Forty Minutes of Hell Page 8

  By then, the Tulsans had made modest progress in improving their ruptured race relations. John Phillips, who later became TU’s coach and attended high school in town in the mid-1960s, says, “The races got along pretty well in the sixties and it wasn’t really a redneck town by any stretch.” The high schools were desegregated by then, and athletics became a place where the races mixed freely. However, there were still powerful elitists resistant to progress.

  Tulsa Athletics Director Emery Turner had desperately wanted to hire Lamar University basketball coach and Tulsa native Billy Tubbs to turn the program around. But Tubbs figured Tulsa was doomed to fail and dropped out of the running. Rumors circulated that it was a done deal: Nolan Richardson would be the next coach.

  One day in early March of 1980, just before the University of Tulsa offered Richardson a contract, a booster named Evans Dunne appeared in the doorway of Ed Beshara’s clothing store. He didn’t want a new suit.

  “What’s on your mind, Evans?” Beshara asked.

  What Evans Dunne said became a familiar refrain among Tulsa boosters that spring: “I’ll never give another dime to the University of Tulsa if they hire a nigger to coach our boys.”

  Evans Dunne was one of the University of Tulsa’s biggest financial contributors, and he donated huge sums to their struggling sports programs. The Dunnes were considered Tulsa’s first family. Evans was the son of an old oil-money family; his wife, Nina Lane Dunne, was the author of Tulsa’s Magic Roots, a picture book published in 1979 that was on every coffee table in South Tulsa.

  Dunne’s attitude was indicative of the dilemma in college sports. While students or faculty might have been ready to desegregate, the people pulling the purse strings often were not. Most schools, especially in the South, began adding black players, but not because it was the right thing to do. Rather, they desegregated when they did not want to risk getting beaten on the court or field. It often took a well-established coach, one with a sense of courage and justice, to begin recruiting black players.

  An administrator who suggested hiring a black coach would be under enormous pressure. But Richardson’s breathtaking junior college teams were averaging over 100 points a game, and that had gotten Tulsa president Paschal Twyman’s attention. “Nolan bowled us over with charisma,” Twyman told Sports Illustrated. “We knew we were breaking some ice here, but we decided to fly with it. We needed to win badly.”

  Richardson’s predecessor, Jim “Country” King, had been a standout player at Tulsa before going on to the NBA. The 6'2" Jim King played plenty for the Los Angeles Lakers, San Francisco Warriors, and finally as a backup on gritty Chicago Bulls teams, their best of the pre–Michael Jordan era.

  When Ken Hayes bolted from Tulsa in 1975 for the head-coaching job at New Mexico State, Tulsa asked Jim King, their most visible alum, to take the helm. The school was in a bind, and King—who had no coaching experience—was pulled by loyalty. Only two years into his NBA retirement, and at the age of thirty-five, Jim King agreed to be Tulsa’s head coach. After his first season, King was offered an NBA assistant-coaching spot but remained at Tulsa.

  King wouldn’t enjoy the consistent winning he had helped to generate in the NBA. His best record at Tulsa was in his third season, 1978–79, when he finished 13-14. King even lost eight in a row to its crosstown rival, Oral Roberts University.

  By the end of January 1980, Jim King took an early retirement. Bill Franey, his assistant, coached the final nine games of that season. King left Tulsa with a record of 44-82. At the age of forty, his career as a coach was over.

  Don Haskins knew a positive piece from popular sportswriter Bill Connors would help smooth the way for Richardson. Connors knew Haskins from his playing days at Oklahoma A&M, took Haskins at his word, and ran a glowing profile of Richardson in the Tulsa World. Richardson continued to make it clear, even to Connors, that he wanted to distance himself from Haskins in terms of coaching philosophy. Richardson never disparaged Haskins personally, but he was quick to criticize the conservative playing style that Henry Iba was credited with popularizing.

  Richardson could, however, sometimes be loose with his language. About his El Paso home, he told Sports Illustrated, “I’m from a place I never want to go back to.” Later, Richardson would clarify this statement. He meant being poor and unknown.

  Tulsa’s on-court struggles were in stark contrast to the success of its crosstown rival, Oral Roberts University.

  ORU was a new school founded by Oral Roberts, the evangelical preacher, educator, businessman, and television personality. The school opened its doors in 1965, and immediately had three winning seasons in a row.

  Reverend Roberts was hugely popular in black communities at that time—not only for his willingness to include blacks in his church, but also for his encouragement for blacks to attend his university and play on his basketball team. ORU had three black players on their inaugural team in the fall of 1966.

  The state of Oklahoma was relatively progressive in desegregating their college sports teams. Henry Iba desegregated his Oklahoma A&M team in 1957, when he signed Memphis native L. C. Gordon. The other major state school, Oklahoma University, followed suit the next season. Before the 1964–65 season, Tulsa coach Joe Swank signed the school’s first black players, a trio of junior college transfers—Sherman Dillard, Julian Hammond, and Herman Callands.

  This was a new era, though, and Oral Roberts University fully integrated their team from its inception, putting a premium on black athletes whose style and speed became a hit in Tulsa.

  In 1968, a seemingly meaningless home game became one of the most important in ORU history. Middle Tennessee State racehorsed past ORU, putting up 115 points. Reverend Roberts, who was a fixture at ORU games, was smitten with Middle Tennessee’s style of play and decided to hire Ken Trickey, their flamboyant coach, the following spring.

  Playing in the smaller College Division, Trickey finished 27-4 his first year at ORU. In 1972, his third year, the school entered the University Division and broke out with a 26-2 season and an NIT bid, the school’s first postseason playoffs.

  But it was more than just the fact that Oral Roberts University was winning. The team was fast-breaking as if the flames of hell were at their heels.

  The godfather of Oklahoma basketball was still Henry Iba, whose strict, disciplined style influenced three generations of local coaches. Teams all over the state walked the ball up the court and played a conservative and stifling defense. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to risk irritating Mister Iba by playing a fast-paced game. Iba, who retired in 1969, was too diplomatic to speak out about what was happening at the new college in the state, but it must have appalled him.

  During Ken Trickey’s 26-2 run of 1972, ORU averaged 105 points per game, and even tallied 155 points in a win over Union College.

  In 1974, ORU won two games in their debut in the NCAA Tournament. ORU needed to beat Kansas to earn a trip to the Final Four—a remarkable feat, considering it was less than a decade since the college opened its doors. Kansas overcame a 9-point deficit in the game’s last few minutes, crushing the hopes of the ORU faithful.

  That spring, the Tulsa police busted Ken Trickey for driving while intoxicated. Trickey had already announced his resignation before the arrest, but rumors of a setup spread through Tulsa.

  Trickey compiled a record of 118-23 in only five years at Oral Roberts University and was a John the Baptist of the Fast Break—indirectly prophesying the coming of Nolan Richardson to Tulsa less than a decade later.

  While ORU was welcoming to black players, their administrative approach was typical of the times. Black players were coveted; black leaders were not. Consider that twenty-six players have scored over one thousand points in the school’s history. Twenty of them have been black. ORU has had ten head coaches, all of them white.

  A few years after Ken Trickey’s departure, Oral Roberts himself enticed coach Ken Hayes to leave New Mexico State and return to the city of Tulsa.

  Haye
s had been successful at New Mexico State, but he decided to return to Tulsa after the reverend made his offer. “You’ll be my last coach,” Roberts promised. Hayes came back to town just after the NCAA sheriffs penalized ORU with serious sanctions in an effort to get Oral’s basketball coach to walk the straight and righteous path.

  Hayes kept the pressure on Tulsa University. In his first season, Hayes knocked off his old TU team twice, the eighth win in a row for ORU over Tulsa.

  The following spring, Nolan Richardson arrived in town.

  Head coaching jobs have always been hard to come by, even for hugely successful junior college coaches. Richardson, who was thirty-eight years old, could not afford to turn his nose up at Tulsa’s pauper past.

  Tulsa competed in the Missouri Valley Conference, which had been one of the premier basketball leagues in America for years. The MVC at one time featured Cincinnati and Louisville, two teams that had won NCAA titles. Memphis State and Drake had earned berths to the Final Four, while Bradley and Wichita State had illustrious histories.

  During the 1960s and 1970s, only one or two nationally televised college basketball games were broadcast a week. The advent of cable television in the late 1980s would slowly strangle the powerful MVC, because none of the schools were in major media centers. They were in Des Moines, Peoria, Canyon. And Tulsa. But before the days of cable TV, the Missouri Valley was a feared conference.

  When Richardson arrived, the MVC had just seen Larry Bird at Indiana State lead his team to the NCAA title game. Richardson would face a long list of greats who would later earn jobs in the NBA: Lewis Lloyd, Antoine Carr, Cliff Levingston, Xavier McDaniel, David Thirdkill, Benoit Benjamin, Kevin McKenna, Mitchell Anderson, Hersey Hawkins, and Jim Les.

  Nobody believed Richardson could win, especially not win immediately, despite his four fine players from Western Texas College—David Brown and Phil Spradling from El Paso, Greg Stewart, and future NBA star Paul Pressey. They’d be joined by Bob Stevenson, Tulsa’s best returning player. Spradling and Stevenson were white.

  Richardson still needed a natural point guard, and he settled on Mike Anderson, a relentless scrapper on the Alabama junior college team he’d beaten for the championship. Anderson’s team lost any hope of winning when he fouled out. In a classic case of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” he signed with Tulsa a few weeks later. Richardson was taken by Anderson’s quickness, but it was more than that. Richardson says, “You could tell he was that rare kid, a natural leader and a listener. And tough? He was as tough as could be.”

  Anderson, who is now the head coach at Missouri, says, “I could see that people just gravitated to Nolan, and he was unique in that way. I was excited about how Nolan played, but my first impression was that Tulsa was the real West, cowboys and Indians.”

  A decade before Richardson took over at Tulsa, Will Robinson was hired as the first black coach in major college basketball. Illinois State, also of the Missouri Valley Conference, named Robinson the head coach in 1970, when he was fifty-eight.

  Like Richardson, Robinson had begun coaching at the high school level, leading Detroit’s Pershing High School to a state title. That team featured Spencer Haywood, who, with Robinson’s help, would successfully challenge the NBA’s ban on allowing underclassmen into the draft.

  Robinson had been a talented high school football quarterback in Ohio and even came in second in the state’s golf tournament—although he was not allowed to play on the golf course at the same time the white kids played.

  His teams at ISU featured the skinny hotshot Doug Collins, who went on to a long NBA playing and coaching career. Robinson compiled a record of 78-51, and never had a losing season, but got dumped in 1975, his college career over after five quick years. Robinson then hooked on as a scout with the Detroit Pistons of the NBA, but declined an offer to be their head coach in the 1980s. Today, the Pistons locker room is called the “Will Robinson Locker Room of Champions.” He died in 2008 at the age of ninety-six.

  Neither John McLendon nor Big House Gaines was ever offered a chance to coach at a major white-majority state university. They were seen as Negro coaches at Negro schools and could not liberate themselves from that identity—or, rather, the administrators who hired new coaches at white universities could not free themselves from that prevailing mindset. Ben Jobe has managed to coach at both historically black colleges and majority white universities. Jobe served as the head coach at five historically black schools, the last of which was Southern University. In between those head coaching posts, Jobe was an assistant at two mostly white colleges, as well as the head coach of the University of Denver (then a Division II school).

  In 1968, while Jobe was at the historically black South Carolina State University in Spartansburg, campus life was shattered when three young black men were shot in the back by police during a campus bonfire and protest. The incident echoed the killing of students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard.

  Except that it didn’t. Kent State got international media coverage and even inspired a rock ’n’ roll anthem. South Carolina State’s killings were largely ignored, and this left Jobe mystified and angry. The white media’s blindness to State’s on-campus slaughter would serve as a twisted metaphor for Jobe’s successes. Despite his 524 college wins, he was ignored, too. He was never offered a head Division I job at a white-majority university.

  Jobe enjoyed his most publicized success at Southern University, where, in 1993, he defeated an old employer, Georgia Tech, in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. His Southern teams qualified for the NCAA Tournament four times and earned one NIT bid (a rarity for a Southwestern Athletic Conference [SWAC] school).

  He won 209 games at Southern, a remarkable total, considering he was forced to play almost ten “guarantee games” a year—games where Southern would travel to play for money, games that would never be “returned” to Baton Rouge, where Jobe’s team could enjoy the home-court advantage. Despite this, Jobe never had a losing season at Southern.

  An important reason coaches at historically black colleges don’t advance to bigger state universities is because their overall won-lost records don’t reflect their coaching ability. The Jobes with overall winning seasons are rare. Guarantee games are often necessary for a smaller school’s survival. A big state university pays anywhere between $40,000 and $80,000 per game to the smaller historically black college. Never does the big school “return” the game and play on the smaller college’s court. (It should be noted that not only the historically black colleges are subject to this prostitution; it might be Sam Houston State or Northeast Louisiana. All these smaller schools very much depend on the guarantee money to keep their programs afloat.)

  The big state schools learn that some of the historically black colleges should be avoided. Over the years, teams like Southern and Coppin State have made the big schools regret paying out enormous amounts of money only to get beat on their own court. Because of guarantee games, there will never be a time when, say, two SWAC teams are awarded NCAA bids, since no teams in the league have impressive enough overall records.

  Ben Jobe is brilliant, politically conscious, and outspoken. He is also devoid of the verbal clichés required of basketball coaches. He despises the Basketball Hall of Fame, where he ought to be a member—although he claims he’d refuse induction. Jobe lambasts the hall of fame for inducting announcers like Dick Vitale and the inventor of the shot clock. (Jobe: “The man who invented the shot clock should be in the General Electric Hall of Fame, not the Basketball Hall of Fame.”) Jobe calls the NCAA a “fascist organization” and blames the NCAA for the destruction of black sports at black colleges.

  Like Jobe, Frankie Allen has coached at both historically black colleges and white-majority universities and has some insights in the problems black coaches have advancing. Allen became the first black head coach at a mostly white school in Virginia when he was named coach at Virginia Tech in 1988. He has also been the head coach at Tennessee St
ate, Howard, and is now at Maryland–Eastern Shore.

  Allen says that if you want to understand the problems at historically black colleges, follow the money. And not just the guarantee game money. “There is little money coming from the private sector at Tennessee State,” he says, “but the white schools enjoy tremendous help from donors.” He says that the guarantee games sometimes allow historically black schools to fund the entire athletics department but that the money rarely goes to the basketball programs. “That all depends on the coach’s relationship with his boss,” Allen says. “We played at Nebraska and got $75,000, and our AD is going to help us get new lockers.”

  One of the costs of this bargaining—almost certain losses for guaranteed money—is the sacrificed coaching careers.

  The head-coaching jobs in the SWAC or MEAC are mirages at best; graveyards of crushed careers at the worst. Each January, every SWAC and MEAC coach starts his conference season with a losing record after its devastating preseason schedule has been played out. If a coach wins the SWAC, he still might not be above .500 for the season.

  Today, a common trend is for big universities to hire a hot coach from a “Cinderella” team that has miraculously made the NCAA Tournament. But no SWAC coach, and just one MEAC coach, has ever gotten that call. One of Nolan Richardson’s longtime assistants, Andy Stoglin, got his first head-coaching job at the SWAC’s Jackson State University. He made the NCAA Tournament there, but the guarantee games prevented him from having a sparkling record, and he never advanced.

  Examining the history of the program at North Carolina A&T affords both a look at the futility of coaching in the MEAC and an insight into how college hoops has evolved ever so slightly.

  The MEAC includes schools like South Carolina State, Coppin State, Bethune-Cookman, and the league’s traditional power, North Carolina A&T.