Free Forty Minutes of Hell by Rus Bradburd

left, Ralph Brewster took a look around the little apartment. The tiny black-and-white television. The malfunctioning air-conditioning. The noisy neighbors. Keep living there? Not likely.
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    Richardson leveled with Brewster in the weeks after his visit to Lubbock. Brewster recalls his coach saying, “Ralph, if you go to Texas Tech, I’ll get to be the coach of Western Texas College.”
    â€œThey’d worked out a package deal,” Brewster says today. “I was going to go wherever Nolan suggested. I had no qualms with that.” And Richardson clearly favored Texas Tech.
    â€œSome of these schools are offering Ralph the world,” Joe Brewster had said to Gerald Myers, the Tech head coach, during their home visit.
    â€œWe don’t do that sort of thing at Texas Tech,” Gerald Myers said.
    â€œBut when I went to Lubbock,” Brewster claims, “every good football player had a Thunderbird or Monte Carlo.”
    Still, Brewster waited. At the end of April, the Tech coaches cornered the Brewsters again in their living room for a final push. This time the Tech coaches were more direct.
    According to Brewster, Rob Evans said, “If you sign, Ralph, Coach Richardson is going to be the next coach at Western TexasCollege. Don’t you want Nolan Richardson to be a college coach?” Package deals and quid pro quo arrangements were standard practice in college sports, but certainly new to El Paso high schools.
    Brewster admitted it would be great if Richardson could be a college coach. He leaned forward on the couch, holding his head in his hands. The apartment seemed to be getting smaller by the minute.
    â€œWhat if Coach Richardson told you to sign with us?” Evans asked. “Would you sign then?”
    Brewster said he would.
    â€œJust a minute,” Evans said.
    â€œThey went outside and got Nolan,” Brewster recalls. “He must have been waiting in the car.”
    Ralph Brewster signed with Texas Tech. It’s possible that without Brewster, Richardson would have either been a school principal or coached his career away at Bowie—although Brewster refuses to stake that claim. “I was a talented player,” he says, “although I wasn’t any All-American. But sure, I went to Tech because it was good for Nolan.”
    In retrospect, Richardson insists Texas Tech was the right choice for Brewster, regardless of the junior college job—UNM was about to implode, and UTEP wasn’t very good at the time. Neither man would have guessed then how Brewster’s career at Tech would unfold.

FIVE
NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME
    S nyder, a tiny oil town halfway between El Paso and Dallas, was named after a buffalo hunter, Pete Snyder, who opened a trading post in 1878. Oil was discovered in Snyder in 1948, and the population tripled. Oil derricks seem to outnumber trees.
    When Western Texas College opened its doors in 1971, Snyder was home to about twelve thousand people, nearly all of them white. The towns in the Western Junior College Athletic Conference are more similar than they are unique. Odessa, the town made famous by Friday Night Lights, is one of those towns. So are Hobbs and Roswell, New Mexico. Throw in Texas towns like Borger, Levelland, Big Spring, Clarendon, and the more upscale Midland, and you have the nation’s premier junior college conference. Former NBA stars Larry Johnson, Spud Webb, and Avery Johnson got their start in this league.
    Director of Athletics Sid Simpson was quickly building a reputation as a shrewd judge of coaches, but college basketball is often aboutfavors and paybacks. Simpson fielded phone calls from all over about the coaching job. “Bobby Knight even called,” Simpson says, “but I figured, what did Bobby Knight know about Snyder? Rob Evans knew our league, had been around it all his life. I trusted him.”
    Even employees of the junior college had suggestions for Simpson. One man had gotten