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Basketball coaching, politically and legally Saturday, Jan 14, 2006 By John Brummett I was on the road to Fort Smith and doing what I'd never do if not needing to pass time and pavement. I was listening to this morning radio show in Little Rock featuring Tommy Smith and the incessantly cackling David Bazzell. Smith, who is something of a quintessential Arkansan, clearly longs for those basketball glory days under Eddie Sutton and Nolan Richardson at that Ozark Mountain college with the pig mascot that he avidly supports though he didn't attend there. It was time, Smith declared, to get rid of this obviously failed basketball coach, Stan Heath. Callers were agreeing. The basketball part didn't interest me. But the socio-political and legal implications and complications did. It would be tricky legally and politically, but not impossible, for the University of Arkansas to fire yet another African-American basketball coach so soon after the stormy firing of another, and do so while keeping around a white football coach who is demonstrably much more thoroughly failed than either of the black basketball coaches. Former coach Nolan Richardson's highly public war with the school in which he alleged racism has contributed to a general lack of ease about matters of color on campus. Never mind that Richardson all but forced his own firing. Black enrollment has remained stagnant, actually declining a couple of years, even as the chancellor has proclaimed diversity to be his top priority. As Richardson went into federal court with a lawsuit, and to "Inside Sports" on HBO to say that the athletic director, Frank Broyles, was "somewhat" a racist, the college hired, in this Stan Heath, an attractive young African-American, to replace him. Richardson had won a national championship and was a national runner-up. Heath inherited a bare cupboard but has shown incremental progress into this his fourth season, although losing these first two conference games has distributed a strong scent among the vultures. Meanwhile, the white football coach by the name of Houston Nutt has had one really good season, his first, which he accomplished using his predecessor's standout players. Since then, he has taken the program ever-deeper into the toilet. Yet he recently got a big raise. He was very recently spared termination after two successive losing seasons, the second worse than the first. He won only four games in this most recent season. And those four wins didn't really count: Two were against minor-league hyphen schools and two were against schools from Mississippi, which we always thank the Lord for. This Nutt fellow lost to Vanderbilt barely a year after crowing that he couldn't wait to start playing Vanderbilt and begin collecting that easy annual win. I'd pay to see John Walker or some lawyer younger and hungrier get hold of this set of facts. Still, here's why and how the university could dump Heath and probably get away with it legally and politically: 1. Heath doesn't strike me as quite as litigious as Richardson. 2. Even if Heath were to sue, the university could contend credibly that the football coach carried a special premium because Nebraska apparently wanted to hire him away, while, conversely, no one has taken any similar runs at Heath. Hiring, salary - these are market issues beyond the university's control, lawyers could contend. It's not the University of Arkansas' fault that Nebraska temporarily lost its mind only to get saved from itself, and unspeakable Cornhusker tragedy, by a real estate man in Fayetteville named Jim Lindsey. 3. After firing Heath, the University of Arkansas could hire yet another African-American coach - the right one, this time. That would seem to be this fellow named Mike Anderson, who was Richardson's top assistant and has since done wonderful things at Alabama-Birmingham. If Anderson wouldn't come, maybe they could rehire Nolan. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
