Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  “Dad,” Clay said, “we need to hurry! That boy’s going to steal our golf ball.”

  Orville Henry stopped in his tracks and turned to his son. “You think he’s going to steal your ball because he’s black, don’t you?”

  When they got to their golf balls, the black boy, perhaps eight years of age, had passed. They were safe. But Henry called and waved the boy back.

  Henry asked the boy if he had ever hit a golf ball. The boy had not.

  “Would you like to try?” Henry pulled out his son’s five-iron. Then Henry emptied his son’s bag of two dozen balls.

  “I’m going to give you a lesson,” Orville Henry said to the boy—or perhaps both boys. Henry showed the black boy the grip, got him in a stable stance, and showed him the classic shoulder turn, and how to keep his eyes down. Fifteen minutes later, with balls sprayed everywhere, Orville Henry turned to his son.

  “Where’s your putting ball?” he said. “Let me have it.”

  Henry presented it to the boy. Then he turned back to his son and said, “Pick up all the balls.”

  Although Richardson had heard the story on several occasions, he always found it moving. He could have been that black kid cutting across the grass.

  One longtime Arkansas sportswriter says that Orville Henry may have been influenced in the same way Evans Dunne was at Tulsa. Although Henry wasn’t racist, he says, Henry would have certainly had an older mentality. “At one time, Orville had been asked not to return to Pine Bluff to speak, because of his off-color jokes,” this sportswriter says. “Later, Nolan sort of won Orville over. Also, Orville had married a very progressive woman, and that helped.”

  Richardson’s trouble with Frank Broyles began during that first season. Orville Henry was friends with both men, and could sometimes smooth over misunderstandings. More often, though, understanding was beyond Richardson’s and Broyles’s grasp.

  Broyles remembered Eddie Sutton’s slower style, and Richardson was radically different. “When Nolan was struggling,” one Arkansas sportswriter says, “Broyles was coming down to watch practice, trying to figure out if Nolan could really coach.”

  Once the disappointing first season concluded, Broyles told Richardson he wanted him to go visit Indiana coach Bob Knight. Broyles felt that Richardson could maybe learn how to teach defense and get his team under control.

  Richardson, who was already sensitive about his rabid pressing and Star Wars–paced offense being slandered, considered this an insult.

  Plenty of coaches still believed Don Haskins to be the best defensive coach in the nation. Knight himself had spent time with Haskins at the 1972 Olympic trials, where Haskins had been an assistant to Henry Iba. “Hell, Knight had all kinds of questions about Mr. Iba’s system,” Haskins recalled. “Knight could have gone to Nolan to learn my system. Nolan knew it as well as anyone.”

  Richardson declined to visit Indiana, although he admired Knight.

  “Fuck Bobby Knight,” Richardson told Broyles. “My daughter is dying and you’re bothering me?”

  Broyles’s pestering Richardson about coaching decisions was not unique to basketball. This was perhaps Broyles’s central contradiction—he found great coaches, then could not stop himself from second-guessing them.

  One October, football coach Ken Hatfield burst into Richardson’s office, fuming, waving a legal pad. “Damn!” Hatfield said. “Broyles is sending me plays to run. First he wants me to fire [assistant coach] Fred Goldsmith, and now he wants me to change my whole attack.”

  Richardson leaned forward in his chair and smiled at his assistant coaches.

  “Let me see those plays,” Richardson said. He still loved football and liked to talk the talk with Hatfield. Richardson studied the diagrams for a long minute, flipping back and forth, engrossed in the possibilities. Suddenly he crumpled the pages into a ball and lofted a left-handed shot at the wastebasket. It banked in.

  “That’s what I do with Broyles’s suggestions,” Richardson said.

  As Yvonne’s situation deteriorated, Richardson lost all patience with Broyles. It was one thing to make suggestions about scheduling, the media guide, or uniform styles. But it was quite another to suggest, by offering tactical advice, that Richardson didn’t know how to coach.

  “I think Frank Broyles had different expectations of black people,” Richardson says today. “Look where he came from—the Deep South, Georgia. His ancestors were slave owners, and he had a different view of the duties black people should have.”

  He finally blasted Broyles over what he believed was his boss’s lack of compassion. “You knew I had a sick daughter when you hired me!” he shouted at Broyles his first season. “Don’t expect me to ignore her.”

  Any gesture from Broyles seemed to irritate Richardson. “Broyles did offer Nolan to take a leave of absence with pay,” one longtime sportswriter says, “but Nolan misinterpreted that to mean Broyles wanted him gone.” Events that would unfold a year later would prove Richardson was right.

  Richardson was not the only person who might be baffled by Frank Broyles.

  Charles Prigmore was the executive vice chancellor at University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock during the 1970s. Prigmore, a former high school football coach, kept a close eye on Broyles, and sees him as a complex man, a charismatic leader who could border on arrogant and self-serving.

  One hot summer day in the early 1970s, Prigmore was in his office at the Medical Center when word began circulating that a Razorback football player, a lineman from South Arkansas, had arrived in an ambulance. He’d fallen out of a pickup truck, and it appeared there might be spinal cord damage. Prigmore hustled down to the neurology floor, where the player had been moved. He was shocked at what he found.

  With a whirlwind of commands, the neurology floor came under Frank Broyles’s jurisdiction. He lined up the staff as if they were freshmen at fall football tryouts. “Our chief of neurology,” Prigmore recalls, “was a quiet and unassuming guy, and he just stepped back when Broyles and his entourage came through. Broyles wasn’t trying to medically treat the kid, but he just took over, saying he needed this type of bed and that kind of room, and calling out orders to nurses.”

  An hour later, without asking anyone for permission, Broyles hosted a press conference in the neurology wing.

  The 1986–87 season was a bit better than Richardson’s first year, but he was preoccupied with Yvonne. Andy Stoglin would coach the team when Richardson couldn’t be in Fayetteville, and the alternating coaches certainly didn’t help the Razorbacks. They couldn’t get any momentum, although they beat Kansas, Ohio Sate, and Cal, and were 8-4 before the league season. Then Yvonne got worse.

  The back-and-forth trips to Tulsa and St. Francis Hospital, where Yvonne had been nearly full-time, were taking their toll on everyone. Transfusions, bone-marrow transplants, chemotherapy, a journey to the Mayo Clinic—nothing improved Yvonne’s situation. At one point, fungus appeared on her lung, and that worried the doctors. They had to break her rib to get to the lung.

  After the New Year, Yvonne was allowed home from the hospital. She slept between the coach and Rose. But her condition worsened, and she was rushed back to the hospital.

  Yvonne Richardson died of leukemia on January 22, 1987. She was fifteen years old.

  Richardson’s sense of isolation from the state, the town, the university, and the athletics department was overwhelming. He was so distraught that even when well-wishers tried to console him, he could barely bring himself to feel their sympathy.

  People close to Richardson believe Yvonne’s death altered his level of compassion. Watching his daughter slowly wither away gave him a more empathetic antenna for others in trouble. Ironically, though, after witnessing Yvonne’s resilience, Richardson pushed his players even harder. While he understood emotional anguish, seeing a healthy player who wouldn’t fight frustrated him.

  His empathy for the underdog was natural—who had had to overcome more obstacles? Starting out as the B
owie coach kept him close to his roots, and he identified with the scruffy Segundo Barrio kids as outsiders. The mindset continued as he became one of the few black college coaches in America, first at Snyder and then Tulsa—and finally as the only black coach in the Southwest Conference.

  Through Yvonne’s illness, Richardson says, Broyles never acknowledged that these were tough times for his family. That hurt Richardson deeply. Then it angered him, especially when he felt as though Broyles was pressuring him to turn his back on his family and focus on the Razorback team.

  A longtime employee of the University of Arkansas athletics department confirmed Broyles’s attitude, but thinks the bad relationship that had already surfaced had less to do with race than ego over the years.

  “Broyles forced out Ken Hatfield as football coach in 1989,” the employee says. Hatfield had amassed over a thousand yards in his playing career at Arkansas as a punt returner—his totals led the nation for two seasons—and he was a hero on Broyles’s best team, when he coached football for Arkansas, in 1964. Hatfield’s coaching record at Arkansas was 55-17, and he was widely regarded as one of the top football coaches in America.

  This employee made an appointment to visit Nolan after he lost Yvonne, although he didn’t know him well then. “I brought him a plaque that someone had given me,” he says. “It wasn’t a fancy gift, but it meant a lot to me and I wanted Nolan to have it.” The employee waited outside Richardson’s office, the gift in his lap, until the coach emerged. The employee presented the bereaved coach with the worn-out plaque and explained why it had given him strength over the years.

  Richardson was clearly touched. He wept, and thanked the man.

  “Nolan told me he felt like he was all alone, on an island,” he continues. “That really surprised me.”

  Less than a week later, this employee was at lunch with a table full of Arkansas football coaches when Frank Broyles approached and began openly disparaging Richardson’s coaching ability. “It just struck me as out of place,” the employee says. “I mean, Yvonne had just died, and he was telling us that [assistant coach] Andy Stoglin was a better coach, that Nolan couldn’t coach.”

  Going into their last home game in 1987, less than two months after Yvonne’s death, the Razorbacks were 6-7 in SWC play—not exactly where Richardson had envisioned being, after taking the job two seasons earlier. The opponent for the final game in Fayetteville was Baylor, which had beaten Arkansas in Waco. With only three games to go, Richardson badly needed a win, since he’d be going on the road for his final two league games. Baylor wasn’t a great team, but their coach was an Iba—Gene Iba, a nephew of Henry Iba—and that ball-control playing style sometimes meant trouble.

  Another concern to negotiate was Senior Night. The last home game for any college usually means a chance to honor the players in the final year, both stars and benchwarmers. The Razorbacks’ starting lineup that season did not include a single senior. Richardson’s predecessor, Eddie Sutton, had traditionally started as many seniors as he could in the last home game.

  Richardson did have one senior, a 6'7" Houston kid named Eric Poerschke, a holdover from the Sutton era. Poerschke was simply the wrong player for Richardson’s system, a bad fit stylistically, and he found himself on the bench his last season. It wasn’t that Poerschke was a bad player. He’d started a handful of games as a sophomore for Sutton. In Richardson’s first season, Poerschke led the Razorbacks in field goal percentage, and scored over fifty baskets for the year.

  “I realized I wasn’t really in his plans my senior year,” Poerschke says, “and that wasn’t a great thing to go through. But I knew that this was part of life, so I decided to be a good teammate and pull for our other guys.”

  The Razorbacks had shown plenty of promise before the holidays, but kept stumbling in SWC play. Poerschke says, “Pressure seemed to come when we started losing. But looking back it didn’t have much to do with winning and losing at all. It was Yvonne.” Now Poerschke can see that the season was incredibly difficult. “I’ve got three kids now, and you begin to realize—well, Nolan was at practice more than most people would have been. And being the first black coach, there was already overwhelming pressure.”

  Richardson respected Poerschke, a brilliant student who would graduate with a business degree, although he rarely played him as a senior. “He never complained, never hung his head,” Richardson says. “He worked and fought like he was one of our main guys.” Yet, because Richardson’s first team at Arkansas had sputtered, he was concerned about a late-season collapse again, so the idea of starting a benchwarmer in an important game made him skittish.

  Regardless, Poerschke was looking forward to Senior Night. His parents were coming from Houston to see his last game, and it would likely be his last chance to shine before the home fans.

  But Baylor controlled the tempo from the outset and wouldn’t let the Razorbacks run their fast break. Richardson’s assistants suggested giving Poerschke a try, but he didn’t seem to hear. Arkansas held on to win by four, but senior Eric Poerschke didn’t play a minute.

  “I wasn’t that upset,” Poerschke claims. “We won.”

  And that, Poerschke thought, was the end of that.

  Arkansas finished that 1986–87 season 8-8 in the SWC, and was awarded an NIT bid. Richardson was fiercely proud of his NIT championship team at Tulsa, so it annoyed him terribly when he began hearing Broyles refer to the NIT as “a loser’s tournament.”

  The NIT bid in 1987 offered an unusual matchup for the Razorbacks. They’d face Arkansas State, which they had not played since 1948.

  There’s a reason the big schools like Arkansas do not schedule the lower-profile in-state schools—a loss would be embarrassing. The afternoon of the game, the president of the university, Ray Thornton, stopped by with Frank Broyles to see their basketball coach. Thornton told Richardson, “Win, lose, or draw tonight, you are going to be our coach.” Then Thornton turned to Broyles, and, according to Richardson, said, “You understand that, Coach Broyles?”

  That evening the Arkansas State Indians got off to a fast start and built a 21-point lead in Fayetteville. Razorback fans squirmed. Their press wasn’t effective, and the game clearly meant more to Arkansas State. After a couple of steals and blocked shots, the momentum shifted, the Democrat-Gazette wrote, and the Razorbacks would rally, sneak by, and perhaps save Richardson’s job, just two years after he began.

  “Nolan has a sixth sense,” Mike Anderson says. “He has a feeling about who wants him to succeed and who does not.”

  Frank Broyles, Richardson believed, did not.

  The Democrat-Gazette must have had the same sense, writing later, “Arkansas Athletics Director Frank Broyles, spotted before the game, is nowhere to be seen afterward. There are rumors that Broyles was back at his office calling boosters to buy out Richardson. Years later, Broyles denies he was at the game, saying he was out of town.”

  According to Richardson, this attempted sabotage by Broyles indicated who was in charge in Fayetteville. It wasn’t the president, either. “Broyles ran the show,” he says. “They couldn’t touch him.”

  Arkansas lost their next NIT game at Nebraska. Richardson returned home believing what the Democrat-Gazette obviously believed, that Frank Broyles wanted him gone. The timing of this—with Yvonne recently deceased—was something the coach never got over. And for Richardson, slights or insults are permanent.

  “But that works both ways for Nolan,” says his longtime friend, El Paso judge Thomas Spieczny. “Any injustice sticks with him, even if it’s one that he caused accidentally.”

  Eric Poerschke, who never stripped off his warm-ups on Senior Night, concurs. “The odd thing is, when I see Nolan, he keeps apologizing for not playing me one game in 1987. I’ve gotten over it, but he can’t. It’s been twenty years.”

  NINE

  INVISIBLE MAN

  Twenty years might seem like a long time to some, but not to Frank Broyles. He served the University of Arkansas as f
ootball coach and then as director of athletics for a total of fifty years—nineteen seasons as football coach, thirty-five as AD, and four years as both. His football teams in the 1960s, along with the University of Texas, set a standard for excellence in the Southwest Conference. Arkansas was a member of the SWC from 1915 until 1991, and the only team in the league not from Texas.

  Broyles was born in 1924 and raised in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Like Nolan Richardson, he starred in football, basketball, and baseball. Richardson had done that in high school, but Broyles did it in college too. He was named All-SEC a half-dozen times at Georgia Tech, both as a football quarterback and a basketball star. Broyles’s Orange Bowl passing record stood for over fifty years. Of course, Broyles never competed against a single black player.

  The state of Georgia in that era set clear lines and values. In the 1940s, Georgia invested $142 per year for each white student, as opposed to $35 for each black student. Eugene Talmadge, who was Georgia’s governor for much of the 1930s and 1940s, said, “I like the nigger, but I like him in his place, and his place is at the back door with his hat in his hand.”

  Georgia passed laws to protect segregation before and after the 1954 Supreme Court decision. One candidate for governor in the mid-1950s wanted children to declare under oath whether they preferred an integrated school. If they did, they would be assigned to a mental institution.

  Frank Broyles returned to Georgia Tech to join its coaching staff as an assistant from 1951 until 1956. The governor of Georgia by then was Marvin Griffin, who realized the impact Jackie Robinson had a few years earlier and saw athletics as an important place to fight against racial equality.

  Broyles was the offensive backfield coach when Georgia Tech was invited to play in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day of 1956. Tech would face Pittsburgh, who had a single black player. Tech head coach Bobby Dodd got Governor Griffin’s permission to play the barely desegregated game, but a month before the contest, Griffin changed his mind, saying, “There is no more difference in compromising the integrity of race on the playing field than in doing so in the classroom. One break in the dike and the relentless seas will rush in and destroy us.” The governor ordered Georgia Tech to stay home.