Forty Minutes of Hell Read online

  Cal Irvin took over at A&T in 1954, and he amassed over three hundred victories at the Greensboro school. He never had a losing season in eighteen years, but never got a chance at the big time either.

  During the 1980s, North Carolina A&T was coached by Don Corbett, who led A&T to seven straight NCAA bids. His overall record, despite a slew of guarantee games at A&T, was 249-133, including thirty-seven wins in a row at home. Yet no mostly white school in basketball-crazed North Carolina, or anywhere else, would try to lure Don Corbett away—or play on his home court.

  Jeff Capel Sr. is the exception that proves the rule. He coached North Carolina A&T for a single season, in 1993–94, and made the NCAA Tournament. He was named the head coach at Old Dominion the next season.

  For every modern success story like Richardson’s, there are forgotten men, brilliant coaches like Cal Irvin and Don Corbett, whose opportunities were limited by their skin color. Richardson still speaks with respect of his successful-yet-obscure predecessors: Ben Jobe, “Fang” Mitchell at Coppin State, and David Whitney at Alcorn State.

  Black coaches, especially assistant coaches, were perceived for years as recruiters who could relate to black players and little more. Recruiting is imperative, but most black coaches consider the label to be belittling at best, as there is a distinct division within the business between recruiters and strategists. The coach who relies on strategy must be smarter, the thinking went, and they were always white.

  Reggie Minton remembers those labels well. He was an assistant at the Air Force Academy before becoming the head coach at Dartmouth, then Air Force. Minton attended Wooster College in Ohio, where he began to develop his political consciousness. “In college I had given a speech,” he recalls, “and I talked about not only wanting to ride in the front of the bus but wanting to drive and then own the bus.” It was a speech America’s athletics directors and college presidents should have been required to attend.

  The Air Force Academy played a PAC-10 school one season when Minton was an assistant. After the game, the coaches went out for beers, but Minton, who doesn’t drink, returned to his hotel room. When his boss, Hank Egan, returned, he told Minton what the PAC-10 coach had said.

  “Why do you have that guy on your staff?” the PAC-10 coach said to Egan, referring to Minton. “Air Force doesn’t even have any black guys.”

  By the early 1980s, Minton was one of the most qualified assistant coaches in the game. That didn’t exactly reap huge rewards. He landed the job at Dartmouth for $30,000 a year.

  Today, Minton helps direct the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC). He thinks today’s new generation of African-American coaches simply does not understand their place in history. “They come along and it is all there,” Minton says, “and they think of it as a right. In 1980, Nolan Richardson was one of a handful of black coaches outside of the historically black colleges. In 1983, there were eight of us. Eight! It was tight, a brotherhood.”

  The long-term effects of college basketball’s segregated coaching ranks can still be charted. When UCLA icon John Wooden began his long string of championships in the 1960s, not a single black coach was competing for the national title. Today’s recently retired coaching legends got their start in a segregated system. Bobby Knight, Don Haskins, Lou Henson, Eddie Sutton, Dean Smith, and Ray Meyer all began their careers well before a black coach could challenge them.

  This segregated system has perpetuated itself, distorting the otherwise impressive “trees” of most of these coaches. For example, Bobby Knight had twenty-five assistant coaches who worked under him land head jobs. Only two have been black.

  Since no black head coaches worked in powerful places, they were not calling the shots on who might get the next promotion, as Eddie Sutton and Lute Olsen did for decades. For a black assistant coach, the wait could be humiliating.

  Rob Evans, who helped launch Nolan Richardson’s career, worked as an assistant for Lou Henson on highly successful teams at New Mexico State. Later, after his long tenure as an assistant at Texas Tech, he joined Eddie Sutton at Oklahoma State. All in all, he served as a major college assistant for twenty-four years before he got the call from Mississippi to run their program. Soon after, Evans led Ole Miss to two straight NCAA bids for the first time in school history and was named SEC Coach of the Year.

  The system in college ball limited black coaches from even thinking about beginning a career. Imagine a typical black college graduate, who did not come from a middle-class background. Would he sign on as a low-paid assistant coach? Or would he take a job at, say, Marshall High School in Chicago for twice as much money? Since young black coaches did not often have the luxury of calling home for help with the rent, they were simply more likely not to be able to pay their dues. Or, rather, pay any more dues.

  “Man, they hired that nigger coach.”

  That became the refrain heard around Tulsa the summer of 1980, and the complaint drove Ed Beshara to distraction. Unbeknown to Richardson, Beshara was able to talk Evans Dunne down, urging him to consider the woeful state of the basketball team, and to not withdraw his support. “Give the guy a chance, let’s see how he does,” Beshara told anyone who would listen.

  Soon after Richardson arrived in Tulsa, Beshara called the basketball office and invited Richardson to stop by for coffee.

  Richardson was met at the store with Beshara’s standard greeting. “Hoss,” said Beshara, “I just want to find out where you stand and who you are.” The two men took off for hamburgers.

  Richardson and Beshara came back to the store two hours later, laughing like school kids on the playground.

  Encouraged by Beshara’s upbeat humor, Richardson began looking for fresh ideas to set his Tulsa team apart. He ordered flashy new uniforms, then decorated the dismal locker room. Next, he selected a theme song to be played endlessly: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us.” When Richardson learned that some of the few fans would dump their trash in the mouth of the team’s bloated mascot, he insisted on a sleeker one.

  On Richardson’s second trip to Ed Beshara’s store, he figured he’d better buy some clothes. He beelined to the sale rack and held a polka-dot shirt to his chest. A row of polka-dot shirts that Beshara could hardly give away lined the wall. Beshara didn’t want them ruining the new coach’s image. “You don’t want that stuff, Nolan,” Beshara called, waving him away.

  He was too late.

  “Check out how these colors look on me!” Richardson said. “How about this? Blue with gold polka dots. Tulsa colors.”

  “It’s totally out of style,” Beshara moaned. “We’re trying to get rid of those.”

  But Richardson was grabbing the eye-catching colors by the handful. “I have to entertain, fill the gym with fans,” Richardson said, checking for sizes.

  “Fill the gym, hoss?” Beshara said. “They only get a few thousand fans a game.”

  Richardson turned serious. “You better get your tickets now,” he said.

  “I used the polka dots as an attention-getter, to get myself and my team noticed,” Richardson says today. Soon the style—or anti-style—caught on, and a tacky Tulsa tradition was born. The students began wearing them as well, and the fans followed suit. Richardson wore polka dots his entire time with the Hurricane.

  “Polka dots became contagious, like a citywide case of the measles,” sportswriter Jimmie Tramel said.

  Ed Beshara said, “I sold polka-dot shirts like selling ice cream.”

  In one mid-season contest, Richardson donned a tuxedo, and the team struggled. As he followed his team toward the locker room at halftime, fans implored him to change his outfit. The coach switched to polka dots in the locker room. Tulsa won in overtime. Later, when he again tried to take a detour from the polka-dot path, his daughter, Yvonne, insisted he stick with them.

  “That kind of talk—about hiring a nigger coach—wasn’t unusual at all back then,” Beshara’s son says today. “It was my dad who was unusual. He just didn’t see color.”


  Ed Beshara also didn’t see basketball. Literally. He rarely went to games at Tulsa, even during Richardson’s tenure. “Five games in five years,” his son says, quoting one of the few stats he recalls. “Dad wasn’t friends with Nolan because he was a coach or famous. If Nolan decided to drive a bus instead of being a coach, they would have still been close.”

  Tulsa easily won their first two games under Richardson, but on December 4, 1980, Louisville was coming to Tulsa. Louisville was the defending NCAA champion and had four returning starters from the 1980 winners, as well as future NBA star Scooter McCray. It would be Richardson’s first big test as a major college coach.

  Louisville had swept through the NCAA Tournament field the previous year with a rip-and-run style, beating UCLA for the national title. They were one of the dominant programs in college basketball in the 1980s and an offensive model for what Richardson hoped to assemble: a fast-breaking team that ran its opponents into the ground. Richardson’s pep talk to his Tulsa team was simple. The lowly Junior College Champions of Western Texas College were taking on the Division I champions of Louisville. Richardson repeatedly reminded his players of their underdog role, and this was Tulsa’s first us-against-the-world challenge.

  The fourth-largest crowd in school history went berserk as Tulsa’s frantic full-court defense forced Louisville to commit an astonishing thirty-five turnovers. Tulsa won, 68-60.

  Two days later, Tulsa beat the University of Oklahoma on its own court.

  Tulsa fans were dizzy from excitement. “It was love at first dribble,” the Tulsa World wrote. Crosstown rival Oral Roberts University was next.

  A miracle was unfolding, but not the one Reverend Roberts hoped for. Richardson won at ORU, 72-69.

  The ensuing matchup was with the University of Georgia, and future NBA stars Dominique Wilkins and Vern Fleming. Lines formed at the Tulsa ticket office for the first time in decades. But the University of Georgia ended Tulsa’s win streak, beating Tulsa by two.

  That was okay with the coach—they were going to have to lose sometime. It was not, however, all right with Yvonne Richardson. The eight-year-old did not recall ever seeing her father lose a game. They’d been undefeated the previous year, and rarely lost a home game in Snyder before that. Her father had won forty-two games in a row. When was the last time she saw him lose—when she was five? Six? Richardson couldn’t recall either, and Yvonne was disconsolate. She wept for hours.

  The Tulsa Hurricane’s quick start won over Evans Dunne and his cohorts,

  Richardson admits, “It was easy for the fans to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got something here.’” Indeed, Tulsa did have something.

  Just before the conference season began, Tulsa beat Purdue, which had been in the Final Four the previous year. The Hurricane cracked the top ten for the first time in their history, and the town was up for grabs. Sportswriter Jimmie Tramel coined the phrase “Rollin’ with Nolan,” and it stuck.

  Polka dots were the most visible change in Tulsa, but something more important was stirring below the surface. Basketball success and improved race relations went together like a screen and roll. In this case, historically white South Tulsa and predominantly black North Tulsa united over Hurricane hoops. For the first time in school history, attendance topped a hundred thousand for the season. Per-game crowds doubled, going from 3,700 a game to 7,300. Tulsa’s townies began referring to the Hurricane team as “we.”

  “A lot of good things happened in Tulsa that had nothing to do with basketball,” Richardson says. “Blacks and whites had something to talk about, something good to share.”

  One fan told Richardson, “I remember going to work and nobody, and I mean black and white, said anything to each other. Now we have a common bond.”

  “When we beat Louisville,” recalls Mike Anderson, “anybody could see that something special was brewing.” The Tulsa team and their coach were at the forefront of social change, both on campus and in town. “Nolan used to tell us all the time,” Anderson says, “there’s just one race. The human race.”

  In 1982, a Gannett News piece claimed that Tulsa University “…may be the number one social phenomenon in college basketball.”

  Just before Christmas, Richardson would give the fans another gift. Tulsa would complete the in-state sweep by nudging out Oklahoma State.

  Nobody seemed to mention the “nigger coach” anymore.

  Tulsa finished the 1980–81 season with a record of 11-5 in the Missouri Valley Conference, good enough for a second-place finish. But they lost in the semifinals of the MVC Tournament and got passed over by the NCAA Tournament selection committee, despite their wins over Louisville, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Tulane, and Purdue in their nonconference schedule. In fact, Tulsa had finished the regular season at 20-6 against eleven teams that went on to postseason play. It was perhaps the worst snub in NCAA Tournament history.

  Only forty-eight teams were invited to the NCAA at that time, and Tulsa was given a bid to the NIT. Because of the sorry state of the Tulsa University facilities, the first few games were to be played on the Oral Roberts campus. Tulsa beat Pan American in their first game to set up a showdown with UTEP and Don Haskins. UTEP was just beginning to recover from three straight losing seasons, the worst of Haskins’s career.

  The game proved to be an emotionally conflicted one for Richardson, as well as a matchup of contrasting styles. He had, of course, totally abandoned Haskins’s philosophy by this time, and it was important for him to have a good showing against his own coach. Richardson’s resentment over being smothered on offense by Haskins’s system had faded—nearly twenty years had passed, and Richardson was the only former UTEP player who was a major college coach. That made it easier for him to reconcile with Haskins’s overbearing control.

  With no shot clock at the time, UTEP began the game passing and cutting for a full minute. Tulsa countered by pressing and trapping everywhere, trying to coax UTEP into a faster pace. Tulsa took the lead with two minutes to go. A frantic rally led by an obscure UTEP sub wasn’t enough, and Tulsa prevailed.

  Tulsa beat South Alabama by one to earn a trip to Madison Square Garden and the semifinals.

  New York City was a blur.

  Tulsa beat West Virginia by two.

  In the NIT championship, Tulsa topped Syracuse in overtime.

  It marked the first time in the history of the game that a black coach won the NIT. Tulsa and Nolan Richardson were on the map.

  What made the biggest impression on the coach in New York City happened during the cutting-down-the-net ceremony in the midst of the on-court celebration. Somebody grabbed Richardson, embraced him, and planted a kiss on his cheek. Richardson had been getting hugs and handshakes, but no kisses. He turned to see who the hell had gotten his cheek wet.

  It was Evans Dunne.

  When the team arrived home in Tulsa at 4:30 a.m., two thousand fans were crammed into the airport terminal to welcome them. University president, Paschal Twyman, pronounced Monday an official campus holiday and shut down the college. Governor George Nigh joined ten thousand other fans in downtown Tulsa’s Bartlett Square for the victory party.

  Richardson refers to that magical year as one of his favorite seasons. “It was maybe the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had as a basketball coach, seeing how much the city and community appreciated what we had accomplished.”

  Ralph Brewster, however, was heartbroken in Lubbock, Texas.

  He’d grown to tolerate the town, and he very much liked his teammates at Texas Tech. He’d overcome his initial homesickness. Then his patience and dedication had paid off with those two fine seasons in a row, when he averaged double figures as a sophomore and junior. Richardson had steered him to the right place, he believed, because he was a success at Tech.

  He’d celebrated privately when Richardson had won the national junior college championship at Western Texas, and he nearly phoned to ask if he could join the guys and transfer to Tulsa. But Brewster knew he’d have some hard explaini
ng to do with his Red Raider teammates. Plus, he’d have to sit out a full year to play just one final season. So he’d stuck around at Tech, anticipating a landmark senior season.

  That great season didn’t happen. Brewster was shocked to find himself on the bench. Richardson’s raucous ride with his crew of El Paso players made him feel worse. Why had Coach Gerald Myers thought the best place for his experienced insider was on the sideline?

  Brewster’s senior year was a disaster. He was healthy, playing in twenty-seven games that final year, but his playing time was chopped in half, and thus his point totals. He scored only 5.7 points per game. His rebounding also fell off, to 4.1 a game. Brewster was humiliated. He had willingly bought into the Bowie backroom deal, and he’d helped launch Nolan Richardson’s career, but he had somehow again gotten caught up in the machinations of college basketball.

  With Brewster on the bench, Tech would stumble to its worst record during his four years there, finishing 15-13. “I didn’t even understand what had happened,” Brewster says, “until years later.”

  When his college days ended, Brewster played professionally in Mexico, Venezuela, the Philippines, and the minor league CBA. After his professional playing career was through, he became a businessman, traveling all over Texas. Once, he phoned Rob Evans, his old assistant coach, when he had an appointment in Lubbock, and suggested getting together. Evans made a tearful confession to Brewster that night, saying that Myers had grown to despise Nolan Richardson and took it out on Brewster. Brewster still didn’t get it—why wouldn’t Myers like Richardson?

  Gerald Myers believed his recommendation had landed Richardson the job at Western Texas and that there should be another payback—signing Brewster out of high school was not enough. “My coaches felt Nolan owed Tech,” Brewster says. When Myers learned that Richardson was bringing his best players with him to Tulsa—especially Paul Pressey—he took out his frustrations on Brewster. “Whenever he saw me, he saw Nolan Richardson,” Brewster says. “Myers suppressed it all, he never said it out loud, but it wasn’t the same for me. After that, he was just anti-Ralph.”