Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  Broyles was concerned about the way Arkansas—the state, university, and football team—would be portrayed. Sports Illustrated had done a blistering series called “The Black Athlete” a few years earlier, and nobody was safe from criticism.

  “Broyles was really scared,” Van Eman continues. “He said, ‘This is a Northern guy.’”

  Arkansas was likely to be a top-ranked team in the coming season, so, naturally, ticket sales for the spring game were brisk. Van Eman attended with the Sports Illustrated writer, happy to be outside on this sunny spring day. But Van Eman was perplexed when he noticed a small tent set up next to the field.

  With no threat of rain, the tent near the sideline seemed strange. Why? Maybe a player had an embarrassing location for a nagging injury—perhaps a pulled groin that would need constant treatment.

  “At that time,” Van Eman says, “there were just three blacks on the football team. Two were on scholarship and the other was a walk-on. Every so often the walk-on would run into the tent. I just couldn’t figure out why.”

  Then it became apparent. The black walk-on would dash into the tent wearing #23. When he came out, he was wearing #41. Next time it might be #35.

  The deceptive costume changes were intended, of course, to make the Sports Illustrated writer believe that Arkansas had plenty of black players.

  The book Untold Stories: Black Sports Heroes Before Integration profiles many of the black athletes in Arkansas whose careers were ruined by the segregated system. Darren Ivy edited the collection, which includes many of his own articles, originally written for the Democrat-Gazette, researched and written when he was only twenty-four years old. The book was published by the Democrat-Gazette, and at first glance seems like a remarkable historical document. Then a pattern emerges—the players were never asked how they felt about being ignored by the University of Arkansas, or what impact segregation had made on their lives.

  In fact, in the entire book of nearly a hundred chapters, there is just one single mention of, or quote from, Frank Broyles. His unwillingness to speak about the racist system he empowered, and the inability of the local press to ask him difficult questions, is astounding.

  Ironically, the book tries to use Broyles’s name to sell copies.

  “Now, in this era of equal access,” the book’s back cover says, “it’s difficult for some to remember that at one time there were two worlds of sport, delineated by pigment.” Difficult for some, alright.

  Just below that is the only Frank Broyles quote, a rather strange one. “It was like a blur,” Broyles’s quote reads. “It just happened, and you can’t remember when it wasn’t.”

  When Darren Ivy was given the assignment to both write and collect the articles by the Democrat-Gazette, he had to find his own way. Ivy was just out of school and not even an Arkansas native. Few records and no film could be found about the black sports heroes, and many of the best players only seemed to exist as legends. So Ivy, who worked at the paper from 2000 until 2004, got busy, relying on word of mouth. Outdoor dirt courts, patchwork uniforms, cracked backboards—one story led to another and soon enough, the Democrat-Gazette had a series. Ivy interviewed Broyles and used the quote—“It just happened and you can’t remember when it wasn’t”—in an early piece.

  Later, when Ivy asked about Fayetteville star “Bull” Hayes, the black player who was steered away to Nebraska, the conversation with Broyles came to an abrupt end. “He started getting all defensive and upset,” Ivy says. “He got pissed off and he hung up on me.”

  That article changed everything for Ivy. “After we wrote the story on Bull Hayes, that was one of the most controversial. The series stopped at that one. It made me realize we’re living in Arkansas, where racial issues are still pretty prevalent.”

  The black players during the era of segregation in Arkansas had been stifled. Years later their voices and stories were, in effect, still censored, because the difficult questions were not being asked. Anyone asking uncomfortable questions about that time was being stifled too.

  There was a cost to this segregated system of keeping these young men on the outside. Not the touchdown totals or cutting down the nets at the Final Four, but a very real human impact. At least one story was begging to be told, one that connected Frank Broyles and Don Haskins.

  Among the first pieces in Untold Stories is a profile of Bobby Walters, a running back who scored a mind-boggling ninety-six touchdowns in his high school career. Near the end of the article, it mentions that Walters was the guy who had coached Tim Hardaway in Chicago. A few years later, of course, Hardaway went to El Paso to play for Don Haskins.

  Few people knew what kind of football hero Bob Walters had been in high school, because he kept it to himself. Instead, in his adult life, Walters was known as the Carver coach, then as Tim Hardaway’s coach.

  Walters scored thirty-two touchdowns as a senior, which should have been counted as the state record. Since McCrae High School of Prescott did not have films, or even detailed statistics, they had a difficult time getting colleges to believe Walters’s amazing touchdown total. Bob Walters’s brother Shelton believes the stats might even be too conservative. “I have to take that as official, since there were no records or films,” Shelton says, “but if Bob scored fewer than four in any game it would be considered unusual.”

  The University of Arkansas, where Frank Broyles had just completed his second season, expressed no interest—despite the fact Walters was also ranked #3 in his class academically. Broyles would have never had a chance to see Bull Hayes play; Hayes’s season at Fayetteville High School was finished by the time Broyles moved to town, so that would have been a handy excuse. Bob Walters may have been the first great black player in Arkansas whom Frank Broyles ignored.

  Northwestern University of the Big Ten took notice, though. Their star, Irv Cross, was a cousin of Walters’s coach.

  Each school year in Prescott featured their annual talent show and awards ceremony. The spring of 1959, Walters’s senior year, would not be any different. There would be all kinds of acts, but the topic on everyone’s mind was where Walters would go to play football. When McCrae football coach Joseph Hale tapped the microphone in preparation of an announcement, people got quiet.

  “Everyone should know,” Coach Hale announced, “that Bob Walters left today on his official visit to Northwestern University.” The gymnasium, filled to capacity, roared its approval. “Bob Walters will be the first Negro player from the South to go to Northwestern, and he’s going to have the opportunity to play on television.” Again, the crowd went berserk.

  Distance was not going to deter Walters from taking a shot at the big time. His father, Johnnie Walters, was likely the only black car salesman in the state of Arkansas, and he always had access to a dependable car. “They didn’t let him wear a shirt and tie,” Shelton says, “but he was allowed to sell cars, mostly to blacks, and that was a big deal.”

  So was the opportunity to play sports in the Big Ten.

  That August, Bob Walters made the journey to Northwestern for preseason football. While he was immediately homesick for Arkansas and overwhelmed by the new surroundings, Walters was happy to be out of Dixie.

  But something happened after the first week of practice at Northwestern. One of the coaches told Walters, “I expect you to keep your nose clean and not date the white girls.”

  Walters was not so much interested in white girls. He was, however, interested in escaping the mentality of the South. The orders from an assistant coach dredged up years of being treated differently because of his skin color. Now Walters realized that the North could be nearly as oppressive. He got discouraged and quietly left campus at the end of the week; a homesick small-town kid, Walters’s promising football career was suddenly a wreck.

  Walters had few options. Without film or statistics, hundreds of miles from home, he was in a bind. A former Northwestern assistant who’d become the coach at Augustana College asked Walters to go to the small school
in western Illinois. Walters went.

  Augustana was just as frustrating. “There was absolutely nothing for him to do at Augustana but play football,” says Shelton Walters. “Bob had no life at all.”

  Regardless, Walters played, and his family would pile into a couple of cars and make the journey to see the games. The trips reminded the family of home in a way. The police in Rock Island would follow their car, both going into the city, then again on their way out of town. Shelton says, “Part of it was harassment and part was to send a message. It was to keep you in your place.”

  Walters quit Augustana after playing just one year.

  A depressed dropout from a small college, Walters was running out of options. He bounced around in Chicago in the early 1960s, working odd jobs and attending two junior colleges. In late August one summer, he went back to Augustana for less than a week, but then enrolled at tiny North Central College in Naperville, near Chicago.

  Walters was an instant sensation at North Central, and his family again began loading up the family car. But a pattern was emerging, even in Illinois. “Naperville was a small town then, not a suburb,” Shelton Walters says. “The police would be waiting at the edge of town, and they would follow us into the city, into the stadium, made sure we left out of town. The police were always in our rearview mirror.”

  Even at North Central, Bob Walters may have been headed toward a professional career. His coach there had played in the NFL and had the connections to get Walters, by far the best player on his team, a serious tryout. But during the fourth game of his senior year, Walters tore up his knee.

  “Bob’s talent would have gotten him in professional football,” his brother Shelton claims, barring that injury, “if the NFL would have been fair and objective.”

  With football in his past, Walters began a career teaching and coaching basketball at Carver High School. He rarely mentioned his stellar prep career in Prescott, and being snubbed by the University of Arkansas was nearly forgotten. But Walters would one day get a chance to thumb his nose at Razorback football.

  Bob Walters’s nephew Danny was only five when he moved from Arkansas to Chicago. The boy was already interested in sports, and over the years he learned bits and pieces about his uncle Bob’s high school exploits from family members remaining in Prescott. Meaning, from everyone except his uncle. “Bob never talked about himself,” Danny says.

  When his parents divorced, Danny moved in with Bob Walters and his wife for a couple of weeks. That experiment went well, so throughout high school Danny would stay with Bob Walters’s family on the weekends. During those times Bob would clear the kitchen table, take the phone off the hook, yank the television plug out of the wall, and go over schoolwork with Danny. Danny might try to change the focus to sports, but Bob rarely fell for it—unless it had to do with attitude. Bob’s influence and control over Danny mushroomed.

  During the Chicago summers, all the Walterses would return to Prescott. Now that he was becoming more interested in focusing on football, the stories Danny would hear about his uncle began to resonate. They always ended with the same refrain—“There’s never been anyone as good as Bob Walters.”

  On these pilgrimages to Arkansas, Danny also became intrigued with the state’s big university. Razorback shirts, posters, and fans were more prevalent in Prescott since the team began adding black players in the early 1970s.

  In the summer of 1976, before anyone was aware of his own status or potential, Danny wrote a letter. He wanted to express his interest in attending his dream school on a football scholarship. The letter was to Frank Broyles.

  Likely, Broyles received hundreds of letters a year asking for a chance to play for the Razorbacks. But Broyles retired from coaching and never wrote back to Danny Walters.

  By Danny’s junior year in Chicago, he emerged as the star of Julian High School’s powerhouse 1977 football team. An explosive hitter with great quickness, Danny was ranked highly by every national recruiting service and was one of Chicago’s top prospects.

  One day, a letter from Arkansas showed up at Julian High School. Then several more. Lou Holtz, whom Broyles picked as his replacement football coach, sent an assistant named Bob Cope to recruit Danny that year. Cope wasn’t the only recruiter to show up. Famed Ohio State coach Woody Hayes came. So did coaches from football factories like Michigan, USC, and Oklahoma. Naturally, Danny began seeking Bob Walters’s advice about what school he should sign with.

  Bob Walters finally had his chance, twenty years later, to get even with the University of Arkansas.

  As the frequency of the phone calls increased, and the pressure was building, Bob Walters came to a realization. He wanted his nephew Danny to play football at Arkansas, despite the way the university ignored his unofficial record-setting career in 1959.

  He never suggested stonewalling Arkansas, according to Danny Walters. “Bob wasn’t that kind of person,” he says. “He wasn’t reared that way.”

  “Bob encouraged Danny to go to Arkansas,” his brother Shelton says, “because it was something that he could not do himself. Bob felt a sense of accomplishment that someone from his bloodline would play for the Razorbacks, especially after he was not allowed that opportunity.”

  So Danny Walters did what Bob Walters could never even consider—he signed with the Razorbacks.

  Twenty years after his family had driven to North Central College games, Bob Walters found himself on the reverse journey, driving back to Arkansas to follow Danny’s Razorback career up close. Legions of the Walters family came up regularly from southwest Arkansas as well.

  While Danny was off to a fast start as a cornerback for the Razorbacks in 1980, Bob Walters got bad news. He was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently had most of his colon removed. He continued coaching at Carver the next few years. His enthusiasm for his team got a big boost in 1981, when he first witnessed hotshot freshman Tim Hardaway dribbling the basketball between his legs as though it were on a string.

  With the cancer gnawing at him, Walters still occasionally felt strong enough for the six-hundred-mile trip to Fayetteville. The Razorbacks earned three bowl game bids with Danny at defensive back. Danny would later be named to the University of Arkansas All-Decade team for the 1980s, then played five years with the NFL’s San Diego Chargers—where, coincidentally, Nolan Richardson had tried out in the 1960s.

  When Bob Walters came to Fayetteville, he never referred to his past, and instead was caught up in the excitement of Danny starring for the Razorbacks. “Nobody would have ever known about Bob’s high school heroics,” Shelton says. “Even Danny hardly knew the exact details.”

  While Walters remembered how the segregated system had forced him to go north, he didn’t dwell on it. “I don’t think Bob lost one minute of sleep over Frank Broyles,” Shelton says. “Bob never expected to be recruited by Arkansas. That was part of playing in the South.” While Danny was one of the team’s best players, Bob Walters never met Frank Broyles.

  As the cancer got worse, Walters could manage fewer trips to Razorback Stadium. He’d sleep in his car while his wife drove, gathering his strength for the Saturday showdowns. Then the unofficial leader in career high school touchdowns for the state of Arkansas would put on his red sweatshirt and cheer anonymously for his nephew and the University of Arkansas.

  By the time Frank Broyles finally decided to desegregate, it was too late for the good of his team. Broyles had blown his recruiting advantage of being the only major school in the state. Terry Nelson, Cleo Miller, Ike Harris, Roscoe Word, and Ike Thomas were all black Arkansans who starred at other colleges before earning spots on NFL teams.

  Yet retired professor Phillip Trapp credits Broyles with rapidly adjusting in the early 1970s. “He changed his tune and quickly began to integrate athletics,” Trapp says. “I think Broyles dragged his feet, but realized that integrating was the only way he could continue to have a winning team.”

  And Trapp is correct about Broyles at least trying to adjust.<
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  By 1974, two years before he quit coaching football, his Arkansas team had twenty-eight black players on the squad, a huge jump from the lonely Jon Richardson days of 1970. This represented 23 percent of Broyles’s team, second highest in the Southwest Conference and a remarkable improvement.

  Bud Zinke is long retired from his physics professorship. Today, the reluctant radical is moderately happy about the progress his university made after the senate council meeting when Broyles shocked the faculty with his “I’ll go back to Georgia” declaration. “The university integrated pretty gracefully after that,” Zinke says. “At that time, the football team was first and everything else was second. But Arkansas has done really well—football is not as popular as it used to be.”

  Zinke scoffs at any notion that Broyles championed integration at Arkansas, though. “It’s really funny. After he realized that he was going to have a second-rate team, he got with it pretty smartly, but that isn’t the way he started out.”

  Broyles was never close to being as successful once he integrated. He won six SWC titles during the Jim Crow era of Arkansas football but could manage only one SWC championship in the integrated 1970s. Regardless of integration issues, by 1976 it was clear that Broyles had become a victim of his own success in the segregated 1960s. In his final five seasons, the Razorbacks were 32-21 with three ties. He lost the last four games of his career.

  Broyles still had an incredible run before that to be proud of. His teams appeared in ten bowl games, and his overall record, including his brief time as Missouri coach, was 149-62, with six ties. Within a decade of his retirement he was inducted into College Football Hall of Fame.

  The willingness Frank Broyles displayed in changing his team from a publicly racist program to a pretty well-integrated one reveals what some feel is the true nature of the Arkansas icon: everything is business to Broyles. Despite his public statements at faculty senate council meetings, other behind-the-scenes moves, and the brutal humiliation of Darrell Brown, many people think Frank Broyles was mostly concerned about money. Big money boosters didn’t want black athletes? Broyles would comply. The rest of the Southwest Conference was passing Arkansas, and it was hurting attendance? Broyles would recruit black athletes.