By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
Frank Broyles was a good football player, a great coach and a legendary athletic director. His unique talent for looking into the future led to a monumental build-up of University of Arkansas athletics between becoming the AD in 1973 and stepping down in 2007.
He died Monday at the age of 92 from complications of Alzheimer’s, and though it may seem a little ironic, it was his post-retirement writing on the subject of Alzheimer’s that was his greatest contribution to mankind.
Broyles’ was never that one-dimensional jock-minded brute personality that some football coaches exude. Even his criticisms sounded heady, even with the thick Georgia accent he never lost despite living in northwest Arkansas three times longer than the early years he spent in his home state.
My own mother was a switchboard operator in Fayetteville in the late 60s. My dad worked for a plumber and sold cars as he and his new bride worked to put him through college.
They attended one Razorback football game together, and it happened to be The Great Shootout against Texas in 1969. They say they sat directly across from Richard Nixon.
Broyles tried to make a phone call during a particularly busy time, and was having to wait his turn for a line. My mother loves to relate the order (accent and all) she received from Fayetteville’s most popular, and possibly powerful, man.
“Well if you would just put fowith a little ayefut.”
She never liked Broyles’ much after that, but even her opinions changed when she discovered his touching caregivers guide.
His book, aptly titled “The Alzheimer’s Playbook”, is a supportive and practical resource for caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients. Broyles was a primary caregiver to his wife Barbara years before he himself was afflicted with the disease. She died from complications of Alzheimer’s in 2004.
For a clear picture of how delicately Broyles handled the subject and how helping and comforting it has been to so many people, just check the nearly 100 reviews of it on Amazon.
Over the course of his career, Broyles revealed many aspects of his personality, and then revealed yet another one after his career with “The Alzheimer’s Playbook.”
As a player, his teammates at Georgia Tech University said he was a fierce competitor. That was also obvious as a coach, but once in charge of the Razorback program, he showed a creative side when he became one of the pioneers of the I-Formation, which was soon duplicated by nearly everyone at every level of football, replacing the old and reliable variants of the T-Formation.
He spent four years as head football coach and athletic director, and in that time began working on building up Arkansas’ other sports programs. Before Broyles, the UA approached other sports as a means to and end. It had to have certain amount of programs to offer to be considered Division I by the NCAA, and they did the bare minimum to meet those requirements.
Broyles began to change that. He hired John McDonnell to head the track program, and gave him the resources he needed to turn it into the greatest NCAA dynasty in the history of American collegiate athletics.
He hired Eddie Sutton and began construction of Barnhill Arena, and the UA was soon on the elite national stage with the likes of UCLA and Indiana.
After Sutton’s departure, Broyles’ peered into the future, and found that it was in nearby Tulsa, Okla. He made Nolan Richardson the first black head coach of a major program in the history of the Southwest Conference, or in the South for that matter.
It wasn’t a popular choice for everyone, but Broyles could see, as with the I-Formation in football, that the frenetic pace set by Richardson’s relentless full-court defense was going to sweep the nation, and it did.
In four years Richardson turned a ragtag team depleted by the turmoil of the end of the Sutton era into a Final Four team. In four more years, he won Arkansas’ first national basketball championship.
Also in the early 90s, Broyles made the highly controversial decision to take Arkansas out of the Southwest Conference, and move into the Southeastern Conference. Not only was that move immensely profitable for the program, it sparked a wave of conference transfers that has made the whole of NCAA sports more profitable.
There were always rumors that while Broyles was a visionary of the big picture, he was too much of a micromanager on the ground floor. Every football and basketball head coach he hired, except for Richardson, ironically, was said to have had a tough time dealing with Broyles’ meddling in his or her operations and game plans.
It might have been true, but several of his hires left unceremoniously and unhappy.
Even though Broyles took a lot of heat for hiring Richardson, he let Richardson do his thing on the court, but even that relationship ended bitterly and controversially, after Richardson was fired.
But Broyles was never one to deny making mistakes.
Lou Holtz, who Broyles hired to replace himself as football coach in 1976, tells the story of how he learned Broyles told the Notre Dame athletic director that firing Holtz was the worst mistake of his career, and they would be fools not to hire him.
He later expressed similar regret about how the Richardson era ended, and has been accepting of the possibility that he perhaps didn’t give coach Jack Crow a fair chance to implement his new system when he fired him after one game in 1992. He finally publicly showed the delicate and caring side he had already shown privately with his Alzheimer’s Playbook, and that will be his lasting legacy, one struggling reader at a time.
