Forty Minutes of Hell by Rus Bradburd Page B

But Joe Brewster had one concern—his boy Ralph walking home. Although his mother was Mexican-American, and both parents were fluent, Ralph couldn’t speak Spanish. Richardson would be required to drive him home every day, and the coach used the time to gain Brewster’s trust.
    The long hours Richardson spent coaching, driving, and telling stories to Ralph Brewster would be worth it. By the time he was a senior, Brewster would bless Richardson in a way nobody could have predicted.
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    Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richardson was absorbing as much as he could from the area’s best coaches. Nobody was more successful than the team three hours away in Hobbs, New Mexico. If Alvis Glidewell’s system was enticing to Richardson, the style of Hobbs coach Ralph Tasker must have been like cool water in the desert.
    Tasker came to the oil-boom town of Hobbs shortly after World War II. He won an astounding number of games—1,122—and took home eleven state championships. Full-court pressure was his calling card.
    Tasker, like Alvis Glidewell, wore glasses, and looked more like a professor than a hoops guru. Tasker preferred his team’s bench to be on the baseline, to witness his press as it uncoiled like a diamondback rattlesnake. His lead defender, guarding the inbounder after made baskets, would follow the first pass and trap it; everyone else would rotate. The opponents knew when the predictable traps were coming, but it usually didn’t matter. Tasker won seventy home games in a row during one stretch.
    â€œHobbs would come into El Paso and destroy our best teams,” Richardson recalls. “They pressed every minute, but it was moreextended, more exciting, than what Alvis Glidewell was doing. So I copied Tasker’s system, too. Later I took it a step further by teaching my kids not to trap at the same time or place. I wanted us to be more difficult to prepare for.”
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    Glidewell today says Richardson may have borrowed more than his full-court press. “Nolan started playing faster when he had better players. He had those two guys, Ralph Brewster and Melvin Patridge, and Nolan let them run more. But Patridge lived on our side of the freeway,” Glidewell insists. “So we challenged the situation with the school district. Patridge’s mother said something like ‘Nolan was his uncle.’ We were saying ‘Richardson is recruiting,’ which was illegal [for high schools], but we lost our challenge.”
    Today, Melvin Patridge laughs about Glidewell’s old claim. “We actually are cousins, but didn’t realize that until eighth grade, in 1972,” he says. “We owned a home in the Bowie district, but didn’t always live there.” Patridge understands Glidewell’s frustration. “We probably could have won state if I’d gone to Austin High School,” he says.
    Patridge remembers how Richardson would use his own version of shock treatment to get his Bowie Bears’ attention. “He would put us on the floor with some of the UTEP players, and they’d kill us,” Patridge says. “But then the high school kids we’d face, they were nothing.”
    Patridge recalls a trip the Bowie team made into central Texas for the state playoffs after winning the city championship. The players filed off the bus to eat a few hours before the game but sat, ignored, for half an hour. “Nolan finally got up and talked to the manager,” Patridge says. Eventually the coach returned to the team and said, “Let’s go.” They bought hamburgers at a McDonald’s and ate them in their hotel rooms.
    Patridge confronted the coach the next day. “Why didn’t we just stay there until we got service?” he asked.
    Richardson had remembered Abilene from his high school baseball trip. “I didn’t want you guys to have the humiliation that I did,” he told Patridge.
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