Forty Minutes of Hell (9 page)

He was too late.

“Check out how these colors look on me!” Richardson said. “How about this? Blue with gold polka dots. Tulsa colors.”

“It's totally out of style,” Beshara moaned. “We're trying to get rid of those.”

But Richardson was grabbing the eye-catching colors by the handful. “I have to entertain, fill the gym with fans,” Richardson said, checking for sizes.

“Fill the gym, hoss?” Beshara said. “They only get a few thousand fans a game.”

Richardson turned serious. “You better get your tickets now,” he said.

“I used the polka dots as an attention-getter, to get myself and my team noticed,” Richardson says today. Soon the style—or anti-style—caught on, and a tacky Tulsa tradition was born. The students began wearing them as well, and the fans followed suit. Richardson wore polka dots his entire time with the Hurricane.

“Polka dots became contagious, like a citywide case of the measles,” sportswriter Jimmie Tramel said.

Ed Beshara said, “I sold polka-dot shirts like selling ice cream.”

In one mid-season contest, Richardson donned a tuxedo, and the team struggled. As he followed his team toward the locker room at halftime, fans implored him to change his outfit. The coach switched
to polka dots in the locker room. Tulsa won in overtime. Later, when he again tried to take a detour from the polka-dot path, his daughter, Yvonne, insisted he stick with them.

“That kind of talk—about hiring a nigger coach—wasn't unusual at all back then,” Beshara's son says today. “It was my dad who was unusual. He just didn't see color.”

Ed Beshara also didn't see basketball. Literally. He rarely went to games at Tulsa, even during Richardson's tenure. “Five games in five years,” his son says, quoting one of the few stats he recalls. “Dad wasn't friends with Nolan because he was a coach or famous. If Nolan decided to drive a bus instead of being a coach, they would have still been close.”

 

Tulsa easily won their
first two games under Richardson, but on December 4, 1980, Louisville was coming to Tulsa. Louisville was the defending NCAA champion and had four returning starters from the 1980 winners, as well as future NBA star Scooter McCray. It would be Richardson's first big test as a major college coach.

Louisville had swept through the NCAA Tournament field the previous year with a rip-and-run style, beating UCLA for the national title. They were one of the dominant programs in college basketball in the 1980s and an offensive model for what Richardson hoped to assemble: a fast-breaking team that ran its opponents into the ground. Richardson's pep talk to his Tulsa team was simple. The lowly Junior College Champions of Western Texas College were taking on the Division I champions of Louisville. Richardson repeatedly reminded his players of their underdog role, and this was Tulsa's first us-against-the-world challenge.

The fourth-largest crowd in school history went berserk as Tulsa's frantic full-court defense forced Louisville to commit an astonishing thirty-five turnovers. Tulsa won, 68-60.

Two days later, Tulsa beat the University of Oklahoma on its own court.

Tulsa fans were dizzy from excitement. “It was love at first dribble,” the
Tulsa World
wrote. Crosstown rival Oral Roberts University was next.

A miracle was unfolding, but not the one Reverend Roberts hoped for. Richardson won at ORU, 72-69.

The ensuing matchup was with the University of Georgia, and future NBA stars Dominique Wilkins and Vern Fleming. Lines formed at the Tulsa ticket office for the first time in decades. But the University of Georgia ended Tulsa's win streak, beating Tulsa by two.

That was okay with the coach—they were going to have to lose sometime. It was not, however, all right with Yvonne Richardson. The eight-year-old did not recall ever seeing her father lose a game. They'd been undefeated the previous year, and rarely lost a home game in Snyder before that. Her father had won forty-two games in a row. When was the last time she saw him lose—when she was five? Six? Richardson couldn't recall either, and Yvonne was disconsolate. She wept for hours.

 

The Tulsa Hurricane's quick
start won over Evans Dunne and his cohorts,

Richardson admits, “It was easy for the fans to say, ‘Hey, we've got something here.'” Indeed, Tulsa did have something.

Just before the conference season began, Tulsa beat Purdue, which had been in the Final Four the previous year. The Hurricane cracked the top ten for the first time in their history, and the town was up for grabs. Sportswriter Jimmie Tramel coined the phrase “Rollin' with Nolan,” and it stuck.

Polka dots were the most visible change in Tulsa, but something
more important was stirring below the surface. Basketball success and improved race relations went together like a screen and roll. In this case, historically white South Tulsa and predominantly black North Tulsa united over Hurricane hoops. For the first time in school history, attendance topped a hundred thousand for the season. Per-game crowds doubled, going from 3,700 a game to 7,300. Tulsa's townies began referring to the Hurricane team as “we.”

“A lot of good things happened in Tulsa that had nothing to do with basketball,” Richardson says. “Blacks and whites had something to talk about, something good to share.”

One fan told Richardson, “I remember going to work and nobody, and I mean black and white, said anything to each other. Now we have a common bond.”

“When we beat Louisville,” recalls Mike Anderson, “anybody could see that something special was brewing.” The Tulsa team and their coach were at the forefront of social change, both on campus and in town. “Nolan used to tell us all the time,” Anderson says, “there's just one race. The human race.”

In 1982, a Gannett News piece claimed that Tulsa University “…may be the number one social phenomenon in college basketball.”

Just before Christmas, Richardson would give the fans another gift. Tulsa would complete the in-state sweep by nudging out Oklahoma State.

Nobody seemed to mention the “nigger coach” anymore.

 

Tulsa finished the 1980–81
season with a record of 11-5 in the Missouri Valley Conference, good enough for a second-place finish. But they lost in the semifinals of the MVC Tournament and got passed over by the NCAA Tournament selection committee, despite their wins over Louisville, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Tulane, and Purdue in their nonconference schedule. In fact, Tulsa had finished the regular season at 20-6 against eleven teams that went on to postseason
play. It was perhaps the worst snub in NCAA Tournament history.

Only forty-eight teams were invited to the NCAA at that time, and Tulsa was given a bid to the NIT. Because of the sorry state of the Tulsa University facilities, the first few games were to be played on the Oral Roberts campus. Tulsa beat Pan American in their first game to set up a showdown with UTEP and Don Haskins. UTEP was just beginning to recover from three straight losing seasons, the worst of Haskins's career.

The game proved to be an emotionally conflicted one for Richardson, as well as a matchup of contrasting styles. He had, of course, totally abandoned Haskins's philosophy by this time, and it was important for him to have a good showing against his own coach. Richardson's resentment over being smothered on offense by Haskins's system had faded—nearly twenty years had passed, and Richardson was the only former UTEP player who was a major college coach. That made it easier for him to reconcile with Haskins's overbearing control.

With no shot clock at the time, UTEP began the game passing and cutting for a full minute. Tulsa countered by pressing and trapping everywhere, trying to coax UTEP into a faster pace. Tulsa took the lead with two minutes to go. A frantic rally led by an obscure UTEP sub wasn't enough, and Tulsa prevailed.

Tulsa beat South Alabama by one to earn a trip to Madison Square Garden and the semifinals.

New York City was a blur.

Tulsa beat West Virginia by two.

In the NIT championship, Tulsa topped Syracuse in overtime.

It marked the first time in the history of the game that a black coach won the NIT. Tulsa and Nolan Richardson were on the map.

What made the biggest impression on the coach in New York City happened during the cutting-down-the-net ceremony in the midst of the on-court celebration. Somebody grabbed Richardson, embraced him, and planted a kiss on his cheek. Richardson had been
getting hugs and handshakes, but no kisses. He turned to see who the hell had gotten his cheek wet.

It was Evans Dunne.

 

When the team arrived
home in Tulsa at 4:30 a.m., two thousand fans were crammed into the airport terminal to welcome them. University president, Paschal Twyman, pronounced Monday an official campus holiday and shut down the college. Governor George Nigh joined ten thousand other fans in downtown Tulsa's Bartlett Square for the victory party.

Richardson refers to that magical year as one of his favorite seasons. “It was maybe the most incredible feeling I've ever had as a basketball coach, seeing how much the city and community appreciated what we had accomplished.”

Ralph Brewster, however, was heartbroken in Lubbock, Texas.

He'd grown to tolerate the town, and he very much liked his teammates at Texas Tech. He'd overcome his initial homesickness. Then his patience and dedication had paid off with those two fine seasons in a row, when he averaged double figures as a sophomore and junior. Richardson had steered him to the right place, he believed, because he was a success at Tech.

He'd celebrated privately when Richardson had won the national junior college championship at Western Texas, and he nearly phoned to ask if he could join the guys and transfer to Tulsa. But Brewster knew he'd have some hard explaining to do with his Red Raider teammates. Plus, he'd have to sit out a full year to play just one final season. So he'd stuck around at Tech, anticipating a landmark senior season.

That great season didn't happen. Brewster was shocked to find himself on the bench. Richardson's raucous ride with his crew of El Paso players made him feel worse. Why had Coach Gerald Myers thought the best place for his experienced insider was on the sideline?

Brewster's senior year was a disaster. He was healthy, playing in twenty-seven games that final year, but his playing time was chopped in half, and thus his point totals. He scored only 5.7 points per game. His rebounding also fell off, to 4.1 a game. Brewster was humiliated. He had willingly bought into the Bowie backroom deal, and he'd helped launch Nolan Richardson's career, but he had somehow again gotten caught up in the machinations of college basketball.

With Brewster on the bench, Tech would stumble to its worst record during his four years there, finishing 15-13. “I didn't even understand what had happened,” Brewster says, “until years later.”

When his college days ended, Brewster played professionally in Mexico, Venezuela, the Philippines, and the minor league CBA. After his professional playing career was through, he became a businessman, traveling all over Texas. Once, he phoned Rob Evans, his old assistant coach, when he had an appointment in Lubbock, and suggested getting together. Evans made a tearful confession to Brewster that night, saying that Myers had grown to despise Nolan Richardson and took it out on Brewster. Brewster still didn't get it—why wouldn't Myers like Richardson?

Gerald Myers believed his recommendation had landed Richardson the job at Western Texas and that there should be another payback—signing Brewster out of high school was not enough. “My coaches felt Nolan
owed
Tech,” Brewster says. When Myers learned that Richardson was bringing his best players with him to Tulsa—especially Paul Pressey—he took out his frustrations on Brewster. “Whenever he saw me, he saw Nolan Richardson,” Brewster says. “Myers suppressed it all, he never said it out loud, but it wasn't the same for me. After that, he was just anti-Ralph.”

Brewster remains perplexed by the irony. Tech had essentially
taught
Nolan Richardson to use his best player to advance his career, yet when Richardson took the next step, going to Tulsa, the Tech coach was angry.

Brewster's Tech teammate and El Paso pal, Dwight Williams,
says the contrast in styles between Myers and Richardson was stark, and that made things more difficult for Brewster. “I think Gerald Myers epitomizes college basketball,” Williams says. “From the top down, it is a business. But from the bottom up, from the player's point of view, it's a game. Somewhere in the middle you're supposed to meet, but we never got that from Coach Myers.” Richardson was different, Williams says. “He will see a man who played at Bowie forty years ago, and know his name.”

To this day, Brewster thinks about his decision to attend Tech. “There's a thin line between resentment and wondering
what if
,” he says. “Because in truth, the way my career turned out was not to my liking at all. In my adolescent mind, I wondered during that senior season, ‘Why did I let Nolan talk me into Tech?'”

 

Winning the NIT meant
the Tulsa program could finally upgrade. Before Richardson arrived, the basketball office didn't employ a full-time secretary; former coach Jim King's wife would volunteer a few days a week. Richardson had only $36,000 to divide among his entire coaching staff his first season. After the big win in New York City, Richardson insisted on raises for his assistants.

The next season, Richardson's team didn't take any chances. They swept through the MVC Tournament by an average margin of 16 points, earning the automatic berth to the NCAA. It was only the second trip to the NCAA in the school's history. Tulsa lost to the University of Houston team, which featured Akeem Olajuwon, 78-74.

 

Richardson was so confident
in his coaching skills that the quick success at Tulsa came as no surprise to him. Besides the breakneck pace his teams played at, there was something else setting Richardson apart. He wanted his players around his home as much as they desired.
This could mean a formal dinner hosting a recruit, a birthday celebration, or simply the guys flopping around his TV room and watching the game of the week, the World Series or the Super Bowl. The total immersion with the players was in complete contrast to most coaches—including Don Haskins—who quickly grew weary of their kids and wanted nothing to do with them once practices were over.