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The Bear In Winter His UTEP Miners are only a shadow of the team that wrought a basketball revolution by winning the 1966 NCAA title, yet coach Don Haskins has no recourse but to sit tight through these rocky timesBy Alexander Wolff
It's tiny Samford of Birmingham that Haskins's University of Texas at El Paso Miners are hosting tonight, and an exam-period torpor leaves UTEP trailing at halftime. Four minutes remain when the Miners finally mince out to a two-point lead and the Bear orders them into a zone. Though Samford will not score again, Haskins does not watch UTEP's final two defensive possessions. A Miners assistant leaps up, waving, yelling instructions, as his boss closes his eyes and fingers the bridge of his nose. It would be easy to conclude from this scene that the game has passed Haskins by. But while he no longer always looks, he still sees. If UTEP hadn't switched to that zone, Samford would have sustained its accustomed patterned style and very likely won. Game time still sets Haskins alight with passion, and only his physical inability to spring up in the faces of referees has spared him several technicals this season. Indeed, watch a Miners practice and you'll see players calibrated like seismographs to the sound of his voice, even as he rarely leaves his seat courtside. "He creates listening better than anybody I've ever been around," says Chicago Bulls coach Tim Floyd, who spent nine seasons as Haskins's assistant. Still, the Bear is in winter. Penalties imposed with two NCAA probations have hamstrung his program virtually through the 1990s. Until this season the Miners hadn't turned in a winning record for three straight years, and twice they failed even to qualify for the Western Athletic Conference tournament. That UTEP was 16-9 as of Sunday and entertaining dreams of the NIT is one more tribute to the Bear's enduring effectiveness -- yet the crowds in the Don Haskins Center have been even thinner this season than last. Little of this is remarked upon beyond El Paso, just as Haskins's 719 wins, with one epic exception, have passed largely unnoticed, and just as his name had to be suggested six times before an exhausted electorate finally waved him into the Hall of Fame two years ago. "He's still the fiercest competitor," says Utah coach Rick Majerus, who hooks up with Haskins in the WAC regularly. "He just doesn't have the players anymore to implement what he wants to do." Once upon a time he did, famously so. Even Haskins's college coach, Henry Iba, picked Kentucky to beat Texas Western, as UTEP was then known, in the 1966 NCAA championship game. But Haskins knew that a small, quick lineup would give his Miners their best chance against Adolph Rupp's undersized Runts. He started 5'6" Willie Worsley in place of 6'8" Nevil (the Shadow) Shed, then saw his decision vindicated in the game's opening moments. Twice in a row Worsley's 5'10" running mate, Bobby Joe Hill, fleeced a Kentucky guard and sailed in for tone-setting conversions. Today, to a generation that remembers them, the names of the players who unnerved Kentucky's shooters that night still resonate with a kind of forerunning cool. Not only Hill and Worsley and Shed but also Orsten (Little O) Artis and Willie (Scoops) Cager, David (Big Daddy) Lattin and Harry (Flo) Flournoy became outriders of a new wave, heralding basketball's inevitable evolution from roundball to hoop. Haskins played nobody but blacks in beating an all-white team, and for that he would get 40,000 pieces of hate mail and a dozen death threats. But over time, for presiding over college basketball's Brown v. Board of Education, he would also get credit for changing the game irrevocably. At his home in Denver, a 38-year-old black postal maintenance worker named Herman Carr watched that game on a small black-and-white TV. Like Haskins, Carr had grown up during the 1940s in Enid, Okla., where the schools and neighborhoods remained segregated but where two kids, one black and one white, could quietly hook up on common ground, the basketball court in Government Springs Park. "I wondered if that was the same Don Haskins I used to play against in the park," Carr says. "He didn't look like I remembered him looking, but by then I didn't look like I'd looked when I was a teenager, either." Today Haskins appears even more removed from the vigor of his youth, when he was a high school hero ticketed for Oklahoma A&M. In January 1996, at halftime of a game against New Mexico, he had a heart attack in the locker room. He underwent triple-bypass surgery and missed the next 12 games. Last month, at San Jose State, Haskins was so weak from a bout with the flu that he remained seated the entire game. He suffers from diabetes, an infected foot and lingering problems with his left eye, on which he had implant surgery before the season, an operation that accounts for his going to the bridge of his nose and missing those dying minutes against Samford, or so he'll say. After a game, put at ease by a Scotch and company, Haskins might recall things he still sees vividly in his mind's eye. He might tell of a Mexican guy he watched in the early 1960s whacking golf balls out of a sand pile beside a construction site in El Paso, a guy daft enough to say he would someday play the PGA Tour, a guy who turned out to be Lee Trevino. Or of Mike Brumbelow, the football coach at Texas Western in the '50s, a spoonerizing raconteur who would call him Dan Hoskins. Or of his coach at Oklahoma A&M, whom even fellow coaches were careful to address as Mr. Iba. Or of how two years ago he went up to play Iowa State, which Floyd was then coaching, and did a little hunting with his former assistant before a game in which the officials would grant the Miners precisely four free throws. "Got me more pheasant that trip than foul shots," he might say. He still talks that way, and it might sound like some carnival act for media folks who make their way through the fastness to Baja New Mexico. But it's not an act, if only because scarcely any media folks do come through, and there's no advantage to keeping such a shtick sharp. Try telling him a story you've heard -- say, about how he supposedly watched a Utah practice in the fall of 1965 and then used the Runnin' Utes' fast break to subdue them in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament the following spring, thus earning the right to play Kentucky -- and he'll correct you, sharpen the tale: "We were playing Utah in football, so I went up to Salt Lake. [Utes basketball coach] Jack Gardner ran a five-on-two fast break drill that I saw backward. I made it a defensive drill, with two guys getting back to stop a break. It's a drill we still do darn near every day in practice. Remember, I played for the finest defensive coach who ever walked." Stories have their use. They are deflective. They lead the listener to something else, someone else, somewhere else, sometime else. Say, 1949. Mr. Iba. Stillwater, Okla. An A&M practice. "Back then it wasn't supposed to be fun, see," Haskins will say. "Over Christmas break he'd have us go nine to noon, two to five and seven to 10. And seven to 10 would be three one-hour scrimmages. No water. No sitting. One night by the end the skin on the ball of my foot had come off. School president was at that practice, and he asked me if I was tired when I came off the floor. "'No, sir,' I told him. "'Sure shouldn't be,' he says back. "Cause you haven't done a damn thing all day.'" Thus he weaves more diverting scenes on the tapestry of his basketball life, so many distracting stitches that you can scarcely make out the fundamental fibers. That's the thing about sitting at Haskins's knee, which is to say at his jowls and torso and hands: You've come to Rome to hear Caesar on Caesar. But Caesar wants to play Gibbon, so you get story after story about Rome in which Caesar figures only glancingly. "Funny, he holds Iba in such regard, to such legendary status," says Majerus. "Now he's there himself, and he doesn't realize it. If he wasn't in our league and in our time zone, he'd have been in the Hall of Fame 20 years ago." Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson starred on Haskins's first Texas Western team in 1961-62, and it pains him to watch his old coach in his dotage. "I don't know all the things happening there, because he's not one to complain," Richardson says, "but you can look at him and tell. The way he's going out, it's the s -- -tiest way I know." Today Haskins is the Bear, but Iba called the kid from Enid something much less magisterial: Rope, for his slender form and the coif surmounting it that seemed to be made of coir. In 1955, three years out of A&M, Haskins alighted at the high school in Benjamin, a town of about 250 in the Cedar Breaks country of west Texas. "I went into coaching because I didn't know how to do anything else," he says. "Being some guy in Peoria at a desk, punching a time clock -- I knew I didn't want to do that. It was like I'd grabbed a lifeline and pulled myself out of the water." It scarcely mattered that terra firma was strewn with tumbleweed. Don and his bride, Mary, pulled up in front of what was to be their new home to find a rattlesnake coiled on the porch. It was in Benjamin that Haskins learned to call coyotes. "Government trapper taught me," he says. "You get hid, see, and then you take a duck call apart so you got an open flute, and you blow on it to make it sound like a rabbit squealin'. Bobcats, hawks, coyotes -- all sorts of varmints appear. "Didn't like to shoot 'em much. Just call 'em. Gotta do something in those little towns I coached in." After stopovers at high schools in the Texas outposts of Hedley and Dumas, he arrived in El Paso. It wasn't inertia that kept him there for 38 years so much as a preference for the familiar, for relating to people one-to-one, which indicates a strain of shyness. Haskins prepares his team as well as any coach for the big game, yet public ceremony paralyzes him. "My grandkids are enjoying me being nervous," he told the crowd at the dinner prior to his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. "They get to eat my steak." Several days before that, at the dedication of the Don Haskins Center, Mary turned to embrace him in front of more than 12,000 people. He didn't much more than shake her hand. Thus the desert fits him fine, even though it was easier to attract coyotes there than players. For a golden while Floyd sat at his elbow, and enough talent flowed in. Not the very best players, but ones good enough to become, under Haskins's hand, better than most. Two wound up among the best: Nate (Tiny) Archibald and Tim Hardaway. The latter helped UTEP to two of its five straight WAC titles in the mid-1980s. So matters remained for a quarter century after the Kentucky game, with no one paying Haskins and UTEP much mind. Then in 1991 the Miners attracted attention of the most unwelcome kind. Haskins isn't sure why the Inspector Javerts of the NCAA began crawling around, but he suspects their arrival might be traced to a day in '86 when he took on a man named Norm Ellenberger as a volunteer assistant coach. Ellenberger had presided over an epic scandal at New Mexico during the late 1970s, a goulash of pay-for-play and academic fraud that left him essentially unemployable. Haskins had competed against Ellenberger, yet during off-seasons he had gone hunting with his rival and, among the mesquite and pronghorn, man-to-man, broached the subject of Ellenberger's ways. "I told Norm exactly which of his guys were bought and paid for," Haskins says. "I said, 'This one is,' and he said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'That one, too,' and he said, 'How'd you know?' I told him it was obvious: The ones who talked back to him, cursed him out in the huddle; they wouldn't be doing that unless they had something on him. Give a player something, see, and you can't coach him anymore." But it was just like Haskins to give Ellenberger another chance when Ellenberger was down and out and desperate to get back into the game. And it was just like Haskins never to suspect that his act of charity might attract the interest of the NCAA. Today Haskins doesn't regret having helped out an old friend. Indeed, he worries that retelling the story might embarrass Ellenberger, who later spent some time on the staff of the NCAA-proof Bob Knight at Indiana. But Haskins also wonders if he was a fool to be so cooperative with the probe, believing he had nothing to hide. He wishes UTEP had retained that cop-a-plea law firm in Kansas City, the one used by schools that get off with a wrist slap. He freely admits that he broke NCAA rules (if not the code he lives by) when he shared some pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee with a recruit's grandmother at seven one morning, three hours earlier than permitted, because she had to go off to work. And he acknowledges that two of his assistants provided improper rides to players, which led UTEP not to renew those coaches' contracts. (One of the former assistants is now up the road in Las Cruces, procuring players for New Mexico State, and that doesn't help the healing.) But Haskins defies you to examine similar cases elsewhere and conclude that UTEP's punishment fit the crime. As people in West Texas say, the entire episode smelled like a wet dog. During the first two probationary seasons, beginning in 1991, the Miners could offer no more than two new scholarships a year. Then, in '97, the NCAA went in and hide-strapped UTEP anew, for having inadvertently played two ineligible players during the 1995-96 season because the athletic department had certified them as good to go. Again, Haskins had to coach under deep scholarship cuts -- only this time the NCAA limited UTEP's total number of rides, as well as the number of new ones the Miners could offer. The program hasn't righted itself since. To Haskins, the most mortifying thing about all this was that Mr. Iba, then still alive, might have thought that Rope wasn't doing right by the way he'd been taught. Why, no one knew better than Mr. Iba that no coach worth his clipboard would ever consent to let a player have him by the short-and-curlies. "If I'd have got caught in recruiting violations -- buying 'em cars or giving 'em money -- I'd have quit then," Haskins says, "but I've done my damnedest to do it the right way. I don't feel like I caused this mess. I'd like to get this thing in a little better shape, get things right again, but how can I do that with only two scholarships a year?" Some friends and followers believe that Haskins, owing to bad luck and a big heart, can't really afford to quit. "It's not to that point," he says. "Don't want it to seem like I'm on skid row." But he admits to a number of financial misadventures over the years. Several years ago Haskins sank $22,500 into a scheme to grow lettuce. Anytime the sky darkened, he would turn into a fretful mess, fearing what rain or hail might do to his precious heads. Once he ran out into his yard in his boxer shorts, ready to stare down the sky. He lost his investment, not because of bad weather but because someone somewhere else offered lettuce at a better price. "We had the greatest lettuce you'd ever see, and we had to turn it over," Haskins says. "You'd think it was about weather, but it's not, see. It's about supply and demand." Floyd and others tell of the time Haskins, returning from a hunting trip, came across a poor family stranded because their car had broken down. He gave them a lift and put them up in a hotel until the garage had done its work. "I can't imagine how much money he's given away," Floyd says. "Every morning we'd meet at this little coffee shop. Nobody was ever there, and this little lady would always come over to serve us. We'd never have more than two cups of coffee, but he always left a $10 tip." During the 1980s, Floyd says, Haskins was "literally supplementing his income going out and killing coyotes. I remember him killing seven in one day. He had the hides in the back of his pickup. I think they were going for $75 a pelt." Long ago Haskins had a chance to coach the Dallas Chaparrals of the ABA, and over the years he was courted by his alma mater, now known as Oklahoma State, and by Washington and the University of Detroit, which offered three times what he was earning in El Paso at the time and ended up hiring a man named Dick Vitale. Haskins turned everyone down. "If you're gonna make money," he says, "you've gotta go to a high-profile school." Nothing, however, set Don and Mary further back every which way than the death in 1994 at age 42 of the oldest of their four sons, Mark, after a long illness. Insurance covered most of Mark's medical care, but bills still gouged out a piece of the Haskins's savings, which included a $500,000 annuity arranged for Don in the late '80s by a circle of wealthy UTEP boosters. His son's death is one of those places Don resolutely won't go. "I didn't take care of myself real well," he will say. "Fifteen years ago I thought I was going to coach forever. Now I know better." Yet he continues to show up faithfully at the Don Haskins Center -- right across Mesa Avenue from where Mary works part time as a travel agent -- not so much because there isn't enough money in the bank, but because there's so much of himself invested in the program. "They should almost have exit counseling for some of these guys," says Majerus. "Tark [Fresno State coach Jerry Tarkanian] wants to win one more. [Former Dayton coach Don] Donoher hung on, and now he doesn't remember the Final Four he went to or the 437 wins -- only the last few seasons when he lost. Don Haskins reminds me of the milk horse my grandpa had in Sheboygan. Once he'd hitched it up, that horse didn't want to do anything else its entire life." "Don't know what it was like where you grew up...." Haskins has launched into another story, one that throws light on his sympathy for the customerless waitress, for the family whose car broke down, for Norm Ellenberger. It illuminates what Floyd calls Haskins's "tremendous appreciation for people who have been through hard times." Haskins is telling the tale of Herman Carr: "...but Enid was set on a town square. I lived on the east side, and like in most towns of that era, blacks lived on the other side of town. Back then I played basketball daylight to dark. It was my sophomore year or so that I met Herman in the park. I was supposedly one of the better players at my high school. He played for [all-black] Booker T. Washington. He was 6'2". We'd play, never more than the two of us, and it was always a battle." Though only 6'1", Haskins could dunk. He loved the game so much that he spent the nights of his junior and senior proms shooting hoops in the gym while his classmates swanned on the far side of a curtain. "Thought everybody was crazy but me," he says. But being called one of the best players in the state, being invited to play for Mr. Iba, didn't mean quite as much when you knew there was someone just across town who might be better than you but wasn't permitted to play with you. "Would have been nice to have played with Herman in high school," Haskins says. "I remember just thinking how unfair it was that this guy couldn't play. Unfortunately, there wasn't a little more equality back then." That's the closest thing to a ringing social statement you'll get from Haskins. "They made it a big deal after the Kentucky game," he says of his long-ago role as basketball's Earl Warren. "That particular night, believe me, I'm not thinking about that. We got home, and all of that was a total shock to me. The mail, it started a week or two later. Got about a year of it. 'Dear Niggerlover.' And every once in a while a letter from a black leader saying that I was an exploiter. That hurt a little bit. To say I went in there waving the flag, that's not true. I just played my best guys, like any coach would do. There were three black players on the team when I arrived in El Paso. It's not like I started it." But there's this thing about stories: Others can tell them, too. Andy Stoglin, the coach at Jackson State and a former Miner, tells of a time during the 1962-63 season that Haskins called him into his office: "Coach Haskins isn't a real talkative guy, but I could tell something was bothering him. He asked me to sit down in his chair, his chair, and he pulled out a drawer. He dumped a bunch of letters on top of his desk and asked me to read them while he left the room. They said he was playing too many niggers, stuff like that: hate mail. He came back 15 minutes later and asked me if I'd read enough. He said, 'I know you realize you're one of the starters. But the reason I don't start you at home' -- and he said he hated this -- 'is that we have to win enough games and then maybe someday we can change things.'" Richardson was also a Miner that season and, like Stoglin, is black. He remembers Haskins telling him the day of a game that he wouldn't be starting that night. The coach told Richardson much the same thing he'd told Stoglin, adding that he believed Richardson -- a senior and an El Pasoan -- could cope better than any of his black teammates with what Haskins made clear he regarded as an injustice. Says Richardson, "Right before game time he says, 'Richardson! Piss on 'em, you're starting. Piss on what they'll say.'" In their recountings both Richardson and Stoglin stress that they respected Haskins that much more for having shared his anguish. And their stories suggest that if he really was oblivious to the significance of what he did in 1966, it's because he had first taken a stand several years before. Yet Haskins denies any recollection of Richardson's and Stoglin's accounts. Read them to him, so his memory might respond to the prod of detail, and he's even more emphatic. "I don't recall this sack of letters," he says of Stoglin's story. "Andy said that?" And of Richardson's story: "Don't remember that ever happening." Then he offers a deflective yarn: "We were in Dallas the next year [after beating Kentucky] to play SMU. Took a call before the game from someone who promised, 'I'm gonna shoot your nigger-loving ass.' Shed was running around in the pregame huddle. Asked him what he was doing, and he said, 'Figure if I'm a moving target, I'll be tougher to hit.' "I told the FBI and the police about that, sure. But you might be the first one other than them I've told. What was to be gained by going public with all that? Was just some redneck. Some crackpot." There's only one problem with Haskins's failure to recall the stories that Richardson and Stoglin tell. He has a snare of a memory. He ticks off phone numbers on demand. He summons in a trice details about people and places from his past. His former players say this: When he tells you he doesn't recall, don't believe it. He remembers everything. "I know him like a book," says Richardson. "I guarantee you he's not going to say he did what he did. He doesn't want any type of credit for anything." Adds Stoglin, "Don Haskins is one of the most honest people I've ever known. The only time he won't be honest is if you say something good about him." It's still exam period, and UTEP has a new opponent with which to stagger through a game: Texas Southern, a historically black college in Houston that lost its chance to attract the best African-American players in the land because of what Haskins and Texas Western did 33 years ago. The crowd in the Don Haskins Center seems beset with the same indifference afflicting the Miners. "Awwwwwright!" says the man on the mike, with a kind of dutiful enthusiasm. "Time for some noise!" Nothing happens. Only with a late effort do the Miners flick Texas Southern away. Afterward Haskins repairs to an RV parked in the lot outside the arena. If there were a Don Haskins Center true to its eponym, this would be it: a structure small and anonymous, with wheels attached so that, on a whim, it might take a man up into the hills for the day. Haskins and two doctor friends call the place the Swamp Cooler. Its owner -- a pediatric dentist named Hampton Briggs -- and Bill Dickey, a urologist who serves as an unofficial team physician, meet Haskins there after many home games. The Scotch pours forth, more stories do too, with Haskins doing most of the talking: "There was that time David Lattin was getting a little chesty, so we left him at home for the Utah State game, and we passed him hitchhiking on the highway, but David made it to Logan anyhow and said we'd never have another problem with him again, and we didn't.... "...and the pecan orchards outside La Mesilla, which you oughta see in the springtime, when they're green and the boughs arch out over the road, and be sure to stop by Chopie's on Highway 28 on your way back, but only between noon and 1:30, 'cause they're closed the rest of the time.... "...out there where the land's so fertile it could make you cry, so why wouldn't a man sink twenty-two-five into growing lettuce, though I'm not into playing that game anymore.... "...and I'll never vote for another Republican again, not after what they've done to that guy, though it's a mess of things he's made in Iraq.... "...says Dr. Dickey, who I was once out shooting whitewing with -- " "Was pigeons, wasn't it?" "No, you pecker checker, it was whitewing, and on the way back the air conditioning in the truck broke down, and this was the middle of the desert, see, and I didn't have the faintest what to do, so I turned to Dr. Dickey, and he just shrugged and said, 'If it ain't bleedin', I can't fix it.'" There is no great battle to be fought in the Swamp Cooler. No society gets integrated here, no child's illness gets cured, no grand inquisitor is brought to heel. But neither can any shrapnel from the skirmishes of life pierce the Swamp Cooler's steel and further wound a man who has chosen to hunker down here. In the Swamp Cooler there's an audience that delights in a particular past being recounted, just so, by this man who has but one abiding, overriding wish: to be regarded not as saint, not as sinner, but as just plain innocent. There's yet another story, from when Haskins was a college sophomore. "Back then they held the All-College Tournament in Oklahoma City around Christmas, and it was one of the highlights of the season. Made all-tournament that year, and afterward Mr. Iba didn't play me for three straight games. Asked him about it years later. I said, 'Coach?' -- he let me call him Coach by then -- 'remember how I made all-tournament at the All-College and you didn't play me for three straight games?' "He said he didn't recall. Which is a lie because he remembered everything." For presiding over college hoops' Brown v. Board of Education, Haskins would get credit for changing the game irrevocably. Today, the names of the players who unnerved Kentucky's shooters that night still resonate with a kind of forerunning cool. "Over Christmas break Iba would have us go nine to noon, two to five and seven to 10," Haskins says. "No water. No sitting." For a golden while Floyd sat at Haskins's elbow, and enough basketball talent flowed into El Paso. To Haskins, the most mortifying thing about NCAA sanctions was what Mr. Iba might have thought. Issue date: March 1, 1999
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