Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

College Basketball

Nolan Richardson deserves to be enshrined

Nolan Richardson was on a roll. That always was a lot of fun.

“Look at what Rick Pitino does,” he said. This was the fall of 1991, and Pitino was just entering the teeth of his tenure at Kentucky, just starting a season that would end with his team playing one of the greatest games of all time against Duke; Richardson’s Arkansas team had been to the Final Four the year before, employing Richardson’s beloved “Forty Minutes of Hell.”

Richardson swigged from a glass of iced tea.

“I love watching Pitino’s teams play. I loved them at Providence, and let me tell you, once he starts getting players, they’re really going to be a lot of fun to watch at Kentucky. Rick’s a great coach. A great coach.”

Now he started to smile, and there’s never been a smile that reflected so many different emotions.

“But tell me if I’m lying: When people watch Pitino’s teams play, they use a lot of different words. They talk about how well-coached they are. They talk about how well-conditioned they are. They talk about how aggressive they are, how they care about defense, and of course how disciplined they are …”

The smile was a laugh now, deep, throaty, guttural.

“And with my teams, they only use one word.”

That word, shortened for use in a family newspaper, was this: “N-ball.”

Richardson gave that talk a lot through the years, and it’s a testament to the eras he bridges and the times in which he coached that it had different impacts at different times. When he was making a name for himself in junior college, winning a national title at Western Texas in Snyder, Texas, he was tuned out because he was an aberration, a black man working a traditionally white-man’s job.

At Tulsa, where he won the NIT, he was looked at as more of an irritant. In the early days at Arkansas — where he was the first African-American hired to be a head coach in Adolph Rupp’s lily-white Southeastern Conference — the whispers were a little uglier, especially early on, when he wasn’t winning much.

And later, once Richardson scaled the mountain, once his ’94 Razorbacks won the NCAA Tournament and he celebrated his greatest triumph by defiantly declaring: “Tell me I still can’t coach!” — what people wanted, more than anything, was this: Tone it down, Nolan. You won. You proved your point. Enjoy yourself.

But that never was Richardson’s way. He had played for Don Haskins at Texas Western (now UTEP) at a time when Haskins was hacking away at basketball stereotypes, missing by two years the Miners’ historic win over Rupp’s Kentucky in the ’66 title game. He adored Haskins, who was white, as he did few others, but it was Richardson who bore much of the brunt of those bad early days in El Paso.

He was stuck coaching high school until his late 30s, didn’t get a chance at Division I until he was 40, played 94 feet the whole time, watched guys like Pitino get credit for “inventing” that style, never stopped reminding anyone who would listen about that — and many who didn’t want to listen.

He was the most complex, most fascinating coach I ever have covered. He could be warm and insulting in the same sentence. He could inspire and infuriate in the same breath. But, damn, could he ever coach. His players didn’t just want to win games, they wanted to win his reputation. They wanted to win so much that nobody would ever forget.

“I would say we loved him,” Corliss Williamson, maybe the best to ever play for him, once said, “but that’s too limiting.”

Richardson was named a finalist Friday for the Naismith Hall of Fame. He has spent most of his professional life waiting — for jobs, for respect, for praise. This one time, it would be right if he only has to wait until Monday of the Final Four, when this year’s class is announced. There can’t be a complete Basketball Hall of Fame if Richardson isn’t in it.

Whack Back at Vac

Andy Romanic: Mike, are you as disappointed in our Olympic curling teams as I am?

Vac: When, oh when will our long national nightmare end?

Stewart Summers: So I was just wondering … which Woody do you think is having a worse 2014, Mike Woodson or Woody Allen?

Vac: I’ll go off the board for Woody Harrelson, whose terrific work in “True Detective” is overshadowed week after week by Matthew McConaughey’s.

@dArefin: Wouldn’t bobsleds travel more efficiently if there were sweepers in front of the sled like in curling?

@MikeVacc: I’ll take ‘Things to ponder once every four years’ for $400, Alex.”

Mitch Berkowitz: After seeing the kudos coming in for Derek Jeter since he announced his retirement, I have to think Alex Rodriquez is beside himself when juxtaposing his impending legacy to that of his best frenemy.

Vac: This would’ve been a good month for Alex to cancel his cable service.

Vac’s Whacks

We get St. John’s-Georgetown game at the Garden tonight with some fairly critical implications for both teams, and suddenly I can’t stop humming Bowling For Soup. Maybe Steve Lavin will wear a sweater.

Some want to point to the Dolphins’ locker room as proof the NFL isn’t ready for gay players, but what’s clear is that Richie Incognito and his crew didn’t much distinguish between straight and gay when it came to acting like meatheads.

Shootouts are fun and all, but isn’t ending a game as wonderful as that USA-Russia tilt Saturday morning like ending a great date at McDonald’s?

Met Jim Fregosi in a concierge lounge one morning, he sat down and immediately started telling me one great story after another … and this was before I told him I knew George King. After that, I got the really good stories. Godspeed.