COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S AND WOMEN’S FINAL FOURS : Hogging the Spotlight : Richardson’s Razorbacks, the Toast of Arkansas, Take to National Stage

What do you call a 47-year-old, 225-pound politician wearing a red plastic hog snout on his head?

Mr. President.

It’s the story no one can escape. Dyed- in- the- wool, voted- as- many- times- for- Bill- Clinton- as- they- could Democrats may wish the leader of the free world would stop draping himself over this team so they can get this basketball tournament over, but this is bigger than that.

It’s the year of the Hog. It’s Hogmania. It’s too much for one small, rural state to contain. It’s going national. The beloved Hogs are headed back to the Final Four, not as a surprise as in 1990, when Oliver Miller, Todd Day and Lee Mayberry were sophomores and Duke gunned them out in the semifinals by 14 points.

These Hogs are just as young--of Coach Nolan Richardson’s top nine players, five are freshmen or sophomores, none are seniors--but they’re the tournament favorites.

Ask them if they aren’t.

“It was totally different,” Richardson says. “This team, the expectation has been there since the day they picked them No. 2 in one poll and 3 in another. . . .

“We’re not an underdog, we’re supposed to win because that’s the expectation. So if you ask the question, what’s going to happen, we’re supposed to win.”

The Arkansas Holy Trinity is in it together. President Clinton brought the family to the Midwest Regional and promises to be in Charlotte. Bud Walton, the brother of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, gave the Hogs their proud, new 20,000-seat building after all those years in little 7,000-seat Barnhill Arena. Now it’s up to Rollin’ Nolan to deliver the dream.

If only all 2 million Arkansans could go! What better fun than to take over some snooty city in red T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, caps and, for those entirely without pretension, the famous Hog hats, one of which Clinton allowed himself to be photographed in while governor? What better cultural exchange than to head for the bar at some swanky hotel like the Hyatt Regency across from Reunion Arena and fill the 20-story atrium with chants of “Soooooey, PIG!”? So what if city slickers like the Dallas Morning News’ Blackie Sherrod run out all those Arkansas jokes (“What are the worst three years in an Arkie’s life? Fourth grade.”)?

At home, the Hogs average more than 20,000. The 35 luxury boxes, priced from $12,000 to $22,000, are sold through 1996. There’s a 4,000-name waiting list for season tickets.

A rich man’s fortune can’t assure him of a ticket from the school’s 1,200-seat allotment for the Southeastern Conference tournament. There are reports Hog fans now buy Mississippi State season tickets, where a smaller donation will move them onto the priority list.

If only the Hogs ever made the SEC final!

Despite years of excellence from Eddie Sutton to Richardson, something always happens. The Miller-Day-Mayberry team made the Final Four as sophomores and never made it back. The Hogs finished this season ranked No. 2 but were upset by Kentucky in the SEC tournament semifinals.

A lovesick state gazes soulfully at its coach.

*

“I could probably play a golf round in about an hour fifteen minutes and I could shoot 69--because when I get to 69, I’m going to quit. That’s just the way I am. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

“I always felt pressure was always on me, so why not put pressure on others?” --Nolan Richardson

No, they aren’t coming after him if he doesn’t win.

It’s not the way it was in 1985, when Arkansas still was in the Southwest Conference and Richardson took over from Sutton, becoming the first black coach of a major sport in that conference, promising the same “40 minutes of hell” he had featured at Tulsa--and went 12-16, instead.

The fans wanted his job. There was a report that a cross was burned on his lawn. It didn’t happen, but it appeared in a paper.

Meanwhile, Richardson’s daughter, Yvonne, was dying of leukemia and he was asking himself what he needed with these yahoos. He says he stayed because he owed it to Frank Broyles, the athletic director who had hired him.

“That’s when I found out what was the most important thing,” Richardson says. “Basketball doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s my job, my occupation, but when I saw what happened seven years ago--I really understand what life’s all about now. And it’s very, very short. . . .

“That man (Broyles) took a chance. I appreciate opportunity. Coach Broyles took a big chance on hiring Nolan Richardson in ’85. Highest chance of an AD to take in the South, in the Southwest Conference, and I hadn’t done my job for him. . . . I told him this on several occasions, ‘You stick with me and I’ll guarantee I’ll turn it around.’ That’s why, if we win it, fine, if we don’t, that’s the way it goes. But I’ve got the program where I think I like it.”

He likes it. Everyone else fears it.

Once the Hogs were a regional power, recruiting mostly in Texas and Memphis, hoping to find the occasional player in Arkansas. Now Richardson goes as far afield as Oakland, where he snatched 6-foot-11 freshman Darnell Robinson out from under Cal’s nose.

“He’s going to go back and say, ‘It ain’t like what they said it was like,’ ” Richardson says. “You come out here, it’s basketball, education and, of course, we don’t have a whole lot of city lights. There aren’t a whole lot of things you can get into. You can play basketball and get you an education.”

You can play basketball Nolan Richardson’s way, too.

A poor kid from South El Paso, one of 11 raised by his grandmother after his parents died, he played for Don Haskins at Texas Western. He suffered the standard humiliations of the period, staying in a separate hotel when most of the team was in one that was whites-only.

Haskins was Bobby Knight without the abuse, a no-nonsense type who had learned his stuff from Hank Iba.

Richardson took the no-nonsense part, junked the ball-control part and began a long, slow climb up the ladder: 10 years on the high school level in El Paso, three years at a junior college in Snyder, Tex., where he won a national title; five years at Tulsa, where he built a program, then Arkansas.

Richardson is 6-3, 240 pounds, with a booming bass voice and a speaker’s gift. He would make dramatic pauses ordering into the speaker at a fast-food drive-up. When he talks, people listen and when he barks, his players jump. He’s an old-fashioned taskmaster who whips his players into top condition, then has them over to the house for barbecue.

He sometimes jokes about race.

“Don’t cut those lights off,” he said at a Midwest Regional news conference when someone turned them down. “Hell, you won’t see me up here. I’m not going to talk to a room and everybody’s kind of wondering where the hell I am.”

Mostly, though, he doesn’t joke about race.

He glows with righteous fervor on whatever subject he is on, whether it’s the opportunities black kids aren’t getting, or the place in Arkansans’ hearts they had for Sutton but deny him, or the burden black coaches still carry.

“There’s always been a stigma,” Richardson says. “The only other coach I’ve ever seen talked about is John Thompson, who got a national championship. Once in a while I hear about John Chaney.

“We’re stereotyped. We don’t coach real well, but we recruit real well. We’re motivators. We’re everything but a coach. When you hear ‘em talk, you never hear what a great coach he is, it’s always what a great motivator and what great athletes he has. . . . If I play the way I play, it’s considered ghetto basketball or street ball. . . .

“I’ve heard all kinds of conversations on my kind of basketball. Rick (Pitino, Kentucky coach) and I are good friends, Rick runs and shoots and guns, but they call his uptempo. They gave it a name. You see what I’m saying?”

Wally Henry, sports editor of the Little Rock Democrat-Gazette, says Richardson has already won, that he owns the state lock, stock and barrel as Sutton never did, but that he doesn’t realize it. Maybe if you came out of a ramshackle place in South El Paso, you wouldn’t know it, either. For whatever reason, he still has the hunger.

“I think getting to the Final Four is a great thing,” he says, “but I’d like to win a national championship, I’ll just be straight up and honest with you.

“I mean Final Four, I’ve been there. I tell my kids, ‘I don’t recruit to win the conference, I won a bunch of those. I recruit to win the big one.’ ”

Happily, he knows he’ll be OK if it doesn’t happen. In the meantime, he’s up there, the booming voice rolling on and on.

An ABC crew wants to come behind the scenes for a “Nightline” piece? Are they sure they have enough tape?

“I love it,” Richardson says. “Shoot, I love it, hoss. I think that’s what it’s all about.

“I got here late. I’m behind in the race. I’m trying to catch up, so I’m enjoying it.”