Forty Minutes of Hell Read online

  It is impossible today not to look at McLendon’s career and wonder what could have been. While McLendon’s name is still revered, it is almost exclusively by black coaches and older players.

  Richardson understood that McLendon was far from the only black coach whose talents were ignored. Each overlooked black coach was a disturbing body in the road to any young black man starting in the profession.

  One of McLendon’s contemporaries was the Winston-Salem State coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines. At the time of his death in 2005, Gaines was fifth on the NCAA’s list of winningest coaches, with 828 career victories. All forty-seven of his seasons were at Winston-Salem State, a historically black college. His 1967 team, featuring Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, went 31-1, and won the NCAA College Division championship.

  A giant of a man, Gaines is a member of eight halls of fame, including the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, which honored him as a coach. He and McLendon would occasionally go on recruiting trips together, promising not to lure each other’s prospects. Since hotels were not always available to black men, they would often sleep in the car. Big House, of course, got the wider backseat.

  Wake Forest University is in the same town as Clarence Gaines’s school. During his time at Winston-Salem State, Wake Forest went through seven basketball coaches. At one point, Wake Forest struggled through thirty-three years (1962–1995) without winning a regular season or ACC Tournament title or qualifying for the NCAA tournament. Yet Clarence Gaines was never offered the Wake Forest job.

  Gaines’s story is not unique, either. Kentucky State coach Lucias Mitchell won three-straight NAIA national titles in 1970, 1971, and 1972, when he was still in his thirties. He was black and was never offered a job at a Division I school.

  The stagnant careers of John McLendon and Big House Gaines haunted Richardson during his early years of coaching. But without the advent of videotapes or cable television, it was only through conversation that he could begin to construct a style contrasting with Don Haskins’s system. Naturally, Haskins was his most prominent influence, and Richardson had a difficult time shaking off Haskins’s way of thinking about the game. So Richardson’s undersized all-Mexican-American teams his first years at Bowie played patiently. The dizzying pace that would one day be a Richardson trademark was almost a decade away.

  “He played a lot closer to Haskins’s style those first few years than people think,” recalls Alvis Glidewell, who was already making a name for himself as a shrewd coach. “He had much smaller kids than the rest of us.”

  Richardson was likely doing what most young coaches do—teaching the game the way they’ve been taught. But he was on the lookout for a specific strategy that suited him. He had no way to familiarize himself with the systems of either McLendon or Big House Gaines. Instead, Richardson first studied, then copied, Glidewell’s Austin High School teams.

  Glidewell says today, “We all copy off somebody. I’d seen things that John Wooden did at clinics when he was winning at UCLA, but I didn’t announce it around town. Nolan certainly wasn’t yet pressing the way he’d get famous for in college.” Glidewell, who is unknown outside El Paso, was surprised to learn that Richardson now credits him with some of his success as a pressing college coach. “We were never close,” Glidewell insists. “He never came over to practice, never let on that he was interested. But he must have been watching pretty close.”

  Glidewell does recall one particular bus ride to Amarillo for a tournament both their teams were competing in. “We sat together for the first time and really talked. He asked questions about our system, but he never wrote anything down, so I had no idea he was going to use it.”

  Richardson says, “Glidewell’s teams were so disciplined that they could press after a missed shot. That really takes total control, but his guys could do it. Not many people know about him, but he should be in somebody’s hall of fame.”

  While he was trying to find his own voice as a coach, Richardson was also struggling at home. His marriage to Helen collapsed in the mid-1960s, something he attributes today to the couple being too young to sustain the pressures of family life. After their divorce, he raised the two boys, while Helen had Madalyn. Helen became a schoolteacher, too, teaching at Bowie’s rival, Jefferson High School, for decades.

  Richardson was coaching three sports and teaching several subjects. He had plenty of extra duties, too, one of which was grooming the baseball field at Bowie. When the heat got the better of him on a sunny May afternoon, he recalled that his high school pal, Manuel Davila, lived across the street from the field. Richardson trudged over to beg a glass of water. That’s when he met Rosario Davila, Manuel’s sister, who was tending to the garden. Like anyone in the Bowie neighborhood, Rosario knew exactly who Richardson was. She also had been married but was now divorced with a daughter of her own, Sylvia. Manuel was not at home, but Richardson stuck around to talk anyway. He asked for a second glass of water.

  Soon after, Richardson married Rosario—he called her Rose, which was Ol’ Mama’s name—and their only child, Yvonne, was born in 1972.

  Richardson’s first Bowie teams were good, but not exceptional. The Bears were simply too small, and the coach had to make adjustments to be competitive. They were so aggressive that local fans began calling them Rabia—Spanish for “rabid dogs.”

  Richardson’s training regimens were a daily test in toughness, and his high school players named the last third of practice “Forty Minutes of Hell.” Years later, the moniker would refer to his style of play in college games of that same length. His coaching philosophy was evolving, but his insistence on defensive pressure was like a mantra—“Pressure leads to poor decisions.”

  Despite the furious pace of Richardson’s practices and his hyper-demanding style, he grew close with his players at Bowie. Years later, those players, many from broken homes, too, credit Richardson with being deeply influential as well as a close friend. Richardson’s identification with and love for his scruffy underdogs from Bowie—the poorest of El Paso’s poor—was authentic.

  After school one afternoon in 1973, Richardson was taking a shortcut through the Bowie gym on his way home. A pickup game in progress stopped him like a forearm to the chest. He didn’t recognize the gangly black youngster who was blocking shots and grabbing rebounds.

  Richardson walked into the middle of the game and asked the new kid his name.

  “Ralph Brewster,” the boy said. He was an eighth-grader, who didn’t even play competitive basketball, although he was already 6'1".

  Richardson looked at Brewster’s feet, which were huge. “Aren’t you Joe Brewster’s son?” he asked.

  “My friends took off when he said that,” Brewster recalls, “ran out of the gym. They thought I was in trouble. So did I. Growing up, Nolan was like God to me.”

  Richardson asked the younger Brewster why he wasn’t playing on the junior high team.

  “My father won’t let me play,” Brewster said.

  With chores and schoolwork to tackle, not to mention Ralph’s smart-aleck demeanor, sports would be a waste of time, his father felt. Joe Brewster, a Korean War hero, was a huge man—over three hundred pounds—and his word was law.

  Later that evening, Richardson phoned Joe Brewster and asked for permission to coach his son.

  “My Dad didn’t see an athlete in me, although he liked sports,” says Brewster. “I was just a gawky kid but I hated losing. Any board game, Ping-Pong, I wanted to win.”

  The next day Richardson went to the Brewsters’ home in Segundo Barrio’s Tays Housing Project and made an appeal to the father. “I’ve seen great players come and go,” he said. “Trust me with Ralph and I’ll make him something special.”

  Joe Brewster was surprised Richardson was interested in his sassy son. “If you think he’s good,” Joe Brewster said, “have at it.” But Joe Brewster had one concern—his boy Ralph walking home. Although his mother was Mexican-American, and both parents were fluent, Ralph couldn’t speak Spani
sh. Richardson would be required to drive him home every day, and the coach used the time to gain Brewster’s trust.

  The long hours Richardson spent coaching, driving, and telling stories to Ralph Brewster would be worth it. By the time he was a senior, Brewster would bless Richardson in a way nobody could have predicted.

  Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richardson was absorbing as much as he could from the area’s best coaches. Nobody was more successful than the team three hours away in Hobbs, New Mexico. If Alvis Glidewell’s system was enticing to Richardson, the style of Hobbs coach Ralph Tasker must have been like cool water in the desert.

  Tasker came to the oil-boom town of Hobbs shortly after World War II. He won an astounding number of games—1,122—and took home eleven state championships. Full-court pressure was his calling card.

  Tasker, like Alvis Glidewell, wore glasses, and looked more like a professor than a hoops guru. Tasker preferred his team’s bench to be on the baseline, to witness his press as it uncoiled like a diamondback rattlesnake. His lead defender, guarding the inbounder after made baskets, would follow the first pass and trap it; everyone else would rotate. The opponents knew when the predictable traps were coming, but it usually didn’t matter. Tasker won seventy home games in a row during one stretch.

  “Hobbs would come into El Paso and destroy our best teams,” Richardson recalls. “They pressed every minute, but it was more extended, more exciting, than what Alvis Glidewell was doing. So I copied Tasker’s system, too. Later I took it a step further by teaching my kids not to trap at the same time or place. I wanted us to be more difficult to prepare for.”

  Glidewell today says Richardson may have borrowed more than his full-court press. “Nolan started playing faster when he had better players. He had those two guys, Ralph Brewster and Melvin Patridge, and Nolan let them run more. But Patridge lived on our side of the freeway,” Glidewell insists. “So we challenged the situation with the school district. Patridge’s mother said something like ‘Nolan was his uncle.’ We were saying ‘Richardson is recruiting,’ which was illegal [for high schools], but we lost our challenge.”

  Today, Melvin Patridge laughs about Glidewell’s old claim. “We actually are cousins, but didn’t realize that until eighth grade, in 1972,” he says. “We owned a home in the Bowie district, but didn’t always live there.” Patridge understands Glidewell’s frustration. “We probably could have won state if I’d gone to Austin High School,” he says.

  Patridge remembers how Richardson would use his own version of shock treatment to get his Bowie Bears’ attention. “He would put us on the floor with some of the UTEP players, and they’d kill us,” Patridge says. “But then the high school kids we’d face, they were nothing.”

  Patridge recalls a trip the Bowie team made into central Texas for the state playoffs after winning the city championship. The players filed off the bus to eat a few hours before the game but sat, ignored, for half an hour. “Nolan finally got up and talked to the manager,” Patridge says. Eventually the coach returned to the team and said, “Let’s go.” They bought hamburgers at a McDonald’s and ate them in their hotel rooms.

  Patridge confronted the coach the next day. “Why didn’t we just stay there until we got service?” he asked.

  Richardson had remembered Abilene from his high school baseball trip. “I didn’t want you guys to have the humiliation that I did,” he told Patridge.

  “He wasn’t often verbal about race at that time,” Patridge says. “Nolan might say, ‘Look, me being a black coach means that my players are going to have to suffer the same as I do. If a call can go either way, it’s going to go against us. I have to prepare you for that.’”

  The us-against-the-world mentality became a recurring theme in Richardson’s pregame and postgame talks.

  According to Kenny John, his former workout partner at Fort Bliss, “Nolan carried that chip on his shoulder, like he had something to prove. He could act during games like the world was against him because he was black. But that worked for him, because he’d sometimes get the calls, and his players seemed to be on a quest. I don’t know if Nolan really felt that way, or if he was just trying to help his team any way he could, like all of us.”

  Patridge sees it differently: “The Anglo coaches could really ride the refs, but the refs would tell Nolan to shut up.”

  The addition of Ralph Brewster, Melvin Patridge, and high-jump hero Arthur Westbrook radically altered the Bowie team’s racial makeup—and success rate. Richardson’s teams were 190-80 in his ten-year career at Bowie. The trio of black players, however, would amass a sparkling record of 101-13 in his final three seasons.

  Brewster grew to be 6'8" and was Richardson’s first and only major college prospect. Patridge and Brewster were the two biggest and strongest kids in El Paso, and they could dominate the boards, allowing them to fast break. “We’d force the issue and push them into submission,” Brewster says.

  Richardson alternated deliberately between being a harsh task-master and a loving father figure with his team. Once, after a brutal Saturday practice, Richardson took Brewster to Luby’s Cafeteria, where the player ate like a famished soldier. When they finished eating, the manager came over and insisted on comping Richardson’s check. The manager told Richardson, loud enough for Brewster to hear, that it was an honor to have him in the restaurant.

  Back in the car, Richardson turned to Brewster. “That’s why I stay on you, because I want to pass that kind of respect on to you,” he said. The rides home were always instructive, with Richardson lecturing or telling stories to Brewster or Patridge from behind the wheel of his dilapidated Oldsmobile.

  “It was a gold 1968 Tornado,” Patridge says, “and it had no shocks. The car would bounce up and down. And the needle on his speedometer would bounce up and down, too. The windshield wipers didn’t work, and if it was raining, look out. Coach Richardson would have his head out the window. We were a sight.”

  “You could get seasick in that car,” Brewster says.

  Once, Patridge asked his coach why he didn’t spring for a better set of wheels.

  “I don’t care about what people think about a car,” Richardson said. “I want them to notice me.”

  Richardson would pontificate on what it took to be a player and why his two stars had to hit the books. “But he never talked about race to me, never,” Brewster insists. “He talked about studying and doing well in class. I didn’t experience any racism then. I thought it was something from my dad’s era.”

  Brewster claimed an El Paso innocence that would be shattered when he went away to college—and believes the story was similar in some ways for his coach. “Bowie was special,” he says, “and ironically, that’s because Bowie was considered the lowest you could go. We supported each other, although it was somewhat of a bubble.” Brewster believes that 1970s El Paso was far more progressive than the rest of Texas. “When I got exposed to the other Texas,” he says, “I started seeing blacks being treated differently. That’s what Nolan went through when he left El Paso.”

  Nolan Richardson’s best year at Bowie was 1977, but by the end of the season, he’d made a decision. Although he longed to be a college coach, he needed a backup plan. Richardson quietly resigned, intending to go back to school for a master’s degree at UTEP so he could one day become a school principal. Richardson would go out a winner at Bowie, though none of the players yet knew of this decision.

  If 1977 was Richardson’s best team, it may have been Don Haskins’s worst. UTEP finished with a losing record for the first time in Haskins’s career. Two losses to hated rival New Mexico really stung. Both schools badly wanted Ralph Brewster, who was only seventeen and didn’t understand what kind of tension he was about to stir up. When Texas Tech began recruiting him, things got complicated.

  In the days before nationalized scouting services and meat-market exposure camps, Brewster was initially something of a secret. Word began to seep out that there was a big kid at Bowie
with a boatload of potential.

  “UTEP knew about me all along,” Brewster says, “and I liked UTEP. But initially I wanted to go to the University of New Mexico. The coaches offered me a new car, and a UNM coach would give me two thousand dollars in cash when he’d come see me play.” This was a shock to Brewster, who was far from a worldly kid.

  Brewster’s indecision would drag into the spring. One April day, Brewster showed up at UTEP’s new arena for a postseason pickup game. UTEP was still actively recruiting Brewster and encouraged him to come around.

  “I drove up in a new 1977 Monte Carlo that UNM had arranged for me,” Brewster says. “The first person I see is [former UTEP star] Nate Archibald.”

  Perhaps the best point guard in the world at that time, Archibald was back in El Paso, rehabbing an injury.

  “Wait a minute,” Archibald said. “Where’d you get that?” Archibald was used to NBA stars driving fancy cars, but not El Paso high school kids.

  “University of New Mexico,” Brewster said.

  “You’d better get it in your name,” Archibald said, according to Brewster.

  Not everyone at UTEP agreed with that assessment. When the first pickup game was over that day, Brewster noticed Richardson coming through the tunnel in the arena, motioning with his finger.

  “We need to talk,” Richardson said.

  Archibald had told Haskins about the Monte Carlo. Haskins had phoned Richardson, who was there to put a stop to it. They marched up the tunnel to Haskins’s office.

  After Brewster admitted the car was a gift from UNM, Richardson spoke up. “You can’t take it. People are going to see a $10,000 car being driven by a South El Paso kid?”

  Brewster considered whether to pay attention to his skinny wallet or his high school coach. Then, according to Brewster, Haskins said, “I don’t care whether you come to UTEP or not. But when you leave here, you take that goddamn car back.”