Oliver Elders was nowhere to be found.
Minutes after a gut-wrenching loss at Pine Bluff, players stood waiting in the visitors locker room for the Little Rock Hall coach to enter, say a few words and tell them to hustle so they could catch their ride back home.
But Elders never made an appearance.
Expecting to see their coach once they set foot on the bus, the Warriors were again stunned to see no sign of Elders on what was a chilly winter's evening.
Fuming because his team had suffered an important conference loss, Elders set out for Pulaski County on foot.
"I'm not a loser," Elders said. "It hurt me to lose. I'm serious. I used to shoot 'keeps' [marbles]. I wanted to win every marble the other folks had.
"I was counseled through a lot of things, but losing wasn't one of them. I didn't know how to take that. It wasn't in my DNA."
Now at 86 -- and 25 years removed from his last day as a high school basketball coach -- Elders remains energetic, sassy and beloved by his former players who know him as more than just a man who blew a whistle in practice.
"The beautiful thing about coach was his consistency," said Allie Freeman, who played on three consecutive state championship teams at Hall before playing four years at the University of Arkansas. "The stuff that he did in the '60s and the '70s, he continued to do them in the '80s and the '90s. The same philosophy. The same type of approaches to the game."
On Monday night, Little Rock Hall will pay tribute to its former coach with an Oliver B. Elders Night. A reception will be held starting at 5 p.m., and Elders and his former players will be recognized between the girls and boys games between Hall and Van Buren.
Born in DeWitt in 1932, Elders graduated from Arkansas AM&N (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) in 1954. He spent 36 years as a coach, the last 35 of which came with the Little Rock School District at Horace Mann and Hall high schools. He completed his career with a 656-310 record, winning four consecutive state championships from 1981-1984 and back-to-back Overall titles in 1983 and 1984.
Raymond Hopes, who played for Elders' Horace Mann team in 1971, described Elders as a coach who taught the same basic principles as UCLA's John Wooden.
"He didn't get too excited," Hopes said. "He didn't get too high. He didn't get too low. And when you scored a basket, he didn't want to see you celebrating. You ran back down the court and played defense, otherwise he had a seat for you right beside him."
Jeff Brown, who was a senior on Hall's first state championship team in 1981, said Elders allowed the Warriors a lot of freedom when it came game time.
"Coach allowed us to go out there and have fun," Brown said. "As long as we were doing what we were supposed to be doing and not doing all that flashy stuff, he was fine with it. He gave us room to freestyle. If we got it going, he would be like 'let 'em go.' "
"He was very laid back. No hollering or screaming," said Tim Scott, who was a sophomore on that 1981 team who also eventually became a Razorback. "He would stand up and give you a number or whatever, but we never really saw him get mad."
Freeman said Elders' wife Joycelyn is the reason the coach was even-tempered and rarely had outbursts such as the one in Pine Bluff.
Dr. Joycelyn Elders served as the surgeon general of the United States under President Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994. She was also the one who rescued the coach from walking home from Pine Bluff on that frosty winter night.
"Every home game we had, she would sit at the very end of the bench," Freeman said. "And in our old gym, the very end was right by the door. The reason she would sit there is that any time he got riled up, he would look and she would look back at him and bring him back down."
While he compiled a lot of coaching victories, Elders said the victories did not matter as long as his players had fun and got an education.
"With these guys, I was at the right place and the right time," Elders said of his former players. "I get emotional about them. They've stuck with me down through the years."
Sports on 11/11/2018