by Rus Bradburd
The well-documented case of Bob Knight is interesting as well. Knight and Richardson are nearly the same age, and both men played for coaches who won NCAA titles—Knight for Fred Taylor at Ohio State. Although Richardson was not a member of Haskins’s 1966 team, he was certainly the better player. By the time Knight was only twenty-four, he was the army’s head coach at West Point. With not a single black man coaching a major college team, Knight simply would not have been given the chance if he had been black. Richardson, of course, toiled at an obscure high school and junior college for over a decade, at a time when Knight was landing a plum Big Ten job.
Both Knight and Richardson won NCAA titles, although Knight won three. Knight’s controversies at Indiana were reported nationally. He was dumped by Indiana in September 2000, but despite the negative publicity, Knight quickly resurfaced at Texas Tech. A group of alumni and fans—not Knight—sued IU soon after he was fired. Knight waited until he was hired and secure at Texas Tech, and then finally filed suit in November 2002, after negotiations for a settlement collapsed.
One of Richardson’s former assistants, Wayne Stehlik, admitted to ESPN.com that part of the reason Richardson was untouchable was that he had sued Broyles. “Athletics directors and chancellors or presidents are probably a little bit nervous,” Stehlik said, “because of how it turned out there at Arkansas.”
The firing of Nolan Richardson remained a source of controversy in Arkansas when Razorback football coach Houston Nutt was let go. Nutt became the head football coach at Arkansas in 1998. His 2006 team was 7-1 in SEC play, and 10-4 overall. Going into the 2007 season—his tenth—Nutt had plenty to be proud of, although he hadn’t approached the success that Richardson had in basketball.
Then a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Nutt, who is married with children, sent close to a thousand text messages to an attractive TV anchorwoman. Arkansas was 3-4 then in the SEC, going into the last game in 2007, and five SEC teams had better records. Yet Chancellor John White and Frank Broyles stood by him, at least publicly.
During that tumultuous autumn, Stanley Reed, the new chairman of the board of trustees at UA, claimed the public had lost confidence in Coach Nutt. The fickle fans were ready for a change, and the “lost confidence” excuse clearly echoed the removal of Richardson, but Reed insisted Arkansas did not want to fire Houston Nutt. “It would look bad,” he said.
What happened next would look worse. In a dramatic season finale, Arkansas beat the #1-ranked LSU Tigers in Baton Rouge. It appeared as though all might be forgiven and Nutt would remain a Razorback. But behind the scenes, boosters started the ball rolling on removing Nutt. A monstrous $3-million buyout was assembled through the Razorback Foundation. And they wouldn’t have to fire the football coach. Houston Nutt resigned.
Chancellor John White stated at the ensuing press conference that UA wished to remove the “golden handcuffs” that were so invasive in Nutt’s life. Since Nutt was resigning, the university should have been free of any financial obligation to him, but clearly there had been an agreement. White publicly encouraged the Razorback Foundation to shell out over $3 million to Nutt.
Stanley Reed was then quoted as saying, “It gets to the point of fairness and equity. We did not want to fire Houston Nutt. He had done a great job…”
Nutt had a conference record of 42-40. He never won an overall conference championship and, of course, no national championship, or the equivalent of a basketball Final Four. A day later, Nutt took a lucrative job at the University of Mississippi. Nutt wouldn’t have to return any of the $3 million—he was free to coach at another school.
Richardson had been terminated in Fayetteville for essentially suggesting the same thing that the UA would later do for Houston Nutt: “If they go ahead and pay me my money, they can take the job tomorrow.” Yet Richardson’s buyout included a strict provision—he would lose any subsequent money if he took another job.
Richardson’s overall winning percentage—70 percent—was far better than Nutt’s overall percentage, not to mention the conference titles, Final Fours, and the 1994 NCAA title. When the University of Arkansas decided to dump Richardson, there was no talk of “fairness and equity” and whether firings would “look bad.” Richardson seems to only have ground his heel into the sense of decorum that made it possible for Nutt to walk away with enough money to fill a Wal-Mart truck.
John White points out that Richardson was given the opportunity to resign in 2002. “Houston Nutt didn’t come out and say that ‘If they pay me my money I’m gone tomorrow.’ We actually treated Houston the same way as Nolan, but there was no way from a public relations perspective that, nationally, people would understand why would Arkansas fire Nutt after the seasons he’s just had. We couldn’t fire him if we wanted to recruit another coach. There was an IRS rule change that meant Nutt couldn’t afford to leave.”
Whenever Richardson’s firing resurfaced, his graduation rate from 1990–1994 was always mentioned as justification. That argument should have changed dramatically on October 4, 2007.
The Northwest Arkansas Morning News ran their usual “Briefly” column on page two of the sports section. The first three short pieces were these important issues in Arkansas:
Tony Parker was taking time off from the French Olympic team to concentrate on his spot with the San Antonio Spurs.
Knicks coach Isiah Thomas focused his mind on basketball during his sexual harassment trial.
Lakers center Kwame Brown was charged with disorderly conduct.
The last section of the column was titled “Graduation Rates Increase Slightly.” Most of the brief story on the NCAA’s latest study—from 1997 until 2002 this time—discussed how overall graduation rates for all athletes were on the rise.
Then, this single sentence: “Arkansas’ football team had a graduation rate of 53 percent, and the men’s basketball team was at 50 percent.”
Richardson’s name was not even mentioned, although those were his final years coaching.
Why wouldn’t Arkansas—which was embarrassed by his published graduation rates from 1990 to 1994—be shouting about this great academic improvement at the end of Richardson’s tenure?
There had to be a big story the next day, when everyone at the UA athletics department had a chance to plan a press conference to get their story out. UA basketball had a respectable graduation rate in Richardson’s last five years! But the next day, there was nothing.
For most of Richardson’s tenure, Morning News sports editor Chip Souza was an hour away, in Fort Smith. He had no excuse as to why the “new and improved” graduation rate was not a frontpage piece. And he wonders why Richardson was constantly hammered for his older graduation rate after he was fired. “Nobody mentioned it when he was winning the national championship,” Souza says. “It was just never an issue, until he lost and then had that press conference.”
The story line about the new graduation rate was so small that almost nobody noticed, even in Arkansas.
Judge Wendell Griffen knows why the new study has never been publicized. “Frank Broyles and John White wanted to get rid of Nolan,” Griffen says. “White was on the ‘Graduation Rate Bandwagon,’ thinking that graduation rates are somehow indicative of how people are doing their jobs. But athletics’ function is to win games, not produce Nobel scientists. If Nolan had graduated every player and won half of his games, he would have been fired a long time ago.”
Still, why not publicize the latest study, which exonerated the basketball program and shed a good light on then-embattled football coach Houston Nutt? “It would be an admission they were wrong,” former UA administrator Lonnie Williams says. “You don’t pick someone up that you’ve been kicking.”
Griffen thinks that in many ways, the NCAA even speaking about graduation rates is hypocritical. “The coach of the basketball team does not have an obligation to graduate anybody, and there’s not a performance feature in most contracts. The fact is that not even the dean of a college or a d
epartment head has an obligation to graduate people at a certain percentage. For the NCAA to suggest that coaches have to do what nobody else is required to do is a kind of lunacy. But that’s what you get from this good old boy network, when everybody knows [college sports] is about dollars.”
Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring, the Southeast Conference hired its first African-American football coach. Sylvester Croom was named the Mississippi State coach in 2004.
College basketball remains far more progressive. One of the last college leagues to desegregate their teams was the glamorous Atlantic Coast Conference. Today, the ACC sets the national standard for black basketball coaches.
With twelve members in its fold, the ACC—perhaps the best league in the country—had seven black head coaches in the 2008–09 season: Boston College (Al Skinner), Georgia Tech (Paul Hewitt), Florida State (Leonard Hamilton), Clemson (Oliver Purnell), Miami (Frank Haith), Virginia (Dave Leitao), and North Carolina State (Sidney Lowe).
Not a single black head coach was employed in the ACC when Richardson won his NCAA title in 1994 (although Bob Wade had been the Maryland coach in the late 1980s).
Perhaps what lifted Nolan Richardson to greatness—his unwavering us-against-the-world attitude—might have contributed to his downfall. But Judge Wendell Griffen points out that Richardson had an important task at hand. “A brain surgeon doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder,” he says, “he simply uses a scalpel and is insistent on helping patients.” What happened to Richardson left Griffen miffed. “We talk about opportunity,” he says, “but we denigrate people who challenge the barriers.”
“Nolan has the irony of being uncommonly good and universally misunderstood,” Griffen says. “Nolan’s battle has been in the cause of inclusion and equality but because he’s a black man of action and courage—without apology or timidity—he’s misunderstood as being angry or having a chip on his shoulder.”
Stan Heath thinks each African-American coach needs to be taken on his own merits and politics, regardless of age. “You can’t put us in the same box. Those guys [Chaney, Thompson, and Richardson] I have tremendous respect for. They voiced concerns and broke barriers in those early years and were instrumental in my development. For any coach, though, you don’t become politically involved until you have success. Then you have a microphone in front of you. Were they as vocal their first years?”
Todd Day, Arkansas’s all-time leading scorer, says, “When Nolan was young, he believed everything was against him. If you didn’t agree with him, then you were against him, too. As he got older, he kept that edge, but that’s what made him an incredibly successful coach.”
Many are perplexed that Nolan Richardson could still feel disrespected or insecure when he was making so much money. Frank Broyles could be said to equate dollars and respect, but for Richardson respect had little to do with income.
Former UTEP All-American Fred Reynolds tells a story that would resonate with Richardson. Reynolds had a long pro career in Europe, returned to El Paso, and used his degree in criminal justice to become a highway patrolman. He also married a successful doctor.
For the last few years, he’s bought season tickets for UTEP basketball. In 2007, an athletics department employee phoned to inform Reynolds of a new plan for season-ticket holders. Reynolds would not only have to pay for his seats, but was now required to make a donation to UTEP athletics. Although he didn’t mind buying tickets, Reynolds said his career on the court was enough of a donation.
“I know your wife is a doctor,” he says the UTEP employee told him. Meaning, of course, that the couple had plenty of money.
When Reynolds complained about this to the UTEP athletics director a week later, he got a similar response. “It’s not like you’re poor, Fred,” he says he was told.
Reynolds believes his wife’s status and their jobs were irrelevant. He gave great years on the court at a crucial time in UTEP basketball history. To the white people asking him, he believes, this contribution meant too little. Asking him to contribute money, even though he could well afford it, was a form of disrespect.
The long history of racism affected black athletes and coaches to varying degrees. Bob Walters was just one of countless black athletes in Arkansas whose career was stolen.
Negro schools didn’t count, so his ninety-six career touchdowns were never listed as the state record. Instead, the Arkansas Activities Association for years listed a player from Osceola who scored eighty-eight touchdowns.
Walters was first diagnosed with cancer in the late 1970s, when Danny Walters was in high school. He had three brutal bouts. First, colon cancer. Then it spread, necessitating the removal of one lung in 1984. The cancer finally metastasized to his brain and kidneys. Walters never complained about the cancer that slowly ate him alive—or the racism that ruined his playing career.
“That was just Bob,” his widow, Sheryl, says. “He didn’t harbor bitterness.”
While Walters was being devastated by the disease, though, he became keen on having his star guard Tim Hardaway join Don Haskins. “Bob liked the man,” Sheryl says, “and he felt Haskins was someone who would see a person as a person, and an athlete as an athlete. Tim wound up in El Paso because Bob had both an admiration for, and trust in, Don Haskins.”
Walters—who’d steered his nephew to Arkansas to play football—pushed Hardaway to sign early rather than wait until the later signing period, when there would no doubt have been a long line. “Bob liked the idea of people recognizing skills,” Sheryl says, “rather than the whole black-white bit. He saw that in Haskins, I guess. There were so many places Bob went where he felt he didn’t get a good shake because he was black.”
Walters was able to both forgive Arkansas through his nephew and honor his own battles with segregation by sending Hardaway to Haskins.
“Bob Walters understood history,” Tim Hardaway adds. “That’s why he was happy to see me with Don Haskins.”
Walters passed away in 1985 at the age of forty-three.
The challenges for the new generation of African-American coaches pose a different set of problems. “There are struggles that are common to the human condition,” Judge Wendell Griffen says, “but it’s a special experience for coaches of color. Coaches of the Stan Heath era are dealing with different facts, but they’re still dealing with the issues of inclusion that Nolan had. One of the privileges of being white is that you never have to worry about boosters not supporting you, or the trustees of the institution wondering if you are white enough to head the program.”
Griffen provides a simple analogy of what it has been like for blacks to navigate through American society. “I’m right-handed, but I never wake up and think about it. When I sit down at one of those preformed desks in a college lecture hall, I can fit.” To those right-handers who are comfortable, everything seems fine. “Only left-handed people are aware of the fact that these desks are set up differently,” Griffen says.
In May 2008, Griffen lost his reelection campaign. An ordained Baptist minister, he had been an appeals court judge in Little Rock for over a decade. During his tenure he had to appear before an ethics panel, where he was successful in fighting for his right to free speech. Griffen was highly critical of more than the way the University of Arkansas had treated minorities and Nolan Richardson. Griffen had pointedly criticized President Bush and also endorsed an increase in minimum wage in Arkansas.
Although his successor, Judge Rita Gruber, did not bring up Griffen’s comments during the campaign, she told the Associated Press, “I think it’s fair to say there were a lot of people in the community who were disappointed with the statements he’s made over the years.”
Even in defeat, Griffen was defiant. “I would much rather have maintained my integrity,” he said, “and experienced these results than sacrificed my integrity for political expediency.”
Ed Beshara died in Tulsa in the spring of 2007 at the age of ninet
y-one. The son of immigrants, Beshara often felt the strain of being an outsider. While Beshara and Richardson looked comically different standing side by side, Richardson believed he and Beshara were two of a kind. Beshara’s background provided him with empathy for the underdog, something Richardson always found endearing. For twenty years, hardly a week would pass without Beshara and Richardson talking.
The month before Beshara’s death, Richardson drove from Arkansas daily—four hours round-trip—to spend time with his friend. Beshara would hold Richardson’s thick hand and call him “my adopted son,” while a stream of nurses and doctors came and went. It was the first time Richardson made the trek to Tulsa on a regular basis since Yvonne had been sick.
“They were friends until the end,” says Ed Beshara Jr., who took over his father’s business. “My dad loved Nolan a great deal. Nolan is extremely loyal and will remember you forever if you try to help him.”
Richardson’s eulogy in tribute to Beshara brought the mourners to their feet, applauding through their tears. “I’d never seen people cheer at a funeral,” Beshara Jr. says, “but they did that day.”
TWENTY-FOUR
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Panama convinced Nolan Richardson to coach its national team in 2005. Richardson was thrilled to lead a national team where his fluency in Spanish would be useful, even if it meant coaching in obscurity. Panama posted its best finish in twenty-six years, but the news was hardly mentioned in the States.
Richardson’s next crack at leading a Spanish-speaking squad was a homecoming of sorts. He was named the Mexican National Coach in the spring of 2007. The Mexicans, who had hopes of an Olympic bid, set up training camp across the Rio Grande from El Paso in Juárez, Mexico.
