Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson

by Rus Bradburd
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For those of you who haven’t heard of Nolan Richardson before, his teams play very hard and very fast, and his players are trained to be flexible. Playing against one of his teams has been described as “forty minutes of Hell.” As the coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team, Nolan Richardson won the 1995 NCAA championship, and he was fired from the University of Arkansas after a rather spectacular press conference seven years later. This book traces his life from his early childhood up to his firing and beyond.

I don’t usually read sports books, but Nolan Richardson and I have a few things in common, so I decided to give this book a try. Nolan and I were born in the same town, El Paso, Texas. We were at the same college, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, at the same time. We both won an NCAA championship. Okay, that last one isn’t true, but the first two are. I’m glad to say that I wasn’t disappointed by Forty Minutes of Hell. It isn’t perfect, but Nolan’s story is an inspiring one, and I really enjoyed reading it.

The Richardsons were the only black family in El Paso’s Hispanic “Segundo Barrio,” so Nolan grew up speaking both English and Spanish fluently. He excelled in sports – he was a good football, but he was actually planning to go to college on a baseball scholarship. However, a coach at a community college got him hooked on basketball, and he ended up going to college on a basketball scholarship.

Nolan started college in 1959. The Civil Rights movement had just begun, and Nolan Richards was a determined black man in the South. His journey from living in the Segundo Barrio to coaching of the Arkansas Razorback basketball team was a long one. When he was a kid e wasn’t allowed to swim in the El Paso community pool because of the color of his skin. In college, he wasn’t always allowed to stay in the same hotels as the white players on his team. When he was hired by Tulsa University, people said, “How can you hire that n***** coach?”

America has gotten better since 1959. The Civil Rights movement was successful. So as the coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team, living in a relatively liberal and well-educated part of Arkansas, the color of his skin no longer mattered, right? Not exactly. Arkansas is not the most liberal state in the Union, and you can find plenty of people who would like to pretend that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. never happened. Unfortunately, some of those people were on the board of trustees at the University of Arkansas. One of them may have been Nolan Richardson’s boss, head coach Frank Broyles.

Eventually, Nolan Richardson spoke out against the way he was treated at Arkansas, and the University fired him. Was he right to speak out? Did the University fire him because he was causing trouble or because he was outspoken and black? The last half of Forty Minutes of Hell focuses on these questions, and in particular on the relationship between Broyles and Richardson. The author, Rus Bradbury, never actually says, “Frank Broyles was an old Southern racist,” but the facts that Bradbury shows don’t look too good for Broyles. How accurate are these facts? I was at the University of Arkansas from 1995 to 2000, but I wasn’t paying attention to sports. The only thing in this book that I can comment on is that, whatever Rus Bradbury thinks, University of Arkansas chancellor John White is not intelligent, sensitive, or caring.

Forty Minutes of Hell isn’t just Nolan Richardson’s story. With over forty years of coaching experience, Nolan has too many former players, bosses, assistant coaches, mentors, and other significant people to count, but pretty much every time the author introduces someone new, we get at least a page (sometimes much more) about this person before Nolan’s story continues. Since I’m not really familiar with basketball history, I thought this was kind of confusing. I often found myself asking, “Wait, who is this? How does this person relate to the story?” Sometimes I had to wait a while until I found out.

Quite a few of these mini-biographies are about really good players and coaches who should have been famous but weren’t, simply because of the color of their skin. Major-league sports in the 50s and 60s and 70s were white. The coaches were white and the players were white. Nolan Richardson and a few other people blazed a trail that future coaches and players would follow, and these mini-biographies show just how impressive his achievements are. They also honor the people who came before him, who tried and failed to do what he did.

Nolan Richardson has done some pretty impressive things, and his story reminds us that, while this country has made a lot of progress since the start of the Civil Rights movement, we still have a long way to go.

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Where to Find It

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