SMOOTH MOVE : Ex-Arizona Basketball Coach Is Happy in Ice Cream Business, but Misses Thrills

As the basketball coach at the University of Arizona when a major athletic scandal swept the school in the early 1980s, Fred Snowden got used to traveling down a rocky road.

Today, Snowden still deals with the rocky road.

And the chocolate fudge swirl, the pralines ‘n’ cream, the raspberry sherbet and 27 other flavors.

He is the vice president in charge of urban affairs and business development for the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company, working to bring his product into new market areas. It is a job of selling, and there have been few better salesmen than Snowden.

Imagine, for example, trying to persuade an 18-year-old, street-slick kid from Detroit to leave everything and everybody he knows and move 2,000 miles west to Tucson, where the number of rattlesnakes was exceeded only by the number of scorpions.

“I sold kids on the University of Arizona, and it was the same as selling ice cream,” Snowden said. “No difference at all. It’s just a matter of how you package it.”

Snowden, 52, became the first black head basketball coach at a major university when he took the Arizona job in 1972. A few months later, John Thompson became coach at Georgetown and George Raveling got the job at Washington State. But Snowden was the first. And for a while, he was the best.

He took a 6-20 Wildcat team from the 1971-72 season and molded it into a 16-10 team in his first season. In the next three years, his teams posted records of 19-7, 22-7 and 24-9, the 1975-76 Wildcats winning the Western Athletic Conference championship for the first time in 25 years.

During the same four years, Thompson at Georgetown and Raveling at Washington State were not faring well.

“My program got off the ground quicker than their programs did and I think for the future of blacks in college coaching, it was a good thing one of us succeeded right away,” Snowden said. “Because I was the first, I felt a lot depended on whether I did well and whether I was perceived as a person of quality for the other black Americans who would come along.

“People have told me in the years since that the success of my teams in those first four years was one of the pivotal reasons that opportunities began to open up for other black coaches. After me, the door was opened.”

Snowden, as you may have detected, is not bashful about discussing his accomplishments. And there were many. He was voted Tucson’s man of the year in 1973 and was chosen by a Tucson newspaper as Arizona’s coach of the decade in 1979. His name made its way into Black America’s Who’s Who in 1979 and into Who’s Who in America the next year.

Snowden, born in a sharecropper’s shack in Brewton, Ala., moved with his family to Detroit when he was 6 and graduated from Northwestern High School in 1955. He later returned to the school as basketball coach and had a five-year record of 89-5.

“I found out I liked coaching, and that I was very good at it,” Snowden said.

He eventually became an assistant coach at the University of Michigan under Johnny Orr. When Michigan’s assistant athletic director, Dave Strack, became Arizona’s athletic director in 1971, he summoned Snowden. The Wildcats quickly became one of the best teams in the country.

So why is this man who was seemingly born to coach now sitting at a desk trying to figure out where to build another ice cream stand?

Snowden was accused by several newspapers of having a slush fund at Arizona, of siphoning airline ticket money from the university and even players’ meal money into it. The rumors were never proved, however, and a long investigation by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. left Snowden unmarked.

But his colleague at Arizona during the ‘70s, football Coach Tony Mason, was indicted along with six of his assistant coaches on felony charges of theft, fraudulent schemes and practices, filing false claims and tampering with public records.

Suddenly, the University of Arizona’s athletic program became synonymous with all that was wrong with college sports.

And the burden dragged Snowden down.

“The talk ruined everybody at the school,” Snowden said. “Me and the football coach and the baseball coach and the track coach. Everybody. Even though only the football program was involved, we all came down. Recruiting became impossible. I decided I didn’t want to labor under that cloud anymore.”

On Jan. 8, 1982, during halftime of the Wildcats’ game against Washington, the announcement was handed to the press: Snowden would resign at the end of the season and would become the school’s assistant athletic director.

The ink on the press releases was hardly dry, though, when that plan crumbled. Under pressure from the school’s Board of Regents, the administration announced the next week that Snowden would be taking a job coordinating athletic events. This would involve such important duties as making sure the bus is on time to take the swim team to its meet.

Snowden bowed out gracefully. The most successful coach the school’s basketball team had ever had rode off into the Arizona sunset, headed for California. He formed Fred Snowden, Inc., a consulting firm, and quickly landed Baskin-Robbins as a client.

In 1985, the ice cream maker decided to bring Snowden, who now lives in Calabasas, into the corporation.

“When I look back, what I miss most are the associations,” Snowden said. “The friendships and the great camaraderie that exists between players and coaches, and between a coach and other coaches. And I miss the unique kinds of challenges that coaching presents. As a coach, your report card is marked instantly, that night. You know that night whether you did well or not. They put it up in lights on a scoreboard.

“I miss the immediacy of that, the instant decision-making process that you live with all the time as a coach. Corporate decisions don’t quite work that way. There are meetings and management groups and eventually you come to a decision, but it doesn’t always happen right away.

“As a coach, you call a timeout and you see the players walking back toward the bench and you know that you had better come up with an idea, and a very good idea, before they get there. That’s a lot of pressure. That is very unique in the world.

“But I enjoyed that and I was very good at it.”

With all the turbulence of his departure from Arizona, one would think that there are things Snowden does not miss about coaching. He can’t seem to think of any, however.

“It’s really hard to say what I don’t miss about coaching,” he said. “I don’t sit around and say how much I hated coaching, how it gave me ulcers. I never had any stomach problems when I coached. I loved coaching. I loved the good and the bad of coaching. It is such a great profession and it was such a major part of my life for so long. When I left coaching, I never said that I would never coach again. Actually, I thought I would.”

Snowden was considered for several coaching jobs, including Cal State Long Beach’s in 1983, but he had immersed himself in his new business.

Seven years after he left Arizona, however, there are once again thoughts of X’s and O’s.

“Would I coach again? It would depend on the circumstances,” he said. “I would not rule out a return to coaching some day. I was good at it. I did that very well. And I think I might be even better at it the second time around, using all that I have learned.

“The day might come around again when a school is looking for someone to build a program and they’ll remember me. And I often think about getting into the executive side of professional sports some day. With all the talk these days of trying to find qualified minorities for high-level positions in pro sports, I believe my resume would stack up against anyone’s.”