Forty Minutes of Hell Page 4

  Haskins’s acerbic tone could be intimidating, yet Richardson believed the team would benefit from the discipline that had been absent under Harold Davis. “You could tell the way Coach Haskins acted—well, it was an act in some ways,” Richardson says. “But he was different under the surface. I didn’t like him much that first semester, though. He was taking away all of my shots.”

  In order to get his Miners to play with more patience, Haskins instituted a rule for practicing their offense. They had to pass the ball ten times before they shot. The rule didn’t sit well with the team, but only Richardson openly challenged the policy.

  “Sometimes when the ball came to me, I’d call out ‘ten!’ and shoot it,” he says.

  Playing for Harold Davis was more fun, but the Miners started to gain momentum, winning eight games in a row in Haskins’s first season. Richardson grudgingly decided to buy into Haskins’s system during the streak, recalling a favorite expression of Ol’ Mama’s—“A raggedy ride is better than a smooth walk.” He stopped studying the stat sheet by January. “I tried not to think about my points,” he says. “You could feel that the program was going to become something important.”

  By the end of Richardson’s junior season—their first together—Haskins had molded Richardson into the Miners’ best defender.

  Texas Western finished Haskins’s first season at 18-6. Under the new system of stubborn half-court defense and a tightly controlled passing-game offense, Richardson’s offensive totals plummeted. A major college player who averages 20 points per game as a sophomore is headed toward basketball greatness and often a professional career. But Richardson went from 21 per game as a sophomore to 13.6, then finally 10.5 as a senior. In fact, in only one game in the two seasons after Haskins’s arrival did Richardson again pop in 20 points, during a win against Tennessee. Any player who had his scoring average chopped in half would be sensitive about it, and Richardson was no exception. Only the fact that they were winning made it palatable.

  Don Haskins was different from the previous coach in another respect, as well.

  The Miners were in Abilene for a game. Haskins had Richardson and Willie Brown, as well as two other black players, Major Dennis and Bobby Joe Hill. (This was not the same Bobby Joe Hill who would star in Texas Western’s upset of Kentucky in 1966, but an East Texas wing player.) The team was scheduled to stay at the same Abilene hotel that had denied Richardson a room as a Bowie player. When the Miners walked into the hotel lobby, the manager came scurrying over.

  “No coloreds!” he said.

  “So I told him to hell with him and his hotel,” Haskins recalled. “We all stayed somewhere else.”

  The Miners rarely played in the South and usually traveled west for road games. But that kind of incident would recur.

  “The next year,” Haskins said, “we were in Salt Lake City, and the same goddamn thing happened. We got the hell out of there, too. I wasn’t going to split my team up.” He used the incident to motivate his team in the locker room—everyone was against the little team from El Paso, Haskins reminded the Miners again and again. He had recycled that “everyone is against us” speech since he arrived at Texas Western. The Miners beat both Utah State and Utah.

  In August of 1962, Andy Stoglin enrolled at Texas Western. Stoglin was a rugged black kid from Phoenix who would become a key player for the Miners. Richardson and Stoglin weren’t immediately tight, but when Richardson wound up in an El Paso hospital with a minor injury, he became friendly with Stoglin’s wife, who worked as a nurse. Soon after, the two players—both married—grew close. The friendship between Stoglin and Richardson would endure for over four decades.

  Stoglin was an outspoken critic of both overt and subtle racism, and Richardson admired him greatly. In fact, in the privacy of Haskins’s office, Stoglin would even challenge Haskins as to why more black players weren’t starting. Stoglin could hold a grudge and had little patience for the good ol’ white boy system.

  One day, Haskins called Stoglin into the office at Holliday Hall, the tiny gym where Texas Western played. “He pulled a drawer open, and showed me several letters saying that Texas Western was starting too many niggers,” Stoglin says.

  Stoglin says he perused a few of the letters, then looked up.

  “Read enough?” Haskins asked him. “That’s the reason I don’t start you. You can handle that, but I don’t want you to tell your teammates.”

  Stoglin remembers the incident down to the smallest detail. Haskins claimed not to recall either the letters or the talk with Stoglin.

  Stoglin was a fine recruit, but Haskins would sign the best big man ever to play for the Miners the spring after Richardson’s junior season.

  Jim “Bad News” Barnes was raised in Arkansas but moved to Oklahoma, where he had hoped to enroll at Oklahoma State and play for Haskins’s mentor, Henry Iba. Academic shortcomings forced Barnes to attend Cameron Junior College in Lawton. Haskins learned that the explosive big man still might not have the grades for OSU.

  Haskins’s own father was born in Arkansas, and he used that fact to try to get close with Barnes during his recruitment. Haskins spent the majority of his recruiting time and budget trying to convince Barnes to come to El Paso. In April, when he felt Barnes was stalling, Haskins played his last card. He challenged Barnes to a free-throw shooting contest. If Haskins lost, he’d leave the big man alone. If Haskins won, Texas Western got Barnes.

  Barnes joined Texas Western for Richardson’s final season.

  Haskins shared credit for recruiting Barnes. “Nolan talked Jim into coming,” he said. “I knew then Nolan would be a good recruiter.” There was more than basketball on Barnes’s mind. He made it clear he didn’t want to live in a segregated city, but thanks to Bert Williams, that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Bad News Barnes was the nation’s dominant big man for two years. In Richardson’s senior year, the Miners qualified for the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history, but they lost to the University of Texas in the first round.

  The following year, without Richardson, the 1963–64 season, Barnes averaged a whopping 29.2 points per game. He led the Miners to their second-ever NCAA Tournament and was the first player picked in the NBA draft.

  As the team’s lone black player with El Paso roots, Richardson was often nominated to take visiting recruits around town. It had worked with Jim Barnes, and Haskins quickly recognized Richardson as the perfect tour guide for black prospects. Even after Richardson’s playing career was over, Haskins relied on him to socialize with Texas Western’s recruits, including most of the historic 1966 team.

  Richardson knew El Paso still had some unofficial Jim Crow sites, and Mexico became the preferred destination.

  In Juárez, black men could eat thick steaks, dance with whomever they wanted, and stay out as late as they pleased. Heroes from the 1966 team, such as Harry Flournoy, Orsten Artis, Bobby Joe Hill, and Nevil Shed all socialized in Mexico with Richardson and had a lively time. As such, Mexico as well as Bert Williams hold a place in the history of American college basketball; they were largely responsible for the recruitment and comfort of the historic Texas Western team.

  While a professional career appeared to be a long shot, Richardson continued to train in order to improve his chances. El Paso barely had a basketball tradition, and few pickup games or playground culture existed. Finding real competition in the off-season was a challenge, so Richardson often trained at Fort Bliss, the ironically named army base. The soldiers, with their stubby beards and thick chests, were not great players, but they offered rough competition, and Richardson loved it.

  Kenny John, a local high school star who was heading to UTEP, heard about the games at Fort Bliss and became a regular as well.

  “Nolan had no off season,” John recalls. John began challenging the older Richardson to play one on one every day, figuring that would help him improve, too. Richardson was incredibly competitive, John says. “He’d get right up next to you and head-check
you.”

  Head-check?

  As John began with the ball at the top of the key, Richardson thrust his forehead into John to control his movement. “His neck was so strong and he was so quick,” John says, “that he’d stick his head into you to slow down your drive. I’ve never seen that, before or since. Can you imagine?”

  John was no pushover—he could dunk, shoot from long range, and would soon be the starting guard at UTEP along with Nate Archibald. “If you want to understand Nolan Richardson,” John says, “just visualize that head-check.”

  FOUR

  NATIVE SON

  Texas Western finally added a baseball team Richardson’s senior year. He hit .421, with ten home runs. He was among the NCAA leaders in RBIs, and that single 1963 season was enough to get him noticed. The Houston Colt 45s drafted him and offered a signing bonus, but Richardson now had three children. A journey beginning in the Class C minor leagues didn’t interest him.

  The AFL’s San Diego Chargers also drafted him in football, although Richardson had not played a minute of the sport since high school. He went to San Diego to try out but pulled a hamstring the first week and came home. Richardson lacked nearly a full semester of coursework to get his diploma from Texas Western, and he would not have returned to college quickly had the Chargers kept him. When he was waived, he opted to finish his degree at Texas Western.

  He went undrafted in basketball but continued to play with a traveling team sponsored by Saul Kleinfeld, the prominent El Pasoan. Their schedule would take them into Mexico, where Richardson’s fluency in Spanish came in handy. He could listen in on the opponents’ strategy during free-throws and dead balls.

  The trips to Mexico would provide him with an important lesson. Kleinfeld’s team might have Texas Western players, including stars such as Bobby Joe Hill and David Lattin. They were far better than most college teams, and Richardson thought nobody in Mexico could possibly come close.

  He was wrong. Occasionally the black stars from the best program in Texas would be frustrated by the press and fast break of the smaller—and superbly conditioned—Mexican teams. It was an epiphany of sorts for Richardson, and he kept the memory of the racehorse Mexican teams in the back of his mind.

  Richardson was hired to teach and coach at Bowie High School in the fall of 1964. The principal, Frank Pollit, must have assumed Richardson’s versatility in athletics meant that he was well-rounded in the classroom. Pollit assigned him a vast array of classes over the next decade, including math, English, social studies, history, and physical education. Richardson was given coaching assignments for JV and ninth-grade football, baseball, and basketball, and he stuck with these lower-level posts for three years. His total salary was $4,500 per year.

  One day, Pollit asked him what sport he really wanted to build his career on.

  Texas high school football, of course, was immensely popular, and the Friday night lights seduced Richardson briefly. He told Pollit that he dreamed of being a head football coach someday.

  “Wrong answer,” said Pollit. “It will take too long for a black man to get a chance in this town.” Pollit had plans for Richardson but knew he might never be a head football coach in Texas. “There’s too much of a good ol’ boy system. You’ll have a better chance in basketball.”

  Richardson felt no resentment toward his principal, a man he admired for being direct and honest. “I can take something straight up,” he says, “and Pollit would tell you right to your face.”

  “Don’t worry about your enemies,” Pollit sometimes told Richardson. That echoed what Ol’ Mama had told him for years. “It’s the people sitting on the fence who might turn against you,” she’d say. “That’s who you have to be careful of.”

  In 1967, Richardson was drafted in a third sport. This time it was the young American Basketball Association and the Dallas Chaparrals, and they offered to match his teaching salary at Bowie. Former Kentucky star Cliff Hagan had arranged a job for Richardson at a television station. Richardson hurt his leg, however, and grew frustrated hanging around a hotel. He considered a return to El Paso.

  Around this time, Richardson’s nephew Butch came down with a bad cold. The boy’s mother, Shirley, began to worry when Butch didn’t get better. When the cold evolved into a sleepiness that wouldn’t go away, the family took Butch to visit an El Paso doctor. Butch was diagnosed with acute lymphatic leukemia, ALL. After a two-month struggle, Butch died. He was seven years old. Richardson began to wonder if this was perhaps the disease that took his own mother, and he left Dallas for good, returning to El Paso in hopes of both counseling Shirley and coaching again at Bowie.

  Pollit surprised Richardson upon his return, telling him he could not have his old job back. He did, however, have a new position to offer. Richardson was named varsity basketball coach at Bowie in the autumn of 1967.

  Still sensitive about the way his college scoring average had taken a beating, and about the way he felt smothered by his coach, Richardson vowed one thing: he was going to be different from Don Haskins.

  Ol’ Mama was still prominent in Richardson’s life, but her health was visibly fading. She suffered a stroke in the mid-1960s, which left her unable to walk or talk. It also forced her out of her own home. “After the stroke she would try to talk,” Madalyn says, “and now I realize that she was so frustrated because her mind was still sharp.”

  Richardson’s grandmother passed away in 1974. The family’s memories of this remarkable woman are still vivid. “She was always very stern,” Madalyn recalls, “and didn’t tolerate a lot of nonsense from the children.”

  Without Ol’ Mama around, the struggle to advance seemed to Richardson more severe, steeper. Head college coaching jobs were out of the question. There were no coaches of color to imitate except at historically black colleges, the closest of which was five hundred miles away. While socializing with the black college players whose teams were playing in El Paso, he began hearing talk of a coach whom he could emulate—a coach who was black and who practically invented fast-break basketball.

  John McLendon was the most successful African-American coach from the 1940s through the 1960s. A pupil of basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, McLendon won 264 games at historically black North Carolina College from 1940 to 1952. He was not a big or brash man, and tried to repair the racially torn world gradually. His tools were craftiness, dignity, and intelligence.

  In 1944, while he was at North Carolina College, articles appeared claiming that the Duke University Medical School team, which was tearing up the intramural competition, was actually the best team in the state. McLendon requested a secret game with the Duke team, which featured a few former stars whose eligibility had expired. Duke and McLendon had an odd relationship. During his glory years at North Carolina College, which was also situated in Durham, he was invited to attend the Duke games and permitted to sit at the end of the Duke team’s bench—if he’d wear a waiter’s coat.

  The game was illegal, and by agreeing to play it, McLendon would put everyone in danger. A challenge was issued by one of North Carolina College’s players, and the game—without spectators, but with referees—was played. McLendon’s team destroyed Duke by 44 points.

  In his last years at North Carolina College, McLendon began petitioning the NCAA to admit the historically black colleges to compete in their national tournament. His numerous requests were denied in writing, so for years afterward the black colleges would compete in the powerful National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), which began including the historically black schools in their national playoffs in 1953. (Teams that were not in either the NCAA’s existing University Division or College Division would compete in the NAIA, which up until the 1970s could boast of some of the best black players in America.)

  When McLendon moved to Tennessee State, he won 88 percent of his games and three consecutive NAIA championships. He remains one of only four coaches to win three straight national titles. (John Wooden, Kentucky State’s black c
oach Lucias Mitchell, and Dan McCarrell of North Park are the others.)

  From 1959 until 1962, McLendon coached the integrated Cleveland Pipers of the National Industrial Basketball League—a postcollege league that was regarded as nearly as competitive as most NBA teams. In 1960, his Pipers handed the best amateur U.S. Olympic team in history—a team featuring Jerry West and Oscar Robertson—their only defeat.

  In 1969, McLendon was named the first black coach in the old ABA with the Denver Rockets. He later coached at Kentucky State and then Cleveland State University, where he was the first black head coach at a predominantly white college. (Cleveland State participates in Division I today but was College Division under McLendon.) He won a total of 522 college games at a clip of 76 percent.

  In both 1968 and 1972, Henry Iba invited McLendon to be an assistant coach for the Olympics. He was joined by Don Haskins on the 1972 staff.

  After those stints, McLendon became America’s finest basketball ambassador, traveling to nearly sixty countries to do clinics at a time when the teaching of basketball overseas was practically nonexistent. In 1979, he became the first black coach to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame—although, in a disgraceful omission, he was not included as a coach, but rather, as a “contributor.”

  As incredible as John McLendon’s success is the way he was ignored by the established white schools his entire career. He was never offered a job at a major state school and was known to only the most astute observers of basketball.

  McLendon’s story is part of a pattern at American colleges—reaping black talent but not black leaders. This system crushed his career, as well as those of countless other talented black coaches. Nolan Richardson, like many young black coaches in the 1960s, came to know McLendon’s story well.

  After a coach named Ray Mears won the NCAA’s College Division title at Wittenberg College of Ohio in the early 1960s, he was named the University of Tennessee coach. Mears, who was white, was inarguably a fine coach. But McLendon had won three national titles in a row, right in the state of Tennessee.