Arkansas’ Dream Now Nightmare : Richardson Teaches Basketball Basics and Growing Up

Arkansas basketball Coach Nolan Richardson won’t say so, but he has to be thinking that soon he will wake up and the bad dream that this season has become will be over.

Richardson arrived here late last summer with his 119-37 record from the University of Tulsa in tow. His job was to replace Eddie Sutton, who had left to become coach of the Kentucky Wildcats. Last season, Sutton’s final one as Razorbacks coach, the team went 22-13 and advanced to the second round of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament before losing to St. John’s.

Still, some Razorbacks fans weren’t happy, saying that the team should have done better. Newspapers ran polls asking whether Sutton should be fired. Kentucky didn’t have to ask Sutton twice if he would like to replace Joe B. Hall.

Enter Richardson, the guy who built Tulsa into a national power. Richardson, who is black, always has had winning teams. He often jokes that in some of the southern cities in which he has coached, he knew he’d better have a winning team. He took over a ballyhooed Arkansas squad. In a preseason poll, other Southwest Conference coaches picked Arkansas to win the league title.

Richardson, who was hired too late to do any recruiting, did not enter cautiously. That’s not his style. He charged in, acknowledged that Sutton had done a tremendous job, then said he planned to continue the winning tradition with a scrappy, racehorse-type team. Look out SWC, the Razorbacks would be “Rollin with Nolan.”

“I did it because I’ve got some guts,” Richardson said recently. “You know, poor-mouth coaches usually are the best coaches. If they win, they’ve done a helluva job. If they lose, they already said they would. I won’t poor-mouth. Even at Tulsa I never said we were rebuilding. We would just reload and go places.”

But Richardson now says several things quickly became apparent: he didn’t have anybody who could shoot the basketball; he didn’t have anybody who could rebound the basketball, and he didn’t have anybody to take charge on the court.

“This team was oversold,” Richardson said. “I read all the stuff, too. Last year’s freshman group was supposed to be the best ever. Every one of them was compared to some great player. But when they were freshmen, I had some of them in my camps at Oklahoma, and I just didn’t see that. I mean, I was nose to nose with these kids and just couldn’t see it.”

Another factor, although one not so apparent at first, was that some of his players didn’t like each other and were carrying their bad feelings onto the court.

After a decent start, the team has plummeted to a 2-9 SWC record, 10-12 overall, and Hawgball has become one of the biggest marketing disasters since new Coke.

It snowed heavily here last Friday, and the airport runways were treacherous. Some flights were canceled, others couldn’t touch down for fear of skidding into the Ozarks. All things considered, it was a good day to stay off the roads, never mind the small planes that fly in and out of this part of the state.

In his office at Barnhill Arena, Richardson was trying hard to get a flight connection out of Fayetteville that afternoon after practice. There was a prospect in New Orleans he wanted to see.

Richardson and his staff are recruiting hard. They are looking particularly close at junior college players--guys who should be a bit more mature and who can help right away. Because there is only one senior on the Razorbacks’ roster, some players will have to go if new ones are brought in. Richardson won’t spell it out, but clearly that’s the idea.

“We have to change this whole thing around,” he said. “I’m sure there will be some players who are very disenchanted, some who aren’t playing a lot. Maybe we’ll lose some because of grades. This way, we’ll have impact players from junior colleges ready to take their place.”

Asked what type of help he is looking for, Richardson said just about everything. He said that if he can get a few Nolan Richardson-type players on the team, things will get better. He wants players who are heads-up on the court and team-oriented on the bench.

“This is like coaching a freshman basketball team,” Richardson said. “I’ve worked extremely hard teaching basic little stuff like dribbling and passing, so much so that we haven’t been able to deal with enough up-tempo basketball. We want to be a pressing team. But, fundamentally, they don’t know how to press. It’s foreign to them.

“Last year, the guards dribbled from sideline to sideline looking to get the ball in to Joe Kleine,” Richardson added, referring to the star center who since has graduated to the National Basketball Assn. “The guards are more active in my scheme of things. They have to make decisions--when to go, when to pass, when to shoot--not just look for Joe.”

“I really do think that it hurt our development,” junior guard Mike Ratliff said of last year’s Arkansas offense. “We did not create on offense and that has slowed us down. We fell behind a whole year. It was made clear that during games Joe was supposed to get the ball.”

“We’ve changed philosophies,” sophomore guard Allie Freeman said. “Joe Kleine was such a great player and a great guy. Our philosophy was inside-out. Work it in. This year it’s different. It has to do with decision-making, knowing what to do. Coach has said he has to get the guys thinking his way. But sometimes we revert to the old style.

“Last year when I looked inside, I was staring Joe Kleine in the face. This year, we are trying to find ourselves.”

Recently, Sutton has gotten wind of some of Richardson’s complaints and apparently has taken them personally. He has fired back through the media that he left a pretty good team behind--a pretty talented team.

“All I’ll say is I’d like to see him coach this team,” Richardson said in response. “He might have a few more problems than he anticipated.”

After Friday afternoon practice, when most of the coaching staff had left on recruiting trips, many of the Razorbacks stayed on the court to work on their shooting. The players appeared to mix together easily, encouraging and teasing each other.

It hasn’t been that way all season.

“I am used to my players rooting for one another, even if they’re not playing, instead of hoping somebody messes up because they’re looking for a chance to show what they can do,” Richardson said.

“We’ve had to clean up a lot of things before dealing with Xs and Os. I did not expect so much of it. Some of them did not have their energies channeled in the right direction. But this team is closer now than it has been since I’ve been here. It took a lot of work. There were so many intangible things going on here that it was unreal.

“We have had our problems as a team,” said guard Scott Rose, the only senior on the squad. “We just found so many ways to lose, in fact we still do, that our team didn’t deal with each other’s mistakes too well. But that’s part of growing up.”

Richardson and the players say that is changing, however, and point to the team’s improved play.

“On all teams with guys who have different personalities there will be some conflicts, without a doubt,” Freeman said. “To a degree, we carried that over to the court. A lot of guys had problems and took things that were said personally. But we’ve been to war together now. We’ve been through tough times. Now we see what has to be done. Anything that is said now is to encourage: ‘Hey, it’s all right.”’

Richardson, dressed in Razorbacks red, sat back in his office one day last week and took a breather. He is encouraged because the team, though still losing, is playing better.

“The people who count,” he said, “people like Coach (Frank) Broyles the AD, the administration, the chancellor, have been great to me. I get 50 letters a day from people saying they understand what has happened. I’ve always felt that adversity is just temporary failure and only lasts as long as you can bear it. This has made me a better person and a better coach. Three years ago, I might have jumped through a window.

“I don’t look back and wish I’d stayed at Tulsa. There is a lot of work to do here and we’re getting it done. Hey, I’m a winner. I didn’t come here with anything to prove.”