As a candidate for Most Interesting Man in the World, College Basketball Division, few people can match Rus Bradburd. He spent eight years at UTEP as an assistant to Don Haskins, then six at New Mexico State, the final three under Lou Henson. But that only hints at Bradburd’s accomplishments. Imagine being 65 and able to point to these notches on the belt of life:
- Won an NCAA Division III title as a reserve guard at Chicago’s North Park College
- Discovered Tim Hardaway in the badlands of the Windy City and delivered him to Haskins
- Coached in seven NCAA tournaments by age 31, and recruited the career leading scorers at both UTEP and New Mexico State
- Tutored Jerry West’s son Jonnie — and several Memphis Grizzlies — in the art of dribbling
- Founded Basketball in the Barrio, now in its 33rd year, a hoops-and-heritage summer program in El Paso’s poorest neighborhood
- Spent a couple of seasons in Ireland guiding the Tralee Tigers to a Super League title and learning to play a tasty Irish fiddle — adventures recounted in his enchanting 2006 memoir, Paddy on the Hardwood
That book, undergirded by an M.F.A. from New Mexico State, marked the beginning of Bradburd’s reinvention as a writer. Until retiring from an NMSU professorship last May, he taught creative writing, and he continues to add to an output that includes the Nolan Richardson biography Forty Minutes of Hell; All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, which tells the courageous story of another former recruit, the gun violence survivor and ex-Aggie Shawn Harrington; and Make It, Take It, a short story collection set in the cauldron of major college basketball.
Bradburd’s most recent effort is his first novel, Big Time (Etruscan Press), about fictional Coors State University. The beer company has bought up naming rights to the school, and the fortunes of a menagerie of characters (athletes and coaches, but professors and administrators too) hang on the fate of the Silver Bullets. A couple of fed-up faculty lead a campus protest movement called “a March Away from Madness,” and the school president gets waterboarded with tallboys of Coors. Through it all, as the pep band plays the Coors State fight song, “Mountain Cold Refreshment,” Bradburd spares no one — not the hopelessly divided and haunted-by-the-’60s faculty; nor the entitled, martinet coaches and legions of toadies at their disposal.
“When I left college coaching in 2000, I was the last assistant in America without a cell phone,” Bradburd says. “I was still fumbling for coins to make a call.” He eventually settled into a healthier relationship with college sports — one where, as the New York Times put it in 2010, he’s “more comfortable writing about it than living it. It’s a better way to express his love.”
Bradburd lives in Las Cruces with his wife, the poet and English professor Connie Voisine, and their daughter, Alma. You can hear him fiddle on Sunday afternoons at the Spotted Dog, a brew pub in La Mesilla on Route 28 (a.k.a “The Lou Henson Highway”), a mile from the New Mexico State campus. Learn more about him at rus-bradburd.com and reach him at rus.bradburd@gmail.com.
I caught up with Bradburd to ask him about Big Time and the regularly rocked world of college sports.
What led you to write a comic novel about major college sports?
Being the new guy in the world of academia sitting in on my first faculty meetings got me started. The contrast between sports and academia was jolting. I already knew, of course, about the crazed mania surrounding college sports, but what I had to come to grips with was the impotence and apathy of the faculty and admins. Like any writer, I was trying to figure out exactly what I had stumbled on to. When I started writing the novel in 2012, I felt a real sense of urgency, which caused me all kinds of problems, trying to rush the book to completion: I’ve got to get Big Time finished before college sports are brought back down to earth, put in perspective. Thank goodness for the book that in the end that wasn’t an issue. And I feel like I should mail Deion Sanders a “Coors State University” hoodie for making the book have the urgency I wanted to capture.
What was the biggest challenge of satirizing that world? It seems to do a pretty good job of lampooning itself.
It’s almost beyond parody, right? I wanted to mock the academic side of the equation, but I grew to really love the five main characters. That’s a fine line, to expose their flaws but still make them loveable. That’s what I love about William Trevor, one of my favorite short story writers. As deeply screwed up as his characters are, it’s clear that he deeply loves them. He’s the gold standard in that regard.
If I had to divine your sympathies for the respective interest groups in Big Time, I’d say the coaches have the least redeeming qualities. Would you assign degrees of villainy to the various archetypes in college sports?
On every big state school campus there’s a battle for dollars, and not just among football and basketball. Sure, the head football coach at Coors State comes off poorly, but these guys are the kings of their fiefdom in a way that even pro coaches don’t enjoy. The dumbing down of our campuses has been going on so long that nobody notices anymore, and in my view we’re all at fault. You can see the implications in today’s America: you get used to bad behavior, then it gets accepted and becomes the norm.
Picks Against the Spread: How to Bet a Wild Wednesday Slate of Games
Who should you bet on today?We know the obvious differences between academia and athletics, but do the two have anything in common?
I think sports, and team sports in particular, can be great “classrooms.” Recently I read Dave Hollander’s book How Basketball Can Save the World. I’d never thought of the game in that way, the give and take, the teamwork, the mindset, the connectedness. One of my true heroes, [former NFL player and Out of Their League author] David Meggyesy, once told me that we might think of college basketball like a diamond ring: in the diamond business there’s an ugly trail leading up to the final product. But isn’t the diamond beautiful? Meggyesy said that at the end of the day, it’s still an incredible game, and that’s why we all keep going back.
We read fiction as an act of empathy, and in Big Time you show real compassion for most of your characters, almost regardless of where in the sports industrial complex they find themselves. Don Haskins and Lou Henson were enormously compassionate people — how did they influence the way you treat others?
Don Haskins and Lou Henson, on the surface, were very different. To distill it crudely, Haskins believed in the power of gruff negative thinking, and Lou Henson was the opposite. But they were quite similar if you dug below the surface. Haskins had such a huge role in desegregating college sports with his 1966 team, but Henson had desegregated Hardin-Simmons well before that, in a touchier part of Texas, where he’d even insisted on hiring a Mexican-American assistant coach.
A little-known side of Don Haskins is that he was a talented artist who’d won a national competition as a high schooler. I think anyone who paints or draws has to look at the world in a different way, and Haskins certainly did that, as far as race was concerned. Maybe the great tragedy of Lou Henson’s life was when his son Lou Jr. died in a car crash on an icy interstate in 1992, five years before I worked for his father. Lou Jr. was a closeted writer with a collection of short stories and poems which were very good by any measure. But I didn’t know that when I told Coach Henson one day in late August of 2000 that I was quitting to become a writer. He walked out of the meeting and my heart sank — I’d let Lou down! He returned a couple minutes later with the athletics director, a man named Brian Faison. They announced that the department would pay for my graduate school. It wasn’t the buyout some coaches get, but it was a huge boost and, more importantly, a vote of loving confidence from Lou that I’ll never forget.
As someone with a foot in both worlds, did you find yourself trying to close the gap between athletics and academics at New Mexico State? How can it be done?
In a word, storytelling. That means books, but let me circle back to that. There’s a tradition, as small as it is, of deep-thinking athletes, the well-rounded competitor. That’s David Meggyesy, Bill Russell, Steve Kerr, Tom Meschery, Dawn Staley, Curt Flood and countless others. Coaches like Paul Westhead and Phil Jackson. To my ear, the most compelling part of Jackson’s legacy isn’t the championship rings, it’s the handing out of books to players on an individual basis. Do you recall that, when Ben Osborne was the editor at Slam, there was a monthly column about what book a certain NBA player should read, and why? I think we’re all wired for stories, we crave stories, and it’s the way we understand the world. Lou Henson was, in my view, a Hall of Fame coach (calling Springfield!) and the greatest X&O coach who ever lived. While I can’t recall a single one of his elaborate plays, I’ve got some great stories about him. Nolan Richardson was probably our greatest basketball psychologist, with his remarkably nuanced understanding of 15 complex teenage mindsets — but it’s the stories of his life, not the Ph.D-level psychoanalysis stuff, that I find more interesting. Anyway, all this to say, books and stories can still change the world. I hope.
With NIL getting traction and real revenue sharing on the horizon, does an athlete advocate like you find it easier to enjoy college sports with a clear conscience?
Yes and no. You couldn’t have it be unrestrained capitalism for the coaches, but socialism for the players. That was a bad idea that got worse. It’s just that the NIL rollout was poorly considered and now things are messy.
I remember being at the playground as a boy when one of our crew approached and announced that Willie Mays had been traded. Willie Mays! Traded! We were astounded. Sports was easier to follow then, and while Curt Flood and Al Attles were giants in pushing for free agency, something was lost at the pro level. Now college kids change teams like we change socks. I have to remind myself: This is the world we’ve given them, we can’t blame them anymore than I can blame my teenage daughter for her cell phone. I keep going back to what Meggyesy taught me, though: At the end of the day, basketball is a truly great game.
You’re a kind of five-tool writer, having tried out everything from narrative non-fiction to biography to short story to novel. What’s your favorite genre and why?
I’m embarrassed to admit that if I could be any kind of writer in the world, it would be a short story writer. And I’m not. The problem is that it’s the most difficult form to do well. Antonya Nelson, William Trevor, Edward P. Jones, Dagoberto Gilb, Robert Boswell, Alistair MacLeod, Eudora Welty, Lee K. Abbott, Flannery O’Connor — I’d rather be any of them, if you can arrange it. Because of the compressed form, the demands of the short story are immense, and I’m simply not talented enough to approach any of the writers listed above — although we can all still treasure them.
What’s next for you on the writing front?
I’m struggling to complete a nonfiction book that began during a Fulbright fellowship in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2022. Despite Belfast’s long history of violence, it’s now a wonderful city, the safest in the U.K., and it’s been getting a huge portion of the refugees for resettlement. Many of the Syrian, Sudanese and Ukrainian children are assimilating through Gaelic football — and nearly all the Irish associated with those Gaelic football clubs have been badly affected by the violent Catholic-vs.-Protestant “Troubles” of Northern Ireland. It’s an odd, unique, niche story, a very small subculture and pocket of the world, but I think there are huge implications within the narrative about the power of sport — and the power of empathy and forgiveness. Almost Like Belonging is the working title, and I think it’s a formidable and strangely redemptive story.
