Forty Minutes of Hell (26 page)

“We can recruit, motivate, and teach, but can we coach? I never hear that”: Nolan Richardson and TV analyst Billy Packer. (
Hawgs Illustrated
)

 

“He seems to make a system out of anger”: Richardson in the late 1990s. (
Brian Bahr/Getty Images Sport/Getty images
)

 

Vamanos!
Richardson returned to the border to coach the Mexican National Team. (
El Paso Times/Victor Calzada
)

 

The most important African-American coach in history: a pensive Richardson before the championship team reunion in 2009. (
Eric Howerton, Now Creative Inc
.)

hard to figure why the film's director encased its celluloid Haskins in plastic, when the real one was so much more interesting.

Glory Road
is filled with deliberate inaccuracies, which was unfortunate, since the true story was more compelling. The movie even missed Haskins's real innovation, aside from his being color-blind—getting inner-city playground players to play slower offensively. Texas Western slowed down the run-and-gun Kentucky Wildcats, contrary to the movie's portrayal.

Haskins likely could never have considered starting five blacks at any other major school in Texas, and some credit would have to go to the Hispanic-majority El Paso that abolished its Jim Crow laws in 1962—after Nolan Richardson and Bert Williams were refused service in a popular restaurant.

Glory Road
is nonetheless a finely constructed film. The banter and camaraderie between the players is perfect in this happily-ever-after story. But it all felt a little too feel-good.

UTEP, now a school with a Hispanic majority, had countless black athletes who have, like the 1966 Miners, brought fame and money to the school. Yet by 2005, UTEP had not had a black coach in any major sport. (Only women's basketball had a black head coach—they could claim Wayne Thornton, who coached for fifty dollars a month during a single season in 1978–79.) UTEP's road ran one way. Black athletes were welcome. Black leaders were not.

Since that glorious 1966 game, Richardson's alma mater has had seven athletics directors, eleven football coaches, four men's track coaches, and three other basketball coaches. (Don Haskins finally retired in 1999.) That's
twenty-five positions of leadership
for some deserving coach.

Every single one of those twenty-five jobs was filled by a white male. Obviously, Don Haskins was not doing the hiring. Three white coaches—all assistants with no wins on the major college level—followed Haskins. On two of those hires, UTEP even passed over Nolan Richardson.

One allegation that the University of Arkansas made at the trial was that Richardson was not really trying to find another job. They mentioned those two openings at UTEP since Richardson's termination. While Richardson may have been happy at times to collect his $500,000 a year from Arkansas (which would end if he accepted a coaching spot elsewhere), he was, in fact, interested in the UTEP job in 2006. But Richardson claims that the interest was not reciprocated.

“They brought Nolan in for an interview,” Haskins said, “and they told him they were going to hire a black coach, but the athletics director didn't want Nolan.”

UTEP finally did hire a black man in 2006, when Tony Barbee, an assistant coach from the University of Memphis, was named basketball coach. Forty years had elapsed since Haskins's historic win.

 

Firing coaches is part
of college basketball. A study of what happens to coaches—both white and black—after they have been terminated is instructive.

New BCA boss Floyd Keith claims this is where racism still prevails. “Classic example. Here's Nolan Richardson,” Keith told Skip Myslenski in a widely syndicated column. “He proved himself. He had no violations. Then I look around, I'm not going to name names, but here's a coach that, at Iowa State, hugged and kissed coeds, got drunk, and he's working again. There's something wrong here.”

Keith was referring to Larry Eustachy, whose demise became a national story when photos of him at Big Twelve parties surfaced on the Internet. Eustachy resigned and acknowledged his addiction to alcohol. He was hired at the University of Southern Mississippi within a year of leaving ISU.

Young black coaches like Randy Ayers and Wade Houston got very brief chances, then never resurfaced, despite the fact that college sports is a business that possesses a limitless ability to recycle white
coaches. Eustachy, Tom Penders, Bob Huggins, Eddie Sutton, and Bob Knight were all rocked by controversy.

Eddie Sutton, who represented the good old days to the good old boys of Arkansas, left Fayetteville for Kentucky. Things went terribly wrong at Kentucky, and Sutton resigned amid accusations of cash payments made to a top recruit. Sutton's career was renewed at Oklahoma State, and he led his alma mater to a couple Final Fours. His time at Oklahoma State would come to an end with a bizarre DWI. Campus cops hoisted the drunken coach—whose blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit—into his car at the Gallagher-Iba Arena. Minutes later, he swerved across four lanes of traffic, slammed into the rear of another vehicle, then crashed into a tree. Sutton was able to find work again, resurfacing for most of a season as the head coach at the University of San Francisco.

The well-documented case of Bob Knight is interesting as well. Knight and Richardson are nearly the same age, and both men played for coaches who won NCAA titles—Knight for Fred Taylor at Ohio State. Although Richardson was not a member of Haskins's 1966 team, he was certainly the better player. By the time Knight was only twenty-four, he was the army's head coach at West Point. With not a single black man coaching a major college team, Knight simply would not have been given the chance if he had been black. Richardson, of course, toiled at an obscure high school and junior college for over a decade, at a time when Knight was landing a plum Big Ten job.

Both Knight and Richardson won NCAA titles, although Knight won three. Knight's controversies at Indiana were reported nationally. He was dumped by Indiana in September 2000, but despite the negative publicity, Knight quickly resurfaced at Texas Tech. A group of alumni and fans—not Knight—sued IU soon after he was fired. Knight waited until he was hired and secure at Texas Tech, and then finally filed suit in November 2002, after negotiations for a settlement collapsed.

One of Richardson's former assistants, Wayne Stehlik, admitted to ESPN.com that part of the reason Richardson was untouchable was that he had sued Broyles. “Athletics directors and chancellors or presidents are probably a little bit nervous,” Stehlik said, “because of how it turned out there at Arkansas.”

 

The firing of Nolan
Richardson remained a source of controversy in Arkansas when Razorback football coach Houston Nutt was let go. Nutt became the head football coach at Arkansas in 1998. His 2006 team was 7-1 in SEC play, and 10-4 overall. Going into the 2007 season—his tenth—Nutt had plenty to be proud of, although he hadn't approached the success that Richardson had in basketball.

Then a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Nutt, who is married with children, sent close to a thousand text messages to an attractive TV anchorwoman. Arkansas was 3-4 then in the SEC, going into the last game in 2007, and five SEC teams had better records. Yet Chancellor John White and Frank Broyles stood by him, at least publicly.

During that tumultuous autumn, Stanley Reed, the new chairman of the board of trustees at UA, claimed the public had lost confidence in Coach Nutt. The fickle fans were ready for a change, and the “lost confidence” excuse clearly echoed the removal of Richardson, but Reed insisted Arkansas did not want to fire Houston Nutt. “It would look bad,” he said.

What happened next would look worse. In a dramatic season finale, Arkansas beat the #1-ranked LSU Tigers in Baton Rouge. It appeared as though all might be forgiven and Nutt would remain a Razorback. But behind the scenes, boosters started the ball rolling on removing Nutt. A monstrous $3-million buyout was assembled through the Razorback Foundation. And they wouldn't have to fire the football coach. Houston Nutt resigned.

Chancellor John White stated at the ensuing press conference that UA wished to remove the “golden handcuffs” that were so invasive in Nutt's life. Since Nutt was resigning, the university should have been free of any financial obligation to him, but clearly there had been an agreement. White publicly encouraged the Razorback Foundation to shell out over $3 million to Nutt.

Stanley Reed was then quoted as saying, “It gets to the point of fairness and equity. We did not want to fire Houston Nutt. He had done a great job…”

Nutt had a conference record of 42-40. He never won an overall conference championship and, of course, no national championship, or the equivalent of a basketball Final Four. A day later, Nutt took a lucrative job at the University of Mississippi. Nutt wouldn't have to return any of the $3 million—he was free to coach at another school.

Richardson had been terminated in Fayetteville for essentially
suggesting
the same thing that the UA would later
do
for Houston Nutt: “If they go ahead and pay me my money, they can take the job tomorrow.” Yet Richardson's buyout included a strict provision—he would lose any subsequent money if he took another job.

Richardson's overall winning percentage—70 percent—was far better than Nutt's overall percentage, not to mention the conference titles, Final Fours, and the 1994 NCAA title. When the University of Arkansas decided to dump Richardson, there was no talk of “fairness and equity” and whether firings would “look bad.” Richardson seems to only have ground his heel into the sense of decorum that made it possible for Nutt to walk away with enough money to fill a Wal-Mart truck.

John White points out that Richardson was given the opportunity to resign in 2002. “Houston Nutt didn't come out and say that ‘If they pay me my money I'm gone tomorrow.' We actually treated Houston the same way as Nolan, but there was no way from a public relations perspective that, nationally, people would
understand why would Arkansas fire Nutt after the seasons he's just had. We couldn't fire him if we wanted to recruit another coach. There was an IRS rule change that meant Nutt couldn't afford to leave.”

 

Whenever Richardson's firing resurfaced,
his graduation rate from 1990–1994 was always mentioned as justification. That argument should have changed dramatically on October 4, 2007.

The Northwest Arkansas
Morning News
ran their usual “Briefly” column on page two of the sports section. The first three short pieces were these important issues in Arkansas:

• Tony Parker was taking time off from the French Olympic team to concentrate on his spot with the San Antonio Spurs.
  
• Knicks coach Isiah Thomas focused his mind on basketball during his sexual harassment trial.
  
• Lakers center Kwame Brown was charged with disorderly conduct.