Forty Minutes of Hell (12 page)

After the New Year, Yvonne was allowed home from the hospital. She slept between the coach and Rose. But her condition worsened, and she was rushed back to the hospital.

Yvonne Richardson died of leukemia on January 22, 1987. She was fifteen years old.

 

Richardson's sense of isolation
from the state, the town, the university, and the athletics department was overwhelming. He was so distraught that even when well-wishers tried to console him, he could barely bring himself to feel their sympathy.

People close to Richardson believe Yvonne's death altered his level of compassion. Watching his daughter slowly wither away gave him a more empathetic antenna for others in trouble. Ironically, though, after witnessing Yvonne's resilience, Richardson pushed his players even harder. While he understood emotional anguish, seeing a healthy player who wouldn't fight frustrated him.

His empathy for the underdog was natural—who had had to overcome more obstacles? Starting out as the Bowie coach kept him close to his roots, and he identified with the scruffy Segundo Barrio kids as outsiders. The mindset continued as he became one of the few black college coaches in America, first at Snyder and then Tulsa—and finally as the only black coach in the Southwest Conference.

Through Yvonne's illness, Richardson says, Broyles never acknowledged that these were tough times for his family. That hurt Richardson deeply. Then it angered him, especially when he felt as though Broyles was pressuring him to turn his back on his family and focus on the Razorback team.

A longtime employee of the University of Arkansas athletics department confirmed Broyles's attitude, but thinks the bad relationship that had already surfaced had less to do with race than ego over the years.

“Broyles forced out Ken Hatfield as football coach in 1989,” the employee says. Hatfield had amassed over a thousand yards in his playing career at Arkansas as a punt returner—his totals led the nation for two seasons—and he was a hero on Broyles's best team,
when he coached football for Arkansas, in 1964. Hatfield's coaching record at Arkansas was 55-17, and he was widely regarded as one of the top football coaches in America.

This employee made an appointment to visit Nolan after he lost Yvonne, although he didn't know him well then. “I brought him a plaque that someone had given me,” he says. “It wasn't a fancy gift, but it meant a lot to me and I wanted Nolan to have it.” The employee waited outside Richardson's office, the gift in his lap, until the coach emerged. The employee presented the bereaved coach with the worn-out plaque and explained why it had given him strength over the years.

Richardson was clearly touched. He wept, and thanked the man.

“Nolan told me he felt like he was all alone, on an island,” he continues. “That really surprised me.”

Less than a week later, this employee was at lunch with a table full of Arkansas football coaches when Frank Broyles approached and began openly disparaging Richardson's coaching ability. “It just struck me as out of place,” the employee says. “I mean, Yvonne had just died, and he was telling us that [assistant coach] Andy Stoglin was a better coach, that Nolan couldn't coach.”

 

Going into their last
home game in 1987, less than two months after Yvonne's death, the Razorbacks were 6-7 in SWC play—not exactly where Richardson had envisioned being, after taking the job two seasons earlier. The opponent for the final game in Fayetteville was Baylor, which had beaten Arkansas in Waco. With only three games to go, Richardson badly needed a win, since he'd be going on the road for his final two league games. Baylor wasn't a great team, but their coach was an Iba—Gene Iba, a nephew of Henry Iba—and that ball-control playing style sometimes meant trouble.

Another concern to negotiate was Senior Night. The last home game for any college usually means a chance to honor the players in
the final year, both stars and benchwarmers. The Razorbacks' starting lineup that season did not include a single senior. Richardson's predecessor, Eddie Sutton, had traditionally started as many seniors as he could in the last home game.

Richardson did have one senior, a 6'7" Houston kid named Eric Poerschke, a holdover from the Sutton era. Poerschke was simply the wrong player for Richardson's system, a bad fit stylistically, and he found himself on the bench his last season. It wasn't that Poerschke was a bad player. He'd started a handful of games as a sophomore for Sutton. In Richardson's first season, Poerschke led the Razorbacks in field goal percentage, and scored over fifty baskets for the year.

“I realized I wasn't really in his plans my senior year,” Poerschke says, “and that wasn't a great thing to go through. But I knew that this was part of life, so I decided to be a good teammate and pull for our other guys.”

The Razorbacks had shown plenty of promise before the holidays, but kept stumbling in SWC play. Poerschke says, “Pressure seemed to come when we started losing. But looking back it didn't have much to do with winning and losing at all. It was Yvonne.” Now Poerschke can see that the season was incredibly difficult. “I've got three kids now, and you begin to realize—well, Nolan was at practice more than most people would have been. And being the first black coach, there was already overwhelming pressure.”

Richardson respected Poerschke, a brilliant student who would graduate with a business degree, although he rarely played him as a senior. “He never complained, never hung his head,” Richardson says. “He worked and fought like he was one of our main guys.” Yet, because Richardson's first team at Arkansas had sputtered, he was concerned about a late-season collapse again, so the idea of starting a benchwarmer in an important game made him skittish.

Regardless, Poerschke was looking forward to Senior Night. His parents were coming from Houston to see his last game, and it would likely be his last chance to shine before the home fans.

But Baylor controlled the tempo from the outset and wouldn't let the Razorbacks run their fast break. Richardson's assistants suggested giving Poerschke a try, but he didn't seem to hear. Arkansas held on to win by four, but senior Eric Poerschke didn't play a minute.

“I wasn't that upset,” Poerschke claims. “We won.”

And that, Poerschke thought, was the end of that.

 

Arkansas finished that 1986–87
season 8-8 in the SWC, and was awarded an NIT bid. Richardson was fiercely proud of his NIT championship team at Tulsa, so it annoyed him terribly when he began hearing Broyles refer to the NIT as “a loser's tournament.”

The NIT bid in 1987 offered an unusual matchup for the Razorbacks. They'd face Arkansas State, which they had not played since 1948.

There's a reason the big schools like Arkansas do not schedule the lower-profile in-state schools—a loss would be embarrassing. The afternoon of the game, the president of the university, Ray Thornton, stopped by with Frank Broyles to see their basketball coach. Thornton told Richardson, “Win, lose, or draw tonight, you are going to be our coach.” Then Thornton turned to Broyles, and, according to Richardson, said, “You understand that, Coach Broyles?”

That evening the Arkansas State Indians got off to a fast start and built a 21-point lead in Fayetteville. Razorback fans squirmed. Their press wasn't effective, and the game clearly meant more to Arkansas State. After a couple of steals and blocked shots, the momentum shifted, the
Democrat-Gazette
wrote, and the Razorbacks would rally, sneak by, and perhaps save Richardson's job, just two years after he began.

“Nolan has a sixth sense,” Mike Anderson says. “He has a feeling about who wants him to succeed and who does not.”

Frank Broyles, Richardson believed, did not.

The
Democrat-Gazette
must have had the same sense, writing
later, “Arkansas Athletics Director Frank Broyles, spotted before the game, is nowhere to be seen afterward. There are rumors that Broyles was back at his office calling boosters to buy out Richardson. Years later, Broyles denies he was at the game, saying he was out of town.”

According to Richardson, this attempted sabotage by Broyles indicated who was in charge in Fayetteville. It wasn't the president, either. “Broyles ran the show,” he says. “They couldn't touch him.”

Arkansas lost their next NIT game at Nebraska. Richardson returned home believing what the
Democrat-Gazette
obviously believed, that Frank Broyles wanted him gone. The timing of this—with Yvonne recently deceased—was something the coach never got over. And for Richardson, slights or insults are permanent.

“But that works both ways for Nolan,” says his longtime friend, El Paso judge Thomas Spieczny. “Any injustice sticks with him, even if it's one that
he
caused accidentally.”

Eric Poerschke, who never stripped off his warm-ups on Senior Night, concurs. “The odd thing is, when I see Nolan, he keeps apologizing for not playing me one game in 1987. I've gotten over it, but he can't. It's been twenty years.”

T
wenty years might
seem like a long time to some, but not to Frank Broyles. He served the University of Arkansas as football coach and then as director of athletics for a total of
fifty
years—nineteen seasons as football coach, thirty-five as AD, and four years as both. His football teams in the 1960s, along with the University of Texas, set a standard for excellence in the Southwest Conference. Arkansas was a member of the SWC from 1915 until 1991, and the only team in the league not from Texas.

Broyles was born in 1924 and raised in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Like Nolan Richardson, he starred in football, basketball, and baseball. Richardson had done that in high school, but Broyles did it in college too. He was named All-SEC a half-dozen times at Georgia Tech, both as a football quarterback and a basketball star. Broyles's Orange Bowl passing record stood for over fifty years. Of course, Broyles never competed against a single black player.

The state of Georgia in that era set clear lines and values. In the 1940s, Georgia invested $142 per year for each white student, as opposed to $35 for each black student. Eugene Talmadge, who was Georgia's governor for much of the 1930s and 1940s, said, “I like the nigger, but I like him in his place, and his place is at the back door with his hat in his hand.”

Georgia passed laws to protect segregation before and after the 1954 Supreme Court decision. One candidate for governor in the mid-1950s wanted children to declare under oath whether they preferred an integrated school. If they did, they would be assigned to a mental institution.

Frank Broyles returned to Georgia Tech to join its coaching staff as an assistant from 1951 until 1956. The governor of Georgia by then was Marvin Griffin, who realized the impact Jackie Robinson had a few years earlier and saw athletics as an important place to fight against racial equality.

Broyles was the offensive backfield coach when Georgia Tech was invited to play in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day of 1956. Tech would face Pittsburgh, who had a single black player. Tech head coach Bobby Dodd got Governor Griffin's permission to play the barely desegregated game, but a month before the contest, Griffin changed his mind, saying, “There is no more difference in compromising the integrity of race on the playing field than in doing so in the classroom. One break in the dike and the relentless seas will rush in and destroy us.” The governor ordered Georgia Tech to stay home.

In a demonstration more indicative of Tech students' love of football than equal opportunity for Negroes, close to two thousand students marched to the capitol building and burned Griffin in effigy. After the Georgia Tech Board of Trustees approved the trip, Governor Griffin backed down. Tech won the game—their fifth bowl game victory in a row—but the leading rusher was Pitt's black star, Bobby Grier.

In 1957, on the heels of Georgia Tech's success, Broyles was named the head football coach at University of Missouri.

Broyles only coached Missouri for one season before accepting the job at Arkansas. Most interesting about his time at Missouri is the fact that on his watch, his football staff signed the first two black players in school history—Norris Stevenson and Mel West. The pair would star on the best teams in University of Missouri history.

Norris Stevenson knew the town of Columbia was segregated before he arrived in 1957. “For one semester I was the only black player,” he says, “and in retrospect, the coaches weren't exactly thrilled with the idea.”

Stevenson was joined by Mel West the following semester. “This was another time,” Stevenson insists. “You'd have to move everybody, physically and emotionally, to understand it. You'd have to recreate the atmosphere, otherwise things we said today would make no sense. We were kids, and half of us didn't know who Martin Luther King was.”

When Broyles announced he was leaving for Arkansas after their freshman year, Stevenson and West stuck around to help Missouri to three fine football seasons. The University of Arkansas had never had a black athlete in any sport.

 

Frank Broyles had a
personal connection to the Little Rock Central crisis of 1957. One of the first moves he made at Arkansas was to lure a man named Wilson Matthews away from his job coaching Central High School to become the Razorbacks' assistant coach.

Playing a whites-only schedule, Wilson Matthews led Central High School to ten state championships in his eleven years there. Matthews had an interesting view of what caused the problems at Central. In Terry Frei's book about the showdown between the Texas and Arkansas football teams of 1969,
Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming
, Matthews is quoted as saying, “…if a bunch of damn soldiers hadn't showed up and got a crowd around, there wouldn't have been any
problems.” Whether Matthews meant the Arkansas National Guard, who held bayonets on black girls, or the 101st Airborne Division, who opened the school to them, is unclear.

Matthews helped Broyles with the Razorbacks from 1958 to 1968 and was known as the most influential coach on Broyles's staff. A passionate and foul-mouthed motivator, Matthews assumed head coaching duties for the freshman team, the “Shoats,” in 1969. Later, he took over the conditioning programs, then moved into athletics administration soon after. He worked as an assistant athletics director until 1992. Because he moved to administration, Matthews never coached a varsity black athlete at the University of Arkansas.

Broyles's debut at Arkansas in 1958 began badly—he lost his first six games in a row. The Razorbacks recovered by winning their last four. They had phenomenal success after that rocky start, especially in the 1960s.

In 1964, Broyles's all-white squad roared through the season undefeated at 11-0. But Arkansas faced only four teams with winning records, so both UPI and AP, the biggest polls, declared Alabama national champs before the bowl games were played, as was their custom at that time.

Alabama devalued that decision by losing to Texas in the Orange Bowl. Then Arkansas beat Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl, 10-7. (Nebraska was the only team Arkansas faced that year that had black players.) Two smaller polls, the Football Writers Association of America and the Helms Foundation, declared the Razorbacks national champions. Today, both Arkansas and Alabama claim the national championship of 1964.

That same year, a black student named Robert Whitfield won a discrimination lawsuit against UA campus housing, and the federal ruling forced the dormitories to be open to all without regard to race. Whitfield and Joanna Edwards became the first two blacks at the University of Arkansas to be admitted to previously segregated dormitories.

Broyles's all-white 1969 team lost a heartbreaker to Texas in the still-segregated contest called “The Game of the Century” by some. The loss likely cost Arkansas a unanimous national title.

Over his career, Broyles's teams won over 70 percent of their games. His Razorbacks appeared in ten bowl games, usually the Cotton Bowl or Sugar Bowl. He would coach only two losing teams in his nineteen years. Broyles's time at Arkansas straddled two eras—the strictly segregated Southwest Conference of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the quickly integrating teams of the early 1970s.

 

The black football phenoms
of the 1950s and 1960s college scene include an impressive roster of stars who later earned places in the NFL's Hall of Fame: Jim Brown, Gale Sayers, “Deacon” Jones, Willie Davis, Lenny Moore, Roosevelt Brown, Carl Eller, Herb Adderly, Emerson Boozer, Ollie Matson, Dick “Night Train” Lane, and Paul Warfield.

The closest NFL team to Arkansas, the St. Louis Cardinals, featured black Texas native Johnny Roland—who, of course, had to leave Texas to play major college football.

The best black players from Arkansas flaunted their talent before Frank Broyles could even get a foothold in Fayetteville. Bobby Mitchell, Willie Davis, and Elijah Pitts were Arkansas natives who became NFL stars despite being ignored by the state university in the 1950s. Other black players from the state, such as Jim Pace and Sidney Williams, had been all-conference players in the Big Ten.

Any objective observer could figure out that black kids deserved a chance based on ability alone. Few states have as impressive a tradition of black football players, but with mostly segregated high schools and a separate athletics association for the Negro schools, it was rare that whites competed on the same field as black kids in Arkansas.

Only the biggest Negro schools competed in football, because of the equipment needed to field a team. There might be thirty schools
competing for the state's Negro championship in any one year, but there were generally eight well-established high school teams. Those teams often had to leave the state to play games. “Separate but equal” was a joke, with the state of Arkansas spending as much as three times more on educating white kids as it did on black kids in some counties. It wasn't until the 1970s that all the black schools were accepted into the Arkansas Activities Association, the governing body of high school sports in the state.

 

Broyles would have had
to go just a few hundred yards to find a great black player to desegregate his team. Fayetteville High School had a star football player named William “Bull” Hayes, who graduated a few months after Broyles arrived in 1958. Bull Hayes was the first black athlete in the state of Arkansas to play against white competition in high school.

Hayes had to deal with more than the usual high school hassles. When the Fayetteville team bused into Harrison for a game, an effigy of a black man was hanging from a tree in the town square. According to the
Democrat-Gazette
, Harrison star Don Branison said his team was told to stop Bull Hayes no matter what it took. “We tried to kill him…. We tried to hurt him real bad,” Branison said.

Fayetteville beat Harrison anyway. Branison was awarded a scholarship to the University of Arkansas the following year.

Bull Hayes had offers from Oklahoma State and Tulsa, where Arkansas played regularly. To avoid the embarrassment of a local black player making them look bad, the Arkansas staff arranged a full ride to University of Nebraska for Bull Hayes.