The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

“It wasn’t until later on,” Nevil Shed said, “that we started realizing that this team had opened the doors, not just for blacks but for all minorities, to have an opportunity to play ball at some of the top-notch schools around the United States. What was so beautiful about it was that the very next year things began to open up.”

  Eventually even Adolph Rupp would recruit a black player. But he was a sore loser. “I hated to see those boys from Texas Western win it,” he told the press after the game. “Not because of race or anything like that, but because of the type of recruiting it represents.” He hinted that several of Haskins’ players had done sinister deeds in the past and that Texas Western had practiced recruiting most foul. A number of sportswriters fell in behind him.

  “The title really should belong to Kentucky…” wrote an Iowa columnist. “I have heard that one of the top Texas Western players had been charged with a major crime at one time.” Since Texas Western was an independent, he wrote, they “can do about as they please in recruiting. They can take rejects from other schools and make them immediately eligible. A school with such low ethics should not be allowed to compete for the national title. Rather it should be in the NBA playoffs.”

  Rupp’s hometown newspaper editorialized that “there is no disgrace in losing to a team such as was assembled by Texas Western after a nationwide search for talent that somehow escaped the recruiters for the Harlem Globetrotters.”

  As Rupp got older, his loss to Texas Western seemed to gnaw more and more exquisitely, and his descriptions of his villainous opponents grew more and more lurid. In a 1975 interview he said the biggest disappointment of his long career had been losing to “all those ineligible players.”

  “It wasn’t even as close as the score indicates,” Orsten Artis said. “At one point we led by 17. Our easiest games in that tournament were the first one, against Oklahoma City, and the last one, against Kentucky.”

  David Lattin had transferred from Tennessee State University, not the state prison, and Bobby Joe Hill and a player on the Texas Western freshman team—not the championship squad—had transferred from Burlington, Iowa, Junior College. There were no ineligible players on the team. Texas Western had never been suspended by the NCAA for any reason. Indeed, the NCAA had investigated the allegations after the tournament and had given the school a clean bill of health.

  “I didn’t like us being called misfits, criminals and convicts,” Nevil Shed said at the team’s reunion. “My mother and father worked hard to bring me up, to make sure that I represented myself in a well-mannered attitude. The people who did that to us didn’t really know us. If they had taken the time to look into what ‘those seven blacks’ were all about, they would have found some pretty impressive guys.”

  Rupp’s vilifications dogged Haskins for years. “I would go to a coaching clinic,” he said, “and somebody would come up to me and ask, ‘Did you really get that guy out of the pen?’”

  But the most serious damage was done in 1968, when Sports Illustrated published a five-part series entitled The Black Athlete. Part 3, the centerpiece of the series, entitled In An Alien World, was devoted entirely to the University of Texas at El Paso (the name of the school had been changed a year earlier) and its alleged exploitation of its black athletes, including the 1966 basketball champions.

  “One might suppose that a school which has so thoroughly and actively exploited black athletes would be breaking itself in half to give them something in return, both in appreciation for the achievements of the past and to assure a steady flow of black athletes in the future,” wrote its author, Jack Olsen. “One might think that UTEP, with its famed Negro basketball players, its Negro football stars and its predominantly Negro track team would be determined to give its black athletes the very squarest of square deals. But the Negroes on the campus insist this is not the case—far from it.”

  Olsen went on to describe UTEP and El Paso as a kind of racist hell in which the athletes labored in virtual slavery. The article outraged almost everyone connected with the university. Perhaps El Paso and UTEP hadn’t achieved a racial paradise during the turbulent ‘60s, but, they contended, they had come closer than much of the country and many of its universities.

  The athletes said that statements attributed to them in the article had been taken out of context and twisted. A flurry of rebuttal whirled through the local press. UTEP President Joseph Smiley ordered an internal investigation of the school’s intercollegiate athletic programs. The investigating committee found no major racial injustices, but recommended a few small reforms, most of them having nothing to do with race.

  Olsen and Sports Illustrated stood by their article, however, and that made recruiting very hard for Haskins. “Every coach in the country had a copy of that article in his back pocket,” he said. “And whenever a black player would indicate an interest in UTEP, they would yank it out and say, ‘You don’t want to go to El Paso. It’s a horrible place.’”

  In 1975, Neil D. Issacs, a college professor, published a book called All the Moves: A History of College Basketball. Relying entirely on Olsen’s article as his source, he cited the 1966 Texas Western team as the best example of the abuse of black athletes in America. “There was little in the way of social rewards for them in El Paso,” he wrote, “none of them was ever awarded a degree from Texas Western, and they feel that they have lived out the full meaning of exploitation.”

  A year later, one of America’s more famous authors took up the tune, adding a few licks of his own. In Sports in America, James A. Michener described the 1966 Miners as “a bunch of loose-jointed ragamuffins” who had been “conscripted” to play basketball in El Paso.

  “The El Paso story is one of the most wretched in the history of American sports,” he wrote. “… I have often thought how much luckier the white players were under Coach Adolph Rupp. He looked after his players; they had a shot at a real education; and they were secure within the traditions of their university, their community and their state. They may have lost the playoff, but they were the winners in every other respect, and their black opponents from El Paso were losers.”

  Years before Michener’s book was published, eight of the 1966 squad—the five whites plus Nevil Shed, Harry Flournoy and Willie Cager—had received their degrees at UTEP. David Lattin had left early because he was drafted by the Phoenix Suns. “He had a year of eligibility left, but I encouraged him to go,” Haskins said. “There was a lot of money in it for him, and I kept thinking, ‘What if he plays another season for me and ruins a knee or something?’” The remaining three players—Orsten Artis, Bobby Joe Hill and Willie Worsley—had amassed between 78 and 115 semester hours of credit before they dropped out of school to take jobs. Worsley later graduated from the State University of New York.

  Michener, who often brags of the amount of research that goes into his massive books, later admitted in a letter to Dr. Mimi Gladstein, a UTEP English professor, that his investigation of the 1966 Miners had gone no farther than the Sports Illustrated article. He had consulted neither Haskins nor the players nor even Olsen.

  Haskins wanted to sue Michener for libel, but his lawyer talked him out of it. He didn’t have the resources, the lawyer said, to fight the author and his publisher, Random House, in the courts.

  “I had no fun after winning the national championship,” Haskins said.

  He’s one of the winningest coaches in the game. During his 30 seasons at Texas Western/UTEP his teams have won 579 games and lost 256. Six of his teams have won the Western Athletic Conference championship, five have played in the National Invitational Tournament, and 13 in the NCAA tournament. Crippled by injuries and the scholastic ineligibility of a key player, the Miners didn’t make it to the NCAA this year. It was the first time in eight years that they weren’t there.

  Today Nevil Shed is the director of intramural athletics at the University of Texas at San Antonio; David Lattin is in public relations in Houston; Harry Flournoy is in sales for a baking company in Califo
rnia; Bobby Joe Hill is senior buyer for El Paso Natural Gas in El Paso; Dick Myers is vice president of a clothing manufacturing company in Florida; David Palacio is vice president of Columbia Records in California; Orsten Artis is a detective on the Gary, Ind., police force; the others—Jerry Armstrong, Louis Baudoin, Willie Cager, Togo Railey and Willie Worsley—are teachers and school administrators in Texas, Missouri, New Mexico and New York state.

  On the day of the 1991 Miners’ last home game and the close of Haskins’ 30th season at UTEP, fans by the hundreds would stand in line at El Paso’s big shopping malls to have the 1966 champions autograph posters, pictures, pennants and basketballs. Later, during halftime of UTEP’s game with New Mexico, the crowd would rise to its feet and cheer the aging heroes once more, and their school would present them with replicas of their old jerseys.

  First, though, they would talk deep into the night, reliving their days of glory.

  “We won some games while you guys were here,” Coach Haskins told them, “but the thing that makes me the happiest is that each and every one of you has turned out to be a fine citizen and a good person and all of you are doing well. That’s the most important thing of all.”

  He’s in the twilight of his career, he said. He has mellowed, he said, and is no longer bitter. It’s finally sweet to have won.

  “It was all a long time ago,” he said. “A lot of bridges have been crossed. The entire country has come a long way in the way people think. Tomorrow night, I’m going to start my best five, regardless. And that’s what I was doing then.”

  March 1991

  BECAUSE IT’S STILL HERE

  For more than 100 years, the people who live in the Davis Mountains have gone about their business - which is ranching - with little interference from the world beyond their horizon. And that’s the way they like life to be. Lately, however, the teeming world outside has begun to encroach on them. People in cities far away see the vast open as the perfect place to dump their garbage, sewage and nuclear waste. And the only city in the region, El Paso, is casting a covetous eye upon the only resource the ranchers have - their water. The city of El Paso now owns Ryan Flat and its water. What it will do with it is anybody’s guess.

  EVEN BEFORE SO MANY PEOPLE LIVED IN THE FAR WESTERN CORNER OF the Trans-Pecos desert, water was scarce. El Paso City Ordinance No. 1, passed at the first meeting of the first City Council in 1873, made it a crime to bathe in the only municipal water supply, an irrigation ditch.

  Since then, as El Paso has grown into a city of more than half a million residents and the population of Ciudad Juarez, its sister village across the Rio Grande, has burgeoned to more than a million, the scarcity has constantly worsened.

  “El Paso has been mining ground water—taking more out of the ground than rainfall can replace—since 1917,” said Ed Archuleta, general manager of El Paso Water Utilities. “In the Hueco Bolson, where we get 65 percent of the water we use, we’re now taking water out 20 times faster than nature can recharge it.”

  The Census Bureau estimates that El Paso will be a city of 1.1 million by the year 2040. How large Juarez, which gets its water from the same underground source, will be by that time is beyond anyone’s guess.

  And since the water scarcity is growing even faster than the metropolitan area, it has begun to inspire fear and worry in people far beyond the city limits, among the ranches and small towns that share the vast, arid Trans-Pecos with Texas’ fourth-largest city. El Paso is casting a covetous eye in their direction.

  In the city, which gets only seven or eight inches of rainfall in a normal year, the problem has become inescapable. Billboards urge residents to conserve, and water makes Page One of the morning paper every day: “Water odd,” the headline reads on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. “Houses with addresses ending in odd numbers may water today, except from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.” Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, the headline reads: “Water even.”

  Environmental enforcement officers patrol the streets looking for violators. And, under a new water conservation ordinance, residents who are caught watering their yards on the wrong day—or hosing down the driveway, or washing the car without a bucket or a shut-off nozzle on the hose—may be fined $50 to $500. The rules are permanent and are enforced year-round.

  Despite the conservation efforts, it’s estimated that the Hueco Bolson will be sucked dry in 35 years, and El Paso is forced to look elsewhere for new sources of supply. The city’s Water Resource Management Plan, in which problems and possible solutions over the next 50 years are projected, calls for greatly increased use of water from the Rio Grande and more recycling of waste water, which would be purified to drinking-water standards and then pumped back into the ground to recharge the Hueco Bolson.

  But it’s the city’s search for new water outside El Paso County that’s causing anger and unease in the sparsely populated counties of the Trans-Pecos.

  “The fear is, El Paso is water-starved and it’s getting desperate,” said Jeff Davis County Bob Dillard in Fort Davis. “The fear is, they’re coming to get our water, and the lives of the people here will mean nothing to them. The fear is that they’ll drink the cup, and when it’s empty they’ll go find some more somewhere else.”

  El Paso spent $8 million and 10 years suing the state of New Mexico for the right to drill for water in the nearby Mesilla Bolson and pipe it across the state line. When the suit failed, the city turned its efforts toward its weaker—and almost equally dry—neighbors in Texas.

  Last month, the city’s Public Service Board, parent body of El Paso Water Utilities, announced a contingency contract for the $2 million purchase of a 25,000-acre farm 150 miles from the city in Jeff Davis and Presidio counties.

  Under the land in the Ryan Aquifer, the board believes, is enough water to supply 80 million gallons a day to El Paso for 17 years.

  Under its contract with the seller, Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., the Public Service Board will drill several test wells on Antelope Valley Farms, as the tract is called, to determine whether its estimates of the quality and quantity of the water are accurate. If they are, the sale will be completed.

  “What scares people here is that El Paso has put that year amount on it,” Judge Dillard said. “They say it’s a 17-year supply. The question is: What happens after the 17 years? Once the water is gone, what do we have left?”

  The Ryan Aquifer is believed to be a basin of ice age water trapped deep below the surface of the earth. It extends under a sizable portion of western Jeff Davis and northern Presidio counties and is the only source of water for the small town of Valentine, near the Jeff Davis-Presidio county line, and a number of ranches in the mountains and flats. Its recharge rate, from an average rainfall of about 14 inches a year, is very low, estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to be about 5,800 acre-feet annually.

  If El Paso were to pump the projected 80 million gallons a day, the annual recharge would provide the city only a 23-day supply of water. After that, the pumps would be mining water, and the water table would begin dropping.

  Antelope Valley Farms has been a worry to area residents ever since the late 1970s, when Olsen Farms, a subsidiary of Connecticut General, bought the acreage and converted it from grazing land to irrigated crop land.

  Albert Miller, a neighboring rancher who also operates the municipal water system for Valentine, a town of about 200, believes the operation has affected the water table significantly during periods of heavy irrigation, especially in years of little rainfall.

  “In 1989, we had only 6½ inches of rain at the ranch,” he said. “And Antelope Valley was pumping real hard. The pump on Valentine’s city well started pumping air. I had to lower it almost 100 feet to get water.”

  Indeed, it was the high cost of pulling water from hundreds of feet within the earth with diesel-powered pumps, Mr. Miller said, that made Antelope Valley’s crops of beans, corn, wheat and milo unprofitable. Eventually the operation went bankrupt, and Connecticut General has bee
n trying to rid itself of the property for years.

  “Some people in the area think El Paso buying the land is better than the alternative,” Judge Dillard said. “It was rumored that the city of Houston or the state of New Jersey was interested in buying the land and using it as a place to dispose of their sewer sludge. But a lot of the ranchers, especially the younger ones, are just as alarmed at what El Paso might do.”

  “I’m really apprehensive,” said Chile Ridley, whose family has ranched across the highway from the Antelope Valley site for generations. “Are all of us out here going to have to deepen our wells in order to run livestock on our land and get drinking water? What about all the wildlife that’s dependent on our windmills and stock tanks?

  “Is El Paso going to suck the water away from Valentine? Will it affect Maria? What will it do to the springs in the Davis Mountains? What will it do to the springs below the rimrock, down near the river? Nobody has done a study of the effects that much pumping is likely to have on the land or on us. We’re all extremely concerned. Without water, our land’s not worth a flip.”

  Although Trans-Pecos ranchers tend to be highly independent folk who loathe government regulation and bureaucracy, Mr. Miller, Mr. Ridley, and others have asked the officials of their counties to investigate the possibility of forming an underground water conservation district in hopes that it could regulate and limit the amount of water El Paso could remove from the ground.

  “You’ve got a willing seller and a willing buyer here,” Mr. Ridley said. “You’ve got private property rights. You’ve got to respect that. But you’re talking about a resource that we have conserved over the years and treated with respect, which they haven’t done in El Paso. And the reason they want it is because it’s still here. So we’re in a battle.”

  Jeff Davis County Attorney Ann Barker said dozens of residents of all parts of the Davis Mountains area have phoned her and even come to her door to express their worry. But their legal options appear bleak so far.