Forty Minutes of Hell (7 page)

It annoyed both Richardson and Stoglin that Haskins would be
involved in this sort of monitoring of their social lives. (Haskins did not recall this incident.) Richardson surprised himself by handling things in Snyder more or less the way Haskins did in El Paso.

Patridge says, “I think that's when the racism thing really raised its head, and he had to adjust. I saw Nolan change there in Snyder, from happy-go-lucky to ‘It's me against the world.'”

That pressure carried onto the court. During one game, the Western Texas team was down by eight points at halftime.

“You have to perform,” Richardson insisted. “If you don't perform I can't feed my family.”

“He had never put it in that context,” Patridge says. “That was new.”

The family would eat—Western Texas College was winning big, even in Richardson's debut season.

 

Western Texas qualified for
the state playoffs at the conclusion of Richardson's first year. The games were to be in Abilene—the town where Richardson had not been allowed in the hotel with his Bowie baseball team, and Haskins's team had been sent back into the night.

When Simpson gave Richardson his travel itinerary, Richardson had to smile. They had reservations at the same hotel. Every pregame talk takes place in a locker room. This one would take place in front of the hotel. Richardson gathered his diverse squad on the sidewalk and stood on the steps, recounting his shame and anger at twice not being allowed to room in that very hotel. Of course he stressed how he'd hammered two home runs after being insulted the first time.

Then Richardson quoted his ace, Ol' Mama. “There are people who pave roads and others who walk on them,” he said. As often would happen over the years, with his us-against-the-world speech, the coach ended with, “Let's go out and beat somebody's ass.”

“You feel like you
can
take on the world after Nolan speaks,” Dwight Williams says. “First, nobody worked harder than us. We were in incredible condition. Coach talked about pride in our work ethic every day. Second, he instilled confidence in us.”

Patridge says Richardson's mindset evolved in Snyder, a town with a practically nonexistent black population. In El Paso, the Hispanic population revered Richardson, considered him one of their own. There was no such comfort zone in Snyder. “When we were at Bowie,” says Patridge, “it wasn't ever
us against the world
, but instead it was
us against whomever we played
. Nolan didn't talk about race so much in El Paso.”

 

Western Texas College won
the state playoffs, qualifying for the national tournament in 1978. They finished Richardson's first season ranked #13 in the nation.

That summer, Texas Tech assistant coach Rob Evans told Richardson about a high schooler named Paul Pressey. Pressey had quit his Richmond, Virginia, high school mid-career, then returned. As a senior, Pressey was discovered to be too old to compete, and so he slipped under the radar of recruiters.

If Ralph Brewster was Richardson's first great high school player, Pressey was his first college star, first of a long line of versatile wing players who would shine for him. At 6'5", he could dominate inside or out. Pressey later went on to score nearly 8,000 points in his NBA career.

Western Texas would alternate between Glidewell's cat-and-mouse press and Ralph Taskers's full-court frenzy, with Paul Pressey usually on the nose of the press. Richardson's second Western Texas team lost only two games in the regular season. They went back to the national playoffs and made it to the first round of the 1979 Final Four.

Dwight Williams, only 5'9", signed at Texas Tech that spring, leaving behind a more talented team in junior college than he'd join
in Lubbock. But Williams, who was friendly with Ralph Brewster from their El Paso days, knew help was on the way. “Paul Pressey, David Brown, Greg Stewart, they were supposed to sign at Tech the next year,” Williams says. “That's the primary reason I went there. The plan was those guys were supposed to follow me to Tech.”

 

Lubbock is less than
an hour by car from Snyder, and it was impossible for Richardson and Brewster not to keep close watch on each other. Brewster had gotten off to a good start at Texas Tech, but he still wasn't crazy about the town or the basketball arena. “We played at the dingy Lubbock Coliseum,” he says. “It was almost like I went back in time being at Texas Tech.” Brewster started some games as a freshman, chipping in almost 4 points per game, and 3.1 rebounds. The team was doing reasonably well, too, finishing 19-10.

Brewster often reminded himself of three facts that made Lubbock easier to stomach. First, UTEP continued to struggle through losing seasons, so Brewster could hardly get wistful thinking how much fun he would have had in El Paso—although the Miners certainly would have improved with him patrolling the paint. Second, rumors were swirling about the University of New Mexico program. They were about to go down in flames, destroyed by a transcript-fixing scandal. Finally, Brewster was playing a lot for a freshman. Brewster could just about make peace with himself over his decision.

Brewster's second season in Lubbock was even better. Tech finished 19-11, and just missed the NCAA Tournament. They did earn an NIT bid, but lost to Indiana in the first round. And Brewster was blossoming, scoring 11 points per game to go along with 7.6 rebounds—impressive sophomore stats.

 

Over Christmas of 1979,
his third year in Snyder, Richardson returned to El Paso. While attending UTEP's Sun Bowl Tournament, he bumped into the school's director of athletics, Jim Bowden. Bowden was a native of Odessa, not far from Snyder, and knew how difficult the world could be for Richardson in West Texas.

Bowden was out of place as a college administrator. He used the plain language of a ranch hand, and he seemed uninterested in glad-handing El Paso's few rich boosters. He had uncommon common sense, and coaches would seek him out for advice.

When Richardson took a seat, Bowden congratulated him for being undefeated so far that season. “You know,” he continued, “the Tulsa job is supposed to open up this year. You should apply.”

Richardson told Bowden that he would.

 

The University of Tulsa's
basketball team was in the midst of their fifth losing season in a row. Their coach, Jim King, would resign only eighteen games into the season. His assistant took over, but things didn't get any better. Although no professional teams claimed this medium-size city as home, attendance for the college was less than 3,800 per game. (UTEP, situated in a similar-size city and carrying a losing record that year, averaged more than twice as many fans as Tulsa.)

Tulsa had been sending teams to the court for over seventy years and had garnered exactly one lonely NCAA Tournament bid. They had earned a trip to the NIT on three occasions—in 1953, 1967, and 1969. Tulsa had not won a postseason game in over two decades.

Consecutive bad years can cripple the enthusiasm of boosters, making them desperate to try something new, almost anything to revive hope.

Ed Beshara had hope. Beshara owned a men's clothing store in Tulsa and was closely involved with raising scholarship money for the private university's basketball program. Beshara stubbornly believed
the school could compete, although the Missouri Valley Conference was one of the nation's best basketball leagues. A Lebanese-American, Beshara was a relentless worker in his little clothing empire. He was also a stubborn optimist and longed for someone who shared his attitude to lead the Tulsa team.

 

Ed Beshara's father, Antone
Beshara, had emigrated from Lebanon in the early 1900s. Religious persecution of Catholics and the chance for a better life brought “Papa Tony” Beshara and his family to Oklahoma.

But Oklahoma, which became a state in 1907, wasn't always friendly to immigrants or people of color. In Okemah, a lynch mob went after a young black crime suspect in 1911. The mob temporarily settled for the suspect's mother, Laura Nelson, knocking down her cabin door, then accusing her of hiding her son. The image of Laura Nelson, dangling with her son from a steel bridge, was captured on camera, sold as a postcard, and remains one of the few lynchings of a woman on record.

Antone Beshara settled in Haskell County, forty miles from Okemah, where he would raise twelve children. With vigilante justice and white mobs lurking in Oklahoma, Papa Tony Beshara wasn't shocked to find the Ku Klux Klan on his doorstep one evening. The Klan charged him with the crime of running a successful business while not being born in America. But Papa Tony knew how to face down cowards in sheets—he returned to the porch moments later with a loaded shotgun.

The Klan scurried away, lobbing curses and threats over their shoulders. Peering out from behind Tony's leg was his American-born son Ed.

Beshara had a rough time growing up when the family moved to Tulsa. “I would get beat up three times a day on my way to school,” he'd say, “and I lived across the street!”

Despite growing to only 5'5", Beshara was a skilled and gutsy football quarterback, who received the equivalent of an athletics scholarship to Washington University of St. Louis. When the Great Depression hit, Beshara's scholarship was rescinded. He was forced to forgo college, moving back to Tulsa to begin working in the clothing business.

In 1950, Ed Beshara Clothing was founded on Harvard Street in Tulsa, where it still stands. Beshara grew to love Tulsa but often struggled with the mentality of the locals and had little patience for racist talk or attitudes.

Blunt and brash, Beshara was well connected around town. He had heard the rumors that Tulsa might consider a black coach, then kept hearing the same refrain from Tulsa business folks—they wanted a white coach. The West Point coach, Mike Krzyzewski, seemed to be the popular choice, and Beshara would have been okay with an immigrant name nobody could spell. But hiring a black coach intrigued him.

“I don't think there's any question that Dad felt sympathetic to a minority coach,” his son, Ed Beshara Jr., says.

Beshara, who considered himself a champion of the underdog, got involved.

 

Richardson's team at Western
Texas College rolled on, making it through his third regular season undefeated. Before the junior college tournament even began in the spring of 1980, Nolan Richardson was promised the job at the University of Tulsa—although he had not signed a contract yet.

He went into the playoffs as the most inspired lame-duck coach in history. Western Texas won it all, finishing the year 37-0.

Snyder's fans knew Richardson was Tulsa-bound, but that didn't stop them from having “Nolan Richardson Day” before he left—a mark of both Richardson's charisma and the way he was able to win the town over. But what Richardson recalls most is the drive back
to Snyder after winning it all. The team got caught in a blizzard. Fearing for the safety of the kids, Richardson ordered the bus to stop in a remote Kansas town. Doors were knocked on; calls were made. The team was eventually put up in a local church. That's how the championship team celebrated: with hot chocolate, plaid blankets, and cookies in a church basement.

 

During Ralph Brewster's junior
year, as Richardson was winning big in junior college, the Tech team took a step backward. Tech finished 16-13, but Brewster was still a force inside, getting 11 points per game again and pulling in 7.1 rebounds. After three seasons at Tech, Brewster had thrown down 33 dunks, and had big games of 29 points on two occasions. He was also one of the coach's favorites and was often trotted out at Elks Club and Lions Club luncheons as a model Tech basketball player. He was growing into an impressive and self-assured young man.

Brewster was thrilled to learn Nolan Richardson was going to be a major college coach at Tulsa. He was pals with the El Paso players on the Western Texas team, and they kept him informed of their success. Brewster's confusion about choosing Tech—it wasn't exactly remorse—had washed away. His unselfishness and loyalty had paid off for Richardson, and, he now concluded, Tech had, in fact, been the correct choice for him. Brewster even fantasized about Texas Tech meeting Tulsa in the playoffs.

There were problems, though. Brewster heard the first subtle strains of racism. “I'd hear people say to black players, ‘You can't major in that,' when someone would express an interest in an academic field.” Yet Brewster was reasonably happy. “I wasn't perfect, either,” he adds. “I'd oversleep on the road, for example.”

Everything pointed to a great final season for Brewster. He was about to have a senior year to remember, but not the one he'd anticipated.

T
ulsa has a
tangled and tragic history of race relations. Oklahoma earned statehood in 1907, and by 1910, Tulsa numbered ten thousand residents. By 1920, the population had multiplied tenfold. The catalyst for this boom was the discovery of oil nearby, and as the town mushroomed, so did its black population. Many blacks were the descendants of runaway slaves who had fled to Indian Territory. Others came with Native American tribes during the “Trail of Tears.” By 1920, more than ten thousand blacks lived in Tulsa. Soon the Ku Klux Klan began to make inroads; a Klan leader from Atlanta attracted a crowd of three thousand as the new decade began.

Most of Tulsa's blacks settled in an area north of Tulsa, which became known as Greenwood. Within the Greenwood district were two newspapers, over a dozen doctors, lawyers, and a thriving black middle class. People referred to the self-sufficient district as “The Negro Wall Street,” or, disparagingly, “Little Africa.” Tulsa might have been a model for future American cities—although greater
Tulsa was not integrated, both communities thrived independently.

Everything changed on May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a black man, was accused of assaulting a white woman in an elevator. Rowland was arrested and held in jail. The next evening the
Tulsa Tribune
ran an editorial with the headline “To Lynch a Negro Tonight.”

Sure enough, that evening, a mob of approximately two thousand whites stormed the jail. Fifty black men—many of them World War I veterans—blocked their path. An argument ensued. Shots were fired. The most devastating and deadly race riot in United States history was on.

Given a free hand by Tulsa police and authorities, white mobs terrorized Greenwood, and thirty-five square blocks of buildings were burned to the ground. The
Chicago Defender
reported that a private airplane was used to drop dynamite on Greenwood. Among the destroyed property were six hundred businesses, twenty-one churches, and dozens of restaurants and groceries, as well as a library and a hospital. In all, over a thousand homes were lost, and as many as three thousand blacks, many of them women and children, were killed. The official total of murdered blacks at that time, however, was twenty-six.

No white person was charged with a crime. Neither was Dick Rowland, the accused elevator assailant.

Few towns in America had as horrific an event in their rearview mirror as the Tulsa Race Riots, a black genocide. Many blacks—the ones who survived—left Tulsa. Others lived in tents. Blacks tried to rebuild Greenwood, and it enjoyed a modest resurgence in the late 1920s. Greenwood was partially leveled during the urban renewal of the 1970s.

By then, the Tulsans had made modest progress in improving their ruptured race relations. John Phillips, who later became TU's coach and attended high school in town in the mid-1960s, says, “The races got along pretty well in the sixties and it wasn't really a redneck town by any stretch.” The high schools were desegregated by then,
and athletics became a place where the races mixed freely. However, there were still powerful elitists resistant to progress.

 

Tulsa Athletics Director Emery
Turner had desperately wanted to hire Lamar University basketball coach and Tulsa native Billy Tubbs to turn the program around. But Tubbs figured Tulsa was doomed to fail and dropped out of the running. Rumors circulated that it was a done deal: Nolan Richardson would be the next coach.

One day in early March of 1980, just before the University of Tulsa offered Richardson a contract, a booster named Evans Dunne appeared in the doorway of Ed Beshara's clothing store. He didn't want a new suit.

“What's on your mind, Evans?” Beshara asked.

What Evans Dunne said became a familiar refrain among Tulsa boosters that spring: “I'll never give another dime to the University of Tulsa if they hire a nigger to coach our boys.”

Evans Dunne was one of the University of Tulsa's biggest financial contributors, and he donated huge sums to their struggling sports programs. The Dunnes were considered Tulsa's first family. Evans was the son of an old oil-money family; his wife, Nina Lane Dunne, was the author of
Tulsa's Magic Roots
, a picture book published in 1979 that was on every coffee table in South Tulsa.

Dunne's attitude was indicative of the dilemma in college sports. While students or faculty might have been ready to desegregate, the people pulling the purse strings often were not. Most schools, especially in the South, began adding black players, but not because it was the right thing to do. Rather, they desegregated when they did not want to risk getting beaten on the court or field. It often took a well-established coach, one with a sense of courage and justice, to begin recruiting black players.

An administrator who suggested hiring a black coach would be under enormous pressure. But Richardson's breathtaking junior col
lege teams were averaging over 100 points a game, and that had gotten Tulsa president Paschal Twyman's attention. “Nolan bowled us over with charisma,” Twyman told
Sports Illustrated.
“We knew we were breaking some ice here, but we decided to fly with it. We needed to win badly.”

 

Richardson's predecessor, Jim “Country”
King, had been a standout player at Tulsa before going on to the NBA. The 6'2" Jim King played plenty for the Los Angeles Lakers, San Francisco Warriors, and finally as a backup on gritty Chicago Bulls teams, their best of the pre–Michael Jordan era.

When Ken Hayes bolted from Tulsa in 1975 for the head-coaching job at New Mexico State, Tulsa asked Jim King, their most visible alum, to take the helm. The school was in a bind, and King—who had no coaching experience—was pulled by loyalty. Only two years into his NBA retirement, and at the age of thirty-five, Jim King agreed to be Tulsa's head coach. After his first season, King was offered an NBA assistant-coaching spot but remained at Tulsa.

King wouldn't enjoy the consistent winning he had helped to generate in the NBA. His best record at Tulsa was in his third season, 1978–79, when he finished 13-14. King even lost eight in a row to its crosstown rival, Oral Roberts University.

By the end of January 1980, Jim King took an early retirement. Bill Franey, his assistant, coached the final nine games of that season. King left Tulsa with a record of 44-82. At the age of forty, his career as a coach was over.

 

Don Haskins knew a
positive piece from popular sportswriter Bill Connors would help smooth the way for Richardson. Connors knew Haskins from his playing days at Oklahoma A&M, took Haskins at his word, and ran a glowing profile of Richardson in the
Tulsa World.
Richardson continued to make it clear, even to Connors, that he wanted to distance himself from Haskins in terms of coaching philosophy. Richardson never disparaged Haskins personally, but he was quick to criticize the conservative playing style that Henry Iba was credited with popularizing.

Richardson could, however, sometimes be loose with his language. About his El Paso home, he told
Sports Illustrated
, “I'm from a place I never want to go back to.” Later, Richardson would clarify this statement. He meant being poor and unknown.

 

Tulsa's on-court struggles were
in stark contrast to the success of its crosstown rival, Oral Roberts University.

ORU was a new school founded by Oral Roberts, the evangelical preacher, educator, businessman, and television personality. The school opened its doors in 1965, and immediately had three winning seasons in a row.

Reverend Roberts was hugely popular in black communities at that time—not only for his willingness to include blacks in his church, but also for his encouragement for blacks to attend his university and play on his basketball team. ORU had three black players on their inaugural team in the fall of 1966.

The state of Oklahoma was relatively progressive in desegregating their college sports teams. Henry Iba desegregated his Oklahoma A&M team in 1957, when he signed Memphis native L. C. Gordon. The other major state school, Oklahoma University, followed suit the next season. Before the 1964–65 season, Tulsa coach Joe Swank signed the school's first black players, a trio of junior college transfers—Sherman Dillard, Julian Hammond, and Herman Callands.

This was a new era, though, and Oral Roberts University fully integrated their team from its inception, putting a premium on black athletes whose style and speed became a hit in Tulsa.

In 1968, a seemingly meaningless home game became one of the
most important in ORU history. Middle Tennessee State racehorsed past ORU, putting up 115 points. Reverend Roberts, who was a fixture at ORU games, was smitten with Middle Tennessee's style of play and decided to hire Ken Trickey, their flamboyant coach, the following spring.

Playing in the smaller College Division, Trickey finished 27-4 his first year at ORU. In 1972, his third year, the school entered the University Division and broke out with a 26-2 season and an NIT bid, the school's first postseason playoffs.

But it was more than just the fact that Oral Roberts University was winning. The team was fast-breaking as if the flames of hell were at their heels.

The godfather of Oklahoma basketball was still Henry Iba, whose strict, disciplined style influenced three generations of local coaches. Teams all over the state walked the ball up the court and played a conservative and stifling defense. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to risk irritating
Mister
Iba by playing a fast-paced game. Iba, who retired in 1969, was too diplomatic to speak out about what was happening at the new college in the state, but it must have appalled him.

During Ken Trickey's 26-2 run of 1972, ORU averaged 105 points per game, and even tallied 155 points in a win over Union College.

In 1974, ORU won two games in their debut in the NCAA Tournament. ORU needed to beat Kansas to earn a trip to the Final Four—a remarkable feat, considering it was less than a decade since the college opened its doors. Kansas overcame a 9-point deficit in the game's last few minutes, crushing the hopes of the ORU faithful.

That spring, the Tulsa police busted Ken Trickey for driving while intoxicated. Trickey had already announced his resignation before the arrest, but rumors of a setup spread through Tulsa.

Trickey compiled a record of 118-23 in only five years at Oral Roberts University and was a John the Baptist of the Fast Break—indirectly prophesying the coming of Nolan Richardson to Tulsa less than a decade later.

 

While ORU was welcoming
to black players, their administrative approach was typical of the times. Black players were coveted; black leaders were not. Consider that twenty-six players have scored over one thousand points in the school's history. Twenty of them have been black. ORU has had ten head coaches, all of them white.

A few years after Ken Trickey's departure, Oral Roberts himself enticed coach Ken Hayes to leave New Mexico State and return to the city of Tulsa.

Hayes had been successful at New Mexico State, but he decided to return to Tulsa after the reverend made his offer. “You'll be my last coach,” Roberts promised. Hayes came back to town just after the NCAA sheriffs penalized ORU with serious sanctions in an effort to get Oral's basketball coach to walk the straight and righteous path.

Hayes kept the pressure on Tulsa University. In his first season, Hayes knocked off his old TU team twice, the eighth win in a row for ORU over Tulsa.

The following spring, Nolan Richardson arrived in town.

 

Head coaching jobs have
always been hard to come by, even for hugely successful junior college coaches. Richardson, who was thirty-eight years old, could not afford to turn his nose up at Tulsa's pauper past.

Tulsa competed in the Missouri Valley Conference, which had been one of the premier basketball leagues in America for years. The MVC at one time featured Cincinnati and Louisville, two teams that had won NCAA titles. Memphis State and Drake had earned berths to the Final Four, while Bradley and Wichita State had illustrious histories.

During the 1960s and 1970s, only one or two nationally televised
college basketball games were broadcast a week. The advent of cable television in the late 1980s would slowly strangle the powerful MVC, because none of the schools were in major media centers. They were in Des Moines, Peoria, Canyon. And Tulsa. But before the days of cable TV, the Missouri Valley was a feared conference.

When Richardson arrived, the MVC had just seen Larry Bird at Indiana State lead his team to the NCAA title game. Richardson would face a long list of greats who would later earn jobs in the NBA: Lewis Lloyd, Antoine Carr, Cliff Levingston, Xavier McDaniel, David Thirdkill, Benoit Benjamin, Kevin McKenna, Mitchell Anderson, Hersey Hawkins, and Jim Les.

Nobody believed Richardson could win, especially not win immediately, despite his four fine players from Western Texas College—David Brown and Phil Spradling from El Paso, Greg Stewart, and future NBA star Paul Pressey. They'd be joined by Bob Stevenson, Tulsa's best returning player. Spradling and Stevenson were white.

Richardson still needed a natural point guard, and he settled on Mike Anderson, a relentless scrapper on the Alabama junior college team he'd beaten for the championship. Anderson's team lost any hope of winning when he fouled out. In a classic case of “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em,” he signed with Tulsa a few weeks later. Richardson was taken by Anderson's quickness, but it was more than that. Richardson says, “You could tell he was that rare kid, a natural leader and a listener. And tough? He was as tough as could be.”

Anderson, who is now the head coach at Missouri, says, “I could see that people just gravitated to Nolan, and he was unique in that way. I was excited about how Nolan played, but my first impression was that Tulsa was the real West, cowboys and Indians.”