Forty Minutes of Hell

by Rus Bradburd

  Heath noticed the parade of white coaches Arkansas fawned over that April. “I have no problems with the new coach, but if you just look at [Pelphrey’s] résumé, the measuring stick had changed. I was an Elite Eight coach, and they hired a coach who had come from the NIT.”

  Unaware of the swirl of politics and maneuvering around him, Heath was focused on his quickly improving team. “I never felt that Dr. White was trying to manage the athletics department; I just thought he was a cheerleader. Dr. White’s a nice guy, but it wasn’t his decision [to fire Heath]. I can tell you, that is a fact.”

  Heath believes White made every effort to try to wrestle control of athletics from his supposed subordinate, Frank Broyles. “My second or third year,” Heath says, “Dr. White wanted to make a change in the athletics director’s job. What I remember came back to us—and this was a rumor—was this. If you try to change [Broyles’s] job, you’re going to lose yours. The lesson was that Broyles is going to run the athletics department.”

  Heath’s point—the unchecked power of Broyles—echoes the feelings of many within the state: The University of Arkansas, in their decades of silence, condoned Broyles’s behavior. “Even when a federal judge criticized him harshly for racially insensitive comments last summer, nobody from the university offered even the mildest censure,” the Chronicle of Higher Education would write. “Not one peep of public reproach has been heard from any other state or university officials.”

  Heath is also quick to point out all Broyles has accomplished and his high regard in the world of college sports. Broyles, however, continued his pattern by meddling with Heath’s basketball team. “He had opinions on the staff he wanted me to hire,” Heath said.

  That didn’t bother Heath so much, since Broyles was admired for uncovering great assistants. Rather, it was his boss’s basketball ideas and his management style. “Broyles never was a guy who told me to run this play or that play, but he certainly had his opinions on style of play. That was where he wanted to have some input. There were times when he had his opinion, but we had difficulty because he was almost like an overseer. We struggled with our communication.”

  Heath’s timing in taking the job put him in an awkward place stylistically. He simply didn’t play at the same pace as Richardson. “But Broyles was pushing us into a full-court press,” he says. Heath thinks this was a matter of expedience for Broyles. “In the early part of his career, he wanted Nolan to play more Eddie Sutton’s style. The fans were used to that. At the end of the day, Broyles wanted to make the fans in Arkansas happy. He wanted me to replace Nolan by playing Nolan’s style.”

  Each year Heath’s team improved, even getting to the championship game of SEC in his final season. By the conclusion of the 2007 season, Heath was itching with anticipation. His Razorbacks had consistently done better, and had no seniors.

  Then the crimson rug was ripped from beneath his feet. “There are coaches going to the NIT, and they get raises. Bill Self lost in the first round of the NCAAs in 2007,” Heath points out. Self’s Kansas team won the national championship the following year.

  Heath says there was one constant motivator for Broyles, which became apparent at the SEC conference meetings each spring. The league meetings involve university presidents, athletics directors, head coaches, and faculty representatives.

  The young head coach and veteran AD, who was closing in on eighty years of age, would sit together. “During the basketball meeting, Broyles would sleep through the whole thing,” Heath says. “People would be looking around, smiling at me.”

  Only one thing could awaken Broyles, Heath claims. One year the SEC bosses said they wanted Arkansas to give up a home game in basketball to play in something called “The SEC Challenge.” Each home game was worth at least $300,000 to Arkansas. “He immediately woke up and snapped to attention,” Heath says.

  At certain times, though, money could be tossed around freely at Broyles’s discretion. Both Nolan Richardson and football coach Houston Nutt were paid piles of money not to coach the Razorbacks. Richardson’s payments finally ended in June of 2008.

  Stan Heath handled his firing gracefully, and he bounced back within weeks, landing as the coach of the University of South Florida. In retrospect, he sees his time in Fayetteville differently. “Nolan made the job easier for me,” he says. “People went out of their way to be kind to me.” When things went badly for Heath, Richardson reached out and shared one of his favorite lines from Ol’ Mama: “All sickness isn’t death.” Richardson also stuck up for the embattled Heath publicly.

  “I wanted to sort of take the baton from Nolan,” Heath says. The baton Heath would get came in the form of the same pink slip. “But it was only one person that led to my change,” Heath says. “There was only one direction I was looking as to what happened to me.”

  “Frank Broyles fired everybody,” one longtime Arkansas athletics department employee says. “Nolan Richardson lasted seventeen seasons, far longer than any football coach. [Football coaches] Lou Holtz, Ken Hatfield, Jack Crowe, Joe Kines, Danny Ford, and Houston Nutt were all either fired, forced out, or made to feel unwelcome by Broyles.”

  A common refrain heard around Fayetteville, Arkansas—athletics staff, faculty, waitresses, Wal-Mart execs among them—is how loved Nolan Richardson was during his tenure at the university.

  Yet the criteria white people in Arkansas use to determine what constitutes racism is fuzzy. When Arkansans are presented with the obstacles Richardson had overcome in his career—reared in racist El Paso, “don’t hire that nigger” sentiments at both Tulsa and Western Texas, dogs being brought in to black fraternity parties—these are dismissed with a shrug.

  Frank Broyles—the face of the University of Arkansas since the early sixties—urging media representatives to use the word “nigger” in print? That was poor judgment. Board of trustees members telling nigger jokes? Well, it wasn’t as though they’d lynched Nolan Richardson, or anyone else.

  Hiring a black man to replace Richardson, keeping him in the post as long as the lawsuit was alive, then dumping him despite his team’s dramatic improvement—that wasn’t racist either, folks in Fayetteville said. That was the nature of college sports.

  NABC director Jim Haney, whose column caused Richardson to reexamine his role as a “token” assistant athletics director, thinks obliviousness to Richardson’s struggle indicates a poor sense of the past. “Just hiring an African-American to be a coach was at one time a huge step,” Haney says. “Then there was that image of the recruiter who couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of the game. Next was, can we hire a black coach at a large state university? In Richardson, Thompson, and Tubby Smith, we’ve seen African-Americans lead teams to the NCAA title.”

  Haney also sees the firing of coaches of color as potentially a good thing. “At the end of the day, you want to be judged on the merits of what you do. Winning, fan base, academics, those things, just as a human being, not based on age or race. Guys like Nolan, John Thompson, Reggie Minton, they were trailblazers.”

  Despite the progress, today the Black Coaches Association is at a crossroads. Richardson, Chaney, and Thompson are no longer coaching. A lack of direction in the late 1990s—along with allegations by the BCA that its former executive director Rudy Washington had misused BCA funds—nearly led to the BCA’s demise. The BCA itself sued Washington, seeking an accounting of funds, and there was an out-of-court settlement.

  The BCA’s influence has waned, but it may be on the rebound. They’ve changed their name to Black Coaches and Administrators. Their current director, Floyd Keith, has struggled to restore confidence and financial stability and has pushed the BCA coaches to get involved with at-risk kids.

  The BCA was also the force behind the Football Hiring Report Card, which rates each college that hires a new football coach and evaluates their interest in considering candidates of color.

  No matter how many basketball games Clarence Gaines, John McClendon, Dave Whitney at Alcor
n State, or Don Corbett at North Carolina A&T won, nobody within the white power structure moved to offer them a job. Head coaches at historically black colleges today likely earn one-tenth of what their counterparts are paid at mostly white state universities.

  Perhaps the most disturbing example of this is football legend Eddie Robinson, who coached at Grambling State University in Louisiana, only twenty-five miles from the Arkansas border. Robinson served at Grambling, a historically black college, for fifty-six years, lasting through eleven United States presidents. He could boast more football wins than any other coach and sent more than two hundred players to the NFL. He had a graduation rate of 80 percent (when football graduation rates were around 50 percent nationally). For his first fifty seasons, Robinson never had a player get in trouble with the law.

  Despite being the winningest football coach of all time, Eddie Robinson was never even offered an interview for a major university head coaching job. Robinson, of course, is not the only man to be overlooked. To this day, in the history of major college football, there have been fewer than thirty black head coaches.

  Some schools have been surprisingly progressive in their hiring. The University of Mississippi has had two black basketball coaches. Texas schools like SMU, Texas A&M, Rice, and Houston have as well. Texas basketball, though, is still behind the curve. Don Haskins’s historic team remains the only Texas school that has ever won the NCAA basketball championship.

  “Integration in sports—as opposed to integration at the ballot box or in public conveyances—was a winning proposition for the whites who controlled the sports-industrial complex,” wrote William Rhoden in his book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves. “They could move to exploit black muscle and talent, thus sucking the life out of black institutions, while at the same time give themselves credit for being humanitarians.”

  Rhoden laments that while the integration of sports often benefited the black athlete, the historically black colleges received a major blow as their talent pool thinned. The same was true of the Negro Leagues once Jackie Robinson opened those floodgates. Integration was ultimately not seen as a challenge to white coaches and administrators.

  Nolan Richardson eclipsed Frank Broyles in popularity, and that may have been seen as a threat to the director of athletics’ power within the state and school. Whenever black men were put in positions of power—as head coaches, for example—it meant a drastic difference from simply having black athletes on the court.

  Haskins’s 1966 championship returned to the national mindset with the release of the movie Glory Road. Stories appeared across the country, and retro Texas Western jerseys became popular. The Nation’s David Zirin called the 1966 game “the Selma Bridge of sports.”

  The Texas Western Miners’ season was a coincidence of events that writers dream of discovering. The acerbic and crusty Haskins was the accidental hero and fine literary and artistic material. Instead of using the real Haskins, though, Disney coated him in cliché. It’s

  Photographic Insert

  Richardson pushed his teams to play at a furious pace.

  (Copyright © Aynsley Floyd)

  Colorblind coach Don Haskins began an avalanche of desegregation.

  (Courtesy of UTEP)

  Rose Richardson, 1885–1968. “Ol’ Mama” was Richardson’s de facto mother. (Courtesy of Nolan Richardson)

  Richardson’s scoring average at Texas Western College plummeted under Haskins’s slowdown system. (Courtesy of UTEP)

  New York Nirvana: Tulsa’s 1981 NIT championship put Richardson in the national spotlight. (Courtesy of University of Tulsa Sports Information)

  High-flying Ralph Brewster: from Bowie to Texas Tech. (Southwest Collections, Special Collection Library, Texas Tech University)

  Yvonne Richardson (left), Rosario Richardson (middle), Nolan Richardson. (Courtesy of Nolan Richardson)

  Leading the faithful: Frank Broyles, University of Arkansas football coach and director of athletics for fifty years. (Wesley Hitt/Getty Images)

  “He could have had a PhD in psychology”: Nolan Richardson and three-point ace Pat Bradley. (Jonathon Daniel/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images)

  Nolan Richardson and his wife, Rosario, celebrate after beating Duke for the 1994 NCAA title. (Damian Strohmeyer/ Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)

  Throwing the book away: Razorback substitute Ken Biley climbs to the top. (Hawgs Illustrated)

  “A whole lot of courage”: Arkansas football walk-on Darrell Brown. (Courtesy of Darrell Brown)

  Unofficial Arkansas high school touchdown leader Bob Walters; nephew Danny Walters became one of the greatest Razorbacks ever. (Courtesy of the Walters family)

  “We can recruit, motivate, and teach, but can we coach? I never hear that”: Nolan Richardson and TV analyst Billy Packer. (Hawgs Illustrated)

  “He seems to make a system out of anger”: Richardson in the late 1990s. (Brian Bahr/Getty Images Sport/Getty images)

  Vamanos! Richardson returned to the border to coach the Mexican National Team. (El Paso Times/Victor Calzada)

  The most important African-American coach in history: a pensive Richardson before the championship team reunion in 2009. (Eric Howerton, Now Creative Inc.)

  hard to figure why the film’s director encased its celluloid Haskins in plastic, when the real one was so much more interesting.

  Glory Road is filled with deliberate inaccuracies, which was unfortunate, since the true story was more compelling. The movie even missed Haskins’s real innovation, aside from his being color-blind—getting inner-city playground players to play slower offensively. Texas Western slowed down the run-and-gun Kentucky Wildcats, contrary to the movie’s portrayal.

  Haskins likely could never have considered starting five blacks at any other major school in Texas, and some credit would have to go to the Hispanic-majority El Paso that abolished its Jim Crow laws in 1962—after Nolan Richardson and Bert Williams were refused service in a popular restaurant.

  Glory Road is nonetheless a finely constructed film. The banter and camaraderie between the players is perfect in this happily-ever-after story. But it all felt a little too feel-good.

  UTEP, now a school with a Hispanic majority, had countless black athletes who have, like the 1966 Miners, brought fame and money to the school. Yet by 2005, UTEP had not had a black coach in any major sport. (Only women’s basketball had a black head coach—they could claim Wayne Thornton, who coached for fifty dollars a month during a single season in 1978–79.) UTEP’s road ran one way. Black athletes were welcome. Black leaders were not.

  Since that glorious 1966 game, Richardson’s alma mater has had seven athletics directors, eleven football coaches, four men’s track coaches, and three other basketball coaches. (Don Haskins finally retired in 1999.) That’s twenty-five positions of leadership for some deserving coach.

  Every single one of those twenty-five jobs was filled by a white male. Obviously, Don Haskins was not doing the hiring. Three white coaches—all assistants with no wins on the major college level—followed Haskins. On two of those hires, UTEP even passed over Nolan Richardson.

  One allegation that the University of Arkansas made at the trial was that Richardson was not really trying to find another job. They mentioned those two openings at UTEP since Richardson’s termination. While Richardson may have been happy at times to collect his $500,000 a year from Arkansas (which would end if he accepted a coaching spot elsewhere), he was, in fact, interested in the UTEP job in 2006. But Richardson claims that the interest was not reciprocated.

  “They brought Nolan in for an interview,” Haskins said, “and they told him they were going to hire a black coach, but the athletics director didn’t want Nolan.”

  UTEP finally did hire a black man in 2006, when Tony Barbee, an assistant coach from the University of Memphis, was named basketball coach. Forty years had elapsed since Haskins’s historic win.

  Firing coaches is part of college basketball. A study of what happens to coaches—both white and bl
ack—after they have been terminated is instructive.

  New BCA boss Floyd Keith claims this is where racism still prevails. “Classic example. Here’s Nolan Richardson,” Keith told Skip Myslenski in a widely syndicated column. “He proved himself. He had no violations. Then I look around, I’m not going to name names, but here’s a coach that, at Iowa State, hugged and kissed coeds, got drunk, and he’s working again. There’s something wrong here.”

  Keith was referring to Larry Eustachy, whose demise became a national story when photos of him at Big Twelve parties surfaced on the Internet. Eustachy resigned and acknowledged his addiction to alcohol. He was hired at the University of Southern Mississippi within a year of leaving ISU.

  Young black coaches like Randy Ayers and Wade Houston got very brief chances, then never resurfaced, despite the fact that college sports is a business that possesses a limitless ability to recycle white coaches. Eustachy, Tom Penders, Bob Huggins, Eddie Sutton, and Bob Knight were all rocked by controversy.

  Eddie Sutton, who represented the good old days to the good old boys of Arkansas, left Fayetteville for Kentucky. Things went terribly wrong at Kentucky, and Sutton resigned amid accusations of cash payments made to a top recruit. Sutton’s career was renewed at Oklahoma State, and he led his alma mater to a couple Final Fours. His time at Oklahoma State would come to an end with a bizarre DWI. Campus cops hoisted the drunken coach—whose blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit—into his car at the Gallagher-Iba Arena. Minutes later, he swerved across four lanes of traffic, slammed into the rear of another vehicle, then crashed into a tree. Sutton was able to find work again, resurfacing for most of a season as the head coach at the University of San Francisco.