Duke of Dunbar
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When he got out, Texas Southern University offered him a basketball scholarship to play under coach Edward Adams. "We ran like the wind," Hughes remembers. "And worked hard." Adams would be Hughes's biggest influence. "I was a finesse guy, a shooter, but I played everywhere—guard, low post, wing. That's why I ride my players to be good at everything." Playing at a tournament in Memphis in 1955, he met Jacquelyne Johnson, who was from Tulsa and who was also part Creek Indian. They later married and had four kids. That same year he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, but he had just torn his Achilles tendon, and he gave up playing. He returned to Oklahoma and went to the University of Tulsa, which had recently opened itself up to blacks, graduating in 1957. Landing a job as a mechanic at Douglas Aircraft and making good money, Hughes was content until Adams called, asking if he had considered coaching. Hughes said he wasn't interested, but Adams persisted and got him a job at I. M. Terrell High School, in Fort Worth.
At the time, if you were a black kid in or near Fort Worth, you went to Terrell, no matter if you lived across the street from a white school or in Weatherford, thirty miles away. There were a few public school buses, but most of Terrell's three thousand students got there by walking, getting a ride, or taking public transportation. Never mind that segregation had been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. In the beginning, Brown desegregated the country's schools in name only, and states like Texas found ways to drag their feet.
Under Hughes, Terrell dominated black basketball in Fort Worth. In 1963 the team won its first Prairie View Interscholastic League title (the organization for black high schools), then two more, in 1965 and 1967. Terrell played the style Hughes had learned from Adams: run, pass, lob, dunk, press, crash the boards. Some called it hully-gully ball, or playground ball. "We were playing today's game back in the sixties," says Wayne Lewis, a guard on two of those championship teams. "We were doing the alley-oop lob pass to six-foot-two guys in 1964. Every fourth or fifth trip down the floor was a dunk."
When the UIL finally began integrating, in 1967, Terrell started playing white teams, many of which were befuddled by the frantic offense and stifling defense. The referees, too, seemed unwilling to accept the Terrell brand of basketball. "We weren't prepared for the officiating," Hughes says about those days. "It was blatant. We were playing basketball, but these other teams were playing full-contact karate. The refs would call us for three-second violations, offensive goaltending, carrying the ball. There's not much you can do." Hughes didn't protest the calls, refusing to give the officials the opportunity to call him for technical fouls.
Hughes rode his players harder then than he does now, practicing almost every day, all year long, demanding perfection. "My biggest problem," he recalls, "was to keep from smiling when I was in this serious mode. I realized I've got to be stone-faced when dealing with players." He was a harsh disciplinarian, using a paddle that he called "the board of education." "He never hit you in a way that you thought was him trying to hurt you," says James Cash, who played for Terrell from 1963 to 1965. "It was used mostly on freshmen and sophomores, in a kind of a socialization process, getting you to perform as a team. But if the man you were guarding in practice scored a layup, he would say to you, 'Come by me,' or 'Bring it by me,' and you'd go to the sideline and he'd give you the board of education."
Some of the Terrell players had no father, and the churchgoing, nonsmoking, teetotaling Hughes became a surrogate. He was hyperresponsible, picking the boys up at five-thirty or six in the morning and driving them to Terrell for morning practice, then, when the afternoon practice was finished, driving them home again. When they played out of town, he shepherded them over a network of friendly roads and stopped at restaurants he knew would accept a bunch of black adults and kids. They didn't always sidestep the ugliness, though. Lewis remembers a trip to Texarkana in 1963. "We stopped at a Sonic to get something to eat," he told me. "The waitresses wouldn't serve us. We just sat there while they skated by our cars."
Terrell was closed in 1973, and Hughes took his record of 373-84 into the job market. Black coaches weren't exactly in demand for college jobs, and even at the high school level, they were given poor choices. Initially, Hughes was offered only an assistant coaching job at a local high school. He declined. He was eventually offered the head job at Dunbar, an all-black school a block from his house in the Stop Six neighborhood in southeast Fort Worth (it got its name from being near the sixth stop on the old Dallas-Fort Worth rail line). Dunbar High hadn't had a winning season since it opened, in 1953, and in Hughes's first year, many of the upperclassmen quit. They couldn't abide the practices—before and after school and on Saturday mornings. Hughes played the season with mostly freshmen and sophomores and went 12-12. "It was probably my best coaching job," he says now. By 1976 Hughes had led Dunbar to the state playoffs.
Dunbar was finally integrated in 1980, and as the decade progressed, although the Wildcats won a lot of games and district titles, Hughes developed a rep for not winning the big one. By 1993 Dunbar had been to the Final Four nine times and lost three championship games. But that year, with the high-scoring duo of Charles Smith and Anthony Burks, the Wildcats won their first UIL title, sweetening a season in which Hughes also won his 1,000th game.
After a drought in the late nineties (Hughes had his first losing season in 1999), Dunbar returned to the semifinals in 2001 and won it all last year. By the end of the season, Hughes and the Wildcats were the biggest high school sports story in the state, and he had finally gotten some of the recognition that had long eluded him. "It doesn't make up for all the wrongs I've been through," said Hughes. "But, like Frank Sinatra said, 'It was a very good year'—all forty-five of them." But what is it, I asked, that drives you to do it again in year 46? "The same thing that drove me last year," he replied. "I'm probably your ultimate competitor. I'd miss walking into the hostile gymnasium. I'd miss the preparation, developing players to fit a position you know you need to fill to be successful."
But what are you trying to prove? "It's not so much to prove anything. I am a competitor. That's what I do. My engine runs at the maximum. It has always run at the maximum. To cut it off and say that's it—I don't think so."
And what happens to the engine when you finally do retire? "That's going to be a problem."
On october 27, three weeks before their opening game, the Wildcats held their first official practice. The session was most notable for the appearance of assistant coach Rambo, who was beginning his thirtieth year with Hughes. As Hughes slowly walked one side of the court, scowling, hands behind his back, Rambo, much shorter and with a prodigious Afro, walked the other, mirroring him, hands behind his back, looking for all the world like Sancho Panza to Hughes's Don Quixote. Rambo is the friendly face, the intermediary with the parents, the good cop. "The scowling," he told me later about his boss, "is just to let the player know, 'I'm not satisfied, and we've worked on it so much. Either you're refusing to do it, or I'm not getting through to you.'"
The practice began with drills up and down the court—fast breaks, passing, layups. But soon Hughes had the first team playing the second, back and forth, back and forth. "We learn by repetition," he told me. "Whether it's your ABCs or counting to one hundred or playing our set offense. It becomes automatic after you've been doing it for three or four years." The truth is, the reason the team looks so good is that they've been playing almost all year long. They took two weeks off after the state tournament and then, in April, the pre-season started for the returning varsity, with weight-lifting, conditioning, and workouts at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, five blocks from the school. By the summer they were practicing four days a week—the starting five playing together as a team, usually about three hours a day—plus they played thirty games in tournaments and shoot-outs. The Dunbar off-season head coach is ex-Terrell star Wayne Lewis. His assistants are Derrick Daniels, who played for Dunbar from 1985 to 1987; Vernon Newton, who played for Dunbar from 1981 to 1983; and Otis Evans, who did the same from 1988 to 1991. "We're prep fanatics," says Lewis, who stays in almost daily contact with his mentor. "I know what he wants, what he looks for, what he asks for from his players."
The boys continued practicing after school started in the fall, plus they played in several pre-season shoot-outs. Players on the Dunbar first team get to know each other's strengths and weaknesses—who can jump how high, who can shoot from where, who can dribble through what kind of a press—far better and far sooner than those on other high school teams, only a few of which set up operations like Dunbar's. So by the first official day of practice, while other teams were still trying to figure out who would get which uniform, Dunbar was already in pretty good shape.
