Robert Hughes: 1928-2024

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Robert Hughes, the iconic Hall of Fame basketball coach and cultural giant in Fort Worth and the Stop Six neighborhood whose influence will be felt for generations to come, has died.

He was 96.

At the urging of his college coach, Hughes came to Fort Worth in 1958 to become a high school basketball coach at I.M. Terrell. After the closure of Terrell following desegregation, he moved to Dunbar, where he became a national figure.

When he retired in 2005 after 47 seasons, Hughes had won more games than any high school boys coach in the nation — 1,333. His storied career included five state championships, including three at Terrell. His teams were state runners-up three times. Between 1977-2003, Hughes took Dunbar to the state final four in Austin 12 times, including 10 in a 17-year run. He was the 2003 national coach of the year.

The Flying Wildcats at Dunbar were a brand, epitomized by his fast-paced, full-court, tough-as-nails style of play. His teams took the court fully confident that no opponent would outwork them, an ethic imparted on them by their coach.

In 2017, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is also a member of the National High School Hall of Fame, the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, the Texas High School Basketball Hall of Fame, the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame, and the Texas Southern University Hall of Fame.

The Fort Worth school district’s court at Wilkerson-Greines Activity, which he roamed as players and onlookers watched in adulation, is named for him. Fort Worth Housing Solutions paid tribute to Hughes’ impact in the community by naming a mixed-use affordable housing development in his honor.

His was among the greatest lives in the history of Fort Worth. He was a gentleman’s gentleman whom I got to know a little through a number of conversations over the years.

“Coach Hughes was the most important man in my life, following my father,” says James Cash, who played for Hughes at Terrell before going on to becoming the first Black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference for TCU and later enjoying a distinguished career in academia and business. “He served as a father figure for many young men and women during the time I learned from him at I.M. Terrell and I’m sure that continued when he moved to Dunbar.

“He taught by his personal behavior and actions rather than words. To this day, many of the things I do and the way I analyze and think about things are heavily influenced by him. Many of the positive things that I have experienced in life would never have happened if I had not met Coach Hughes.”

Hughes was born on May 15, 1928, in Bristow, Oklahoma.

After high school, he joined the Army rather than accepting an offer to attend Langston College in Oklahoma. The head football coach there was also the head basketball coach, he told me several years ago.

“I was gonna have to play football,” he said. “Well, I rejected that.”

After he left the service, Hughes went to Texas Southern. He played under Coach Ed Adams. After Texas Southern, Hughes was drafted by the Boston Celtics. He also played for the Harlem Magicians, an exhibition enterprise in the spirit of the rival Globetrotters.

Hughes met his future wife, the former Jacquelyne Sue Johnson, in 1954 at Tennessee State University in Nashville, where the Magicians were playing. Jacquelyne Hughes died in 2014. The Hugheses were parents to four children, including Bob Hughes Jr., who succeeded his father as coach at Dunbar. Another son, John Charles Hughes, preceded his parents in death. The family included two daughters, Robin Hughes and the Rev. Carlye Hughes, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark in New Jersey.

In conversation, Hughes recalled meeting his wife: “Texas Southern was playing in the conference tournament and for whatever reason there were about five or six young ladies from Tulsa Booker T. [Washington]. How they got from Booker T. in Tulsa to Tennessee State I don t know. They heard there was a guy from Oklahoma playing at Texas Southern. So, they came down to the gym to find out who the Oklahoma guy was.”

Hughes returned to earn his degree at University of Tulsa while working at Douglas Aircraft. He later earned a master’s from Texas Wesleyan.

His former coach at Texas Southern, Adams, called him with advice: “Hughes, you need to go into coaching,” Hughes recalled. “He called me back with three high school jobs.”

The one he took was at I.M. Terrell.

“I went into coaching because of him,” Hughes said, adding that he borrowed “probably everything” from the coach in adopting his own coaching style. “The discipline he had with his players, the way he handled them, the loyalty to them. That first [Terrell] team, I said, ‘You guys look just like those old TSU teams.’ One of my biggest disappointments was in October of that first year of coaching, he died suddenly. He never got to see those carbon copies that I got from him.”

Hughes won three state titles in the segregated Prairie View Interscholastic League, in 1963, ’65, and ’67. He won two more in the University Interscholastic League at Dunbar, in 1993 and 2003.

However, the Flying Wildcats were often knocking on the door in Austin. Hughes’ Dunbar teams were state runners-up three times. After winning the the Class 5A state title in 1993 behind stars Charles "Spider" Smith, who went on to a professional career in the National Basketball Association, and Anthony Burks, Hughes was selected the 2003 national coach of the year at age 74.

"Robert Hughes was a larger than life coach," says T.R. Sullivan, a journalist who covered many of those Dunbar teams in the 1980s for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and who went on to become a prolific baseball writer covering the Texas Rangers. "He dominated Texas basketball for decades not only with the talent on his team and knowledge of the game, but by the sheer force of his personality. He demanded excellence from his players and got it from them. He holds records that will be impossible to match because of his incredible willpower."

During the stretch from 1974 until his retirment in 2005, Dunbar made 30 consecutive playoff appearances and won 25 district championships.

During each of those seasons at Dunbar was Hughes' faithful assistant, Leondas Rambo, who retired at the same time. "I always told him, 'I'll stay as long as you're there. When you go, I'll go,' " Rambo said then. Rambo died in 2020. 

“They were the torchbearers. If you ever want to be considered [at the top of] Fort Worth basketball that ran through Robert Hughes and the Flying Wildcats,” says Tommy Brakel, 53, who just completed his 26th season at head coach of North Crowley, a highly successful program. “He did some things to really mentor me, not just directly, but indirectly. Just sitting back as a young coach and watching somebody run a program the way he did and the success that he had.

“You know, I mean, you can pick out any one of his great years or the individual accolades, but, man, the career accolades … being successful year after year after year, that's what's so tough.”

Said Jim Wall, 79, who coached against Hughes at Paschal and Western Hills, among others, in Fort Worth for many years: “His kids were so disciplined. And they bought into the culture of his program. Plus, he did a great job developing kids. They got better every year playing for him. And he was a fierce competitor.”

His former players were effusive in praise for their former coach and, like Cash says, father figure.

Hughes was strict and demanding but a great motivator. He was an advocate for his players, but he kept the relationship as mentor to student. In one of our last conversations probably seven years ago, he opined that today’s parents had changed since he began all those years ago.

He said he didn’t know if he’d last through freshman orientation today. “We had a different set of parents than the parents we have today. Parents today are ‘my baby’s’ best friend. Our parents were never our best friends. Our parents were our parents. Your baby does not need a best friend. There’s a whole school full of friends.”

“He meant a hell of a whole lot to me,” says Quincy Alexander, Dunbar basketball player, Class of 1992. “He's a lifesaver for me. He's a father figure to me, like a dad. He means a lot to me. I'm going to miss him. You can't say nothing bad about him in front of me. I'm honored to be a part of his legacy, [a product of] his leadership. I love him, I’m going to miss him, and I thank him.”

Alexander was with Sam Goss, another former player at Dunbar, when I spoke to them. Goss didn’t play his senior season because of academics, but when the coach at Central State University in Ohio called to talk about Goss’ potential, Hughes went to bat for him even though “I didn’t bounce a basketball all season.” Because of that phone call, Goss earned a scholarship to the Ohio school.

Alexander, who played at Lamar and North Carolina-Charlotte, and Goss were merely two of too many to tell who found their way to universities through Hughes and basketball. Hughes, Goss reminds, also coached girls volleyball.

“I'm not going to say he was tough, but he was consistent in what he did,” Goss says. “He loved what he did or he wouldn't have done it for so long. And then, of course, he actually taught a class, which was health. So, he had the opportunity to touch all the students, not just, basketball players.”

Hughes, Goss says, was direct but fair. “If you didn’t have a basketball IQ, he would tell you,” Goss says laughing.

Hughes was also quick-witted and clever, renowned for his one-liners.

“You can't hit a bull in the ass with a handful of sand,” former player Anthony Burks recalls, laughing, one of the coach’s favorite lines for guys who were having difficult shooting games.  

Burks, who went on to play at Texas A&M and TCU, was later involved in Hughes campaigning for the bond proposal to build Dickies Arena. Proponents for building the arena, including Ed Bass, wanted Hughes to speak to African American voters about the need for the arena.

Bass even agreed to meet Hughes and personally show him renderings of the building. They had never met, Burks recalls.

“Coach Hughes was shaking Ed Bass's hand. And he said something that was the funniest icebreaker. It had Ed Bass rolling. Everybody was laughing who took part in the meeting. He said, ‘When my wife was living, my premier job was to chauffeur her when we both were retired. I would chauffeur her around town and take her shopping.’ And he said, ‘I told her, look, remember, you're married to Robert Hughes not Robert Bass.’”

Hughes agreed to help with the political pitch. Today, a tribute to Hughes greets all the performers who enter Dickies Arena through the passageways into the arena. Included is a quote from Hughes.

“Ask every day, ‘What can I do today to be the best?’ And then do it.”

“When I think about the coach and the impact he had on the community, it's important that people realize when he coached those boys, he also coached their families,” says Fort Worth Mayor Pro-Tem Gyna Bivens, who represents Stop Six. “Families of those who played under him got the benefit of his wisdom, his leadership, his knowledge. He really cared about people and had tangible ways of showing that.”