Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  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.

  Of course Richardson was winning, and that helped. The open-door policy meant Rose Richardson was always cooking, and young Yvonne was balancing trays of soft drinks. He was cognizant of this void in his earlier years and that plenty of his players came from fractured homes as well. The team quickly learned that Richardson’s dissatisfaction or anger on the practice court remained there.

  Although Richardson was emotionally closer to his players than the vast majority of coaches, there were occasions where he simply could not solve the riddle presented by some troublesome player.

  Such was the case with a chronically overweight Phoenix player named Bruce Vanley. Despite his weight, Vanley was a talented and effective college pivot who once outplayed North Carolina star Sam Perkins when Tulsa tamed the Tar Heels by 10 points. Regardless, Vanley’s weight remained a problem. Extra sprints. Jump-rope sessions. Laps. Diet restrictions. Lectures and threats. Nothing helped. It was a mystery to Richardson how an overweight player might remain fat within his frenetic system. Yet Richardson was fond of Vanley, and he made it clear that the pudgy post player, like everyone else, was always welcome at the Richardson home.

  One evening, Richardson went to scout a Tulsa high school prospect. By the end of the first quarter, the coach had seen enough. The player wasn’t fast enough for Tulsa, and Richardson slipped out a side door and headed home.

  When he shook open the back door, Bruce Vanley was sitting at his kitchen table. Below his round face was a pie tin. Half the apple pie was gone. Vanley looked up, his mouth full.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Richardson bellowed.

  “Hi, coach,” Vanley mumbled.

  Richardson sprang forward as if to toss the entire table aside. But Rosario appeared at Richardson’s hip, and she slid between the coach and the still-chewing Vanley. She pointed her finger at her husband. “This is my kitchen!” she said. “I’m in charge. I do what I want in here.”

  Vanley shoveled in another bite. Richardson reached for his own plate.

  Tulsa would slip a bit during the 1982–83 campaign, finishing 19-12 and earning a return to the NIT. That the players were now disappointed with the NIT bid revealed how far the program had come. Not out to prove themselves as they had been in 1981, Tulsa lost to TCU 64-62 in the first round.

  In 1983–84, Tulsa would finish 27-4. Although it was a few years before the three-point line was instituted, Tulsa averaged a blistering 90.8 points per game. The season marked a new high in excitement for Tulsa basketball, and the team’s scoring totals were by far the highest in their history.

  Tulsa’s fans took notice, too. Attendance under Nolan Richardson is still the high mark for the University of Tulsa. Many of the players who competed for Tulsa during those years allude to the era as a time when nothing could go wrong. The team’s success seemed pre-ordained in a way, as if they were destined at Richardson’s arrival to become one of the most improved teams in the nation.

  Only one thing was nagging at Richardson. Yvonne sometimes complained that she didn’t feel well. She was fatigued often, and if she had a fever it seemed forever until it came down.

  Richardson would finish his time at Tulsa with a home record of 80-6, and Tulsa would win the Missouri Valley Conference in 1984 and 1985. In Richardson’s five seasons, he boasted a record of 119-37, a rate of 76 percent.

  Just as impressive, and invigorating to the Tulsa faithful, black and white, was the way Richardson disposed of their non-league in-state rivals. Richardson would amass an astonishing record of 17-1 against Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Oral Roberts University. He was 10-0 against ORU, a team that had regularly qualified for the NCAA and NIT. That record of 17-1, maybe more than the NIT title and NCAA bids, is what solidified Richardson’s hero status in Tulsa.

  Still, Richardson’s legacy at Tulsa goes far beyond jump-starting a dormant program. While twenty-three coaches preceded Richardson at Tulsa, only one coach made the NCAA Tournament. There have been eight coaches since Nolan Richardson left Tulsa in 1985, and five of those coaches have qualified for the NCAA Tournament, a shocking turnaround even with the expanded field of sixty-five teams today. One other coach, Buzz Peterson, won the NIT in his first and only season before tripling his salary at Tennessee. The Tulsa job is now coveted nationally, and coaches like Tubby Smith and Bill Self, who would also go on to win NCAA titles, have gotten their starts in Tulsa.

  Just as important, Richardson paved the way for three African-American coaches: Tubby Smith, Steve Robinson, and Alvin “Pooh” Williamson, who took over briefly in 2005. Incredible progress has been made in Tulsa since the “nigger coach” complaints of 1980.

  In March of 1985, the Tulsa team was waiting to hear their matchup in the NCAA Tournament. When Richardson learned Tulsa would be in the same bracket as Don Haskins’s UTEP team, his feelings were mixed. Either Richardson or Haskins would be sent home from the NCAA playoffs after a single game.

  The next morning, Yvonne Richardson, who had not been feeling well since February, was diagnosed with leukemia. She was thirteen years old.

  A few weeks later, Arkansas coach Eddie Sutton announced he was leaving to accept the University of Kentucky job. Sutton, like Don Haskins, had played for Henry Iba. In an uncharacteristic display of frustration, Sutton said he would have crawled to Kentucky to be the coach there. Something or someone at the University of Arkansas, evidently, had angered him.

  Sutton had taken his 1978 Arkansas squad to the Final Four, the first time a Southwest Conference team earned a Final Four bid with black players.

  Arkansas athletics director Frank Broyles phoned to gauge Richardson’s interest in Arkansas. Broyles
played in Ed Beshara’s annual golf tournament, and had heard an earful from Tulsa fans about their black coach.

  Yet Richardson originally declined to be interviewed for the Arkansas job, citing his daughter’s diagnosis. Yvonne’s doctor was there in Tulsa, and that was that. But Yvonne reminded her father of his own complaint, that if he’d just had a better on-campus home court he might win the NCAA championship. She encouraged Richardson to at least listen to Arkansas. He had driven Yvonne to Fayetteville when Tulsa played them in football, and she was astounded by Arkansas’s rabid crowd and first-class facilities.

  Richardson, as it turned out, was not the top candidate. In a move indicating either the nerve or foolishness of Frank Broyles, the job was first offered to that year’s NCAA championship coach, Rollie Massimino of Villanova. When Massimino declined, Bobby Cremins and Gary Williams were approached, but none of the three white coaches had a genuine interest. “They all three used Broyles to get a raise at their own schools,” one Arkansas sportswriter says. Richardson was the last one standing, front and center, and Broyles offered him the job.

  The coach, though, told Yvonne he had decided he was going to stay at Tulsa.

  “No, Papi,” she said. “We’re going to Arkansas.”

  Richardson relented and accepted Broyles’s offer.

  “Two hours later,” the same sportswriter says, “Broyles was on a plane that went to Augusta National Golf Club. Augusta is an archaic and blind place,” he says, “but that’s how Frank was raised and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.” The home of the Masters Tournament was segregated at that time, and the irony of his Augusta trip after hiring a black coach was obvious to some Arkansas insiders.

  Richardson still mulls over his decision today. “Everything was there for Yvonne in Tulsa,” Richardson says. “Not just her doctors, but her friends, too.”

  Years later, Richardson would express remorse to the Tulsa World. Despite Yvonne’s encouragement, he wondered if the move might not have been the best one for her. “When you think about that, going back over things,” Richardson said, “you often ask yourself if you had to do it over again, would you do that? I would have probably not done it. No one was more important than my girl. That was a selfish decision…what I really wanted was her.”

  Haskins couldn’t recall much about beating Tulsa in the NCAA Tournament in 1985. He claimed not to have any recollection of setting the NCAA record with fifty-five free throws attempted, although Richardson could not forget that statistic.

  But Haskins clearly remembered when Frank Broyles phoned for a recommendation on Nolan Richardson a week later. “I told Nolan that I wouldn’t go to Arkansas,” Haskins claimed. “I asked Broyles, ‘If Nolan gets in trouble, are you going to stand behind him?’”

  Broyles’s answer, according to Haskins, was, “It’s a black man’s game.”

  “That’s all he kept saying,” Haskins said, “the entire phone conversation, ‘It’s a black man’s game.’ He never did answer my question about standing behind Nolan.”

  Yet no other large state school in the old Confederacy had ever chosen a black head coach in basketball, and it would be seventeen more years until a black man was picked as a football coach in the south. Regardless of Frank Broyles’s assessment of the state of college basketball, his decision to hire Richardson in 1985 was daring.

  SEVEN

  THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

  Arkansas joined the Union as a slave state in 1836 and seven years later prohibited the entrance of any new free men of color. In 1853, an editorial ran in the Arkansas State Gazette and Democrat. God, the newspaper said, had created Africans to be slaves. Slavery was both divinely sanctioned and legal.

  On the eve of the Civil War, 111,000 slaves lived in Arkansas, roughly a quarter of the state’s population. But three-quarters of Arkansas slaves lived in the southeast half of the state. That diagonal demarcation is still important today. The Mississippi floodplain to the southeast meant flat lands, big plantations, and slave owner-ship. The northwest half of Arkansas, with the Ozark and Ouchita Mountains, was less suited to cotton plantations. Northwest Arkansas was both whiter and poorer, with largely yeoman farmers scratching out a living.

  Just before the start of the war, the Arkansas legislature voted to expel the remaining free blacks, less than a thousand men. When the fighting began, many slaves fled for the North. A lot of them would return. Between five thousand and fifteen thousand black men from Arkansas fought for the Union before the conclusion of the war.

  In 1864, Arkansas’s “Organic Law” abolished slavery, repudiated secession, and forbade any law “prohibiting the education of any class.” Allowing freed slaves to be educated was a surprising development, but voting was another matter. No provisions were enacted for black male suffrage—not for literate black men, for those who owned property, or even for Union soldiers. And blacks not already living in Arkansas could not take up residence in the state, except in the unlikely case of an exception made by the U.S. government.

  Radical Reconstruction had hardly been unveiled before the balance of power shifted back to ex-Confederates. The Ku Klux Klan appeared in Arkansas in 1868, and a wave of lynchings followed, with the precise purpose of influencing elections. The sheriff in Monticello was kidnapped and tied to a black man before both men were shot. Then their corpses were posed, embracing, and left to rot, as a lesson.

  When Jim Crow segregation became official in the 1870s, the frequency of lynchings declined, although there would be periodic outbreaks, especially in the southern part of the state. Arkansas became a center of the Back to Africa movement, and Liberia was promoted within the black community as a fine place for freed slaves to live.

  Arkansas became a national joke (if you could bring yourself to overlook the lynchings) in 1869, with the opening of a popular theatrical production called The Arkansas Traveler. The protagonist was a rustic back-hills character with a muddy Southern accent and laconic wit, initiating the hillbilly stereotype. The production traveled around American stages, a success until it closed in 1899.

  The damage to the state’s reputation continued in the 1880s, when the widely published newspaper column called—surprise—“The Arkansas Traveler” featured more depictions of hillbillies dispensing wit and wisdom. Soon a magazine with the identical name and goal—making fun of Arkansas—was published and stayed in national circulation for over thirty years.

  Arkansans began to adopt attitudes of resentment and paranoia about the East. Of course, Arkansas could be its own worst enemy. The well-known journalist H. L. Mencken, in a lengthy article about the South, made a brief reference to Arkansas, writing that residents were “too stupid to see what was the matter with them.” The state’s General Assembly leaped into action, passing a resolution that demanded an apology from Mencken.

  In the resolution, they misspelled the author’s name.

  The worst post–Civil War racial episode in the state’s history occurred in 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas. Whites feared the organization of a black union there, and when a hundred sharecroppers attended a gathering of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, violence erupted. Five whites and hundreds of blacks were killed; in fact, the exact number of murdered blacks has never been known.

  Probably the most publicized lynching occurred in 1927, when John Carter was accused of assaulting a white woman. He was hung from a telephone pole, set on fire, dragged through the streets, then dumped at the corner of Ninth & Broadway in the heart of Little Rock’s black community.

  During the Great Depression, two western Arkansas residents created the fictional radio characters that became the Lum and Abner Show. NBC bought the program and moved the “rural philosophers” to Chicago, where the show aired for twenty-five years. The Arkansas hayseed backwoods image was now a firmly established nationwide joke.

  A few years later, Reader’s Digest published a note that was supposedly found on a bulletin board at a closed factory up North. The note read: “Pair
of shoes for sale; moving back to Arkansas.” Despite the lighthearted nature of some of the humor, concern about the state’s reputation was of growing importance.

  In 1953, Arkansas elected a governor with a progressive background, named Orval Faubus. One of Faubus’s best moves was to appoint a Rockefeller to oversee the state’s economy. In Winthrop Rockefeller’s first year, 1956, over five hundred businesses were convinced that Arkansas would be a great place to relocate.

  The University of Arkansas opened its doors in 1871 as the state’s land-grant institution. Just a year later, the university’s board of trustees announced the school was “open to all without regard to race, sex, or sect.”

  At least two freed slaves attended UA that year. One, James McGahee, is credited with being the first black student to enroll. (The story of McGahee’s enrollment was discovered in 2006 by a graduate student.) The university president taught McGahee himself, so as not to embarrass the teachers.

  In 1873, the Arkansas State Legislature authorized a university branch in Pine Bluff to be the school for African-Americans. Then, as the state’s politics shifted, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville began excluding blacks.

  That policy of exclusion was unchanged until Silas Hunt applied to the UA law school in 1948. Hunt was an army hero who had fought at the Battle of the Bulge, where he was badly wounded. (Hunt was not, however, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. No black soldier would be honored for decades.) Through a coordinated effort with Little Rock activist Wiley Brandt, Hunt was admitted to the UA School of Law in 1948. That same year, Edith Mae Irby became the first black to enroll at the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock.