Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  In a demonstration more indicative of Tech students’ love of football than equal opportunity for Negroes, close to two thousand students marched to the capitol building and burned Griffin in effigy. After the Georgia Tech Board of Trustees approved the trip, Governor Griffin backed down. Tech won the game—their fifth bowl game victory in a row—but the leading rusher was Pitt’s black star, Bobby Grier.

  In 1957, on the heels of Georgia Tech’s success, Broyles was named the head football coach at University of Missouri.

  Broyles only coached Missouri for one season before accepting the job at Arkansas. Most interesting about his time at Missouri is the fact that on his watch, his football staff signed the first two black players in school history—Norris Stevenson and Mel West. The pair would star on the best teams in University of Missouri history.

  Norris Stevenson knew the town of Columbia was segregated before he arrived in 1957. “For one semester I was the only black player,” he says, “and in retrospect, the coaches weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea.”

  Stevenson was joined by Mel West the following semester. “This was another time,” Stevenson insists. “You’d have to move everybody, physically and emotionally, to understand it. You’d have to recreate the atmosphere, otherwise things we said today would make no sense. We were kids, and half of us didn’t know who Martin Luther King was.”

  When Broyles announced he was leaving for Arkansas after their freshman year, Stevenson and West stuck around to help Missouri to three fine football seasons. The University of Arkansas had never had a black athlete in any sport.

  Frank Broyles had a personal connection to the Little Rock Central crisis of 1957. One of the first moves he made at Arkansas was to lure a man named Wilson Matthews away from his job coaching Central High School to become the Razorbacks’ assistant coach.

  Playing a whites-only schedule, Wilson Matthews led Central High School to ten state championships in his eleven years there. Matthews had an interesting view of what caused the problems at Central. In Terry Frei’s book about the showdown between the Texas and Arkansas football teams of 1969, Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming, Matthews is quoted as saying, “…if a bunch of damn soldiers hadn’t showed up and got a crowd around, there wouldn’t have been any problems.” Whether Matthews meant the Arkansas National Guard, who held bayonets on black girls, or the 101st Airborne Division, who opened the school to them, is unclear.

  Matthews helped Broyles with the Razorbacks from 1958 to 1968 and was known as the most influential coach on Broyles’s staff. A passionate and foul-mouthed motivator, Matthews assumed head coaching duties for the freshman team, the “Shoats,” in 1969. Later, he took over the conditioning programs, then moved into athletics administration soon after. He worked as an assistant athletics director until 1992. Because he moved to administration, Matthews never coached a varsity black athlete at the University of Arkansas.

  Broyles’s debut at Arkansas in 1958 began badly—he lost his first six games in a row. The Razorbacks recovered by winning their last four. They had phenomenal success after that rocky start, especially in the 1960s.

  In 1964, Broyles’s all-white squad roared through the season undefeated at 11-0. But Arkansas faced only four teams with winning records, so both UPI and AP, the biggest polls, declared Alabama national champs before the bowl games were played, as was their custom at that time.

  Alabama devalued that decision by losing to Texas in the Orange Bowl. Then Arkansas beat Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl, 10-7. (Nebraska was the only team Arkansas faced that year that had black players.) Two smaller polls, the Football Writers Association of America and the Helms Foundation, declared the Razorbacks national champions. Today, both Arkansas and Alabama claim the national championship of 1964.

  That same year, a black student named Robert Whitfield won a discrimination lawsuit against UA campus housing, and the federal ruling forced the dormitories to be open to all without regard to race. Whitfield and Joanna Edwards became the first two blacks at the University of Arkansas to be admitted to previously segregated dormitories.

  Broyles’s all-white 1969 team lost a heartbreaker to Texas in the still-segregated contest called “The Game of the Century” by some. The loss likely cost Arkansas a unanimous national title.

  Over his career, Broyles’s teams won over 70 percent of their games. His Razorbacks appeared in ten bowl games, usually the Cotton Bowl or Sugar Bowl. He would coach only two losing teams in his nineteen years. Broyles’s time at Arkansas straddled two eras—the strictly segregated Southwest Conference of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the quickly integrating teams of the early 1970s.

  The black football phenoms of the 1950s and 1960s college scene include an impressive roster of stars who later earned places in the NFL’s Hall of Fame: Jim Brown, Gale Sayers, “Deacon” Jones, Willie Davis, Lenny Moore, Roosevelt Brown, Carl Eller, Herb Adderly, Emerson Boozer, Ollie Matson, Dick “Night Train” Lane, and Paul Warfield.

  The closest NFL team to Arkansas, the St. Louis Cardinals, featured black Texas native Johnny Roland—who, of course, had to leave Texas to play major college football.

  The best black players from Arkansas flaunted their talent before Frank Broyles could even get a foothold in Fayetteville. Bobby Mitchell, Willie Davis, and Elijah Pitts were Arkansas natives who became NFL stars despite being ignored by the state university in the 1950s. Other black players from the state, such as Jim Pace and Sidney Williams, had been all-conference players in the Big Ten.

  Any objective observer could figure out that black kids deserved a chance based on ability alone. Few states have as impressive a tradition of black football players, but with mostly segregated high schools and a separate athletics association for the Negro schools, it was rare that whites competed on the same field as black kids in Arkansas.

  Only the biggest Negro schools competed in football, because of the equipment needed to field a team. There might be thirty schools competing for the state’s Negro championship in any one year, but there were generally eight well-established high school teams. Those teams often had to leave the state to play games. “Separate but equal” was a joke, with the state of Arkansas spending as much as three times more on educating white kids as it did on black kids in some counties. It wasn’t until the 1970s that all the black schools were accepted into the Arkansas Activities Association, the governing body of high school sports in the state.

  Broyles would have had to go just a few hundred yards to find a great black player to desegregate his team. Fayetteville High School had a star football player named William “Bull” Hayes, who graduated a few months after Broyles arrived in 1958. Bull Hayes was the first black athlete in the state of Arkansas to play against white competition in high school.

  Hayes had to deal with more than the usual high school hassles. When the Fayetteville team bused into Harrison for a game, an effigy of a black man was hanging from a tree in the town square. According to the Democrat-Gazette, Harrison star Don Branison said his team was told to stop Bull Hayes no matter what it took. “We tried to kill him…. We tried to hurt him real bad,” Branison said.

  Fayetteville beat Harrison anyway. Branison was awarded a scholarship to the University of Arkansas the following year.

  Bull Hayes had offers from Oklahoma State and Tulsa, where Arkansas played regularly. To avoid the embarrassment of a local black player making them look bad, the Arkansas staff arranged a full ride to University of Nebraska for Bull Hayes.

  TEN

  THE EDGE OF CAMPUS

  Richardson’s task as the first black coach in the old Confederacy was not fully appreciated, and most newsmen didn’t see the significance. “They didn’t understand that this was another world,” TV journalist Steve Narisi says, “this was the Southwest Conference.” The fact that Richardson didn’t have the instant success he did in Tulsa compounded the trouble.

  Yvonne’s decline, of all things, caused Richardson problems with the fans and Broyles. “
He’d miss games with Yvonne sick,” Narisi says, “and people would get down on him for that. From the very early days Richardson was on the wrong side of some of the fans. I don’t think Nolan ever got over that. If he was a white coach under those circumstances, the fans and media would have been far more patient.”

  Another source of trouble was the speed at which Richardson was pushing his team to play. Wally Hall, whose Democrat-Gazette columns irritated Richardson for years, says, “I will be the first to admit that I didn’t embrace Nolan’s style. He was a pioneer, and it took me two years to appreciate that.” Hall says both the media and the fans had grown accustomed to the Iba-influenced style with which Eddie Sutton succeeded.

  With two major newspapers in Little Rock, numerous television stations, and his first teams spinning their wheels, Richardson was confronted with a different media presence than that in Tulsa. Richardson’s relationship with Arkansas journalists was complicated. During his first few years in Arkansas, there were two statewide papers, the Democrat as well as the Gazette. An aggressive battle for readership meant inflammatory articles were sometimes the norm. John Robert Starr was especially critical of Richardson, and when the Razorbacks made dramatic improvements over the years, Starr took credit for that in print, claiming his mean-spirited attacks made Richardson a better coach. In the late 1980s, the papers merged, but Starr continued his critiques.

  The games at Arkansas brought a surprising yet familiar face on a regular basis—Tulsa clothier Ed Beshara, who had rarely attended games at TU.

  Richardson had talked Beshara into a road trip to attend a Tulsa game at West Texas State in the early 1980s and invited him to sit on the bench. With the score tied, and just seconds remaining, Richardson took a time-out. As he started to set the play, he became aware of a commotion in his own huddle. It was Ed Beshara, jumping around, red-faced, yelling, “Get the ball to Ricky Ross!”

  Ross hit the winning shot moments later. After that, though, Richardson figured Beshara was too excitable.

  Nevertheless, Richardson was comforted to see Beshara appear at every home game in his early days at Arkansas. With Yvonne dying and the team struggling, Beshara was more than a fan. Richardson loved and trusted him.

  “Suddenly you’re a real supporter,” Richardson joked. “Why didn’t you come to the games at Tulsa when it was ten minutes away?”

  Beshara answered straight away. “You didn’t need me at Tulsa. You need me here at Arkansas, hoss.”

  “Everyone deals with death in different ways,” Mike Anderson says. “Rose’s job, like a lot of mothers’ jobs, was to raise her child. Then Yvonne wasn’t there. Basketball was going on, and that was Coach Richardson’s focus because the players were family, too.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who gave so much of herself as Rose,” says Madalyn Richardson about her stepmom, “especially after Yvonne passed.”

  Several people close to the couple suggest that Rose in particular is still, twenty years later, struggling with the loss of Yvonne.

  When Richardson was gone recruiting or at a speaking engagement, Rose would often remain in her bathrobe all day, living in a corner of their bedroom. She would switch on the television, letting the noise distract her. Sometimes she would go days without even venturing outside the townhouse, let alone into Fayetteville.

  Some say, however, that Richardson himself carried the grief around even longer.

  “After the loss of Yvonne,” one player says, “Coach could always go to basketball, and when you’re playing or coaching there’s that feeling nothing else is going on. His team could substitute for the family.”

  After reading about Yvonne’s death, Temple University coach John Chaney phoned Richardson. Chaney is in some ways Richardson’s northern alter ego. His résumé is another testament to how difficult advancement was for black coaches of that era.

  Chaney played ten seasons in the Eastern Basketball League, the only minor league below the NBA, and was named that league’s MVP in 1959 and 1960. The MVP awards never led to an NBA career; most teams still had quotas limiting the number of black players.

  Temple University hired Chaney in 1982. It was seen as a risky move—he was fifty years old, and despite his incredible success as a Division II coach, he had not a single minute of experience at the Division I level as a player or even assistant coach. The gamble paid off, as his Temple teams were usually nationally ranked.

  Chaney has had some controversial moments. During a rough-and-tumble game against Saint Joseph’s in 2005, he sent substitute Nehemiah Ingram into the game and ordered him to foul intentionally. Chaney, whose team recorded more fouls that night than field goals, would regret the move. Ingram badly injured a Saint Joseph’s player. Chaney suspended himself for the remainder of the season.

  Chaney refuses to sidestep these incidents. In the Temple media guide the following season—obviously controlled and written by Temple with his guidance—one of the topics in the “Chat with Coach Chaney” section is “On last year’s incident with Saint Joseph.”

  Chaney can be blunt, charming, and funny. He’s part philosopher, part social critic. When questioned about his career accomplishments, he declines to mention the five-hundred-something games he won at Temple. Rather it’s “To cause the NCAA to sit down and listen to us about the needs and changes that should be made for many of our young athletes who are predominantly black. That is the fight that I have not stopped fighting.”

  Chaney and Richardson would cement their friendship in Virginia in the late 1980s, where a new organization called the Black Coaches Association was holding one of their first meetings.

  Talks with Chaney helped Richardson regain his focus. By the autumn of 1987, the beginning of his third season, Richardson felt a sense of urgency to get Arkansas back to the NCAA Tournament. His Razorbacks responded, going 21-9, including 11-5 in the SWC. They were rewarded with their first NCAA Tournament appearance since Eddie Sutton left Arkansas.

  The Razorbacks drew Villanova in the first round and lost 82-74. Richardson was now 0-4 as a coach in NCAA Tournament games, including his time at Tulsa.

  Broyles, still not convinced Richardson could coach, suggested after that season that Richardson hire Bob Weltlich as an assistant coach. Richardson knew the reason. Weltlich, who had stumbled as head coach of University of Texas and was fired, got his start as an assistant to Bob Knight. It exasperated Richardson that Broyles wanted him to hire a coach whom he had little trouble beating.

  Instead of a staff change, Richardson gathered his assistants a week after the Villanova loss to talk about intensifying their recruiting. Richardson was blessed with a terrific staff—several of his assistant coaches would one day be head coaches. Andy Stoglin, Scott Edgar, Mike Anderson, and his son, Nolan “Notes” Richardson III, all coached Division I teams after leaving Arkansas.

  Richardson had his own style of dealing with prospects. Whether it was at a high school gym or campus visit, Richardson would have an assistant coach gather the recruit or his family and bring them to him. Former Tulsa coach John Phillips says, “Nolan would never get up and go to the player. He was establishing early on that if you want to play for him, it was going to be on his terms.”

  In the spring of 1988, Richardson and his staff signed one of the best recruiting classes in school history. The group included Todd Day, Lee Mayberry, and Oliver Miller, a trio who would win three consecutive SWC regular-season and tournament titles.

  The following year, the Razorbacks finished the 1988–89 season at 25-7, including 13-3 in the SWC. Richardson won his first NCAA Tournament in 1989 over Loyola-Marymount.

  Richardson created a new award at the conclusion of the 1989 season, for the Razorback with the best attitude and grades. He called it the Poerschke Award. Eric Poerschke, who was glued to the bench on Senior Night in 1987, was now forever a part of Razorback lore. Richardson recognized himself in the underdog, even if the guy was a well-to-do white benchwarmer with straight A grades.


  Richardson’s sense of justice was becoming tied to memory—by reminding everyone of past injustices, even his own, he could make things better.

  Despite the Razorbacks’ gradual improvement, Richardson could still find himself frustrated by the Arkansas mentality. It had been difficult to change old habits, and not only with his players. The university and townspeople sometimes left him flummoxed.

  The northwest corner of the state, where Fayetteville is located, still had a far greater percentage of whites than the rest of Arkansas. Many towns in the northwest had unofficial laws forbidding blacks from living in them at all.

  The town of Alix had a sign at its city limits that read NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN ALIX until 1970. Nearly one hundred “sundown towns” existed in Arkansas through the 1960s. Towns like Paragould and Springdale—practically a twin city of Fayetteville—were also sundown towns. A Springdale steak house called Heinie’s had paper placemats that read, THIS IS AN ALL-WHITE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY. Harrison, a Klan stronghold, was a sundown town until 2002.

  All of these towns are a short drive from the University of Arkansas.

  One morning, during Richardson’s early years at Arkansas, his secretary, Terri Mercer, announced that he had some visitors: representatives from a black fraternity and sorority. The young lady was crying. “They ruined our social on Saturday,” he heard her say to Mercer.