Going into his sophomore year Greg Thomas was poised to become the first African-American to start at quarterback for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. With spring football practices coming up after the spring break, Thomas decided to go on a reconnaissance mission.
During the 1985 Spring Break, Thomas went back to Texas and hung out with old teammates and opponents who were also in the SWC. Between drinks, he somehow took advantage of their braggadocio and convinced them to diagram out their most successful defenses. He gathered the notes written down on napkins and delivered them to Lee in time for Spring practices.
No Doubting Thomas Razorbacker Exclusive: Part 3
Rebel Yells
As fate would have it, Greg Thomas got his first start as Arkansas quarterback that fall in the season opener in Oxford, Mississippi against Ole Miss. An underdog 1970 Rebels squad had reveled in beating the No. 3 Razorbacks in the Sugar Bowl to cap a bitter ending to one of Broyles’ best — yet most frustrating seasons as head coach.
After Ole Miss tied the Razorbacks 15-15 in 1984, Broyles made no bones about how much it meant to the program to beat their southern neighbors. Thomas would lead Arkansas to a 24-19 victory, but not without being peppered with racial insults and other attempts at degradation before, during and after the game.
Ole Miss officials even got in on the shenanigans before the game, players hurled racial slurs during the game and fans threw beer (and more) afterwards. During the pregame warmups, Goldsmith got wind of some of insults raining down from the bleachers. He remarked how shameful it was and offered his apologies to Thomas, but Thomas couldn’t help but point out...
“Coach, those were our fans.”
Thomas went on to start eight of 10 games as Arkansas and finished with a 10-2 record. The two losses were by a total of six points to SWC rivals Texas and Texas A&M. However, that was enough to allow the Aggies to win the conference title while Arkansas tied for second place — again.
Nagging injuries opened the door for senior quarterback Mark Calcagni, whose brother, Ron, had quarterbacked the 1978 Orange Bowl upset of Oklahoma. Along with the two losses, a door was opened for more doubts about Thomas’ role as the starter. The younger Calcagni started against Rice and played valuable minutes leading up to the Holiday Bowl against Arizona State.
"I had no idea who was starting. They both practiced," said Parks. "Greg got hurt in the Houston game, but he had come back and practiced. I thought they were going to put him in for a series and then put Greg back in."
Thomas said the narrative that he and Calcagni platooned during the season is false, and Hatfield's promise to alternate them in the bowl game never materialized. Instead Thomas says he played five plays in the first half and none in the second.
"There was no platooning like Baylor was doing. That's a misconception," he said. "Like, saying Quinn came in and and beat me out was a misconception. He never did that. He was my backup the whole year."
Parks agreed.
"Don’t get me wrong. Mark was a good quarterback too," Parks said. "He could come in and spark something where he might be able to do some things, but Greg was the starter and I really felt like they used Calcagni to have leverage over Greg — like keeping someone over his shoulder. But don’t get me wrong. Looking back on it, Mark Calcagni was a good quarterback too."
After starting all but one game and finally getting healthy, Thomas was caught off guard when Hatfield announced Calcagni as the starter against Arizona State to a national audience on ESPN. The coach said having both options at quarterback would make it harder for the Sun Devils to prepare for the Razorbacks, but Thomas hardly touched the field during the 18-17 Razorback win.
"Greg went that whole damn season with maybe only one or two interceptions," said Foreman who scored the game's decisive touchdown. "I don't even know if he made all conference that year because what most people don't realize, to make all conference, your coach has to put your name in the ballot box."
Injuries aside, Thomas felt he was unfairly blamed for a lack of statistics — particularly in the passing game which grew more conservative while he was playing quarterback.
"There there's no such thing as fair because they won't talk about it," Thomas added. "That was the thing. Go back and see how many games I took responsibility for us losing, and we know it was the play call.
"(Hatfield) would always say, 'Greg has to be better.' Greg has got this, but don't give me a (BS) play to call with no time to make an adjustment and one receiver running a route. Because if I don't have the time to make the adjustment, and then we run that play and it doesn't be successful, who are they gonna blame?"
To Be Frank
As Hatfield made his way shaking hands on the victorious bus afterwards, Thomas told him, “This is my last game at Arkansas.”
The team flew back into Tulsa, but instead of joining the others on the bus to Fayetteville, Thomas made arrangements to fly into Dallas where his family gathered at his grandmother's home to watch the bowl game. He contacted schools like Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Nebraska about transferring. The coaching grapevine soon brought the news back to Broyles who summoned Thomas back to Fayetteville and laid down the law.
The Name Image and Likeness era this was not. There was no transfer portal, and Broyles ordered a meeting between the coach and quarterback. He explained to Thomas he once had a similar dilemma between senior Bill Montgomery and rifle-armed youngster Joe Ferguson, who would eventually go on to long and distinguished career in the NFL.
Hatfield and Thomas eventually agreed to move forward and the Razorbacks came into Thomas' junior year with high expectations. Despite the quarterback controversies, Thomas was nominated as a finalist for the Davey O’Brien Award after finishing second to Miami’s Vinny Testerverde in quarterback rating. However, he was not nominated by his coach for All-SWC honors.
As a team, Arkansas was a chic pick to win the SWC title for the first-time in twenty years. ESPN’s Game Day even picked preseason No. 12 Arkansas as a dark-horse contender to win another national title, and they would go on to play in the program's first New Year's Day bowl in nearly a decade.
Several Razorbacks like Parks and Foreman were among those named pre-season All-SWC by the media, but notably absent was Thomas. Meanwhile Razorback beat writers like Wally Hall, Mike Irwin and Orville Henry continued to speak in code to question whether Thomas had what it took to finally beat Texas and bring the SWC championship trophy back to Fayetteville.
The Hands of our fathers
Thomas’ resolve to stay the course at Arkansas was buoyed with the announcement that Nolan Richardson would be the first black head basketball coach to helm a program in the South. Thomas had met Richardson during a vacation bible school program while Richardson was coaching Western Texas Junior College to a national championship.
After Richardson won a National Invitational Tournament title at Tulsa, Oklahoma, Broyles brought him to Fayetteville to replace Eddie Sutton in 1985. Like Thomas, Richardson endured an initial wave of backlash – even as his teenaged daughter died of Leukemia.
"Nolan came in around that time, and he was going through a lot of stuff too, you know, being the first black coach there," Foreman said. "I saw that because, I mean Greg was in my room a lot too. They kind of received a lot of the same hate mail."
"I live Northwest Arkansas, but at the end of the day, it is Arkansas. It was bad," he said. "When I got here at eighty three, there was still a sign hanging in Springdale, Arkansas — which is the next city over. It said, 'If you are of colored, don't let the sun go down before you leave.'"
As his third season at Arkansas progressed in 1986, Arkansas climbed to No. 8 nationally before suffering their first loss to Texas Tech in week five. The Razorbacks seemed to make up for it by breaking the 20-year drought by beating Texas in Austin, but a week nine loss at Baylor cost them an outright conference title.
That triggered another angry backlash against Hatfield and Thomas, who played through an undisclosed hand injury for much of the season. The season ended with a blowout loss to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. Things got so intense for Thomas that his family stopped attending games in Arkansas and Richardson put aside his own grief – on and off the court – to become a become a surrogate father to Thomas.
Like Richardson, Foreman still resides in Northwest Arkansas. He said times have changed since then, but those memories are still with them all.
The Final Word
Thomas' senior season ended with another second-place finish in the SWC and a loss to Georgia in the Liberty Bowl to finish with a 9-4 overall record. The Razorbacks were crushed at War Memorial Stadium by Jimmy Johnson's top ranked Miami Hurricanes in the pre-conference and later suffered heartbreaking losses to Texas and Texas A&M during conference play.
Although he never got Arkansas to the promised land of a national championship or a SWC title, (the SWC titles would come a year later under his successor Grovey), Thomas undoubtedly left a historic mark on the program and won more games than any quarterback in program history.
In all, Arkansas finished 35-13-1 and achieved its highest ranking in national polls in 20 years while finishing no less than 3rd in the SWC (2nd in each of the final three seasons). The team played in bowl games all four years and set a record for wins over that period.
Even with Grovey’s success in winning back-to-back SWC titles and 10-2 records in 1988 and 1989, Hatfield was run off from The Hill after the 1989 campaign by supporters who felt his run-heavy approach couldn’t elevate Arkansas to a national championship level. Nutt would eventually suffer the same fate despite his own success at Arkansas.
"If you look at my class and the 84 class, those guys went to four bowl games, and they didn’t have a losing record," Parks said. "Back then, you didn’t have the Penstripe Bowl, the Cheeto Bowl or whatever bowl you may have. It was probably less than 12 bowl games or something, so in order to go to a bowl game, you had to win, and win we did."
Ironically, some feel Hatfield’s departure had more to do with the color of his quarterbacks than his results on the field. Like Thomas, Hatfield's winning record is unsurpassed at Arkansas to this day as none of the more pass-oriented successors have surpassed them with quarterbacks of any persuasion.
Still Thomas believes Hatfield’s short comings at Arkansas were not about statistics or wins and losses. Instead he believes his coach’s reluctance to open up the offense and open his arms to his players were more problematic.
"Don't tell me numbers. Numbers are are manipulated all the time," Thomas said. "Play is different all the time. I was always raised to win games.
"Then all of a sudden, when you're not winning games, then we win the numbers game. That's when you move the goalposts. We'll get this cat more recognition because he got along with us better, or he came to talk to us. That's (BS). That opens up some wounds that we've gotta deal with. The heck with my wounds. The heck with them threatening to kill me and shoot me and steal and all that stuff today that we give headlines to when it was happening to me thirty years ago."
Like Thomas, Parks — who also coaches at the high school level in his home state — has taken his experiences at Arkansas and deploys them to heal the next generation of athletes.
"I always told myself I would never treat my kids the way they treated some of us," he said. "I would never treat my players like that because without those players there would be no me. I don’t think (Hatfield) understood that.
"If you look back on it, Greg was our starter and if it wasn’t for Greg Thomas, he paved the way for all these other African American quarterbacks after him because Greg took those shots. A lot of us took those shots but he took the most."
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