coach who had come from the NIT.”

Unaware of the swirl of politics and maneuvering around him, Heath was focused on his quickly improving team. “I never felt that Dr. White was trying to manage the athletics department; I just thought he was a cheerleader. Dr. White's a nice guy, but it wasn't his decision [to fire Heath]. I can tell you, that is a fact.”

Heath believes White made every effort to try to wrestle control of athletics from his supposed subordinate, Frank Broyles. “My second or third year,” Heath says, “Dr. White wanted to make a change in the athletics director's job. What I remember came back to us—and this was a rumor—was this. If you try to change [Broyles's] job, you're going to lose yours. The lesson was that Broyles is going to run the athletics department.”

Heath's point—the unchecked power of Broyles—echoes the feelings of many within the state: The University of Arkansas, in their decades of silence, condoned Broyles's behavior. “Even when a federal judge criticized him harshly for racially insensitive comments last summer, nobody from the university offered even the mildest censure,” the
Chronicle of Higher Education
would write. “Not one peep of public reproach has been heard from any other state or university officials.”

 

Heath is also quick
to point out all Broyles has accomplished and his high regard in the world of college sports. Broyles, however, con
tinued his pattern by meddling with Heath's basketball team. “He had opinions on the staff he wanted me to hire,” Heath said.

That didn't bother Heath so much, since Broyles was admired for uncovering great assistants. Rather, it was his boss's basketball ideas and his management style. “Broyles never was a guy who told me to run this play or that play, but he certainly had his opinions on
style
of play. That was where he wanted to have some input. There were times when he had his opinion, but we had difficulty because he was almost like an overseer. We struggled with our communication.”

Heath's timing in taking the job put him in an awkward place stylistically. He simply didn't play at the same pace as Richardson. “But Broyles was pushing us into a full-court press,” he says. Heath thinks this was a matter of expedience for Broyles. “In the early part of his career, he wanted Nolan to play more Eddie Sutton's style. The fans were used to that. At the end of the day, Broyles wanted to make the fans in Arkansas happy. He wanted me to
replace
Nolan by playing Nolan's style.”

Each year Heath's team improved, even getting to the championship game of SEC in his final season. By the conclusion of the 2007 season, Heath was itching with anticipation. His Razorbacks had consistently done better, and had no seniors.

Then the crimson rug was ripped from beneath his feet. “There are coaches going to the NIT, and they get raises. Bill Self lost in the first round of the NCAAs in 2007,” Heath points out. Self's Kansas team won the national championship the following year.

Heath says there was one constant motivator for Broyles, which became apparent at the SEC conference meetings each spring. The league meetings involve university presidents, athletics directors, head coaches, and faculty representatives.

The young head coach and veteran AD, who was closing in on eighty years of age, would sit together. “During the basketball meeting, Broyles would sleep through the whole thing,” Heath says. “People would be looking around, smiling at me.”

Only one thing could awaken Broyles, Heath claims. One year the SEC bosses said they wanted Arkansas to give up a home game in basketball to play in something called “The SEC Challenge.” Each home game was worth at least $300,000 to Arkansas. “He immediately woke up and snapped to attention,” Heath says.

At certain times, though, money could be tossed around freely at Broyles's discretion. Both Nolan Richardson and football coach Houston Nutt were paid piles of money
not
to coach the Razorbacks. Richardson's payments finally ended in June of 2008.

Stan Heath handled his firing gracefully, and he bounced back within weeks, landing as the coach of the University of South Florida. In retrospect, he sees his time in Fayetteville differently. “Nolan made the job easier for me,” he says. “People went out of their way to be kind to me.” When things went badly for Heath, Richardson reached out and shared one of his favorite lines from Ol' Mama: “All sickness isn't death.” Richardson also stuck up for the embattled Heath publicly.

“I wanted to sort of take the baton from Nolan,” Heath says. The baton Heath would get came in the form of the same pink slip. “But it was only one person that led to my change,” Heath says. “There was only one direction I was looking as to what happened to me.”

“Frank Broyles fired everybody,” one longtime Arkansas athletics department employee says. “Nolan Richardson lasted seventeen seasons, far longer than any football coach. [Football coaches] Lou Holtz, Ken Hatfield, Jack Crowe, Joe Kines, Danny Ford, and Houston Nutt were all either fired, forced out, or made to feel unwelcome by Broyles.”

 

A common refrain heard
around Fayetteville, Arkansas—athletics staff, faculty, waitresses, Wal-Mart execs among them—is how loved Nolan Richardson was during his tenure at the university.

Yet the criteria white people in Arkansas use to determine what
constitutes racism is fuzzy. When Arkansans are presented with the obstacles Richardson had overcome in his career—reared in racist El Paso, “don't hire that nigger” sentiments at both Tulsa and Western Texas, dogs being brought in to black fraternity parties—these are dismissed with a shrug.

Frank Broyles—the face of the University of Arkansas since the early sixties—urging media representatives to use the word “nigger” in print? That was poor judgment. Board of trustees members telling nigger jokes? Well, it wasn't as though they'd lynched Nolan Richardson, or anyone else.

Hiring a black man to replace Richardson, keeping him in the post as long as the lawsuit was alive, then dumping him despite his team's dramatic improvement—that wasn't racist either, folks in Fayetteville said. That was the nature of college sports.

NABC director Jim Haney, whose column caused Richardson to reexamine his role as a “token” assistant athletics director, thinks obliviousness to Richardson's struggle indicates a poor sense of the past. “Just hiring an African-American to be a coach was at one time a huge step,” Haney says. “Then there was that image of the recruiter who couldn't possibly understand the intricacies of the game. Next was, can we hire a black coach at a large state university? In Richardson, Thompson, and Tubby Smith, we've seen African-Americans lead teams to the NCAA title.”

Haney also sees the firing of coaches of color as potentially a good thing. “At the end of the day, you want to be judged on the merits of what you do. Winning, fan base, academics, those things, just as a human being, not based on age or race. Guys like Nolan, John Thompson, Reggie Minton, they were trailblazers.”

Despite the progress, today the Black Coaches Association is at a crossroads. Richardson, Chaney, and Thompson are no longer coaching. A lack of direction in the late 1990s—along with allegations by the BCA that its former executive director Rudy Washington had misused BCA funds—nearly led to the BCA's demise. The BCA itself
sued Washington, seeking an accounting of funds, and there was an out-of-court settlement.

The BCA's influence has waned, but it may be on the rebound. They've changed their name to Black Coaches and Administrators. Their current director, Floyd Keith, has struggled to restore confidence and financial stability and has pushed the BCA coaches to get involved with at-risk kids.

The BCA was also the force behind the Football Hiring Report Card, which rates each college that hires a new football coach and evaluates their interest in considering candidates of color.

 

No matter how many
basketball games Clarence Gaines, John McClendon, Dave Whitney at Alcorn State, or Don Corbett at North Carolina A&T won, nobody within the white power structure moved to offer them a job. Head coaches at historically black colleges today likely earn one-tenth of what their counterparts are paid at mostly white state universities.

Perhaps the most disturbing example of this is football legend Eddie Robinson, who coached at Grambling State University in Louisiana, only twenty-five miles from the Arkansas border. Robinson served at Grambling, a historically black college, for fifty-six years, lasting through eleven United States presidents. He could boast more football wins than any other coach and sent more than two hundred players to the NFL. He had a graduation rate of 80 percent (when football graduation rates were around 50 percent nationally). For his first fifty seasons, Robinson never had a player get in trouble with the law.

Despite being the winningest football coach of all time, Eddie Robinson was never even offered an
interview
for a major university head coaching job. Robinson, of course, is not the only man to be overlooked. To this day, in the history of major college football, there have been fewer than thirty black head coaches.

Some schools have been surprisingly progressive in their hiring.
The University of Mississippi has had two black basketball coaches. Texas schools like SMU, Texas A&M, Rice, and Houston have as well. Texas basketball, though, is still behind the curve. Don Haskins's historic team remains the only Texas school that has ever won the NCAA basketball championship.

“Integration in sports—as opposed to integration at the ballot box or in public conveyances—was a winning proposition for the whites who controlled the sports-industrial complex,” wrote William Rhoden in his book,
Forty Million Dollar Slaves.
“They could move to exploit black muscle and talent, thus sucking the life out of black institutions, while at the same time give themselves credit for being humanitarians.”

Rhoden laments that while the integration of sports often benefited the black athlete, the historically black colleges received a major blow as their talent pool thinned. The same was true of the Negro Leagues once Jackie Robinson opened those floodgates. Integration was ultimately not seen as a challenge to white coaches and administrators.

Nolan Richardson eclipsed Frank Broyles in popularity, and that may have been seen as a threat to the director of athletics' power within the state and school. Whenever black men were put in positions of power—as head coaches, for example—it meant a drastic difference from simply having black athletes on the court.

 

Haskins's 1966 championship returned
to the national mindset with the release of the movie
Glory Road
. Stories appeared across the country, and retro Texas Western jerseys became popular. The
Nation
's David Zirin called the 1966 game “the Selma Bridge of sports.”

The Texas Western Miners' season was a coincidence of events that writers dream of discovering. The acerbic and crusty Haskins was the accidental hero and fine literary and artistic material. Instead of using the real Haskins, though, Disney coated him in cliché. It's

Richardson pushed his teams to play at a furious pace.

(
Copyright © Aynsley Floyd
)