Forty Minutes of Hell (27 page)

The last section of the column was titled “Graduation Rates Increase Slightly.” Most of the brief story on the NCAA's latest study—from 1997 until 2002 this time—discussed how overall graduation rates for all athletes were on the rise.

Then, this single sentence: “Arkansas' football team had a graduation rate of 53 percent, and the men's basketball team was at 50 percent.”

Richardson's name was not even mentioned, although those were his final years coaching.

Why wouldn't Arkansas—which was embarrassed by his published graduation rates from 1990 to 1994—be shouting about this great academic improvement at the end of Richardson's tenure?

There had to be a big story the next day, when everyone at the
UA athletics department had a chance to plan a press conference to get their story out.
UA basketball had a respectable graduation rate in Richardson's last five years!
But the next day, there was nothing.

For most of Richardson's tenure,
Morning News
sports editor Chip Souza was an hour away, in Fort Smith. He had no excuse as to why the “new and improved” graduation rate was not a frontpage piece. And he wonders why Richardson was constantly hammered for his older graduation rate after he was fired. “Nobody mentioned it when he was winning the national championship,” Souza says. “It was just never an issue, until he lost and then had that press conference.”

The story line about the new graduation rate was so small that almost nobody noticed, even in Arkansas.

Judge Wendell Griffen knows why the new study has never been publicized. “Frank Broyles and John White
wanted
to get rid of Nolan,” Griffen says. “White was on the ‘Graduation Rate Bandwagon,' thinking that graduation rates are somehow indicative of how people are doing their jobs. But athletics' function is to win games, not produce Nobel scientists. If Nolan had graduated every player and won half of his games, he would have been fired a long time ago.”

Still, why not publicize the latest study, which exonerated the basketball program and shed a good light on then-embattled football coach Houston Nutt? “It would be an admission they were wrong,” former UA administrator Lonnie Williams says. “You don't pick someone up that you've been kicking.”

Griffen thinks that in many ways, the NCAA even speaking about graduation rates is hypocritical. “The coach of the basketball team does not have an obligation to graduate anybody, and there's not a performance feature in most contracts. The fact is that not even the dean of a college or a department head has an obligation to graduate people at a certain percentage. For the NCAA to suggest that coaches have to do what nobody else is required to do is a kind of lunacy. But
that's what you get from this good old boy network, when everybody knows [college sports] is about dollars.”

 

Forty years after the
passage of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring, the Southeast Conference hired its first African-American football coach. Sylvester Croom was named the Mississippi State coach in 2004.

College basketball remains far more progressive. One of the last college leagues to desegregate their teams was the glamorous Atlantic Coast Conference. Today, the ACC sets the national standard for black basketball coaches.

With twelve members in its fold, the ACC—perhaps the best league in the country—had seven black head coaches in the 2008–09 season: Boston College (Al Skinner), Georgia Tech (Paul Hewitt), Florida State (Leonard Hamilton), Clemson (Oliver Purnell), Miami (Frank Haith), Virginia (Dave Leitao), and North Carolina State (Sidney Lowe).

Not a single black head coach was employed in the ACC when Richardson won his NCAA title in 1994 (although Bob Wade had been the Maryland coach in the late 1980s).

Perhaps what lifted Nolan Richardson to greatness—his unwavering us-against-the-world attitude—might have contributed to his downfall. But Judge Wendell Griffen points out that Richardson had an important task at hand. “A brain surgeon doesn't have a chip on his shoulder,” he says, “he simply uses a scalpel and is insistent on helping patients.” What happened to Richardson left Griffen miffed. “We talk about opportunity,” he says, “but we denigrate people who challenge the barriers.”

“Nolan has the irony of being uncommonly good and universally misunderstood,” Griffen says. “Nolan's battle has been in the cause of inclusion and equality but because he's a black man of action and courage—without apology or timidity—he's misunderstood as being angry or having a chip on his shoulder.”

Stan Heath thinks each African-American coach needs to be taken on his own merits and politics, regardless of age. “You can't put us in the same box. Those guys [Chaney, Thompson, and Richardson] I have tremendous respect for. They voiced concerns and broke barriers in those early years and were instrumental in my development. For any coach, though, you don't become politically involved until you have success. Then you have a microphone in front of you. Were they as vocal their first years?”

Todd Day, Arkansas's all-time leading scorer, says, “When Nolan was young, he believed everything was against him. If you didn't agree with him, then you were against him, too. As he got older, he kept that edge, but that's what made him an incredibly successful coach.”

 

Many are perplexed that
Nolan Richardson could still feel disrespected or insecure when he was making so much money. Frank Broyles could be said to equate dollars and respect, but for Richardson respect had little to do with income.

Former UTEP All-American Fred Reynolds tells a story that would resonate with Richardson. Reynolds had a long pro career in Europe, returned to El Paso, and used his degree in criminal justice to become a highway patrolman. He also married a successful doctor.

For the last few years, he's bought season tickets for UTEP basketball. In 2007, an athletics department employee phoned to inform Reynolds of a new plan for season-ticket holders. Reynolds would not only have to pay for his seats, but was now required to make a donation to UTEP athletics. Although he didn't mind buying tickets, Reynolds said his career on the court was enough of a donation.

“I know your wife is a doctor,” he says the UTEP employee told him. Meaning, of course, that the couple had plenty of money.

When Reynolds complained about this to the UTEP athletics director a week later, he got a similar response. “It's not like you're poor, Fred,” he says he was told.

Reynolds believes his wife's status and their jobs were irrelevant. He gave great years on the court at a crucial time in UTEP basketball history. To the white people asking him, he believes, this contribution meant too little. Asking him to contribute money, even though he could well afford it, was a form of disrespect.

 

The long history of
racism affected black athletes and coaches to varying degrees. Bob Walters was just one of countless black athletes in Arkansas whose career was stolen.

Negro schools didn't count, so his ninety-six career touchdowns were never listed as the state record. Instead, the Arkansas Activities Association for years listed a player from Osceola who scored eighty-eight touchdowns.

Walters was first diagnosed with cancer in the late 1970s, when Danny Walters was in high school. He had three brutal bouts. First, colon cancer. Then it spread, necessitating the removal of one lung in 1984. The cancer finally metastasized to his brain and kidneys. Walters never complained about the cancer that slowly ate him alive—or the racism that ruined his playing career.

“That was just Bob,” his widow, Sheryl, says. “He didn't harbor bitterness.”

While Walters was being devastated by the disease, though, he became keen on having his star guard Tim Hardaway join Don Haskins. “Bob liked the man,” Sheryl says, “and he felt Haskins was someone who would see a person as a person, and an athlete as an athlete. Tim wound up in El Paso because Bob had both an admiration for, and trust in, Don Haskins.”

Walters—who'd steered his nephew to Arkansas to play football—pushed Hardaway to sign early rather than wait until the later signing period, when there would no doubt have been a long line. “Bob liked the idea of people recognizing skills,” Sheryl says, “rather than the whole black-white bit. He saw that in Haskins, I guess. There were
so many places Bob went where he felt he didn't get a good shake because he was black.”

Walters was able to both forgive Arkansas through his nephew and honor his own battles with segregation by sending Hardaway to Haskins.

“Bob Walters understood history,” Tim Hardaway adds. “That's why he was happy to see me with Don Haskins.”

Walters passed away in 1985 at the age of forty-three.

 

The challenges for the
new generation of African-American coaches pose a different set of problems. “There are struggles that are common to the human condition,” Judge Wendell Griffen says, “but it's a special experience for coaches of color. Coaches of the Stan Heath era are dealing with different facts, but they're still dealing with the issues of inclusion that Nolan had. One of the privileges of being white is that you never have to worry about boosters not supporting you, or the trustees of the institution wondering if you are white enough to head the program.”

Griffen provides a simple analogy of what it has been like for blacks to navigate through American society. “I'm right-handed, but I never wake up and think about it. When I sit down at one of those preformed desks in a college lecture hall, I can fit.” To those right-handers who are comfortable, everything seems fine. “Only left-handed people are aware of the fact that these desks are set up differently,” Griffen says.

In May 2008, Griffen lost his reelection campaign. An ordained Baptist minister, he had been an appeals court judge in Little Rock for over a decade. During his tenure he had to appear before an ethics panel, where he was successful in fighting for his right to free speech. Griffen was highly critical of more than the way the University of Arkansas had treated minorities and Nolan Richardson. Griffen had pointedly criticized President Bush and also endorsed an increase in minimum wage in Arkansas.

Although his successor, Judge Rita Gruber, did not bring up Griffen's comments during the campaign, she told the Associated Press, “I think it's fair to say there were a lot of people in the community who were disappointed with the statements he's made over the years.”

Even in defeat, Griffen was defiant. “I would much rather have maintained my integrity,” he said, “and experienced these results than sacrificed my integrity for political expediency.”

 

Ed Beshara died in
Tulsa in the spring of 2007 at the age of ninety-one. The son of immigrants, Beshara often felt the strain of being an outsider. While Beshara and Richardson looked comically different standing side by side, Richardson believed he and Beshara were two of a kind. Beshara's background provided him with empathy for the underdog, something Richardson always found endearing. For twenty years, hardly a week would pass without Beshara and Richardson talking.

The month before Beshara's death, Richardson drove from Arkansas daily—four hours round-trip—to spend time with his friend. Beshara would hold Richardson's thick hand and call him “my adopted son,” while a stream of nurses and doctors came and went. It was the first time Richardson made the trek to Tulsa on a regular basis since Yvonne had been sick.

“They were friends until the end,” says Ed Beshara Jr., who took over his father's business. “My dad loved Nolan a great deal. Nolan is extremely loyal and will remember you forever if you try to help him.”

Richardson's eulogy in tribute to Beshara brought the mourners to their feet, applauding through their tears. “I'd never seen people cheer at a funeral,” Beshara Jr. says, “but they did that day.”

P
anama convinced Nolan
Richardson to coach its national team in 2005. Richardson was thrilled to lead a national team where his fluency in Spanish would be useful, even if it meant coaching in obscurity. Panama posted its best finish in twenty-six years, but the news was hardly mentioned in the States.

Richardson's next crack at leading a Spanish-speaking squad was a homecoming of sorts. He was named the Mexican National Coach in the spring of 2007. The Mexicans, who had hopes of an Olympic bid, set up training camp across the Rio Grande from El Paso in Juárez, Mexico.

Today's Texas-Mexico border is radically different from the one Nolan Richardson grew up on. Juárez is now home to somewhere around two million people and a vast sprawl of poverty. The bridges that connect El Paso to Juárez are teeming with window-washers, accordion players, and trinket salesmen hustling like walk-ons at var
sity tryouts. NAFTA's “free trade” has damaged the already-troubled Mexican economy—half-built concrete structures sit uncompleted all over town. Post-9/11 security measures and a rash of violence have discouraged tourism, one of the few steady sources of cash. Hundreds of women have been murdered in Juárez during the last decade and the crimes remain unsolved. If there was ever a city that should have “Us Against the World” as its motto, it's Juárez.

The Mexican team accepted Richardson without hesitation, as though he had simply been stuck in traffic on the bridge for a few decades. Richardson's squad featured players with both NCAA credentials and Mexican passports.

The players who did
not
participate for Mexico, however, devastated the team before Richardson ever coached a game. Eduardo Najera had an impressive run during his nine years in the NBA, but Najera claimed he would not represent Mexico under the current leadership of the Olympic committee. Earl Watson, whose mother was born in Mexico, may have made a bigger impact for Richardson. Watson was a solid NBA point guard, and Richardson's scrambling-and-trapping style would have been the perfect showcase for him. While Watson never officially declined, he didn't join the team either.

 

Nolan Richardson remains surprisingly
fit for a man in his late sixties. He has a trim waist, muscular shoulders, and he's thirty pounds lighter than when he prowled the sidelines at Arkansas. His hair has gone gray, and he's let it grow out, along with a mustache that has evolved into a goatee. He leans forward when he walks, the way a young Mike Tyson did when he answered the bell.

Richardson appeared to reverse the aging process at practice in Juárez, morphing into a younger man. He hopped out of the way to avoid a collision. Grabbing the ball, he demonstrated the correct way
to jump-stop. He was quick to halt play and hammer home a point. Occasionally he laughed along with his team, sometimes even at mistakes, as if they all shared the same secret—it's great to be back on the basketball court.

The most impressive aspect of his coaching comeback was how Richardson ran his practice with his fluent border Spanish—and Spanglish. He switched back and forth as easily as he had traversed the border as a boy. It didn't take him long to recall the words for “trap” and “fast break.”

His “Forty Minutes of Hell” depended on a brutally fast pace. During the first week of training, nearly every player was bent over, hands to knees, and gasping for breath.
“Qué pasa, hórale, muévanse!”
Richardson said, but they couldn't move at the pace he was demanding.

Even after surrendering a layup, the Mexicans were required to racehorse the ball back down the court. “If you want to take the other team's heart,
no hay nada como hechar una canasta enseguida de la de ellos
,” Richardson says. Scoring quickly after his own teams' defensive breakdowns. Attacking the attacker. A Richardson trademark.

 

The Mexican National Team
would take the floor the last day of May 2007.

It wasn't at Bud Walton Arena. Instead, it was a meaningless exhibition game in a dank Juárez gym. Meaningless with one exception—it was Mexico's first game with Nolan Richardson as coach. Ninety minutes before the match was to begin, the gym was jammed and the atmosphere was festive. Musicians, busking for pesos, set up outside the entrance. Inside, dozens of autograph-seekers and cell-phone-wielding photographers formed a queue, but the target wasn't the players.

A few minutes later, in a decaying locker room deep in the bowels
of the building, Richardson gathered the red-white-and-green-clad players. “
Vamos a empezar
a half-court defense,” Richardson said, but as the game progressed, he'd turn up the pressure with his
“Cuarenta minutos de infierno.”

After a few brief reminders, the players rose to their feet.

“Vámanos,”
Richardson hollered, and the team gathered around him in a tight circle, every hand reaching forward. “This is a new beginning for us,” Richardson said, and the coach indeed looked new in his all-white attire. Clean, fresh, and young. Then he led the chant—
“Uno, dos, tres…México!”

 

With the reborn Richardson
guiding them, the undermanned Mexican team put on a valiant showing in Las Vegas in the summer of 2007, hoping to qualify for the Olympics for the first time in decades. They opened with an upset over bronze winner Puerto Rico, and it appeared as though Richardson might have to recall the Spanish expression for “Hollywood ending.”

The Mexicans beat Venezuela later, but stumbled in games against Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, and Panama. In the end, Mexico did not win enough to qualify for the Beijing Olympics. Despite these disappointments, the Mexican team earned a measure of respect against the overstocked Americans—a monstrous team good enough for a Wheaties box, a team that had been winning by an average of 47 points. In his pregame talk, USA (and Duke) coach Mike Krzyzewski lectured his young squad on the historical importance of Nolan Richardson.

Mexico converted time and again off fast breaks, often after made baskets, and in the third quarter Mexico pulled within a dozen. Richardson's team would run 100 points on the Americans, the most the USA team allowed the entire tournament. That wasn't nearly enough. In the end Mexico lost by 27 points.

 

“Nolan Richardson was one
of the best five coaches in the nation,” Don Haskins said shortly after the Mexican team was eliminated. “It's terrible that he's not coaching in college. I don't even care about that black coach stuff,” he added. “All I know is he was one hell of a coach.”

Don Haskins died in September of 2008. The funeral services were held at the Methodist church near downtown El Paso, where Richardson had hustled parking cars on Sundays during his college days. Within a week of Haskins's death, Richardson's first wife, Helen, who had been on dialysis for years, passed away as well.

 

A few months later,
Nolan Richardson was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City. Other inductees included Charles Barkley, Danny Manning, and television commentators Dick Vitale and Billy Packer.

Richardson and his wife, Rosario, arrived early, and were quickly surrounded by a crew of Razorback supporters and ex-players. Just then, there seemed to be some sort of disturbance; the Arkansas group turned back toward the street, with big eyes.

Frank Broyles was getting out of an SUV.

Broyles looks more like a basketball man than a football coach. He's well over six feet, long-armed, and moves gracefully. For a man in his eighties, he looks fantastic. Broyles had no official responsibility to be at Richardson's Hall of Fame night; he had retired from the university nearly a year earlier.

Richardson helped Rose remove her red leather coat. She said something to him about the surprise guest. Richardson didn't seem too worried, though. “Let's just enjoy ourselves,” he told her.

Several of Richardson's players were there. Ken Biley. Scotty Thurman. Corliss Williamson. Clint McDaniel. So was his attorney
in the lawsuit, John Walker. Former assistant coach Wayne Stehlik and longtime basketball secretary Terri Mercer were there, as was his old boss from the junior college, Sid Simpson, and Arkansas's new AD, Jeff Long.

The press conference was jammed, with close to five hundred fans and media in attendance. Each inductee was given five minutes to speak.

Richardson is still a powerful public speaker and has an incredible sense of drama. His voice didn't crescendo with the power of a storefront preacher this time. Instead, he sounded reflective. Richardson mentioned Ol' Mama, Sid Simpson, and Don Haskins. His public talks often refer to his inevitable reckoning some day with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates. This time he brought up somebody else.

“I noticed Frank Broyles is here,” Richardson said, “and I appreciate him coming.”

The Arkansas faithful in attendance saw it as a profound moment—Broyles took a small step; Richardson took one as well.

Scotty Thurman was surprised but not shocked. “They both know they could have handled it differently,” he says. “People who have a lot of power play those battles. Deep down they don't really like each other, but they respect each other.”

When all the inductees had spoken, master of ceremonies Reggie Minton invited anyone who wanted to interview or congratulate the inductees to come forward. Lines quickly formed in front of each honoree. Frank Broyles, who was sitting at the very back, got in line to shake hands with Nolan Richardson.

The next morning at breakfast, Richardson talked about his mixed emotions after both receiving a great honor and seeing Broyles. Richardson's tone had mellowed again. He admitted that he had noticed Broyles waiting patiently at the back of the line and said that Broyles was complimentary and congratulatory when he finally got his turn.

 

In February 2009, the
school finally honored the 1994 NCAA title team—and coach. It marked the fifteenth anniversary of their championship and would be Richardson's first time on campus since he was fired. The ten-year anniversary had come and gone without mention because of the ongoing lawsuit. Frank Broyles had retired a year earlier and been replaced by Jeff Long, who seemed genuinely interested in bringing Richardson back into the Razorback family.

Northwest Arkansas had been rocked earlier in the month by vicious ice storms. Trees were torn out at their roots, buildings damaged, and power lines were dead all over the Ozarks. The lack of power had hit Madison County, just south of Fayetteville, especially hard. With no phone service or electricity functioning in this mountainous part of the state, a hundred workers were sent from Pennsylvania to assist the local electric cooperative in restoring power. Nearly a third of the conscripted workers from the North were African-American.

Madison County is virtually all-white, and the ice storm exposed an archaic mindset that still lives on in Arkansas, only minutes from the state's university.

The Pennsylvania workers were harassed by gangs of white men driving around them, hollering racial epithets, waving Confederate flags and guns. The imported workers figured they'd better call the sheriff's office—not in Madison County, though. They phoned nearby Washington County instead.

Madison County was in the national news after Barack Obama was elected in November, as well. In Huntsville, the day after the election, the owners of the Faubus Motel removed the Stars and Stripes and raised the Confederate flag. American voters, the owners claimed, had turned their backs on the principles of our founding fathers. The motel was at one time owned by the former governor but no longer had any connection to the Faubus family.

Even after the phone and power lines had been repaired, the
mangled trees and busted branches remained all over northwest Arkansas.

The Razorback basketball team had won just a single SEC game going into this final home contest. It was their worst season since joining the SEC.

Ken Biley would have walked to the reunion from Kansas City, where he works for H&R Block. “I've had all kinds of excitement in my life,” says the surprise starter of the 1994 champs. “I've witnessed my wife giving birth to our kids. But my starting in that championship game, that honor did more for me than anyone could imagine.”

Today, Biley still needs a few more classes for his college diploma. He's continued to watch sports in the fifteen years since Arkansas won it all, especially championship games, looking for a story that would mirror his own. He has uncovered nothing even close. “This wasn't a fourth down gamble in football,” Biley says. “This was the NCAA championship on national TV. What would the critics say about Nolan if we had lost the game?”

The reunion weekend began with a Richardson staple—the team, along with wives, family, and friends, were invited to his home for a colossal barbecue. The players went out on the town afterward, but managed to be up the next day by nine a.m. for another typical Richardson event, a free basketball clinic at the Yvonne Richardson Community Center. The center, situated in Fayetteville's tiny traditional black neighborhood south of downtown, was opened in Yvonne's honor a few years after her death.

The players from the 1994 team were the guest coaches, but for the first few minutes of the clinic, they sloughed about and yawned, arms crossed and shirts untucked. Former Razorback assistant Wayne Stehlik tried to bring the kids and coaches to life with a warm-up drill, a simple relay race for the youngsters. Even that couldn't motivate the former NCAA champs, who were no longer subject to curfews to ensure a good night's sleep.

When the relay was just a minute old, Richardson appeared at the
entrance. The parents noticed, then some of the campers—none of whom were born yet when Richardson led the Razorbacks to the title. A couple of his former players noticed, too.