COLLEGE BASKETBALL: 1994-95 PREVIEW : Going for More : Arkansas, Richardson Still Seek Respect After First Title

The Arkansas Razorbacks squealed for respect all the way to the NCAA championship last season. But surely even Nolan Richardson and his Hogs know they can’t do that anymore, not when they rule all of college basketball from their home in the Ozarks.

National champions. Preseason No. 1. Every starter back too--the first NCAA champions to do that since UCLA’s 1967 lineup returned intact.

Corliss Williamson, Scotty

Thurman, Corey Beck, Dwight Stewart and Darnell Robinson. Only one of the top nine players is gone.

Respect roosts in the rafters of Bud Walton Arena, the year-old, 19,200-seat arena with a coach’s suite as lavish as anyone’s and a multimedia Razorback hall of fame in the lobby that beats anything in Springfield, Mass.

“We talked about respect all last year,” said Williamson, the 6-foot-7 junior who was most valuable player of the Final Four. “We come back this year, and boom, we’re on the covers of magazines, interviews every day. . . . “

Williamson smiles. The young man they call “Big Nasty” knows the game is up.

But do the rest of the Razorbacks? Thurman, the junior forward whose arching three-pointer with 51 seconds left did in Duke in the title game, went to the Southeastern Conference media day in October and somebody asked him who he was.

“I guess we haven’t caught the eyes of everyone yet,” Thurman said. “I wouldn’t say the respect isn’t there, but I don’t think we’ve earned it from everyone. Not everyone wants to see Arkansas win. I think a lot of people want to try to build us up to be so great that if we don’t win it, they can call us failures.”

Sounds like something Richardson might imagine, the skeptics laying a trap for Arkansas. Columnist Bob Stephens of the Morning News of Northwest Arkansas wrote a column last month, tweaking Richardson for his tendency to play things off as Hogs against the world.

“If Nolan Richardson doesn’t win the national championship this season, he should be fired. . . . If Nolan Richardson can’t win it all with this team, it’ll be obvious he can’t coach. . . . If Nolan Richardson and the Hogs don’t cut down the nets in Seattle in April, it’ll prove they were lucky this spring.”

Period. New paragraph.

“There it is, Nolan. That should be enough firepower.”

And Richardson? After 31 years of coaching and 52 years of living, no trophy, no title, no coach-of-the-year award can change Nolan Richardson.

“When you think that I won the national championship, wouldn’t you think I should be just as happy as a jaybird?” asked Richardson, his smile passing for a moment and his booming voice turning insistent. “I’ve got a good contract, I’m pretty well set. I’ve been on every level, won on every level. Wouldn’t you think I ought to be just as happy as a jaybird? Yeah, I guess so.

“Most people say, ‘Oh, man, what do you want?’ But I’m not talking about what I want. I’m going to work hard as I can to get what I want. I’m not just about me. I just want opportunities for some other people. That’s all. And I’m not accusing anyone. All I’m doing is, I’m looking at history.

“You talk about respect, what’s he upset about? I’ve been upset all my life if that’s the case. It’s not about me. It’s about other people.”

The Razorbacks’ call for respect is a complex one, tied up in who they are and, more important, who Richardson is. He says it started with the players’ reaction to the fickleness of the polls.

“The respect that the kids got angry about was all in the polls,” he said. “We went down in the polls after winning and some other team that lost went up in the polls. So our kids in practice said, ‘Damn, we ain’t getting no respect, man.’ ”

When Richardson preached about respect to the assembled national media during the NCAA tournament, some suspected it was a motivational maneuver designed to inspire his team. Others closer to him suspected he was taking advantage of the opportunity to speak to a wider audience about some of the topics he’s passionate about. The unfairness to blacks he sees in the SAT, the ACT and their role in NCAA academic eligibility. The stereotyping he sees when white coaches are called tacticians and black coaches are called motivators and recruiters.

“Any time you ask him about certain topics, you can spark him,” Thurman warns affectionately. “And once you get him going, it’s hard to stop him.”

Richardson insists, “The respect I was talking about was not about me. See, I know who I am. The respect I was talking about was African Americans not ever getting respect about teaching and coaching.”

But it is about Richardson. It is also about others, but it is definitely about him. Some things are seared on the soul, and no success can scrape them away.

Richardson is a black man in what, incredibly, was a white man’s game when he was young, 30 years ago. How many times has Richardson plucked the framed photo from the shelf, 12 young men in Texas Western uniforms, and said, “This is my team. Pick me out.”

Eleven white faces eliminate the challenge.

A few years later, under new Coach Don Haskins, Texas Western won the 1966 NCAA title with a starting lineup of five blacks. Richardson, then coach at El Paso Bowie High, was beside himself, telling the players, “You will never really realize what you have done.”

How many times has Richardson told the story of not being able to go to the movies in El Paso, or about the game against Centenary in Louisiana when he was left home because blacks weren’t allowed in the gym?

And what it was like to grow up poor, raised by his grandmother in El Paso, the only black in a class of Mexican Americans who he says always treated him “good as gold?” To be the first black coach of a junior college in Texas, the first black coach at a major university in Oklahoma at Tulsa, the first black coach in the Southwest Conference at Arkansas?

These are sources of pride, but they created a habit of striving against barriers that are impossible to break, even when there’s no barrier there.

“Think of all the things Coach has been through, throughout his life,” Williamson said. “He always feels he has something to prove to people, to show them, ‘I do deserve the respect I didn’t get way back then, when I was doing the same things I’m doing now.’ ”

It might turn out that Richardson’s unrelenting drive could help his team in its effort to repeat, something only Duke has done in the 21 years since UCLA won its seventh consecutive title in 1973.

The challenge noted by John Wooden and every coach since who has tried to repeat is that you have to find a way to avoid complacency, a way to duplicate hunger after it has been satisfied.

Nevada Las Vegas’ 1991 team, “the best team I’ve seen in modern times,” Richardson says, somehow didn’t repeat, perhaps a victim of its own superiority, of boredom or infatuation with the pros--and of a Duke team that Richardson remembers played “out of their gourds” to beat the Rebels in a national semifinal game.

Duke somehow did repeat, maybe in part because Mike Krzyzewski insisted from the beginning that it could not truly repeat, claiming in a semantic twist that the 1992 team was not the same team as the 1991 team that won it, because players had come and gone and the new team had to have a life of its own.

And, of course, there is luck. The injury that doesn’t happen. Or the desperation shot that drops, like Christian Laettner’s overtime game-winner for Duke against Kentucky in a regional final game in 1992, the year the Blue Devils went on to beat Michigan in the title game to repeat.

“All I’m saying is, we must try to keep ourselves in position to have luck,” Richardson said. “You start thinking about, goddang, there are so many variables that have to come together for this team to be as good as it was last year. And we know we’re better than we were last year. I know that.

“But will things fall into place? Dwight Stewart is a key component of this basketball team and he’s not going to play the first game (because of a sprained ankle). We could lose the first game (against third-ranked Massachusetts on Friday).”

They could, and they could face a challenge from Georgetown three days later.

But with Williamson, Thurman and point guard Beck, they have a tremendous core. The Razorbacks are also deep. Guard Clint McDaniel is a crack defender who started 13 games last season. Three-point specialist Alex Dillard--the 26-year-old who returned to junior college after working three years after high school--is back too, and Reggie Garrett, a swing man who transferred from New Orleans, has already made a strong impression in practice.

Still, Richardson ordered his team into two-a-days after an exhibition victory last week that Williamson says not only wasn’t 40 minutes of hell, but “I don’t think we even had any seconds of it.”

Said Richardson: “In my case, what I’ve tried to do is, hopefully, have my team take on the attitude that I have about the game. I’ve always felt that I was late in this game. When you start looking at the records of all those coaches who won all those games, look when they started.

“I always took Martin Luther King’s theory, that I’ve always been behind in the race, and in order for me to catch up, I have to outrun the guy in front of me. OK, we won a national championship. How many coaches in this country ever won one? A lot of them haven’t. A lot of them died trying.

“But still, I feel I’m behind in the race. I feel there’s a lot more championships in me before I retire, simply because I got here late. If I’d come a little earlier, I’d have won some more championships, that’s what I’m saying.”

When a reporter asked earlier if the Razorbacks could stay hungry, Richardson ate up the question.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “It seems like I haven’t eaten in years. I’m real hungry.

“We’ve got to develop an attitude that we want more than what we’ve got,” he said later. “We’re not satisfied with what we’ve got. Those are just peanuts they threw out there to us. We want the bread and the meat.

“I have a great amount of admiration for this team. Whether they win the national championship or not is not going to determine how I feel about them. This is a very special group.

“What I’m saying to you is that it’s not going to blow my mind and make me feel any different because these kids don’t repeat. I know they want to and how they feel. Whether that takes place or not remains to be seen. All we want is the opportunity. If we get that opportunity we can make the best of it.”

Opportunity. Nolan Richardson will tell you it’s all he has ever wanted. For himself or anybody else.