Game Over 
Duke of Dunbar
Last spring, when the Fort Worth school's head basketball coach won his fifth state championship and became the winningest coach in high school basketball history, most people figured he would finally walk away from the game. Most people don't know.
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Except, in Hughes's mind, for one guy. That afternoon he was particularly dissatisfied with Chris Evans, a tall, muscular forward who is the only starter who wasn't on the varsity last year. "In some ways, Chris is the most important player out there," Hughes told me. And so he's harder on him than on the others. When Chris made a shot in the paint, Hughes yelled, "You were in there too long!" When a pass flew off one of Chris's hands, Hughes yelled, "Who fumbles more balls than anyone here? Now, why would you try to catch it with one hand? You can't catch it with two!" A player has to have a thick skin to play for Coach Hughes. He almost never tells his kids they're playing well, and this, one assumes, is the burden of pushing them to be great. But sometimes Hughes' stone face softens and it looks like he's smiling. When he does this, it seems like he's thinking what anyone in his right mind would be thinking: Man, these kids are good.
IN THE STOP SIX NEIGHBORHOOD, basketball—or more specifically, Dunbar basketball—is life. Here they talk about the shots Derrick Daniels made in the mid-eighties, the moves Charles Smith made in the mid-nineties, and the dunks Jeremis Smith made last week. The neighborhood kids hang out and shoot hoops at the King Center, and it is here that young boys, eight and nine years old, get their first sense of what Dunbar basketball is all about when they come to learn to play or just to watch the local heroes in the varsity practice. It's at the center that many current Wildcats heard about the Coach, the old man, the guy who yelled at you but made you better. Jared Watley still remembers being in the sixth grade and coming to the center to watch his big brother practice. His father had played for Hughes too, so Jared had heard the stories. "I wanted to play for Dunbar from then on," he says.
Hughes's legend hangs over Stop Six the way Vince Lombardi's does over Green Bay. Like that old-school taskmaster, Hughes has always been seen as a father figure here, and one reason is, he takes care of his own, and he does it, as Sinatra might have said, his way. For example, on October 6, Jeremis, Jeff, and reserve guard Marcus Samuels were arrested for stealing $105 worth of DVDs and CDs from a local Target. Hughes was furious and treated them the way he's always treated his players. "If you step over the line in this program," he told me, "there's a penalty. You're going to have to pay for it. Those three guys are going to be running so much they'll feel like they're on an Olympic marathon team." Some wanted him to kick them off the team, but Hughes was unmoved. "I don't want to get in a debate. It's like some countries—if you steal a biscuit, they cut your arm off. What we do has worked for thirty years. We can handle Dunbar. We can handle our problems here."
Hughes hates talk; he only reluctantly spoke about the shoplifting incident. Like any other stern, no-nonsense guy who reads westerns in his spare time, he's a man of deeds. And as his former players will tell you, it's not important what he says about loyalty or discipline, hard work or responsibility; former Baylor University coach Dave Bliss used to talk about all those things too. "It's one thing to just be a disciplinarian without setting high standards," says James Cash, who went on from Terrell to become the first black player in the Southwest Conference, at TCU in 1965, and who eventually became a senior associate dean of the Harvard Business School. "That wasn't Coach Hughes. I wouldn't be what I am today without him and the lessons he taught. Not because he told me I was supposed to act this way but because of the ways he acted. This guy would not let anybody throw him off."
Once, when Cash was in his second year at TCU, he called Hughes after a bad night in Mobile, Alabama, when the refs kept whistling him for no cause, trying to make a black teenager lose his cool. It was 1967, the first year Terrell was playing white teams, and Hughes told Cash about his own experiences with blatantly bad calls. Cash remembers, "He was very angry, but he ended up laughing. He said, 'And they think this is going to break me?' He taught me to stay focused on the task at hand, not to get distracted because people didn't like me for the color of my skin or something else. There was no chance anything thrown at me at TCU would throw me off my stride."
Cash comes back every year to watch the Wildcats play. Many of Hughes's ex-players return, sometimes practicing with the current team, sometimes just going to the games. Dunbar, they all say, is a family; this is home. Mostly they come to see the old man, the one who pushed them so hard, sometimes too hard; the loner who preaches a team game; the man who hates showboating yet loves winning, who hates the drawing of attention to oneself yet whose team thrives on it; the man who suffered the humiliations of Jim Crow yet puts his kids through the hell of Bob Hughes; the man who uses discipline and hard work to help kids play a game to perfection. The man determined to prove one more time that you are better than number five or number six. You're not like every-damn-body else. And neither is he.
The day of the big game, november 18, was like any other; Hughes saw to that. There was no pep rally at the school, even though this was the first game of the season in a quest to be repeat champs and even though it was a match against DeSoto, the only team to beat Dunbar last year. "We don't do pep rallies," Hughes had told me. The players held their own rally just before the game, in the hallway at the Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center. Led by Jeremis, who had just signed a letter of intent to play at Georgia Tech, they clapped, jumped, and chanted "Whoop! Yeah!" for a minute or so while six thousand fans waited. Rambo put his fingers in his ears, and Hughes stood patiently to the side, head down. He wore a blue blazer, slacks, dress shoes, and a shirt and tie.
With Hughes standing on the sidelines of the Robert Hughes Court (it was renamed last year), Dunbar jumped out to a quick 7-0 lead. The first substitution came after Chris Evans threw the ball away—straight into Hughes's arms. Shaking his head in disgust, Hughes marched straight to his bench, pointed at Naterian, and sat Chris down. After a thundering dunk by Jeremis and a withering fast break, Dunbar led 20-8.
And then it all fell apart. DeSoto started pressing, and Dunbar started turning the ball over. DeSoto began hitting three-pointers, and Dunbar seemed powerless to stop them. All of a sudden DeSoto was doing everything Dunbar was known for—crisp passing, smart shooting, aggressive pressing—and the Flying Wildcats looked like house tabbies. At halftime DeSoto was up 40-39. In the second half, Dunbar kept trying to get the ball in to Jeremis, and he kept getting fouled, but he was making only about half of his free throws. Dunbar had no spark, no snap, and Hughes was furious, calling players over and yelling at them or benching them. Nothing seemed to work.
With three minutes left, DeSoto had a three-point lead and the ball; they went into a slow-down offense, passing back and forth, waiting for Dunbar to try to make a steal. With 47 seconds left, Dunbar fouled, and the teams traded free throws for the next 40 seconds. Then, with 7 ticks left on the clock and his team down by three, Jeremis made an inbounds pass and was handed it back. He frantically dribbled half the length of the court through a crowd of defenders to a spot 35 feet from the basket, where, with 2 seconds remaining, he leaped, leaned, and launched an off-balance shot.
The ball curved through the air in a perfect arc and snapped right through the basket. The gym erupted. Dunbar had tied the game, sending it to overtime, yet Hughes stood as he had been standing the whole game. Impassively. Furious. And though the Wildcats controlled the overtime period, they continued to turn the ball over and miss open shots. Worst of all, they weren't hitting their free throws. With eighteen seconds left and a comfortable five-point lead, Hughes was out on the floor yelling at Jeff, who was about to shoot two more free throws. He hit only one. Hughes's expression didn't change as the buzzer sounded, and he walked off the court alone, looking down and fuming.
The players waited in the locker room, enveloped in a sense of dread. They had just beaten the defending 5A champs in a revenge match they had been looking forward to for a year. Yet it felt like somebody had died. Or was about to. Hughes walked in. "A word to the wise," he said, measuring his syllables. "If I was you, I wouldn't say a thing. I wouldn't talk to anybody." After a pause, he added, "We missed enough free throws to last a season." He seemed ready to go on but stopped, as if there were too many sins to enumerate. He walked out.
The DeSoto win was number 1,283, and more would follow. But for Hughes, it would not be enough, nor would it ever be.
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