Forty Minutes of Hell Read online

  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 occasionally 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?

  TWO

  BLACK BOY

  El 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. Th
ey 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.

  “I think my first shock was trying to go to the movies, and seeing how the different theaters operated,” Richardson says. “Movies were our biggest form of entertainment, but nearly all of the theaters were for whites only.” At the Mission Theater, blacks could sit in the balcony. The Alcazar Theater was the only integrated movie house in El Paso until Richardson attended college, although the army base sometimes hosted integrated audiences at movies then, too. Occasionally, his Mexican-American friends had to be reminded that Richardson couldn’t go everywhere they were allowed.

  Mexican-Americans viewed Richardson as one of their own, and his status as an unofficial Mexican had its benefits—with perhaps one drawback. “The treatment my dad received from Mexican-Americans is very different than the way he was received by whites,” his daughter Madalyn says. “Still, I don’t think El Paso’s Mexican people fully understood the racial discrimination he was fighting against. It was different for him as a black man. But that’s because the Mexican people never assigned the color black to his skin.”

  During Richardson’s
history class his junior year at Bowie, a teacher told the students about a high school in the South where the Negro students were having problems. The National Guard had been called in to help a handful of Negro kids enroll at the all-white Central High School. Nine of them, mostly girls, came to Central, and some of those girls had been spit on, even by their classmates.

  This was in Arkansas, the teacher said. Then she pulled down a tattered map and reminded the students where Arkansas was. Girls being threatened and spit upon? Richardson didn’t know whether to weep or fight.

  That night, he and his grandmother went across the street to a neighbor’s to see Arkansas on the evening news. “All these troops were coming in, and their governor was on, too,” Richardson recalls, “talking bad about President Eisenhower. Nothing like that had ever happened at Bowie. Until that day in class, there was no reason to talk about what was happening in Arkansas. Now I was frightened, scared of Arkansas, Mississippi, places like that. Ol’ Mama said it was horrible there for black folks.”

  Fearing Ol’ Mama’s fierce glare, Richardson took school seriously, and developed other talents besides athletics. He played the dented trumpet issued by the school for marching band, except during football season. “The coach wouldn’t let me march during the halftime shows,” he says.

  As a young boy, Richardson idolized Rocky Galarza, a Segundo Barrio legend with movie-star good looks. Ten years Richardson’s senior, Galarza was one of the heroes on Bowie’s state championship baseball team of 1949. Galarza had encouraged him to attend Bowie, emphasizing what a great leader Nemo Herrera was. Herrera coached baseball and basketball at Bowie and was regarded as the godfather of El Paso coaches.