Forty Minutes of Hell by Rus Bradburd

coaches, with 828 career victories. All forty-seven of his seasons were at Winston-Salem State, a historically black college. His 1967 team, featuring Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, went 31-1, and won the NCAA College Division championship.
    A giant of a man, Gaines is a member of eight halls of fame, including the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, which honored him as a coach. He and McLendon would occasionally go on recruiting trips together, promising not to lure each other’s prospects. Since hotels were not always available to black men, they would often sleep in the car. Big House, of course, got the wider backseat.
    Wake Forest University is in the same town as Clarence Gaines’s school. During his time at Winston-Salem State, Wake Forest went through seven basketball coaches. At one point, Wake Forest struggled through thirty-three years (1962–1995) without winning a regular season or ACC Tournament title or qualifying for the NCAA tournament. Yet Clarence Gaines was never offered the Wake Forest job.
    Gaines’s story is not unique, either. Kentucky State coach Lucias Mitchell won three-straight NAIA national titles in 1970, 1971, and 1972, when he was still in his thirties. He was black and was never offered a job at a Division I school.
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    The stagnant careers of John McLendon and Big House Gaines haunted Richardson during his early years of coaching. But without the advent of videotapes or cable television, it was only through conversation that he could begin to construct a style contrasting with Don Haskins’s system. Naturally, Haskins was his most prominent influence, and Richardson had a difficult time shaking off Haskins’s way of thinking about the game. So Richardson’s undersized all-Mexican-American teams his first years at Bowie played patiently. The dizzying pace that would one day be a Richardson trademark was almost a decade away.
    â€œHe played a lot closer to Haskins’s style those first few years than people think,” recalls Alvis Glidewell, who was already making a name for himself as a shrewd coach. “He had much smaller kids than the rest of us.”
    Richardson was likely doing what most young coaches do—teaching the game the way they’ve been taught. But he was on the lookout for a specific strategy that suited him. He had no way to familiarize himself with the systems of either McLendon or Big House Gaines. Instead, Richardson first studied, then copied, Glidewell’s Austin High School teams.
    Glidewell says today, “We all copy off somebody. I’d seen things that John Wooden did at clinics when he was winning at UCLA, but I didn’t announce it around town. Nolan certainly wasn’t yet pressing the way he’d get famous for in college.” Glidewell, who is unknown outside El Paso, was surprised to learn that Richardson now credits him with some of his success as a pressing college coach. “We were never close,” Glidewell insists. “He never came over to practice, never let on that he was interested. But he must have been watching pretty close.”
    Glidewell does recall one particular bus ride to Amarillo for a tournament both their teams were competing in. “We sat together for the first time and really talked. He asked questions about our system, but he never wrote anything down, so I had no idea he was going to use it.”
    Richardson says, “Glidewell’s teams were so disciplined that they could press after a missed shot. That really takes total control, but his guys could do it. Not many people know about him, but he should be in somebody’s hall of fame.”
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    While he was trying to find his own voice as a coach, Richardson was also struggling at home. His marriage to Helen collapsed in themid-1960s, something he attributes today to the couple being too young to sustain the pressures of family life. After their divorce, he raised the two boys, while Helen had