Richardson is passionate about charity and coaching

	After failing to get the head coaching position at Texas-El Paso, Nolan Richardson knows his college coaching career may be over. AP

Earlier this month, while shuttling from speaking appearances in Oklahoma and Virginia and putting in many hours on behalf of dozens of charities, Nolan Richardson flew to El Paso to meet with UTEP athletic director Bob Stull. UTEP was in the market for a new basketball coach, but though Stull's face-to-face with Richardson was widely characterized as an "interview," the chat lasted less than an hour. The following day, Stull announced that Tony Barbee, a 35-year-old assistant at Memphis with no head coaching experience, had been chosen to replace Doc Sadler, who had been plucked by Nebraska the previous week.

If you know anything about Richardson, you know that he is not the type of person to bite his tongue if he believes he has been slighted. I thought I might hear some bile when I reached Richardson by phone late last week. Instead, he sounded sanguine about UTEP's decision -- and not just because Barbee is the first African-American head coach in school history.

"I just didn't get the impression that I would be their guy. That's the bottom line," Richardson said. "They couldn't afford to hire me, so it never got to a point where they might offer me the job. I told them I certainly wish them the best. When other schools want to hire your coaches, that's when you know things are going in the right direction."

Richardson, 64, still lives in a suburb of Fayetteville, Ark., about a 15-minute drive from the campus of his erstwhile employer, the University of Arkansas. He has never seriously considered another gig since Arkansas ignominiously fired him before the end of the 2001-02 season. Nor does it sound like he's avidly pursuing one. 

If Richardson were ever going to contemplate a return to the sidelines, UTEP would seem to be an ideal place. He was born and raised in El Paso, played at UTEP (then Texas Western) for legendary coach Don Haskins and began his coaching career in the city, first at Bowie High and then at Western Texas Junior College, where he won the national junior college championship in 1980. Richardson remains a local legend in El Paso; there is a school, a street and a recreation center named for him, and another street bears the name of his daughter Yvonne, who died from leukemia two decades ago. Indeed, Stull's invitation to meet with Richardson was really just a token gesture to satisfy the denizens who had called local radio stations pleading for Richardson to be hired.