by Rus Bradburd
Richardson, an outsider all of his childhood and professional life, seemed unable to accept the accolades. Despite the national ranking and the notoriety the team had earned, the coach hammered the us-against-the-world story into their heads over and over. The team came to believe that they were not, in fact, getting the respect they deserved—despite being ranked #1 most of the season.
In the semifinals, Arkansas guards Clint McDaniel and Corey Beck harassed Arizona’s backcourt, regarded as the best offensive duo in America, into making just two of twenty-two attempts from behind the three-point arc. Arkansas beat Arizona, 91-82.
Richardson held court after the Arizona game, lecturing the media. In the Sporting News, he was quoted as saying “…if I would win games and some of the other black coaches would win, we would never win because of our brains and our techniques and our teachings…. it was always because ‘Well, they’ve got the best athletes’ and ‘Man, look at those athletes that guy’s got out there.’ Wait a minute, I said, look at my team and look at Krzyzewski’s team and put us on paper and just ask how many they want of their All-Americans as opposed to us—they don’t know us, they don’t know anything about us—and see whose team they’re going to pick, whose players they’re going to pick. That was the thing that used to bother me more than anything.” The Duke coach, Richardson believed, had his pick of the nation’s top high school players, while Richardson relied on under-recruited sleepers.
What raised even more eyebrows was what Richardson said on national television to color analyst Billy Packer immediately after the Arizona game. Packer had irritated Richardson plenty in the past; not directly, but through what Richardson felt were his veiled comments about black coaches and athletes—the very same things he would be lecturing the media about a few minutes later.
Minutes after the game ended, Packer lobbed a softball question to Richardson. “Gee, Billy,” Richardson said, “a blind man could see that.”
Don Haskins believed Packer had an East Coast bias. “If you weren’t from the ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference], Billy Packer thought you didn’t know anything,” he said, but Haskins would never challenge Packer, or anyone else, on live television. Haskins thought Richardson’s comments, both with Packer and to the media, were a distraction. “I don’t think he needed to do that,” Haskins was quoted as saying. “He kicked Arizona’s ass, and he should’ve left it at that.” With the NCAA championship still to be played, Haskins in his day would have been anything but political. Richardson had emerged as even more politically conscious and outspoken with the national title at stake.
The Razorbacks would play Duke, the NCAA champs in 1991 and 1992. Duke had a host of great players, but their star was Grant Hill, a consensus pick for national Player of the Year honors.
The day before the championship, Richardson grew pensive. He was reasonably proud of his accomplishments, but something was nagging him. Richardson had been the underdog so long that despite his team’s yearlong national ranking, he still felt dispossessed. He found himself pondering one of Arkansas’s little-used substitutes, a senior named Ken Biley.
Biley was an undersized post player who was raised in Pine Bluff. Neither of his parents had the opportunity to go to college, but every one of his fifteen siblings did, and nearly all graduated. “I had already learned that everybody has to play his role,” Biley says of his upbringing.
As a freshman and sophomore, Biley saw some court time and even started a couple of games, but his playing time later evaporated and he lost faith. “Everyone wants to play, and when you don’t you get discouraged,” he says.
On two occasions, he sat down with his coach and asked what he could do to earn a more important role. “I never demanded anything,” Biley says, “and he told me exactly what I needed to do, but we had so many good players ahead of me. Corliss Williamson, for one.”
Nearly every coach, under the pressure of a championship showdown, reverts to the basic strategies that got the team into the finals. But Richardson couldn’t stop thinking about Biley, and what a selfless worker he had been for four years. The day before the championship game against Duke, at the conclusion of practice, Richardson pulled Biley aside. Biley had hardly played in the first five playoff games leading up to the NCAA title match—a total of four minutes.
“I’ve watched how your career has progressed, and how you’ve handled not getting to play,” Richardson began. “I appreciate the leadership you’ve been showing and I want to reward you, as a senior.”
“Thanks coach,” Biley said. He was unprepared for what came next.
“You’re starting tomorrow against Duke,” Richardson said. “And you’re guarding Grant Hill.”
Biley was speechless. Then overcome with emotion.
“I was shocked, freaked out!” Biley says. “I hadn’t played much for two years. I just could not believe it.”
Biley had plenty of time to think about Grant Hill. “I was a nervous wreck, like you’d expect,” he says. He had a restless night—he stared at the ceiling, sat on the edge of his bed, then flopped around trying to sleep.
Richardson had disdained book coaches for years. Now he was throwing the book in the trash by starting a benchwarmer in the NCAA championship game.
On the day of the game, New York Times columnist William Rhoden wrote a column titled “A Coach and a Player Climb a Mountaintop.” The article profiled Nolan Richardson and Duke star Grant Hill. It was April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the coincidence was not lost on Rhoden.
Rhoden wrote of the volatile political and social climate that meant college sports were being more closely examined than ever. This was a “basketball season that became a civil rights movement, and a tournament that, largely because of Richardson, has forced the news media to at least hear, if not address, festering sociocultural issues striking at the foundation of college sports.” Who would play, coach, write about, and profit from college basketball? These issues were now at the forefront.
Rather than win gracefully, Richardson had used the NCAA triumphs to “…drive home the BCA’s message of giving African-Americans the same off-the-court opportunities that they command on the court.” Rhoden also called out the media on what he called a “manufactured morality play,” something that had bothered Richardson for so long—the perception journalists had helped foster, that Arkansas had “talent” while Duke had “intelligence.”
Rhoden marveled at Richardson’s influence. “Richardson has talked so often and so loudly,” Rhoden wrote, “that athletes are beginning to hear what he’s saying.” Of course, nobody heard more about it than the Razorbacks.
Near the end of Rhoden’s piece, he asked a question that would prove prophetic: “Why do black coaches who get fired have such a difficult time resurfacing, if they resurface at all?”
Ken Biley had admired Grant Hill’s skills countless times when Duke played on television. He made a conscious decision—he wouldn’t back off Hill or give him too much respect. He’d deny Hill the ball whenever he could, crowd him, and try to overwhelm Hill with aggressiveness. Fatigue wasn’t going to be a factor, since he figured he’d get limited minutes. “I didn’t want to save anything. I always tried to contribute with defense and rebounding, anyway.”
Biley was quite aware that this was not the ideal time for a coach to pay tribute to substitutes with good attitudes. “It was risky,” he says. “What might it do for our chemistry and our tone for the game?”
Minutes before the game, Arkansas radio spotter Bob Carver watched to see what the reaction might be with the media as one of Richardson’s assistants penciled in Ken Biley as a starter at the scorer’s table. “Press row lit up!” Carver says. “You could see them thinking, ‘Has Richardson lost his mind?’”
As expected, Ken Biley would play less than four minutes and did not score a basket. But he harassed Grant Hill, using his long arms and great lateral movement to hassle the All-American. Hill played point guard at
the start, and was off his game. He would throw the ball away nine times that night.
Arkansas guards Clint McDaniel and Corey Beck set the tone with their furious defensive pressure. Corliss Williamson grabbed seven offensive rebounds and put in ten field goals. Scotty Thurman—from Ruston, Louisiana, where Ol’ Mama was born—drilled a three-pointer with under a minute to go. That shot sealed the Arkansas victory. Arkansas beat Duke, 76-72. Nolan Richardson had won the national title.
The following week, Curry Kirkpatrick wrote about Richardson’s NCAA title run for Newsweek and reflected on what he called the coach’s manipulation of the media, whom “…Richardson plucked like a Stradivarius in motivating his team to overcome what the coach—though seemingly nobody else—perceived as slights based on racism.”
Kirkpatrick felt the national polls were enough respect. Richardson insisted the polls were not—it wasn’t respect for his team he was looking for. Richardson never suggested it was all a ploy to motivate his team—he remained the defiant outsider, reminding the respected writer of the ugly history in the rearview mirror.
“I know who I am,” Richardson railed. “We [black coaches] can recruit, motivate, teach…but are we good coaches? I never hear that.”
Later, John Thompson told the Sporting News, “The game is defined differently for a black coach. Truthfully, it’s hard to explain that to a white person…. There’s no such thing as the game for the sake of the game. It’s not a luxury but a necessity; it’s a means to an end, it’s a means to an end for a lot of people. Nolan understands that.”
Thompson was later quoted nationally as saying, “Nolan can never compete as 100 percent coach. He has other responsibilities as a black man. I hear people say they’re in it for the love of the game. He can’t go in feeling that way; no black man can.”
Frank Broyles didn’t make the trip to the Final Four in Charlotte because he was hospitalized briefly. He recovered enough to address the crowd at Bud Walton Arena the next week. The two men would embrace in front of the hysterical Razorback fans.
Scotty Thurman says Richardson never discussed his relationship with Broyles, but that the tension was obvious, even after the championship. “You could tell they didn’t like one another,” Thurman says.
Todd Day, by this time an established NBA star, says, “Frank Broyles had run Arkansas for forty years, and here comes this outspoken black man disagreeing with him. Nolan would stand up for what he thought and challenge Broyles.”
There was one powerful person from Arkansas, however, for whom Richardson had no animosity. On June 15, 1994, the Arkansas basketball team was honored in the Rose Garden by President Bill Clinton.
Clinton had made a brief speech in the locker room after the Duke game, and had even posed on the cover of Sports Illustrated sporting a sweat suit Richardson had given him. “Nolan Richardson has done a lot of remarkable things in his life,” Clinton said to the team, “often against all odds…. And so I say to him and all the players, you did your state proud. You made the president happy. But more important, you showed America the best of what college athletics should be. And we are all very proud of you.”
Despite the praise from the president of the United States, Richardson had a difficult time enjoying himself. “You create a monster,” Richardson told the Sporting News after the season. “I know that I’ve created a monster.”
SIXTEEN
IF BLESSING COMES
Nolan Richardson was the first black man in power to openly challenge Frank Broyles, but the ground had been shifting under Broyles’s feet since the mid-1960s.
The University of Arkansas campus was not exactly a bastion of radicalism then, but attitudes began changing. The student body and faculty confronted Broyles, and by 1969 he’d been forced to finally offer a scholarship to Jon Richardson. A modest antiwar movement had even emerged on campus, led in part by Professor “Bud” Zinke. In 1969, Gordon D. Morgan and Margaret Clark became the first black faculty members.
The school yearbook reflected the shift on campus. One photograph of Broyles in a late 1960s yearbook had the caption “The best football coach in America. Just ask him.” Another photo featured a new group on campus, Black Americans for Democracy (BAD), whose objective was to raise the number of blacks enrolled at Arkansas. Another full page was devoted to marijuana growing and smoking among white students.
Whether it was because of Arkansas’s reputation as a stronghold of segregation or a lack of recruiting effort, Arkansas football just couldn’t seem to attract the best black players. After 1967, Broyles would not coach another first-round NFL draft choice.
Broyles claimed to have been handcuffed by the board of trustees, and also to have ignored them on the subject of desegregation. Did he have the power to simply desegregate when he wanted? Or did the board of trustees insist that Broyles be last among colleges in Arkansas and teams in the Southwest Conference?
By 1961, Broyles had won three straight Southwest Conference titles. He was thirty-seven years old and one of the hottest names in all of football. Broyles won at least part of a national championship in 1964 and was named the national Coach of the Year. He was acknowledged by both supporters and detractors as perhaps the most powerful person in the state of Arkansas. The university, dorms, and basketball teams were already desegregating by the time Broyles made a move.
In other words, Broyles likely could have desegregated whenever he wanted to, and definitely after being named national Coach of the Year.
Certainly Broyles lived in a different place than, say, Don Haskins in El Paso, where half the city was Hispanic. Yet Arkansas has never been considered the Deep South. What if Broyles had the courage needed simply to announce he was going to break the color barrier first in the SWC, or look for a job elsewhere?
Fort Smith native Joe Neal, a passionate antiwar activist, rattled the establishment in the late 1960s by leading demonstrations outside UA football games. “The peace movement and the Civil Rights movement were interwoven,” Neal says today. “One day we were out trying to stop the war, the next we wanted the campus newspaper to cover black issues.”
Neal understood the emotional heart of the university was Frank Broyles’s football team, and his blocking of desegregation needed to be challenged. At home football games, Neal and his crew stood in an area outside Razorback Stadium with signs reading WE WANT RAZOR-BLACKS.
“We set up where people were walking into the stadium,” Neal recalls, “so they’d have to see us. We operated on the assumption that if Broyles wanted blacks on the team, he could have had them. Broyles was an extreme exemplar of the establishment and Arkansas was way behind the country. But in retrospect, they were trying to always raise money in parts of the state that wouldn’t have wanted black football players.”
The “Razorblacks” demonstrations were one of a quick succession of events that rattled the slowly awakening campus. Next came the occupation of Hill Hall, which housed the school of journalism and campus newspaper. Black and white students were angry that the school’s weekly, the Traveler, would not print a letter rebutting an earlier one criticizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hill Hall later burned, but nobody was ever charged with arson. School president David Mullins’s office was occupied by thirty black students who were frustrated with Arkansas’s lack of progress.
Not everyone within those progressive movements was in agreement. “There was tension between well-meaning white liberals and others who were closer to the street,” says Neal. “There were a lot of people around campus on both sides who felt threatened by black activists.”
One of those black activists was former football walk-on Darrell Brown. Brown and a group of other black students bonded together in an attempt to get the school’s band to stop playing the Confederate anthem “Dixie” every time Arkansas scored a touchdown or took the field. The song had irritated the first black basketball player on scholarship, T. J. Johnson, and that revulsion was typical of black students. In 1969, black students threa
tened to storm the field during the nationally televised showdown with Texas if the band didn’t stop playing “Dixie.”
On the weekend following the Arkansas v. Texas game, Darrell Brown was on the front page of the Traveler, along with the Razorback football team. Neither Brown nor the football team had good news to report.
Arkansas had lost to Texas in the white-guy version of the self-proclaimed “Game of the Century.”
Darrell Brown had been shot, hit in the leg by an unknown sniper near campus after a meeting about the “Dixie” issue. The president of the university hadn’t bothered to check on the wounded student, despite a personal plea from Gordon Morgan, UA’s first black professor.
President Nixon was in attendance, as was George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The shooting of a black student was the last kind of publicity the state or university needed. As it turned out, the administration didn’t need to worry about Arkansas’s image. Darrell Brown’s shooting was not mentioned on television. The Razorblack protest didn’t make it on national TV. Neither did “Bud” Zinke’s antiwar crew.
The band director, acting independently, had decided to quit playing “Dixie” altogether, so black students did not storm the football field. Soon after, the student senate voted to recommend the song be dropped from the band’s repertoire.
Brown’s law school dean offered a public reward leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the shooting, but nobody was ever charged with the crime.
Arkansas avoided national exposure when Darrell Brown was hit by sniper fire, and they’d work hard to avoid embarrassment in the future. “I can’t say that Frank Broyles was prejudiced,” Arkansas’s former basketball coach Lanny Van Eman stresses. “But there was one incident where a Sports Illustrated writer I knew came down for a spring football game, in 1970 or 1971.” Broyles called Van Eman to his office and said, “A friend of yours is coming to town.”
