Forty Minutes of Hell Page 6

  Brewster reluctantly returned the car.

  Then something happened that would change Richardson’s choice and the course of his life. El Paso’s remote location meant that no matter what level of success a local high school coach enjoyed, nobody outside of town noticed. The odds against Richardson advancing to be a college coach were astronomical. Don Haskins, of course, was not going anywhere, and the closest Texas colleges were the two-year schools, which were a five-hour drive away. Under normal circumstances, even they wouldn’t care who was doing well in El Paso, a town where no high school coach had ever moved on to a college position.

  Western Texas College was a two-year school in Snyder, Texas, nearly four hundred miles from El Paso. Many of the Texas junior colleges were remote, but few were as isolated as Snyder, which was a half-hour north of the newly built interstate. Sid Simpson, their director of athletics, felt it was time for a new direction for his basketball team. After coaching the team himself for a while, he took a chance on a hot young coach named Mike Mitchell. At just twenty-six years of age, Mitchell won the National Junior College Championship.

  Simpson, an Arkansas native, found himself in a quandary when Mitchell bolted for the College of Southern Idaho after the 1977 season. Simpson wanted to keep winning, that was obvious, but Mitchell had irritated him with his harsh treatment of players.

  Yet Simpson himself was halfway annoyed with the typical I’m-going-to-the-NBA mentality of junior college kids. He wanted a coach who was tough and smart, but also somebody who could emotionally connect with the kind of conscripted kids who populated the rosters of the Texas junior colleges.

  When Texas Tech assistant Rob Evans walked in one April day and announced, “I’ve found your next coach,” Simpson was intrigued and assumed Evans was referring to himself. The junior college had never had a black coach—no integrated junior college in Texas ever had—but Rob Evans was clearly head-coaching material.

  Evans had played at Hobbs High School for the iconic Ralph Tasker, then starred at New Mexico State in the mid-1960s. Evans had been an assistant coach at NMSU under Lou Henson before going to Tech. He had the demeanor of an ambassador and the reputation for being honest and patient.

  “Would you consider hiring a black coach?” Evans asked Simpson.

  Simpson sensed it would be a great coup to land Evans. “You might be perfect, Rob,” Simpson admitted.

  “No, no,” Evans said. “It’s not me. I’m talking about an El Paso high school coach named Nolan Richardson.”

  Texas Tech had been hot on the trail of Ralph Brewster, and Rob Evans was leading the recruiting charge.

  Around this time, near the conclusion of Brewster’s senior season, Richardson had pulled his star into the office.

  “You know about Texas Tech?” Richardson asked.

  Of course Brewster did. He had a box of letters from Lubbock that Richardson had hand-delivered.

  Richardson continued. “Rob Evans is going to offer you a full ride to Tech, and now he’s interested in Melvin Patridge as well.”

  “That made me sit up,” Brewster says, “because Melvin and I were close.” Brewster began to think he’d decline the offers from UTEP and UNM.

  When Tech realized Patridge was on shakier ground academically, they slowly backed off from him. Brewster’s academics, on the other hand, were fine—he even had congressional approval for admission into the Air Force Academy. Richardson began hinting over the next few weeks that Tech might be the best fit.

  Brewster went on his official visit to Lubbock alone, and he came back disappointed. “There was no basketball spirit,” he says. “I could tell by the dirty gym that smelled like cow manure. It was a football school.” Brewster decided to hold off on signing anywhere despite pressure from the three universities.

  Brewster had been leaning toward taking the UNM deal. “But then Haskins came to my home, and everyone knew he never went out recruiting,” Brewster says. “He met with my dad, who mentioned the UNM car.”

  “When you start giving kids things,” Haskins said, “they start expecting that for the rest of their lives. If he wants a car so bad, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll do it legally, but he won’t be able to live on campus.”

  That sounded good to Brewster at first. Haskins outlined his idea. Brewster could live with his parents, then use the scholarship money normally tagged for room and board to make a modest, but legitimate, car payment.

  “That got my dad’s attention,” Brewster says. But not his. It wouldn’t be a new Monte Carlo. It wouldn’t be a new anything.

  When Haskins left, Ralph Brewster took a look around the little apartment. The tiny black-and-white television. The malfunctioning air-conditioning. The noisy neighbors. Keep living there? Not likely.

  Richardson leveled with Brewster in the weeks after his visit to Lubbock. Brewster recalls his coach saying, “Ralph, if you go to Texas Tech, I’ll get to be the coach of Western Texas College.”

  “They’d worked out a package deal,” Brewster says today. “I was going to go wherever Nolan suggested. I had no qualms with that.” And Richardson clearly favored Texas Tech.

  “Some of these schools are offering Ralph the world,” Joe Brewster had said to Gerald Myers, the Tech head coach, during their home visit.

  “We don’t do that sort of thing at Texas Tech,” Gerald Myers said.

  “But when I went to Lubbock,” Brewster claims, “every good football player had a Thunderbird or Monte Carlo.”

  Still, Brewster waited. At the end of April, the Tech coaches cornered the Brewsters again in their living room for a final push. This time the Tech coaches were more direct.

  According to Brewster, Rob Evans said, “If you sign, Ralph, Coach Richardson is going to be the next coach at Western Texas College. Don’t you want Nolan Richardson to be a college coach?” Package deals and quid pro quo arrangements were standard practice in college sports, but certainly new to El Paso high schools.

  Brewster admitted it would be great if Richardson could be a college coach. He leaned forward on the couch, holding his head in his hands. The apartment seemed to be getting smaller by the minute.

  “What if Coach Richardson told you to sign with us?” Evans asked. “Would you sign then?”

  Brewster said he would.

  “Just a minute,” Evans said.

  “They went outside and got Nolan,” Brewster recalls. “He must have been waiting in the car.”

  Ralph Brewster signed with Texas Tech. It’s possible that without Brewster, Richardson would have either been a school principal or coached his career away at Bowie—although Brewster refuses to stake that claim. “I was a talented player,” he says, “although I wasn’t any All-American. But sure, I went to Tech because it was good for Nolan.”

  In retrospect, Richardson insists Texas Tech was the right choice for Brewster, regardless of the junior college job—UNM was about to implode, and UTEP wasn’t very good at the time. Neither man would have guessed then how Brewster’s career at Tech would unfold.

  FIVE

  NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME

  Snyder, a tiny oil town halfway between El Paso and Dallas, was named after a buffalo hunter, Pete Snyder, who opened a trading post in 1878. Oil was discovered in Snyder in 1948, and the population tripled. Oil derricks seem to outnumber trees.

  When Western Texas College opened its doors in 1971, Snyder was home to about twelve thousand people, nearly all of them white. The towns in the Western Junior College Athletic Conference are more similar than they are unique. Odessa, the town made famous by Friday Night Lights, is one of those towns. So are Hobbs and Roswell, New Mexico. Throw in Texas towns like Borger, Levelland, Big Spring, Clarendon, and the more upscale Midland, and you have the nation’s premier junior college conference. Former NBA stars Larry Johnson, Spud Webb, and Avery Johnson got their start in this league.

  Director of Athletics Sid Simpson was quickly building a reputation as a shrewd judge of coaches, but college basketball i
s often about favors and paybacks. Simpson fielded phone calls from all over about the coaching job. “Bobby Knight even called,” Simpson says, “but I figured, what did Bobby Knight know about Snyder? Rob Evans knew our league, had been around it all his life. I trusted him.”

  Even employees of the junior college had suggestions for Simpson. One man had gotten wind of the fact that Sid Simpson was considering hiring a black coach and wanted to recommend his own coaching pal, but he must have sensed Simpson was leaning toward Nolan Richardson.

  “You’re going to be sorry if you hire that nigger,” the school employee said.

  “I didn’t worry about any of that,” Simpson says. “I wanted a guy who cared about Western Texas College.”

  Simpson drove to El Paso to interview Richardson and his family over dinner at a steak house, where a procession of people came over to greet Richardson throughout the meal. Whites. Mexicans. Blacks. “It was people of all ages, too,” Simpson recalls, “and you could tell they held him in the highest esteem. I could see he could get along with all kinds of people.”

  Simpson knew coaching could tear up families and render the coach ineffective, so he closely considered Richardson’s immediate circle. “I instantly liked Rosario,” he says. “She was supportive and captivated by Nolan, but was clearly a strong woman.”

  One other thing stuck in Simpson’s head. Simpson was charmed by their daughter, Yvonne, who was then six years old. “She was the cutest kid,” he says, “smart as could be. You could have a conversation with her just like she was an adult. The way Nolan interacted with his wife and child, well, that had a lot to do with why I was impressed with him.”

  Simpson drove back to Snyder with the radio off. There had never been a black coach at any integrated junior college in Texas, school employees kept reminding him. The next morning Simpson told his president that he wanted to hire Nolan Richardson.

  The school’s president, Dr. Robert Clinton, ran the proposal by the school’s board, but there was plenty of unease. Dr. Clinton wasn’t opposed to the idea of hiring a black coach, but knew it was a gamble in Snyder. The business of Rosario, his Mexican-American wife, and their child, had to be considered—an interracial couple and a biracial child in Snyder, Texas? Simpson told Dr. Clinton, “If somebody sees Nolan walking with his wife, it’s going to look different.”

  Simpson asked for a single year for Richardson to prove himself.

  Dr. Clinton told Simpson it would be his decision, but added a warning. “If this Nolan Richardson is not what you say he is,” Dr. Clinton said, “and we don’t win, it’s going to reflect on you. You’ll have to get a couple one-way bus tickets out of town.”

  Simpson says, “Dr. Clinton wasn’t all that prejudiced, he was just being practical. There was going to be pressure on us both, Nolan and myself.”

  Nolan Richardson signed on for $19,000 a season, a raise of $2,000. It was 1977, and a historic hire. (Richardson was not, however, the first black coach at a majority-white college in Texas. Bob “Snake” Legrand was named the head coach at the University of Texas–Arlington in 1977, just before Richardson went to Snyder. There were less than a half-dozen black major college coaches in America at the time.)

  “Snyder is redneck central,” Don Haskins said. “It was about as tough a place for Nolan Richardson to start out as you could imagine. Sid Simpson was gutsy to take a chance on him.”

  Richardson’s first junior college team featured eight El Paso kids whom he’d rounded up and brought along. “They looked like a team from the United Nations,” Simpson laughs. “They were white, brown, and black, and all sizes.”

  Perhaps feeling a little unmoored being away from El Paso, Richardson reached back to his roots, but not to Don Haskins. Richardson wanted to speed the game up and needed reminders of Alvis Glidewell’s system—he’d used parts of it for a few years, but now he wanted more. By November, Richardson had implemented as much of Glidewell’s system as he could recall.

  Dwight Williams, his new fireplug guard who had played high school ball for Glidewell, would be Richardson’s bridge back to El Paso. At Richardson’s insistence, Williams sought out Glidewell at Christmas break that first year, with specific instructions: collect the rules, cues, options, and rotations of the full-court pressure.

  By January, Richardson’s first team had implemented Glidewell’s presses, and they tore through the competition during the conference season.

  The team adjusted to “redneck central” as quickly as their coach had. Players who are winning make peace with their surroundings, and Dwight Williams was no different. “Snyder had one stoplight, a typical little Texas town, but it was a wonderful place because it was all centered around the college,” he says. “Race didn’t come into play until my sophomore year, although it was always in our minds.”

  Sid Simpson was more than just the athletics director. He coached the women’s team, too, but he made sure to watch nearly every Richardson-run practice and game. “Nolan would just have his team jump in the other team’s face the second they got off the bus,” Simpson says. “They’d spread the court with their defense, and run, run, run. There was playing time for everyone. I’d been trying to press and do some of the things that Nolan was doing, but it was funny—when I told my team to do it, they wouldn’t respond to me, although I was often saying nearly the same thing Nolan was.”

  Simpson had neglected to reveal one of the oddities of the job in Snyder during the interview process. The college was outside of town, and it was too far to walk. That was fine with Richardson—nothing to distract his players from school and basketball. But the cafeteria was closed on the weekends. That meant the players would have to cram into a few cars to buy fast food with the minimal meal allowance Simpson could supply.

  Richardson realized the athletics department wasn’t as frugal as he and Rosario were. He suggested to Simpson that they use the money to buy groceries instead.

  “Who is going to cook?” Simpson asked.

  “Rose and I will,” Richardson said. Rosario had run a barbecue stand and Mexican restaurant in El Paso and could do wonders with a low budget.

  The next Saturday morning, shopping for groceries for team meals, Rose noticed the manager taking meat off the shelf and putting it into a large cart. She asked him what he was doing.

  “These are pull-backs,” he told Rose. “They’re still good, but we can’t sell them after a certain date.”

  From that day forward, the Western Texas College team feasted on pull-backs, and the regular weekend meals helped the ballplayers to bond. Richardson delivered the meals to the dorms personally, with Yvonne dragging a basket of her own. It was one thing when the brash new coach hollered at you and ran you to exhaustion for three hours. But when the coach, his wife, and daughter donned aprons, chopped onions, and then hauled out enormous baskets of home cooking every Saturday and Sunday?

  “The meals were outstanding!” Dwight Williams says. “Mrs. Richardson used to run the kitchen in The King’s X, which is famous for Mexican food in El Paso. Coach would be staggering under the weight of the baskets, and he’d hand-deliver it to our rooms.”

  “It was a family atmosphere like I’ve never seen before or since,” Simpson says. “Nolan could make a purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  Yvonne would roam from room to room, goofing with the players, pretending to be a waitress taking food orders. Her sense of fun rubbed off on her father. “Coach Richardson can be a very mischievous guy,” Dwight Williams says, “and Yvonne brought that out in him. She personified the best parts of Rose and Nolan. Yvonne got her father’s fearlessness and her mother’s endurance.”

  Since the family was away from El Paso and their families, Yvonne and her father had time and space to grow close in a way Richardson had not been able to with his first three children. He had been busier and less patient with them; then the divorce complicated things. His youngest daughter understood him, he felt. They were closely matched, personality-wise.


  She knew how to push his buttons, as well, especially if she needed his attention. “I want an interview!” she would say.

  Richardson, who had mainly lived in El Paso, could immediately sense a different racial mindset in Snyder. He was sensitive to any slight or insult, real or imagined, and occasionally Richardson even misinterpreted Sid Simpson’s best intentions that first season. When Rosario and Yvonne were back visiting El Paso one weekend, Simpson learned Richardson was alone. He invited his coach over for dinner. Simpson’s son Mike loved to cook, and Southern cuisine was his specialty.

  When he arrived at Simpson’s home, Richardson surveyed the spread awaiting him. Fried chicken. Corn bread. Collard greens. Black-eyed peas. Sweet potato pie. Even watermelon. “Ahh hah, I see,” Richardson thought. “They’re feeding me soul food.” He sat down cautiously, not sure if he was being insulted or perhaps was the butt of a joke.

  Simpson recalls, “Nolan had one eyebrow raised up, checking us out.”

  Simpson slid into his chair and, without ceremony or comment, tore into the fried chicken. His son grabbed a thigh and attacked it.

  “I knew Sid was for real when I saw him eat that night,” Richardson says.

  Richardson learned that coaching in Texas junior colleges could be a rough ride. Once, Western Texas was at Panola Junior College, where Richardson grew more and more incensed with the biased officiating as the first half progressed. After computing the total number of free throws for both teams at halftime, he sent a manager up from the locker room to the scorer’s table with an announcement. Western Texas was done. They would not be coming out for the second half, because they were being cheated.

  The Panola officials were shocked, then livid; they set up outside the Western Texas locker room to prevent Richardson from exiting to the team bus. Richardson said in no uncertain terms that the referees were prejudiced and wouldn’t give a black coach a fair shake. The Panola athletics director tried to calm Richardson down. “We know it’s bad out there,” he said, only to appease the coach.