Forty Minutes of Hell (22 page)

As White finished his prayers, Richardson came to understand that White was genuine—he really was asking for help from a higher power. But the entity with higher power had already left the office, at White's request.

 

ESPN aired a program
the same day Nolan Richardson was fired, an interview with the coach that had been prerecorded in January. The timing could not have been worse for him.

The ESPN interview included John White and Richardson discussing the just-published graduation rate of black players at Arkansas. The NCAA had released the study of black players at every Division I basketball program. The results, for black basketball players who entered as freshmen between 1990 and 1994, were based on a formula that evaluated whether a degree was received within six years of enrolling.

Richardson was the focus of the interview partly because the last year of the study was the season his Razorbacks won the NCAA title. ESPN compared the Razorbacks' rate to that of Duke, a private school that had a terrific percentage for graduation. Arkansas had not graduated a single black player during the specified time, 1990–94. Richardson said that the ultimate responsibility lay with each individual player, not the coach or administration.

The list of schools with a graduation rate of 0 percent included a lot more than Nolan Richardson's Razorbacks. Many of the schools were basketball powers with renowned coaches: Georgia Tech (Bobby Cremins), James Madison (Lefty Driesell), LSU (Dale Brown), Oregon State, Texas Tech, Cincinnati (Bob Huggins), Hawaii (Riley Wallace), Louisville (Denny Crum), Nevada, Pacific (Bob Thomason), Wyoming, Utah State, Virginia Commonwealth, Colorado, Long Beach State, Cal State–Sacramento, Cleveland State, Eastern Washington, Georgia Southern, Jacksonville State, McNeese State, Morehead State, Samford, SW Missouri (now Missouri State), Idaho, Memphis, Minnesota (Clem Haskins), UNLV, Oklahoma, UTEP (Don Haskins), Texas Pan-American, Toledo, and Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The ESPN program did more to damage Richardson's reputation than any other single story and would be used repeatedly to justify his firing.

 

A few days later,
Democrat-Gazette
sports editor Wally Hall wrote a piece in response to all the media requests for the usually low-profile Arkansas press corps. He wrote that many of the inquirers wanted to know, “Has the media in Arkansas treated Nolan Richardson with kid gloves out of fear of being called racist?”

Hall wrote, “What everyone saw Monday night, Nolan Richardson's anger, was something the media in Arkansas has experienced dozens of times. We called it the real ‘forty minutes of hell.' This time, though, he did it with cameras running and everyone got to see why he has been stroked and petted by the press for seventeen years. We've walked around on eggshells for years because of Richardson's anger.”

The tension was clearly a two-way street between Hall and Richardson. When Little Rock civil rights attorney John Walker was asked by the same newspaper if he would be representing Richardson, he said, “Unless coach asks me to do something for him, then I'm not authorized to say one way or another, especially to the
Democrat
.”

There was still one more home game to play, and assistant coach Mike Anderson took the helm. Arkansas beat Vanderbilt, but the following week they lost to Tennessee in the first round of the SEC tourney. In both games, the Razorback players wrote the name of their deposed coach on their sneakers to honor him.

 

“I was shocked, totally
shocked,” Temple coach John Chaney recalls. “My president made it very clear that when I got ready to express my opinion, I could.” While Chaney was disappointed in Arkansas's chancellor, he likes to remind people that John White was not the only higher-up who did not stand up for the coach. “Neither did [then-governor] Mike Huckabee, and he's an Evangelist! That's the house of righteousness? You can't dismiss the truth that was spoken by Nolan.”

Huckabee did, in fact, weigh in. He told the Associated Press, “I
think [Richardson is] one of the truly great people I've known, and I have appreciated that he has overcome more than most people. That's one of the things that a lot of people now don't fully comprehend. They haven't walked in his shoes. They haven't taken his journey. They may not fully understand some of the deep feelings that he carries inside. There's a wonderful success story in Nolan Richardson.”

Richardson also received a letter of support from Huckabee, which read, in part, “Please don't let the critics and the media wear you down. I know from experience it's exasperating when those with small minds and big mouths seem to have all the answers. I face those types of people every day.”

Chaney understands Richardson's refusal to sugarcoat statements during tough times. Before Temple played Xavier, Chaney had criticized the invasion of Iraq. “I made it very clear about Bush,” Chaney says. “This man is guilty of treason and guilty of making a decision to kill our kids. In Ohio, they'd lost half a million jobs.” Chaney found himself greeted by a hostile crowd, and got an escort to and from the bench by Ohio state troopers.

When Temple returned to Philadelphia, Chaney was pulled out of practice. It was ex-president Bill Clinton calling to thank Chaney for speaking up.

 

On March 9, the
St. Petersburg Times
ran a piece by Darrell Fry called “Don't Play the Race Card if You Can't Cover the Bet.” Fry wrote, “These days the race card is tossed out like worthless lottery tickets.” Then Darrell Fry brought out a card of his own, the one that would repeatedly be used to bury Richardson—the graduation-rate card. Zero percent from 1990 to 1994.

NABC director Jim Haney thinks that Richardson's graduation rate for that period is not entirely accurate. “Nolan had guys leaving to go to the NBA early,” he says. “The way the graduation rate was determined then, it didn't count freshmen who transferred and
graduated! Junior college kids didn't count and weren't factored in at all, and Nolan had lots of those guys. There's simply a high transfer rate among college players, and that can affect the way the percentages are calculated. You have to really study Nolan's circumstances. Now the APR [academic progress report, which factors in junior college players and transfers] gives you a more accurate rate.” Corliss Williamson and Scotty Thurman, Haney points out, were the two most visible players, and they left school early for the professional ranks. Others would play pro ball in Europe.

Alex Dillard was the third-leading scorer on Arkansas's 1994 NCAA champs but wasn't as productive off the court, and he did not graduate with his class. Over a decade later, he is completing his degree requirements at home in Alabama. He takes the blame for his delay in graduation.

“Nolan didn't give a shit about us making it in basketball,” he says. “He was more concerned about us succeeding in the real world. ‘Your skills can only last this long,' he'd say. Now I truly understand what he meant. He was trying to prepare us for life. If we missed a day of class he would run our ass until we dropped.”

The media's perception of Richardson's academics and the weak graduation numbers from 1990–94 exposed by the NCAA's study were not indicators of Richardson's priorities, Dillard claims. “Coach
said
it wasn't his job on TV, but that's all he cared about. School.” Almost everyone close to the Razorbacks' basketball program—even players disgruntled about playing time—say that Richardson talked about education and opportunity constantly.

Scotty Thurman, whose three-pointer sealed the Razorbacks NCAA title in 1994, left Arkansas before his eligibility was up. The NBA didn't work out, but gigs in Greece and Italy paid nearly as well. When his long career in Europe was over, Thurman finished his degree in English at the historically black Philander Smith College in Little Rock. Today he works for a real estate company.

Thurman believes Richardson's policy of running his players as
punishment for academic problems was a mistake, since running does not directly improve academic performance. “Looking back, I feel like there were some things that could have been done differently,” Thurman says. “If a guy is coming to school for hoops, running only helps him get better on the basketball floor.”

Thurman had both parents at home, and his father had played college ball at Grambling. “But a lot of the players didn't have both parents like I did. A lot didn't have a strong father figure, and they looked up to Coach Richardson.” Thurman believes Richardson should have held players out of games for missing class, not just punished them by running. “If your son was coming to play for me,” he says, “isn't it my responsibility to get him to go to class? Some of those guys came from tough situations.”

Sometimes players were simply not interested in graduating. “Nolan had a player named Arlin Bowers,” trainer Dave England recalls, “a great kid whose dream was to be a firefighter.” Bowers would often insist that firefighters didn't need a college degree. Today, Bowers is a firefighter near Memphis. “It may surprise some people to learn that Nolan stressed academics all the time,” England says.

In this respect, Richardson was a paradox—he stressed opportunity and education to his players daily but lashed out at critics who questioned his graduation rate, saying it wasn't his job to graduate players. Rather than admit to common academic shortcomings during his tenure—dozens of schools were on the same list—Richardson went on the attack. Rather than bragging (as he saw it) that he did indeed stress academic success, he confronted the very premise of their criticism.

T
he firing of
Nolan Richardson left the black residents of

Arkansas and black alumni bitter. After 2002, even moves the university made to diversify were viewed with suspicion. Old wounds opened, reminding the black community of Arkansas of the years of deception and delay at the university.

His dismissal spurred students, alumni, and faculty to consider reforms in the process of how UA recruited African-American students, as well as the manner in which the university hired and promoted minority faculty.

The African-American studies program at the University of Arkansas is part of the school's Fulbright College. J. William Fulbright, president of the University of Arkansas from 1939 unti1 1941, went on to be a U.S. senator for thirty years. He was one of the first senators to condemn the United States' invasion of Vietnam; before that, Fulbright stood up to the bullying and Communist witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Charles Robinson, head of the African-American studies program, says the Fulbright name (and the seven-foot statue of him outside) reminds him of the daily complexities of living in the South. “Fulbright was an avowed racist. He's turning over in his grave right now, over the very existence of my program.”

While Robinson admires Nolan Richardson, he was taken aback by the coach's comments after his graduation rate from 1990–94 was revealed, and was confused by Richardson's explanation on ESPN.

Robinson believes the Arkansas story is complicated. He is proud of the university, pointing out that it was the first major white university in the South to integrate. Yet the firing of Richardson left him shaking his head. “After all he's done, this man still can't control his own destiny. His time was up when his boss, the white athletics director, said it was up.”

 

Arkansas did not take
long to find a replacement for Nolan Richardson. With a lawsuit likely, the new hire was no surprise—African-American coach Stan Heath. Heath had just finished an incredible run in his first year as coach of Kent State, where they won thirty games and came within a single win of going to the NCAA Final Four.

Many felt the hiring of Heath was a deliberate move to avoid a lawsuit. “Absolutely, Heath was hired to keep the racial tension down,” says Fayetteville
Morning News
sports editor Chip Souza. And most blacks in Arkansas believed that the hiring of Heath was cynical and cosmetic. “You can't fix the
Titanic
by changing out the deck chairs,” Judge Wendell Griffen told the
Democrat-Gazette
.

In the spring of 2002, the enrollment of black students at UA was close to 6 percent, well below the 16 percent makeup of the state's population. Blacks also made up less than 4 percent of the UA faculty. Judge Griffen believed that the dismissal of Richardson would make things even worse. “Same song, different verse,” Griffen said. “If the
university didn't deal fairly with Nolan Richardson, then hiring a new [African-American] coach does nothing.”

Professor Charles Robinson acknowledges that the bar was set high for Heath, who would have had to win
two
NCAA titles and earn four Final Four berths to surpass Richardson. “I feel the hiring was calculated, definitely,” Robinson says. “I'm not saying Stan Heath wasn't a deserving coach, but as quickly as he was hired? And no interest in athletics about hiring other African-American coaches?”

Nobody in Arkansas's black community was surprised by Richardson's replacement. “Stan Heath was hired to appease the turmoil that was rising within the black alumni,” says Lonnie Williams, who marched across campus to help Richardson challenge the issue of police dogs on campus in the 1980s.

Hiring a black coach to replace a fired black coach almost never happens, except at historically black colleges, and a small percentage of people viewed the hire as another bold move by Frank Broyles.

Lonnie Williams, who has since moved to Arkansas State University, doesn't buy that. He believes the hiring of Heath was premeditated to coincide with the threat of a lawsuit. “I told African-American staff members at the UA to ask for whatever they needed soon, because they [UA administration] are going to lean over backward to support diversity efforts. If there was a lawsuit that got settled, the well may quickly dry up.”

Williams has seen enough to be certain that “America—especially Arkansas—is still afraid of a strong black man who can speak his mind. Nolan Richardson won't bite his tongue, he's still speaking up like a man. America can't handle that.”

 

Stan Heath bristled at
first. “I wasn't hired to help in the threat of a lawsuit,” he stressed. “We'd won thirty games at Kent State.” Yet Heath quickly points out that he knew he was walking into a hornet's nest in Hawg country. “My color was a plus at that particular job
because it might calm some of the fire that was brewing because of Nolan's situation. My color helped in those terms, but we'd been to the Elite Eight at Kent State. Yes, the university in some ways was trying to use me to pacify a situation that was difficult. But I looked at it as an opportunity to continue the legacy of Eddie Sutton and Nolan.
Somebody
was going to take the job. All of us feel, as black coaches, we take jobs that are going to have big obstacles. They might not be the Duke or North Carolina job.” Heath signed a five-year contract.

 

Chancellor John White would
remain in his position until June of 2008, when he returned to teaching. When asked about the repercussions of the firing, and its effect on his attempts at diversity, he doesn't hesitate. “The difficulty has been, frankly, in getting past the continuing negative feelings within the state after Nolan Richardson's dismissal,” he says. “It's still an uphill battle to get parents, particularly in the Delta, to have their kids come to northwest Arkansas and the university.”

His remorse over what happened to Richardson seeps into his remarks about the controversy. “We were already there, doing well,” White insists. “If anything, the firing set us back as far as the negative publicity associated with it, and as far as faculty and staff. In my eleven years here, we've had two women and two African-American student body presidents. It's hard to say that we're better off today, I wouldn't say that at all. I think it was just a sad chapter in the history of the University of Arkansas and Nolan Richardson, and I'm frankly not able to see what good has come from it. There are still people who have strong feelings on both sides of the issue and time has not ameliorated it the way I thought it would.”

White does think there may be positives for Richardson on the heels of his own return to the classroom—as well as the departure of
Frank Broyles. “Maybe it will take Frank being off the scene and me being less visible for Nolan to feel comfortable,” he says.

Lonnie Williams has sympathy for White's immense challenge of racial issues in Arkansas. Or some sympathy. “John White
wants
to do right on racial issues,” Williams says, “but it's one step forward, two steps back. He can't control the underlying issues. He talks the talk, but when you bring in this many black staff and faculty, and have the same amount leaving? Diversity is always in the top five goals, but we never seem to get much better.”

Williams feels perhaps John White's problems are coming from across campus. “John White wanted to move Broyles to a fund-raiser position away from athletics, according to newspaper reports, and some board of trustees members weighed in, then John White was rebuffed.”

Broyles remained as athletics director. “That shows where the power is located. Athletics,” Williams says.

 

Judge Wendell Griffen says,
“The University of Arkansas is the Southern institution with the longest track record for having admitted blacks and the worst track record for treating them in this century.”

Griffen says the number of blacks admitted, their inclusion in college life, the number of graduates, and the number of faculty employed and retained all reveal a deeper problem. “In Nolan Richardson, we have a stellar person, morally, professionally, and personally,” Griffen says, “who literally was ousted because people were too unwilling to accept him as the person he is. That's
cultural incompetence
in its most glaring consequences. It is a classic example of what happens when incompetent people are in power and have to deal with cultural issues. The problem didn't lie with Nolan,” Griffen insists, “the problem lay with Frank Broyles and John White and the institution that has historically been behind, when it had every reason and chance to be a leader.”

While some people believe the firing of Richardson improved things for blacks on campus, that progress has been made, Griffen does not.

“I don't talk about the University of Arkansas and use the word ‘progress,'” Griffen says. “I use the word ‘movement.' If a student has an average of twenty points in a class, and later has an average of forty, that student has had movement but not progress. The University of Arkansas is still at the ‘F' level, but seemingly determined to congratulate itself.”

 

The state of Arkansas
took a beating again in the national media—just as it had for decades—when Richardson was fired. “We've a feeling Arkansas won't come out looking too good,” the
Democrat-Gazette
wrote in an editorial, and they were correct.

The editorial continued:

Their conclusion—“just move on”—was typical within the state, and indicative of the dominant mindset in Arkansas. Any bad news or ugly history, especially where race is concerned, needs to be put behind us as quickly as possible. Richardson's biggest sin might have been his refusal to let anyone forget.

Nearly every writer concurred with the decision to dump the coach. But a small few were sensitive to the dynamic of a black coach being covered by an all-white media. J. A. Adande, who is black, wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
, “I've read some tired columns that sarcastically lament poor Nolan Richardson and his $3 million buyout. These writers will never even have a chance of considering Richardson's perspective. They'll never write in a newsroom in which they're the minority.”

William Rhoden of the
New York Times
, who lionized Richardson during his NCAA title run, was less supportive this time:

Other writers used the story to take yet another shot at the state of Arkansas.

Bernie Lincicome of the
Rocky Mountain News
wrote, “Nothing Richardson could have said would bring more discredit to Arkansas
than its idiotic school cheer [known as “calling the hogs”], never mind all those reasonable and caring alumni wearing red hog snouts like hats.”

 

Sid Simpson, who hired
Richardson at Western Texas College, remains a staunch defender of the coach. But when pressed, Simpson will admit that Richardson has two flaws. Or rather, Simpson stresses, two strengths that can be seen as flaws.

“First, if you get Nolan trapped in a corner, he's going to fight his way out.” This is apparent, Simpson says, from his response on ESPN's program about graduation rates. When challenged on the poor graduation rate of his championship team, Richardson could have said, “We always want to improve our graduation rates and we'll continue to stress higher education.” Or he could have named several players who graduated before and after that time-specific study. Instead, Richardson insisted that it is not his job to graduate players—a direct contradiction to the way he actually dealt with his team over the years.

“Second,” Simpson continues, “he responds from the heart, whether it's the right thing to say or not.”

The question at his post-Kentucky press conference in 2002 was, “What were you and [Kentucky coach] Tubby Smith talking about after the game?”

“Hardly a question to make someone offer up a job that no one—let me repeat—no one has asked for,” Wally Hall wrote
.

Richardson could have said, “That's between Tubby and me,” or “Just general stuff about our teams.” Or even “No comment.”

Instead, Richardson revealed that he and Smith talked about focusing on their paychecks during tough times, which led to Richardson's quote, “If they go ahead and pay me my money, they can take the job.”