Forty Minutes of Hell Page 7

  “If you know it’s bad, why haven’t you stopped it?” Richardson said.

  “That’s just my way,” Richardson says now, “to speak out. When I coach, it’s me versus everybody. Same with when I played. I kept a chip on my shoulder, and that’s something I guess I still carry from Ol’ Mama.”

  Richardson also admits he can be intimidating. “I’m a black man with a big, strong voice. I have a certain physical stature,” he says. “There are games within games, psychological games, and that’s part of what I’m up to on the sidelines.” In characteristic fashion, he adds, “That’s something you won’t find in coaching books.”

  Eventually, the Panola boss talked him into bringing his team on for the second half. Although they were behind by twenty points, Western Texas stormed back to win easily. Richardson had proved a point. Or so he thought.

  A note was on his door when he got back to school Monday morning: Please see Dr. Clinton in the president’s office, pronto.

  “I heard you had a little trouble in Panola the other night,” Dr. Clinton said.

  Richardson forced a smile, not sure what to expect. Would he be suspended? Chastised? Fired?

  “I’m damn proud of you,” Dr. Clinton said. “Don’t back down from anybody, Nolan. We don’t want you walking on eggshells around here.”

  It was the first direct vote of confidence Richardson received from his president. “That just made me sure that I could win,” he says. “I knew the school was behind me.”

  It wasn’t only the president who was affected by Richardson. “Nolan could have run for mayor of Snyder and won, after his first season,” Simpson says.

  Later that spring, Richardson began socializing regularly with the employee who told Sid Simpson not to hire the “nigger coach.”

  One afternoon that first season in Snyder, Richardson called the team into the locker room and singled out a Detroit native, Freddy Davis. Richardson said, “Freddy, that white girl you’re dating? You can’t be seen in town, at the movies, at a football game. Some boosters have called, and they’re going to withdraw their support.”

  Melvin Patridge recalls, “Nolan put it out to all of us, so we’d know what kind of atmosphere we were in. These are the same boosters that were having us to dinner and smiling in our faces. In El Paso, who you were dating wasn’t a big deal. But we saw racism in Snyder, and the look on Nolan’s face that day, you could tell it was the hardest thing to tell us.”

  During Richardson’s college days, Don Haskins had called in his friend and teammate, Andy Stoglin. According to Stoglin, Haskins told him to stop holding hands with a white girl around the El Paso campus.

  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 atte
nding 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.

  SIX

  GOING TO THE TERRITORY

  Tulsa 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.