Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  In any case, Broyles resigned from football in 1976 to concentrate solely on administrative duties. He would reinvent his career by becoming perhaps the most successful and powerful athletics director in college sports.

  SEVENTEEN

  ONLY TWICE I’VE WISHED FOR HEAVEN

  Despite the glow of the 1994 NCAA basketball championship, another misunderstanding between Broyles and Richardson was festering. This one would irritate both men for years. In 1995, Broyles amended Richardson’s job title to head basketball coach and assistant athletics director. Richardson was thrilled. At first.

  Broyles was now in his seventies, and the question of who his successor would be was often a topic of conversation in Arkansas. Broyles told Fred Vorsanger: “If Nolan ever applies for another job, either as a coach or administrator, it will help him.”

  Richardson asked Broyles what his new duties would entail. Broyles admitted that there wouldn’t actually be any extra responsibility. That fall, although Arkansas had a dozen assistant athletics directors and as many meetings, Richardson was never invited. Broyles told him it was a token position. Richardson says, “That was the word he used. ‘Token.’”

  Vorsanger says, “Broyles thought he was helping Nolan.”

  Richardson simply did not believe it. “I didn’t need a résumé for other jobs,” Richardson says. “I wanted to stay at Arkansas.”

  “This place is not very good at communicating,” Vorsanger adds.

  On the eve of the next season, with a terrific team in place, Richardson went on the offensive. “When I was playing running basketball, they called it niggerball,” he told Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated. “When Rick [Pitino] did it, it was called up-tempo. If I lose, I can’t coach. If I win, it’s because my athletes are better.”

  “He seems to make a system of anger,” Wolff wrote. “Players with something to prove identify with his sense of aggrievement and thrive.”

  Scotty Thurman agreed. “Coach talked about how nobody respected us. He was adamant about that.”

  Often, before playing a nationally ranked team, Richardson would work his way through the locker room, asking the players one by one if the university they were facing had actively recruited them. Since there were dozens of highly rated programs, the odds were always against it, but Richardson would still rub their collective noses in it—“Did Duke recruit you?”—reminding them that they were under-appreciated.

  Thurman says, “He used our past and under-recruitment in high school, then brainwashed people to get them to do what they needed to do.”

  In February of 1995, while Richardson was revamping his Razorbacks for another NCAA title run, the BCA got some unusual help from a college president.

  The BCA’s executive director, Rudy Washington, hinted publicly that the threat level was elevated now. It wouldn’t be the coaches who acted as if the boycott planned in 1994 were still to occur. This time it would be the students. More than one hundred students marched onto the basketball court at halftime of a Rutgers game and refused to budge. The game was canceled.

  Much of the furor was caused by a statement made by then-Rutgers-president Martin Lawrence, who was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Do we set standards in the future so we don’t admit anybody? Or do we deal with a disadvantaged population that doesn’t have the genetic, hereditary background to have a higher average?” Naturally, the unfortunate folks with poor “genetic, hereditary backgrounds” were likely 6'9" and could dunk a basketball with either hand. Lawrence later backpedaled on his remarks, saying that he did not believe racial heredity could forecast academic success.

  John Thompson was not buying the retraction. “This was a deep statement,” he told the New York Times, “interjected in conversation that was intended to be handled subtly or privately.”

  The BCA finally got their wish, yet there was no next step. The coaches were so involved with their own teams as the NCAA Tournament approached that they couldn’t muster a unified response. Writer William Rhoden saw it as a wasted chance. “…[T]his time the BCA missed an opportunity to ignite a movement it actually predicted…. The BCA has run out of threats and, in the case of Rutgers, come up short on providing direction as well,” Rhoden wrote. “There was a movement in Piscataway, ready to be ignited. The BCA wasn’t prepared to strike the match.”

  In early spring of 1995, feeling the pressure of expectations for another NCAA title, an obviously frustrated Richardson called Razorback fans “turds and assholes.” The Democrat-Gazette printed the quote verbatim. Richardson quickly apologized, saying a very small percentage of supporters had upset him. His earlier comments about creating a monster were coming true—the fans, media, and especially the coach, all expected another NCAA title. Nobody from the university administration questioned or counseled him about the “turds and assholes” quote.

  In a Sporting News interview in 1995 with Bob Hille, Richardson softened his tone. “There are some good, beautiful, wonderful people in Arkansas,” he said. “There’s a few who are always going to stick—” At this point, Richardson checked himself, concluding, “They don’t want me to be successful, so they’ll do anything they can or say some things that are going to affect that.”

  The 1994–95 Arkansas team was the favorite to win a second national title, with nearly everyone back from the 1994 title team, including the usual starters. Arkansas lost in overtime to Kentucky for the SEC Tournament championship, but that didn’t hurt their tournament seeding. Then, in the NCAA playoffs, the Razorbacks struggled before beating Texas Southern, Syracuse, Memphis, and Virginia by a total of 15 points to get to the Final Four. Two of those wins were in overtime.

  Just as the NCAA playoffs commenced, the United States Basketball Writers Association gave Richardson the award for Most Courageous Coach. The justification for winning the award was as much for the coach’s emotional recovery after Yvonne’s death as for his pioneering career. Receiving the award, however, left him raw, retrospective, and saddened. He may have been psychologically unprepared for the Final Four.

  The Razorbacks beat North Carolina in the national semifinals, but they were denied a second consecutive NCAA title, losing to UCLA 89-78.

  Corliss Williamson and Scotty Thurman decided to declare for the NBA draft after the season. Both were juniors, eligibility-wise. This proved to be the right move for Williamson, but Thurman went undrafted and never played a minute in the NBA. In 2007, ESPN rated Thurman as one of the “Top ten players who should have stayed in school” of all time.

  The 1995–96 Razorbacks went into the season with a recruiting class that was ranked first in the nation, but the group featured mostly junior college players who would have a rough transition. In January of that season, leading scorer Jesse Pate and leading rebounder Sunday Adebayo were declared ineligible by the school because of allegations their junior college grades were improperly certified. This controversy set off an eighteen-month NCAA investigation. Despite these troubles, the Razorbacks made the NCAA Tournament, barely, as a #12 seed. They defied the odds by making the Sweet 16 after wins over Penn State and Marquette.

  “There were questions by the University of Missouri, which had tried to recruit Adebayo and Pate, about their transcripts,” one Arkansas insider says. “Arkansas reviewed it all, but by January they still couldn’t figure out the transcripts. So it was Arkansas who made them ineligible, and it was Frank Broyles’s decision, not the NCAA’s. Nolan felt that Broyles had fucked him.”

  What happened next further angered Richardson.

  “When this conflict over Pate and Adebayo became an NCAA investigation,” the insider continues, “the NCAA came back and said that those kids, Pate and Adebayo, should have been eligible.”

  The Razorbacks suffered when Jesse Pate went on to the minor league CBA. Richardson believed that the school’s compliance staff within the Arkansas athletics department fought for his program, but that Frank Broyles did not.

  Arkansas self-imposed some pena
lties, most of which were mild. But one of the sanctions—no junior college players allowed for two seasons—infuriated Richardson yet again.

  The story got stranger when Sunday Adebayo transferred to Memphis during the transcript trouble. While at Memphis, he led them to victory over his old school. Then he petitioned the NCAA to reconsider his grades and won the appeal. Adebayo then transferred back to Fayetteville, where he powered Arkansas to a win over, ironically, Memphis.

  The following season, 1996–97, featured a stripped-down Arkansas team without junior college recruits. It also marked the first time in ten seasons that Arkansas did not earn a bid to the NCAA Tournament; instead, they settled for the NIT. They bumped off Northern Arizona, Pittsburgh, and UNLV before losing in the semifinals at Madison Square Garden. Arkansas finished the year 18-14, and 8-8 in the SEC.

  In 1997, the University of Arkansas introduced Dr. John White as its new chancellor. Each of the branches within the Arkansas system—Fayetteville, Pine Bluff, Little Rock, and Monticello—has its own chancellor, but the premier job within that system is in Fayetteville. John White was excited about coming back to his alma mater after his combined twenty-two years as a Georgia Tech faculty member and dean of engineering. Nobody speculated that it might have helped White’s application that Frank Broyles was a Georgia Tech graduate.

  John White was a natural fit; he was bright, congenial, and had strong ties within the academic and business communities. White males, however, have traditionally dominated engineering, and his hiring raised concerns within Arkansas African-American community as to how sensitive White would be to racial issues.

  White, an introspective and thoughtful academic, recognized that and understood the problems with race relations were entrenched at the university. Fortunately, White had an interesting background in seeking diversity. He’d attended the National Science Foundation convention in 1988 and looked at the national data in regard to women and minorities in his field. He returned to Georgia Tech with a fresh view. “I got very concerned,” he says. “You could count on one hand the number of graduating engineers each spring who were black or female.”

  While in Atlanta, White had been working on something called “The Committee of 100,” which was attempting to double the amount of women and minority faculty. Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and White became close and would work together to recruit top black doctoral students.

  The results raised eyebrows within the field of engineering, particularly at MIT, which was losing its own graduates to Georgia Tech’s graduate school. White was framing it as a choice for prospective black students between Boston and Atlanta. “We were simply using Atlanta to its fullest potential,” he says.

  Fayetteville, where the African-American population was under 4 percent, was a world away from Atlanta. At his first major press conference, a journalist asked Chancellor White what he would miss most about Georgia Tech.

  White knew Arkansas had an African-American population of only 16 percent. “It’s more about Atlanta,” White responded, “and what I miss is the diversity. This place is too white for me.”

  The response was palpable. “You could have heard a pin drop in that room, and everybody got big eyes,” he recalls. But White had done his research. Like a crafty coach, he had statistics to back up his claim. “There’s only one black employee on this floor,” he said, “there’s none on the second floor, there’s one on the first floor. We’re going to have to do things to improve diversity.”

  Frank Broyles would not have been thinking about “diversity” when he offered the job to Nolan Richardson in 1985. Yet Broyles’s hiring of Richardson was dramatic, unprecedented, and historically significant.

  No other majority white university in the old Confederacy had ever hired a black head coach in any major sport—basketball or football. It took tremendous nerve to be the first, and Broyles certainly had that. He had consolidated power over the years, and although his later teams’ records damaged some of his mystique, by the early 1980s Broyles controlled the purse strings.

  Neither would Broyles have hired Richardson because he thought it was time for a black man to finally have an opportunity, or have selected Richardson as a way to redeem himself for throwing wrenches into the wheels of integration throughout the 1960s. Black players had been dominating basketball for years, and Broyles must have figured a black coach would give Arkansas a recruiting edge. Does that make Broyles simply a smart, albeit cynical, businessman?

  Sid Simpson, Richardson’s old boss who has resided in Arkansas for years, makes his feelings on Broyles plain. “Broyles is a racist,” Simpson says. “I know from talking to Broyles that the only reason he hired Nolan is because he was black.”

  Over Christmas in 1964, Broyles earned the honor of coaching in the North v. South all-star football holiday classic. It was his first time ever coaching a black player in a game. During the game, the South was trapped on the one-yard line, and Broyles called for a simple off-tackle dive on second down, trying to inch his way up field.

  But the black running back—the future NFL star Gale Sayers—busted loose for a ninety-nine-yard touchdown. Sayers would later score twenty-two touchdowns in his rookie season with the Chicago Bears, including six touchdowns in a single game.

  According to Nolan Richardson, Broyles concluded the Gale Sayers story by adding, “I said, damn, I’ve got to have me some of those.”

  When Southern Cal pounded still-all-white Alabama in football in 1970, USC’s black star Sam “Bam” Cunningham ran wild, scoring three touchdowns. After the game, one of the Alabama coaches reportedly said that Sam Cunningham had done more for integration in two hours than Martin Luther King Jr. had done in twenty years—a statement suggesting the basis for integration in sports was often not idealistic but exploitative.

  Getting “some of those” might have been exactly what Broyles was up to when he hired Nolan Richardson. The hottest coach in the nation at that time was John Thompson, who had won the NCAA title in 1984, becoming the first black coach to do so. In 1985, Villanova squeaked by Georgetown. With Villanova’s coach Rollie Massimino no longer interested, Broyles began looking for another candidate. Thompson wouldn’t leave Georgetown, but Broyles decided to nab the next-hottest African-American coach.

  Regardless of Broyles’s motivation, his knack for hiring great coaches is nothing less than incredible, and in hiring football assistants, Broyles stands alone. His former assistant coaches have gone on to win five national championships, over forty conference titles and have combined for over two thousand victories in college. He has had forty assistants go on to be head coaches in college or the NFL.

  The Rotary Club of Little Rock sponsors the only national award for assistant football coaches, the Broyles Award. The trophy depicts the coach kneeling in front of his former assistant, Wilson Matthews.

  The Broyles Award reflects the lack of racial progress in college football. The selection committee members who choose the award winner are nine white men, including Broyles. No black man has ever been on the committee.

  The award began in 1996. It took four years before a black man was even one of the five assistant coaches nominated. There has never been a time when more than one black man was a nominee. Sixty-seven assistants have been nominated overall. Six were black. That comes out to 8 percent, while 33 percent of assistant coaches today are black. Only once in the twelve-year history of the award has the winner been a black man. Randy Shannon of Miami won in 2001.

  At the time of this writing, Randy Shannon is the only black head football coach at a top sixty-four BCS university. Like the award’s namesake in the 1960s, the Broyles Award Committee can’t seem to locate qualified black men.

  The most obvious sign of Frank Broyles’s impact on the Arkansas campus today is its incredible athletics facilities. Razorback Stadium is a breathtaking tribute to the power and place of sports at the University of Arkansas.

  Next to Razorback Stadium sits the old Barnhill Arena, basketball�
�s old home. Past that is Bud Walton Arena, the state-of-the-art basketball facility. Then the Smith Golf Center. Next is Walker Pavilion, an indoor football practice field. There is McDonnell Field for the track team, and also the Tyson Track Center for indoor races. Baum Stadium looks like a Major League baseball park.

  Don’t worry, many on campus assure. Athletics isn’t taking a nickel away from academics, and it’s not like the money would have been donated for education. “All of the facility improvements have been financed through private donations without a dollar of tax revenues,” an Arkansas media guide says. In the past thirty years, with Broyles as boss, the athletics program has spent nearly $250,000,000 on building or improving athletics facilities. Athletics has an annual budget around $40,000,000.

  Over the years, Broyles has ingratiated himself to the biggest money people. He is a member of Augusta National in Georgia, one of America’s most affluent and exclusive golf clubs. Membership to Augusta, which is on the site of an old plantation, is by invitation only; there is no application process. Only about three hundred people are members at any one time. Augusta admitted its first black member in 1990, nearly seventy years after it opened, and no woman has ever been a member.

  Yet money talks at Arkansas and in the world of college sports. After decades of covering college sports in the area, the Tulsa World’s longtime sportswriter Bill Connors named Frank Broyles “Best Athletics Director” in his farewell column of 1995.