Forty Minutes of Hell (2 page)

O
n March 1, 2002,
Nolan Richardson was terminated by the University of Arkansas. I was finishing a graduate degree at the time, after ending my own modest career in college basketball. Burned out, I stayed away from the game. Two NCAA Tournaments had come and gone, and I had not watched a single minute. I could not, however, avert my eyes from the train wreck Nolan Richardson's career had become, and I read as much as possible about his fantastic fall. Nearly every piece said that Richardson had brought on his own firing. The coaches I talked to—the white ones, anyway—wanted to know what a guy making that kind of money had to complain about.

Richardson seemed unable to move beyond 1968, determined to fight a war most Americans believed had ended long ago.

To understand Richardson's mindset, I knew I'd have to seriously examine the two most influential people in his professional career. Both of these men were icons in the world of college athletics, but they couldn't have been more different.

One, Don Haskins, was Richardson's own basketball coach, who accidentally began the avalanche that was the desegregation of college basketball teams. The other, Frank Broyles, was Richardson's boss at the University of Arkansas.

 

A photograph of Nolan
Richardson hung above my desk at the University of Texas–El Paso for eight years. My assistant coaching job kept me on the phone constantly, so there was plenty of time to study that photo of Richardson, with
TEXAS WESTERN
across his chest, soaring above some anonymous white player. Richardson was an El Paso native, who finished his playing career in 1963, the photo's caption said. I wasn't one of those people who thought basketball had much to do with a person's character, but the photo revealed something. Power, maybe. Nerve and confidence. Aggression.

UTEP (Texas Western College until 1967) had a compelling basketball history. Every wall in the basketball office was adorned with black-and-white action shots of players who had survived the decades of Don Haskins's harrowing discipline. These guys had magical names that
sounded
like they were basketball players. Willie Cager. Bobby Joe Hill and “Big Daddy” Lattin. Tiny Archibald and “Bad News” Barnes.

I had stumbled onto that job at UTEP in 1983, an entry-level graduate assistant under the Miners' coach Don Haskins. Haskins was a cult figure then because he had stunned the world of college basketball by upsetting Kentucky for the NCAA title in 1966. What got people excited wasn't simply the shock of a remote school beating a traditional power. The focus was on race. Haskins played only his black players in that final game.

No team in the Southwest Conference, where nearly all the big Texas schools competed, had ever suited up a single black player. Texas Western, however, was an independent with no conference affiliation.

The championship game had been dominated by black athletes before 1966. In 1963, Loyola beat Cincinnati for the national title. Loyola started four black players, Cincinnati three. But as chance would have it in 1966, Texas Western's Miners faced Kentucky, who had never dressed out a black player. Kentucky's entire league, the Southeast Conference, was segregated.

Given that the 1960s were an era of protest, it is tempting to interpret Haskins's move as a political statement. It wasn't. The Black Power movement of the 1960s didn't alter Haskins one bit. He was hard on his players before, during, and after, and wasn't exactly poring over the writings of Eldridge Cleaver. Haskins, who won over seven hundred games during his tenure at El Paso, was distinctly apolitical, and his only quest was to smother opponents with stifling defense. Both in interviews and during private conversation, he insisted that he merely started his best five players.

Haskins's nickname was “The Bear,” and he seemed to have ridden on horseback out of the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. He preferred shooting pool, smoking, tavern life, and hunting quail to schmoozing with corporate types or doing television interviews. His speech was peppered with Southwestern cowboy-isms, and he rarely asked a question to which he didn't already know the answer. Making big money was of little interest to Haskins, and only once was he even offered another job.

During my eight seasons at UTEP, I became an unofficial expert in the history of the basketball team. Forty years after their historic victory, the 1966 El Paso team would become the subject of the movie
Glory Road.
At the movie's premiere, two ushers shushed me as I pointed out the numerous factual errors in the film.

In fact, the 1966 championship brought Haskins plenty of aggravation.
Sports Illustrated,
in a 1968 series called “The Black Athlete,” attacked Haskins for his black players' graduation rate. Then James Michener, in his book
Sports in America,
repeated the claims: none of the black players had graduated. Both
Sports Illustrated
and Michener
were off base—all but two of the entire championship team earned degrees—but Haskins's reputation suffered.

 

I lucked out my
first year recruiting at UTEP by finding an unknown point guard out of Chicago, named Tim Hardaway. After college, Hardaway would play thirteen NBA seasons and appear in five NBA All Star games. We signed him early, and I got a reputation for being an astute judge of talent.

Hardaway's high school coach was a guy named Bob Walters. Many blacks in Chicago have ties to Mississippi's Delta; that's how the blues came to Chicago, on the backs of musicians such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. But Walters was not from Mississippi. He was from Prescott, Arkansas. Walters had an unusually clear memory of watching the 1966 Texas Western championship and knew details about that historic match-up that only real students of the game could possibly recall.

I would smile sheepishly when people said nabbing Hardaway was a brilliant move. The talk about my shrewd evaluations was flattering; my modesty, however, was genuine. It was beginner's luck. Hardaway took just one other campus visit before signing early at UTEP, fifteen hundred miles from Chicago. I never analyzed our good fortune in landing Hardaway, or the enthusiasm Bob Walters had for UTEP.

 

Once an older fan,
a friend of Haskins, walked in and tapped his knuckles to the photo of Richardson, who was by then a successful college coach.

“He won't shut up about racism,” the man said. “Everything is black or white to Nolan Richardson.”

That take on Richardson proved to be a common point of view. Even Don Haskins, the Abe Lincoln of college hoops, was occasion
ally perplexed when Richardson would challenge the newest SAT requirements or media coverage as racist.

I followed Richardson's coaching career closely—he was an older uncle in my new UTEP family. We met a few times, on rental car shuttles, at junior college tournaments, or at airports. In the 1985 NCAA playoffs, UTEP played his Tulsa team. But Richardson's daughter was sick, and he didn't get to the game until minutes before tip-off. We beat Tulsa that night in a fairly close game, and we got a little help from the referees since UTEP set the NCAA record for “Most Free Throws Attempted.” It was not the kind of record that impresses anyone, but it was something Richardson emphasized to me when I first began interviewing him twenty years later. Fifty-five free throws UTEP shot that night, he said. He was exactly right, as it turned out, but who remembers getting screwed after two decades?

E
l Paso, Texas,
was known as El Paso del Norte until the late 1850s. A gap between the Franklin Mountains and the Sierra de Juárez allowed travelers a convenient route to journey east to west. Because of this geographical advantage, the border town below attracted nomads and newcomers, and some boundaries blurred.

Black men could find work because four separate railroad lines ran through El Paso at the turn of the century. The railroads provided jobs as well as access. El Paso, at the edge of U.S. territory, was relatively open to working black men and even had a Negro Women's League. Plenty of social and legal pressures, however, kept the races apart, especially black men and white women. In 1893, the state of Texas enacted a law that prohibited interracial marriage.

No obvious black neighborhood existed in El Paso in the early 1900s, and there isn't one today. By the time Richardson was old enough to attend school, close to four thousand blacks lived in El Paso—a mere 3 percent of the population. Some lived near the army
base, and others lived close to the border, near downtown. All black children had to attend Frederick Douglass Colored School, which opened around 1890.

In 1911, the school's principal introduced Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, to a packed house at the El Paso Theater. That day, Booker T. Washington urged blacks not to fight the forces of segregation and instead to accommodate whites based on their mutual interests—economics. This idea played well in El Paso, a town where blacks were treated a little better than in most of Texas. Around that same time, a chapter of the NAACP formed in El Paso.

The Ku Klux Klan moved into El Paso soon afterward and exerted a growing influence over city hall and El Paso's biggest newspaper.

 

Nolan Richardson's mother, Clareast,
was just twenty-one years old when she withered away from a mysterious disease in 1944. The family was living in Los Angeles, and had little access to medical care. Clareast Richardson left behind three young kids: Shirley was five, Nolan Jr. three, Helen six months old. The Richardson kids had few options but to move in with the children's grandmother in El Paso's poorest neighborhood, the Segundo Barrio
.

For years, the Segundo Barrio was the Ellis Island for many Mexican immigrants coming to the United States. Despite the constant influx of newcomers, the neighborhood had a settled and historic feel. Low-slung adobe buildings, hand-painted storefronts, blaring
norteño
music, and lively street life dominated El Paso's second ward.

Nolan's father, Nolan Richardson Sr., had a sporadic career as a prizefighter. He lived in El Paso on and off, working at a car dealership when he was in town. While he stopped by to visit his kids after their relocation, he didn't often live with the family. He battled the bottle much of his adult life.

That left the responsibility of raising Clareast's three kids to their
grandmother, Rose Richardson—“Ol' Mama.” Ol' Mama was from just outside of Ruston, Louisiana, but had moved to El Paso in her youth. She worked two jobs: one as a cook at Hardees, a family restaurant on Alameda Street; the other waitressing around El Paso.

Richardson's grandfather—Ol' Papa, of course—was a huge man, whose health was already declining when the grandkids moved in. He was born in 1875, ten years before Ol' Mama. He gave young Nolan the nickname “Sam.” Sometimes he was “Sweet Sam” and sometimes “Sam Don't Give a Damn.”

The expanded family resided in a three-room house, well before the days when air-conditioning made El Paso tolerable. The house was at 1626 Overland Street, a short walk from the downtown bridge that connected El Paso to Juárez, Mexico. Ol' Mama was a peculiarly determined and serious woman, and she made no secret of her belief that young Nolan Jr. was special. She reminded him constantly that he was going to be different from other kids, and she very much meant it. Richardson is still struck today by the bond he had with his stern, diminutive grandmother, despite the fact that the extended family was large. “I had the feeling that she loved
me
more,” he says.

 

The gritty pocket of
the Segundo Barrio where Richardson became fluent in border Spanish was called El Pujido
.
The area was plagued by poverty, but Richardson insists he was never hassled in the Mexican-American neighborhood, despite being the only black boy around.

Outsiders believed the El Paso neighborhood the Richardsons lived in was treacherous, but he only feared two things: Ol' Mama's disapproval, or, worse, her leaving him. His cousins would go out of town for Christmas. Not Richardson. “I'd stay around Ol' Mama because I was afraid when I came back she might be gone,” he says. Richardson would sit at her feet and badger her to tell him stories.
When he was small, this meant Bible stories. “I knew the Bible better than any churchgoing friends of mine,” he says.

She'd also tell Richardson about her own parents.

Ol' Mama was born in 1885; her parents had been enslaved in Louisiana. This one-person separation from that history had a profound impact on Richardson. “I grew up hearing stories about what slavery was like,” he says. “Not from any
book
,” he says, a refrain he'd use in his professional life, “but from my grandmother, whose very parents had lived it.” A story that stuck with him was about one of the few ways a slave had to rebel: inflicting an injury on himself.

 

It began to register
with Richardson that being black was something of consequence one day, when he was ten years old, at El Paso's Washington Park.

The El Paso summer heat can be devastating, and in the 1940s and 1950s, the only relief was at the local swimming pools. Richardson already knew he was not allowed to swim at the Segundo Barrio's Armijo Park pool: they had a no-Negroes rule. Ol' Mama figured they'd try at Washington Park, where black kids were allowed—one single afternoon a year.

The blistering sun made it almost too hot to stand in place on the cement deck that day. Not that the barefoot kids would have stood still—they sprinted before slanting a dive or cannonball into the cool, blue water.

Occasionally, a splash reached close to Richardson's sneakered feet. He kept his fingers wrapped in a fist around the fencing that kept him from the swimming pool. The yelping of the white children was joyous, but he didn't smile. He could feel the intense heat rise up from the bottom of his shoes, as if the rubber might melt and he'd be stuck watching the swimmers forever. It was over one hundred degrees, as it often was in El Paso.

The dozens of white kids didn't notice him. They shoved and
dunked each other amiably, then ran up close enough to him that it was nearly impolite of them not to say hello, or come on in, the water's fine.

Richardson knew they'd gotten the day wrong, but stood for a while anyway. It was June of 1951, but not Juneteenth, the unofficial holiday that celebrated the end of slavery in Texas. Juneteenth was the single day each year when black kids were allowed to swim. “They'd drain the pool afterward,” he says, “and fill it up fresh again.”

Richardson often recalls this swimming-pool story when he talks about growing up in El Paso. “Lots of people think that because Texas Western won the national championship in 1966 that El Paso was always a progressive town,” he says. “But that's not true.” El Paso's theaters, restaurants, and hotels were segregated as well. Mexican-Americans were welcome most places, but blacks were not.

Once-a-summer swimming in El Paso's blazing heat wasn't enough to cool him off. He found the Missouri Street Center, the only pool where black and Mexican-American kids could swim all summer. As he got older, if Richardson felt frustrated in the lagging-behind Texas town, he would head south. With the border only a baseball-throw away, he crossed into Mexico at will by the time he was a teenager. “In Juárez, I always felt freer,” he says. “My Spanish was nearly as good as my English, and the folks in Mexico didn't seem the least bit concerned with a young black kid exploring the streets.”

When Richardson was twelve, his father died. His grandfather, Ol' Papa, passed away soon after. With the men in his life gone, he grew even closer with Ol' Mama.

 

Frederick Douglass School was
a small building on Eucalyptus Street that housed close to a hundred students. Because of a lack of space and teachers, every classroom served several grades, from first
to twelfth. The books were ragged hand-me-downs from El Paso's white schools and included the long list of previous owners' names on the books' inside covers. Yet, by all accounts, Douglass had talented teachers and was the unifying institution for El Paso blacks. It wasn't exactly idyllic, but Douglass provided Richardson with both a sense of place and history.

The social scene for blacks in El Paso, formed at Douglass School, was limited but lively. Shiloh Baptist Church was a hub, as were places like Rusty's Playhouse, Gillespie's Steak House, and the Square Deal Barbershop.

On one scorching afternoon, when Richardson was thirteen, a teacher named Mrs. Johnnie Calvert closed the doors and windows. That got the attention of everyone in the class. “We knew that something important was up,” Richardson says.

Mrs. Calvert cleared her throat and spoke softly to her subdued class. “There's going to be a big change coming to this country,” she said. “Soon, Negro children and white children will be going to school together, and all of you will have a choice to make.” There was a Supreme Court case, the teacher said, in which a Negro family had challenged the laws, hoping their daughter could go to the same school as the white kids. The Douglass students looked at each other but didn't speak. “You can stay at Douglass, or you can go to the school in your neighborhood,” Mrs. Calvert said.

 

Douglass School's 1954 valedictorian,
Thelma White, decided to test that Supreme Court decision. With the help of the local NAACP, she applied at Texas Western College, but was denied admission. She took Texas Western to court and won. The following year, she was admitted, along with twelve other black students. But Thelma White, put off by the snub and subsequent delays, had enrolled at nearby New Mexico State University by the time the case was decided.

George McCarty, the Texas Western basketball coach at the time, realized that the college's decision to admit blacks might be used to his advantage. He signed up a junior college player named Charlie Brown in 1956 to be the first black athlete at any mainly white school in the old Confederacy. Richardson, a high school freshman, was intrigued by the news.

El Paso during this era was torn. While the influence of the Klan had long faded, this was still Texas. The town remained segregated and blacks had to ride in the back of city buses and trolleys. Unlike most of the South, though, blacks could shop and feel welcome at premier places, such as the Popular and White House Department Store. They could even try on clothes and hats before making a purchase, something that was denied them all over the South.

 

The peculiar combination Richardson
absorbed—the community and tradition at Douglass School, and his soulful Mexican neighborhood—gave him a unique view of the world. Richardson was the only Douglass student who lived in the Pujido section, part of the Bowie High School district. Bowie was virtually one hundred percent Mexican-American. That didn't worry Richardson. He chose Bowie and became their first black student. “All the kids I'd known forever from the barrio were going to Bowie,” he says, “and I knew I'd be fine. I didn't have any kind of chip on my shoulder, because in that neighborhood, I was just Sam.”

Richardson loved nearly everything about his time at Bowie. “The Mexican kids treated me so well,” he says. “I was an athlete, of course, and that helped.”

There were some problems before Richardson established himself as a sports hero, though. During his freshman year, he was called to the main office by an assistant principal, named, of all things, Patton. “Raymond Patton,” Richardson recalls. “And he was mean.”

Richardson looked down, shuffling in place as Patton chewed him out for an overdue library book. “You're not allowed back in school until this fine is paid and I see your parents,” Patton said.

Richardson made the long trek home in the heat to tell Ol' Mama. She grabbed her purse, and the two walked back to Bowie to meet Patton.

“How much do you owe?” Ol' Mama asked midway to the high school.

“Six cents,” Richardson said.

Ol' Mama's pace quickened. When they got to Patton's office, Ol' Mama went on the attack, insisting to Patton that the punishment didn't fit the crime. Richardson, who often stared at his shoes when confronted by authority, was quietly thrilled that Ol' Mama had straightened out the most feared faculty member in the building. He didn't expect what happened when they got outside the office.

Ol' Mama turned on Richardson and let him have it, too. “I saw you looking down at the ground in there,” she said, poking him in the chest. “Don't you ever put your head down in front of anyone. You look every man in the eye, I don't care what color he is!”

Richardson offered to escort her home, but she declined, and ordered him back to class. But not until she gave him one more earful. “You don't like yourself,” she said. “Don't be staring down at the floor ever again.”

Richardson, who was fourteen at the time, sees this episode as a crossroads in his life. “She had given me permission to be a man,” he says.

 

As a teenager, Nolan
began to see more of El Paso. He had friends who owned
ranflas,
and they wanted to drive these jalopies to investigate more than the town's swimming pools.