I came across a lot of interesting stories during the research and writing of my 1998 book Longhorn Hoops / The History of Texas Basketball. Some were curious, some were amusing, and some begged for more attention. In the latter category I would put Rodney Page.
He never played basketball at UT, but Page had a pair of degrees from the University of Houston and had helped coach the women’s team there. In 1974, he was hired to take over the Texas women’s program—if that term may be used. Women’s basketball was then emerging from the dark ages. Most home games were at a tiny campus gym, the uniforms had skirts, the players furnished their own transportation to out-of-town games, and there was almost no money and no support from the university. The media basically ignored them. Page, although very careful about treating his players as women, pushed them in terms of conditioning and competition. The results? Victories rose from 7 in 1974 to 17 in 1975 to 21 in 1976, by which time they were playing in Gregory Gym before many more fans. That is progress.
Page's players, like Rita Egger, Lorene McClellan, Retha Swindell and Cathy Self, were devoted to him. They loved him, respected him and knew what he had done for female hoops at the University of Texas. So they were more than a bit upset when news came that he was out of a job. Donna Lopiano had been hired as the first women’s athletic director at UT, and to her it made little difference what Page had done over the last three years. A fire-breathing feminist, she could not bear the thought of a man coaching the women’s basketball team. Page, in Lopiano’s view, simply had to go.
It should be remembered that Page had taken the position because nobody else wanted it. The pay was minimal, and the conditions would have discouraged even the most optimistic of coaches. But he signed on and succeeded in every way. At this point, I must discuss the sensitive matter of race. Page was black. Until Swindell came along, all his players were European American. Lopiano was European-American, as well. Every other coach in every sport in University of Texas history had been of European descent. It spoke well for UT to have a black coach who certainly had not been hired due to so-called affirmative action or European-American guilt. The guy was a superb coach who deserved to keep his job when funding of the women’s athletic department jumped by 800% over a four-year span.
But no, Page had been fired. Lopiano offered a lame excuse—that she needed a coach to handle both basketball and volleyball. While few people took what she said at face value, the UT administration let her have her way. Page, who was sorely tempted to lash out or file a wrongful termination lawsuit, refrained from doing that. My interviews with him were painful because we both knew he had been badly treated.
Two days after Page's termination, Lopiano hired Jody Conradt (European-American, of course) to take his place. She had experience coaching volleyball—and did so in Austin for two years—but let’s not pretend that had anything to do with it. Conradt was female, and neo-sexism had prevailed. Over the next 31 years, she won a lot of games—783, to be precise. One would hope so since Conradt had been handed the keys to a high-powered Maserati when most of her peers were getting by with horses and buggies, if you will forgive the cliché. The Longhorns won a national championship in 1986 and came close a couple of other times. Conradt, of whom I am actually quite fond, was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1998.
UT had inherent advantages over most other schools (money, facilities, fan base, etc.), but the gap closed over the years. Conradt’s girls could barely win 50% of their games in 2006 and 2007. Finally, to all the hosannas you can imagine, she stepped down. I wondered what Rod Page thought at that time. He would never have said it, but I had no hesitation in telling people that if he had been allowed to stay on the job back in the mid-1970s and not gotten interference from Lopiano, Texas would have won more games and more championships.
These days, the University of Texas, like most American institutions of higher learning, is obsessed with “diversity.” How great would it have been if Page, who turned around the women’s hoops program, had been doing all that winning? A natural, organic and wholly positive evolution with a black man in charge of the program: Now, that would have been a reason for all Longhorns to stand up and cheer.
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