NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT : MIDWEST REGIONAL : Win or Lose, Texas and Arkansas Have Rebuilt Respect for SWC

Arkansas and Texas will play today in an all-Southwest Conference final to the Midwest Regional. What the world beyond Lake Texoma will see is a matchup of teams that play the up-tempo game, and coaches whose competitive juices have boiled over on occasion.

The Arkansas-Texas final guarantees that the SWC will be represented in the Final Four for the first time since 1984. It also means a windfall of close to $2.5 million for the two schools--$1.1 million for the loser, $1.4 million for the team that advances--at a time when revenue is down because of NCAA sanctions against Southwest football programs and the soft economy in the region.

But no matter which team goes to Denver, the conference, generally perceived as a basketball backwater, will come away from this NCAA tournament with the kind of recognition and exposure money can’t buy.

“If you had mentioned all the talent we’ve got in the Southwest Conference to some reporter at the beginning of the year, he would have thought you were blowing smoke,” Arkansas Coach Nolan Richardson said. “But I’m not blowing smoke. This is a conference with some pretty good athletes. We’re hoping the message will be sent out that we can play good basketball.”

SWC basketball hasn’t enjoyed this kind of attention since 1978, when Eddie Sutton took Arkansas to the Final Four; and Texas, coached by Abe Lemons, won the National Invitation Tournament.

Houston reached the Final Four three consecutive times in the early ‘80s, but those teams--the Phi Slama Jama teams--were something of an aberration, the result of Akeem Olajuwon showing up almost out of the blue on the Houston campus.

It has been said that as Texas and Arkansas, the conference’s dominant state schools, go, so goes the SWC. And with Texas’ firing of Lemons in 1982 and Sutton’s move to Kentucky in ‘85, SWC basketball declined.

Hired away from Tulsa, where he won 119 games in five seasons, Richardson was not an immediate success at Arkansas. On the court, he was trying to mesh his coaching style with players left by Sutton, and not succeeding. Away from it, he was trying to cope with the illness of his daughter, Yvonne, who was diagnosed as having leukemia in March of 1985 and died from the disease three years later. His first two Arkansas teams were 12-16 and 19-14, and the criticism he received still bothers him.

“I don’t think I was given a fair chance at times,” he said. “I was crucified every day. I was going through some serious problems with my daughter. I still go through some of those problems, still have flashbacks. I feel so sorry for the kids Eddie left. I didn’t give all of me. They didn’t give all of themselves.”

But the situation has turned around for Richardson in the last three years. Now, after winning the SWC regular-season and postseason tournament titles and surviving tight NCAA tournament games against Princeton and Dayton, the Razorbacks (29-4) are about where they expected to be.

Texas’ rise to the final eight is a different story.

Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds replaced Lemons with Bob Weltlich, a Bob Knight protege from the University of Mississippi. But Weltlich turned off Texas fans and many of his own players with his harsh tactics.

Two years ago, Dodds brought in Tom Penders, who had taken Rhode Island to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 with upsets of Missouri and Syracuse.

Penders had hoped to have the Longhorns in the NCAA tournament by 1991. But he inherited three guards--Travis Mays, Lance Blanks and Joey Wright--who, free at last to run and put up three-pointers, have led Texas (24-8) to two consecutive appearances in the tournament.