Forty Minutes of Hell (19 page)

So was the opportunity to play sports in the Big Ten.

That August, Bob Walters made the journey to Northwestern for
preseason football. While he was immediately homesick for Arkansas and overwhelmed by the new surroundings, Walters was happy to be out of Dixie.

But something happened after the first week of practice at Northwestern. One of the coaches told Walters, “I expect you to keep your nose clean and not date the white girls.”

Walters was not so much interested in white girls. He was, however, interested in escaping the mentality of the South. The orders from an assistant coach dredged up years of being treated differently because of his skin color. Now Walters realized that the North could be nearly as oppressive. He got discouraged and quietly left campus at the end of the week; a homesick small-town kid, Walters's promising football career was suddenly a wreck.

Walters had few options. Without film or statistics, hundreds of miles from home, he was in a bind. A former Northwestern assistant who'd become the coach at Augustana College asked Walters to go to the small school in western Illinois. Walters went.

Augustana was just as frustrating. “There was absolutely nothing for him to do at Augustana but play football,” says Shelton Walters. “Bob had no life at all.”

Regardless, Walters played, and his family would pile into a couple of cars and make the journey to see the games. The trips reminded the family of home in a way. The police in Rock Island would follow their car, both going into the city, then again on their way out of town. Shelton says, “Part of it was harassment and part was to send a message. It was to keep you in your place.”

Walters quit Augustana after playing just one year.

 

A depressed dropout from
a small college, Walters was running out of options. He bounced around in Chicago in the early 1960s, working odd jobs and attending two junior colleges. In late August one summer, he went back to Augustana for less than a week, but then
enrolled at tiny North Central College in Naperville, near Chicago.

Walters was an instant sensation at North Central, and his family again began loading up the family car. But a pattern was emerging, even in Illinois. “Naperville was a small town then, not a suburb,” Shelton Walters says. “The police would be waiting at the edge of town, and they would follow us into the city, into the stadium, made sure we left out of town. The police were always in our rearview mirror.”

Even at North Central, Bob Walters may have been headed toward a professional career. His coach there had played in the NFL and had the connections to get Walters, by far the best player on his team, a serious tryout. But during the fourth game of his senior year, Walters tore up his knee.

“Bob's talent would have gotten him in professional football,” his brother Shelton claims, barring that injury, “if the NFL would have been fair and objective.”

With football in his past, Walters began a career teaching and coaching basketball at Carver High School. He rarely mentioned his stellar prep career in Prescott, and being snubbed by the University of Arkansas was nearly forgotten. But Walters would one day get a chance to thumb his nose at Razorback football.

 

Bob Walters's nephew Danny
was only five when he moved from Arkansas to Chicago. The boy was already interested in sports, and over the years he learned bits and pieces about his uncle Bob's high school exploits from family members remaining in Prescott. Meaning, from everyone except his uncle. “Bob never talked about himself,” Danny says.

When his parents divorced, Danny moved in with Bob Walters and his wife for a couple of weeks. That experiment went well, so throughout high school Danny would stay with Bob Walters's family on the weekends. During those times Bob would clear the
kitchen table, take the phone off the hook, yank the television plug out of the wall, and go over schoolwork with Danny. Danny might try to change the focus to sports, but Bob rarely fell for it—unless it had to do with attitude. Bob's influence and control over Danny mushroomed.

During the Chicago summers, all the Walterses would return to Prescott. Now that he was becoming more interested in focusing on football, the stories Danny would hear about his uncle began to resonate. They always ended with the same refrain—“There's never been anyone as good as Bob Walters.”

On these pilgrimages to Arkansas, Danny also became intrigued with the state's big university. Razorback shirts, posters, and fans were more prevalent in Prescott since the team began adding black players in the early 1970s.

In the summer of 1976, before anyone was aware of his own status or potential, Danny wrote a letter. He wanted to express his interest in attending his dream school on a football scholarship. The letter was to Frank Broyles.

Likely, Broyles received hundreds of letters a year asking for a chance to play for the Razorbacks. But Broyles retired from coaching and never wrote back to Danny Walters.

By Danny's junior year in Chicago, he emerged as the star of Julian High School's powerhouse 1977 football team. An explosive hitter with great quickness, Danny was ranked highly by every national recruiting service and was one of Chicago's top prospects.

One day, a letter from Arkansas showed up at Julian High School. Then several more. Lou Holtz, whom Broyles picked as his replacement football coach, sent an assistant named Bob Cope to recruit Danny that year. Cope wasn't the only recruiter to show up. Famed Ohio State coach Woody Hayes came. So did coaches from football factories like Michigan, USC, and Oklahoma. Naturally, Danny began seeking Bob Walters's advice about what school he should sign with.

Bob Walters finally had his chance, twenty years later, to get even with the University of Arkansas.

 

As the frequency of
the phone calls increased, and the pressure was building, Bob Walters came to a realization. He wanted his nephew Danny to play football at Arkansas, despite the way the university ignored his unofficial record-setting career in 1959.

He never suggested stonewalling Arkansas, according to Danny Walters. “Bob wasn't that kind of person,” he says. “He wasn't reared that way.”

“Bob
encouraged
Danny to go to Arkansas,” his brother Shelton says, “because it was something that he could not do himself. Bob felt a sense of accomplishment that someone from his bloodline would play for the Razorbacks, especially after he was not allowed that opportunity.”

So Danny Walters did what Bob Walters could never even consider—he signed with the Razorbacks.

Twenty years after his family had driven to North Central College games, Bob Walters found himself on the reverse journey, driving back to Arkansas to follow Danny's Razorback career up close. Legions of the Walters family came up regularly from southwest Arkansas as well.

While Danny was off to a fast start as a cornerback for the Razorbacks in 1980, Bob Walters got bad news. He was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently had most of his colon removed. He continued coaching at Carver the next few years. His enthusiasm for his team got a big boost in 1981, when he first witnessed hotshot freshman Tim Hardaway dribbling the basketball between his legs as though it were on a string.

With the cancer gnawing at him, Walters still occasionally felt strong enough for the six-hundred-mile trip to Fayetteville. The Razorbacks earned three bowl game bids with Danny at defensive
back. Danny would later be named to the University of Arkansas All-Decade team for the 1980s, then played five years with the NFL's San Diego Chargers—where, coincidentally, Nolan Richardson had tried out in the 1960s.

When Bob Walters came to Fayetteville, he never referred to his past, and instead was caught up in the excitement of Danny starring for the Razorbacks. “Nobody would have ever known about Bob's high school heroics,” Shelton says. “Even Danny hardly knew the exact details.”

While Walters remembered how the segregated system had forced him to go north, he didn't dwell on it. “I don't think Bob lost one minute of sleep over Frank Broyles,” Shelton says. “Bob never expected to be recruited by Arkansas. That was part of playing in the South.” While Danny was one of the team's best players, Bob Walters never met Frank Broyles.

As the cancer got worse, Walters could manage fewer trips to Razorback Stadium. He'd sleep in his car while his wife drove, gathering his strength for the Saturday showdowns. Then the unofficial leader in career high school touchdowns for the state of Arkansas would put on his red sweatshirt and cheer anonymously for his nephew and the University of Arkansas.

 

By the time Frank
Broyles finally decided to desegregate, it was too late for the good of his team. Broyles had blown his recruiting advantage of being the only major school in the state. Terry Nelson, Cleo Miller, Ike Harris, Roscoe Word, and Ike Thomas were all black Arkansans who starred at other colleges before earning spots on NFL teams.

Yet retired professor Phillip Trapp credits Broyles with rapidly adjusting in the early 1970s. “He changed his tune and quickly began to integrate athletics,” Trapp says. “I think Broyles dragged his feet,
but realized that integrating was the only way he could continue to have a winning team.”

And Trapp is correct about Broyles at least trying to adjust.

By 1974, two years before he quit coaching football, his Arkansas team had
twenty-eight
black players on the squad, a huge jump from the lonely Jon Richardson days of 1970. This represented 23 percent of Broyles's team, second highest in the Southwest Conference and a remarkable improvement.

Bud Zinke is long retired from his physics professorship. Today, the reluctant radical is moderately happy about the progress his university made after the senate council meeting when Broyles shocked the faculty with his “I'll go back to Georgia” declaration. “The university integrated pretty gracefully after that,” Zinke says. “At that time, the football team was first and everything else was second. But Arkansas has done really well—football is not as popular as it used to be.”

Zinke scoffs at any notion that Broyles championed integration at Arkansas, though. “It's really funny. After he realized that he was going to have a second-rate team, he got with it pretty smartly, but that isn't the way he started out.”

Broyles was never close to being as successful once he integrated. He won six SWC titles during the Jim Crow era of Arkansas football but could manage only one SWC championship in the integrated 1970s. Regardless of integration issues, by 1976 it was clear that Broyles had become a victim of his own success in the segregated 1960s. In his final five seasons, the Razorbacks were 32-21 with three ties. He lost the last four games of his career.

Broyles still had an incredible run before that to be proud of. His teams appeared in ten bowl games, and his overall record, including his brief time as Missouri coach, was 149-62, with six ties. Within a decade of his retirement he was inducted into College Football Hall of Fame.

The willingness Frank Broyles displayed in changing his team from a publicly racist program to a pretty well-integrated one reveals what some feel is the true nature of the Arkansas icon: everything is business to Broyles. Despite his public statements at faculty senate council meetings, other behind-the-scenes moves, and the brutal humiliation of Darrell Brown, many people think Frank Broyles was mostly concerned about money. Big money boosters didn't want black athletes? Broyles would comply. The rest of the Southwest Conference was passing Arkansas, and it was hurting attendance? Broyles would recruit black athletes.

In any case, Broyles resigned from football in 1976 to concentrate solely on administrative duties. He would reinvent his career by becoming perhaps the most successful and powerful athletics director in college sports.

D
espite the glow
of the 1994 NCAA basketball championship, another misunderstanding between Broyles and Richardson was festering. This one would irritate both men for years. In 1995, Broyles amended Richardson's job title to head basketball coach
and
assistant athletics director. Richardson was thrilled. At first.

Broyles was now in his seventies, and the question of who his successor would be was often a topic of conversation in Arkansas. Broyles told Fred Vorsanger: “If Nolan ever applies for another job, either as a coach or administrator, it will help him.”

Richardson asked Broyles what his new duties would entail. Broyles admitted that there wouldn't actually be any extra responsibility. That fall, although Arkansas had a dozen assistant athletics directors and as many meetings, Richardson was never invited. Broyles told him it was a token position. Richardson says, “That was the word he used. ‘Token.'”

Vorsanger says, “Broyles thought he was helping Nolan.”

Richardson simply did not believe it. “I didn't need a résumé for other jobs,” Richardson says. “I wanted to stay at Arkansas.”

“This place is not very good at communicating,” Vorsanger adds.

 

On the eve of
the next season, with a terrific team in place, Richardson went on the offensive. “When I was playing running basketball, they called it niggerball,” he told Alexander Wolff of
Sports Illustrated.
“When Rick [Pitino] did it, it was called up-tempo. If I lose, I can't coach. If I win, it's because my athletes are better.”

“He seems to make a system of anger,” Wolff wrote. “Players with something to prove identify with his sense of aggrievement and thrive.”

Scotty Thurman agreed. “Coach talked about how nobody respected us. He was adamant about that.”

Often, before playing a nationally ranked team, Richardson would work his way through the locker room, asking the players one by one if the university they were facing had actively recruited them. Since there were dozens of highly rated programs, the odds were always against it, but Richardson would still rub their collective noses in it—“Did Duke recruit
you
?”—reminding them that they were under-appreciated.

Thurman says, “He used our past and under-recruitment in high school, then brainwashed people to get them to do what they needed to do.”

 

In February of 1995,
while Richardson was revamping his Razorbacks for another NCAA title run, the BCA got some unusual help from a college president.

The BCA's executive director, Rudy Washington, hinted publicly that the threat level was elevated now. It wouldn't be the coaches who acted as if the boycott planned in 1994 were still to occur. This time
it would be the students. More than one hundred students marched onto the basketball court at halftime of a Rutgers game and refused to budge. The game was canceled.

Much of the furor was caused by a statement made by then-Rutgers-president Martin Lawrence, who was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying, “Do we set standards in the future so we don't admit anybody? Or do we deal with a disadvantaged population that doesn't have the genetic, hereditary background to have a higher average?” Naturally, the unfortunate folks with poor “genetic, hereditary backgrounds” were likely 6'9" and could dunk a basketball with either hand. Lawrence later backpedaled on his remarks, saying that he did not believe racial heredity could forecast academic success.

John Thompson was not buying the retraction. “This was a deep statement,” he told the
New York Times
, “interjected in conversation that was intended to be handled subtly or privately.”

The BCA finally got their wish, yet there was no next step. The coaches were so involved with their own teams as the NCAA Tournament approached that they couldn't muster a unified response. Writer William Rhoden saw it as a wasted chance. “…[T]his time the BCA missed an opportunity to ignite a movement it actually predicted…. The BCA has run out of threats and, in the case of Rutgers, come up short on providing direction as well,” Rhoden wrote. “There was a movement in Piscataway, ready to be ignited. The BCA wasn't prepared to strike the match.”

 

In early spring of
1995, feeling the pressure of expectations for another NCAA title, an obviously frustrated Richardson called Razorback fans “turds and assholes.” The
Democrat-Gazette
printed the quote verbatim. Richardson quickly apologized, saying a very small percentage of supporters had upset him. His earlier comments about creating a monster were coming true—the fans, media, and
especially the coach, all expected another NCAA title. Nobody from the university administration questioned or counseled him about the “turds and assholes” quote.

In a
Sporting News
interview in 1995 with Bob Hille, Richardson softened his tone. “There are some good, beautiful, wonderful people in Arkansas,” he said. “There's a few who are always going to stick—” At this point, Richardson checked himself, concluding, “They don't want me to be successful, so they'll do anything they can or say some things that are going to affect that.”

 

The 1994–95 Arkansas team
was the favorite to win a second national title, with nearly everyone back from the 1994 title team, including the usual starters. Arkansas lost in overtime to Kentucky for the SEC Tournament championship, but that didn't hurt their tournament seeding. Then, in the NCAA playoffs, the Razorbacks struggled before beating Texas Southern, Syracuse, Memphis, and Virginia by a total of 15 points to get to the Final Four. Two of those wins were in overtime.

Just as the NCAA playoffs commenced, the United States Basketball Writers Association gave Richardson the award for Most Courageous Coach. The justification for winning the award was as much for the coach's emotional recovery after Yvonne's death as for his pioneering career. Receiving the award, however, left him raw, retrospective, and saddened. He may have been psychologically unprepared for the Final Four.

The Razorbacks beat North Carolina in the national semifinals, but they were denied a second consecutive NCAA title, losing to UCLA 89-78.

Corliss Williamson and Scotty Thurman decided to declare for the NBA draft after the season. Both were juniors, eligibility-wise. This proved to be the right move for Williamson, but Thurman went undrafted and never played a minute in the NBA. In 2007, ESPN
rated Thurman as one of the “Top ten players who should have stayed in school” of all time.

 

The 1995–96 Razorbacks went
into the season with a recruiting class that was ranked first in the nation, but the group featured mostly junior college players who would have a rough transition. In January of that season, leading scorer Jesse Pate and leading rebounder Sunday Adebayo were declared ineligible by the school because of allegations their junior college grades were improperly certified. This controversy set off an eighteen-month NCAA investigation. Despite these troubles, the Razorbacks made the NCAA Tournament, barely, as a #12 seed. They defied the odds by making the Sweet 16 after wins over Penn State and Marquette.

“There were questions by the University of Missouri, which had tried to recruit Adebayo and Pate, about their transcripts,” one Arkansas insider says. “Arkansas reviewed it all, but by January they still couldn't figure out the transcripts. So it was Arkansas who made them ineligible, and it was Frank Broyles's decision, not the NCAA's. Nolan felt that Broyles had fucked him.”

What happened next further angered Richardson.

“When this conflict over Pate and Adebayo became an NCAA investigation,” the insider continues, “the NCAA came back and said that those kids, Pate and Adebayo,
should
have been eligible.”

The Razorbacks suffered when Jesse Pate went on to the minor league CBA. Richardson believed that the school's compliance staff within the Arkansas athletics department fought for his program, but that Frank Broyles did not.

Arkansas self-imposed some penalties, most of which were mild. But one of the sanctions—no junior college players allowed for two seasons—infuriated Richardson yet again.

The story got stranger when Sunday Adebayo transferred to Memphis during the transcript trouble. While at Memphis, he led
them to victory over his old school. Then he petitioned the NCAA to reconsider his grades and won the appeal. Adebayo then transferred back to Fayetteville, where he powered Arkansas to a win over, ironically, Memphis.

The following season, 1996–97, featured a stripped-down Arkansas team without junior college recruits. It also marked the first time in ten seasons that Arkansas did not earn a bid to the NCAA Tournament; instead, they settled for the NIT. They bumped off Northern Arizona, Pittsburgh, and UNLV before losing in the semifinals at Madison Square Garden. Arkansas finished the year 18-14, and 8-8 in the SEC.

 

In 1997, the University
of Arkansas introduced Dr. John White as its new chancellor. Each of the branches within the Arkansas system—Fayetteville, Pine Bluff, Little Rock, and Monticello—has its own chancellor, but the premier job within that system is in Fayetteville. John White was excited about coming back to his alma mater after his combined twenty-two years as a Georgia Tech faculty member and dean of engineering. Nobody speculated that it might have helped White's application that Frank Broyles was a Georgia Tech graduate.

John White was a natural fit; he was bright, congenial, and had strong ties within the academic and business communities. White males, however, have traditionally dominated engineering, and his hiring raised concerns within Arkansas African-American community as to how sensitive White would be to racial issues.

White, an introspective and thoughtful academic, recognized that and understood the problems with race relations were entrenched at the university. Fortunately, White had an interesting background in seeking diversity. He'd attended the National Science Foundation convention in 1988 and looked at the national data in regard to women and minorities in his field. He returned to Georgia Tech with a fresh
view. “I got very concerned,” he says. “You could count on one hand the number of graduating engineers each spring who were black or female.”

While in Atlanta, White had been working on something called “The Committee of 100,” which was attempting to double the amount of women and minority faculty. Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and White became close and would work together to recruit top black doctoral students.

The results raised eyebrows within the field of engineering, particularly at MIT, which was losing its own graduates to Georgia Tech's graduate school. White was framing it as a choice for prospective black students between Boston and Atlanta. “We were simply using Atlanta to its fullest potential,” he says.

Fayetteville, where the African-American population was under 4 percent, was a world away from Atlanta. At his first major press conference, a journalist asked Chancellor White what he would miss most about Georgia Tech.

White knew Arkansas had an African-American population of only 16 percent. “It's more about Atlanta,” White responded, “and what I miss is the diversity. This place is too white for me.”

The response was palpable. “You could have heard a pin drop in that room, and everybody got big eyes,” he recalls. But White had done his research. Like a crafty coach, he had statistics to back up his claim. “There's only one black employee on this floor,” he said, “there's none on the second floor, there's one on the first floor. We're going to have to do things to improve diversity.”

 

Frank Broyles would not
have been thinking about “diversity” when he offered the job to Nolan Richardson in 1985. Yet Broyles's hiring of Richardson was dramatic, unprecedented, and historically significant.

No other majority white university in the old Confederacy had
ever hired a black head coach in any major sport—basketball or football. It took tremendous nerve to be the first, and Broyles certainly had that. He had consolidated power over the years, and although his later teams' records damaged some of his mystique, by the early 1980s Broyles controlled the purse strings.

Neither would Broyles have hired Richardson because he thought it was time for a black man to finally have an opportunity, or have selected Richardson as a way to redeem himself for throwing wrenches into the wheels of integration throughout the 1960s. Black players had been dominating basketball for years, and Broyles must have figured a black coach would give Arkansas a recruiting edge. Does that make Broyles simply a smart, albeit cynical, businessman?

Sid Simpson, Richardson's old boss who has resided in Arkansas for years, makes his feelings on Broyles plain. “Broyles is a racist,” Simpson says. “I know from talking to Broyles that the
only
reason he hired Nolan is because he was black.”

 

Over Christmas in 1964,
Broyles earned the honor of coaching in the North v. South all-star football holiday classic. It was his first time ever coaching a black player in a game. During the game, the South was trapped on the one-yard line, and Broyles called for a simple off-tackle dive on second down, trying to inch his way up field.

But the black running back—the future NFL star Gale Sayers—busted loose for a ninety-nine-yard touchdown. Sayers would later score twenty-two touchdowns in his rookie season with the Chicago Bears, including six touchdowns in a single game.

According to Nolan Richardson, Broyles concluded the Gale Sayers story by adding, “I said, damn, I've got to have me some of those.”

When Southern Cal pounded still-all-white Alabama in football in 1970, USC's black star Sam “Bam” Cunningham ran wild, scoring three touchdowns. After the game, one of the Alabama coaches
reportedly said that Sam Cunningham had done more for integration in two hours than Martin Luther King Jr. had done in twenty years—a statement suggesting the basis for integration in sports was often not idealistic but exploitative.