by Seth Davis
That disappointment aside, Naulls and Taft were the only players to be selected unanimously to the 1956 PCC first team. With their impending graduation, it would be that much harder for Wooden to claim his elusive NCAA tournament win. Bill Russell was also leaving, but while Wooden welcomed that news, he would soon face another imposing obstacle from the Bay Area. This time it arrived in the form of a coach, not a shot-blocking center, but it would be just as effective at preventing the hard-driving Wooden from reaching his goals.
15
Pete
Another off-season, another unforeseen shakeup.
This time, the tremors came from UCLA’s football program. In March 1956, the Oakland Tribune published an article alleging that UCLA football players were given $40 above the $75 in expenses permitted by the Pacific Coast Conference. The PCC found the charges to be true and responded in heavy-handed fashion, declaring all UCLA football players ineligible unless they could prove that they had not been given illicit cash. In response to that action, the Los Angeles district attorney, who happened to be a UCLA alumnus, called a press conference to claim that he had evidence that USC had paid more than fifty athletes a total of over $71,000. The remaining conference schools jumped in, and the scandal metastasized into a blur of charges and countercharges. When the smoke finally cleared, the PCC imposed on UCLA a three-year suspension from championship and bowl competitions in all sports, plus fines totaling around $93,000. The Los Angeles City Council struck back by passing a resolution recommending that UCLA and USC “seriously consider” withdrawing from the PCC. It was an ugly, destablizing few months for this once proud forty-one-year-old league.
Though Wooden’s basketball program had not been accused of breaking any rules, it was swept up in the scandal. The three-year postseason ban was a devastating blow for Wooden. His team had already lost its home court and four starters, including Willie Naulls and Morris Taft. Now it had lost the chance to play for a national championship and was on the brink of losing its league. This was not the way Wooden had hoped to begin the 1956–57 season.
Despite these setbacks, the Bruins were a pleasant surprise in the early going, winning seven of their first eight games, which set up a big test during their midwestern road swing in late December. They were scheduled to play at No. 5 St. Louis, which had an All-American candidate in forward Bob Ferry. Trailing by 4 points with seven minutes to play, the Bruins went on one of their patented late-game bursts, outscoring the Billikens 16–4 to pull off the upset.
The win would have been cause for celebration if Wooden had allowed it. When he heard his players whooping it up afterward in the shower, the coach marched into the locker room and ordered them to knock it off. “He was very strident about it,” said Roland Underhill, a six-foot-four sophomore forward. “He always told us to treat defeat the same way you treat victory.”
That trip, and that lecture, set the tone for a terrific season. Having vaulted to No. 8 in the AP poll because of the upset, the Bruins justified that standing by winning eleven of their first twelve PCC games. Unlike the previous season, when Taft and Naulls did most of the damage, the Bruins got scoring from several different players. That appealed to the engineer in Wooden. He liked things to be neat, tidy, structured—and most of all, balanced. “I noticed in checking our four conference games that the leading scorer has averaged 12 points, with the lowest 9 points,” he said in January. “Our balance again proved true.” A 4-point loss to USC dropped the Bruins to 11–2 in the league. That left them one game behind first-place California heading into the two-game series between those teams in Berkeley on the first weekend in March.
Cal’s program, which hadn’t made it to the NCAA tournament since its lone appearance in 1949, was in the midst of a remarkable resurgence, and it wasn’t because the team had a bunch of heralded recruits. It was because Pete Newell had taken over as coach just two years before. A Southern California native who played for Loyola University, Newell had previously coached the University of San Francisco to the NIT championship in 1949. He left the following year for Michigan State and returned to the Bay Area in 1954. Newell’s team at Cal won just one conference game in his first season. The next year, it won ten. Now, in year three, Newell had his Bears poised to challenge the titans from the south for the PCC crown.
Newell and Wooden had much in common. They both loved baseball (Newell spent a summer playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate in Pine Bluff, Arkansas), shared an affection for the English language (Newell was also a prolific letter writer), and heeded quirky superstitions (Wooden liked to stick found bobby pins in trees; Newell tucked them into his pocket). Those similarities, however, were dwarfed by their contrasts. Newell was no teetotaling hermit. He was a man’s man and a coach’s coach. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day (often lighting up before he even got out of bed in the morning) and was an inveterate night prowler. Newell loved nothing more than to hang with the fellas well past midnight, downing bourbon and talking ball. He could be tough on his players, but he was just as quick to put an arm around them once practice was over. He believed it was his job not just to tell them what to do, but why. He insisted they call him Pete.
Unlike Wooden, Newell never mastered the art of the even keel. Coaching basketball made him such a nervous wreck that he often said that fifteen minutes before each game, he wondered why he had ever gotten into the profession. “When my team went out on the court for warm-ups, I would stay in the dressing room for several minutes, thinking of all the things that might go wrong,” he said. “It was a feeling of being alone and no one understanding the dark thoughts I was having.”
Most of all, Newell taught a style of basketball that was the exact antithesis of Wooden’s. Newell liked his tempo slow and his scores low. He was a devoted defensive tactician who was one of the first coaches to use a full-court man-to-man press. On offense, he ran a system called “reverse action,” whereby players passed the ball from side to side over and over again, moving defenders back and forth, until an opportunity to score finally presented itself. “It would drive you up a wall,” Bruin center John Berberich said of playing Cal. “They would pass the ball for ten minutes and then finally take a shot that they’d passed up seven minutes ago.”
Wooden looked down his nose at this kind of basketball. Sometimes, if one of his own players passed up an open shot in practice, Wooden would chastise him by saying, “If you don’t want to shoot, go to Cal.” Newell was equally unimpressed with the racehorse attack Wooden had imported from the Midwest. “John didn’t like our slowdown style at first,” Newell said. “He came from the Piggy Lambert school, which had a lot more imagination and movement in the offense, but Lambert’s teams just outscored people. They didn’t play defense. The whole state of Indiana was one of the worst areas for defense I’d ever seen.”
Wooden frequently quoted Lambert as saying, “The team that makes the most mistakes usually wins.” In 1960, Newell told Sports Illustrated, “Basketball is a game of mistakes, and the team making the fewer mistakes generally wins.” The two men coached the same sport, and yet they taught two completely different games.
They did share at least one fundamental policy: they never wanted to call the first time-out. Both men had started their careers in an era when coaches weren’t allowed to huddle with their players on the sidelines. In those days, when time-out was called, the players gathered in a circle by themselves on the court. Newell and Wooden wanted their guys to think for themselves. They were also both fanatical about conditioning, which was even more reason never to call time-out. When Newell said that “a player should be conditioned to play the last five minutes of a game, not just the first five,” he was uttering words that often came out of Wooden’s mouth.
Their disdain for calling time-out was more than a piece of strategy. It was a point of pride. Earl Schulz, a guard at Cal, recalled: “It was just a mental game, a way of saying, ‘We’re not a bunch of candy asses. We’re not going to roll over.’�
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Such was the collision course that brought UCLA and Cal together on the final weekend of the 1956–57 season, with first place in the PCC on the line. The games had been sold out for over a week, and tickets were being scalped for ten dollars and up. “Never before has a Cal cage game so excited this city,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The San Francisco Chronicle pronounced the Bruins to be “maybe the best team Johnny Wooden [has] produced at Westwood. Certainly it is the best balanced.”
In preparing for UCLA, Newell left no stone unturned. He dispatched his assistant coach, Rene Herrerias, to scout the Bruins during their game against Oregon. Newell himself was on hand when they took on USC a few days before. This was yet another way in which Newell and Wooden were different. Whereas Wooden hardly ever mentioned the opponent to his team, Newell and Herrerias handed their players detailed reports on opponents’ tendencies. During practice, Herrerias would coach the reserves as they formed a “scout team” that ran the offense the starters were going to defend. By the time the game arrived, the Bears knew their opponents’ plays as well as they did, if not better. “I remember one time we were playing at Oregon, and I said to one of the guys, ‘Hey, you’re supposed to be over here,’” said Bill McClintock, who played at Cal from 1959 to 1961. “The guy looked at me and said, ‘You’re right.’”
UCLA drew first blood in game 1, outrebounding the Bears by 11 and overcoming a 15-point halftime deficit to win, 71–66. It was their ninth straight victory over Cal. Game 2 was a different story. This time the referees tightened up the contact under the basket, and as a result, Wooden saw his two centers, Ben Rogers and Conrad Burke, foul out early in the second half. As Cal cranked up the full-court pressure, Newell kept glancing at the opposite bench, wondering if Wooden would turn candy ass and stop play. With the score tied at 55–all with seven minutes remaining, Cal went on a quick 8–0 burst. Wooden finally relented and called time-out.
It was too late. The Bears held on to prevail, 73–68. When the buzzer sounded, the Cal players carried Newell off the court on their shoulders. The 7,200 fans broke out into a cheer of “We want Pete! We want Pete!” which forced the coach to return for a curtain call. The Bears had not technically locked up the conference title, and even if they had lost, they still would have gone to the NCAA tournament because UCLA was ineligible. But the fans in Berkeley had been humiliated so many times by their rivals to the south that they were sent into a delirious celebration by a single win that decided nothing.
Wooden was less than pleased, not just with the outcome but the disparity in fouls: twenty-seven called against UCLA, fourteen against Cal. The next day’s San Francisco Chronicle reported that when the game ended, Wooden “stalked away from the placating hand of referee John Kolb and stomped off the floor. Wooden was unhappy all night because Kolb and Lou Batmale called a far different game than they had on Friday night.” The Bay Area papers enjoyed needling Wooden on the rare occasions when his team lost there. One of the Chronicle’s stories the next day appeared under the headline, “Cal Cagers Beat UCLA (and Unhappy Coach Wooden).” The story included a photo of Wooden barking from the bench with his mouth open and head jutting forward. The caption dripped with sarcasm: “UCLA coach John Wooden no doubt is complimenting the refs on their clear vision at Cal.”
Despite that setback, UCLA set a new single-season school record when it notched its twenty-second win in the regular season finale against USC, but California finished in first place with a 14–2 record. In the NCAA tournament’s Western Regional in Corvallis—a graveyard where many a UCLA season had been buried—the Bears cakewalked to a 27-point win over BYU. The next day, Cal lost by 4 points to Newell’s former employer, San Francisco. In just his third year at Berkeley, Newell had accomplished something Wooden hadn’t done in nine years at UCLA: win a game in the NCAA tournament.
For Newell, that first triumph over Wooden would be as significant as any he would experience. From where he sat on the bench, the victory did more than catapult his team to a PCC title. It signified a defining shift in a bitter, long-standing rivalry. “I made time[outs] a big issue in that game. I felt the winning and losing was going to somehow be tied to it, and I was right,” Newell said. “They never played timeouts again with us. Psychologically, that had so much to do with our confidence every time we played them. Our guys just figured, ‘We never called timeout. They did.’”
For the first time since he came out west, Wooden was coaching against a man who cared as much about basketball as he did. If Wooden didn’t know better, he might have thought this new rival had been raised in Martinsville, not Los Angeles.
* * *
The hostility between California and UCLA stretched back to UCLA’s founding in the 1920s, when the Cal faculty objected to its southern counterpart’s desire to move its campus from Vermont Avenue for fear it would sap the flagship campus of prestige. The bitterness festered for decades. It did not go unnoticed in Los Angeles that the football scandal that devastated Red Sanders’s powerhouse began with a report in a Bay Area newspaper. “It is obvious, and has been for years, that Cal cannot willingly accept UCLA’s development and its athletic success,” one Los Angeles resident wrote in a letter to the Times. “The time for separation from Berkeley has now come.” The people in Berkeley harbored similar resentment. “You couldn’t talk about UCLA in our house. They were the antichrist,” said Tom Newell, Pete’s son.
That history helps explain why the Cal fans reacted so lustily when the Bears finally knocked off the Bruins in a basketball game with few real consequences. It also explains why they embraced their handsome, charming coach. Newell may not have been in Berkeley long, but the people could see that he represented their last, best hope at derailing the Johnny Wooden express.
If Wooden couldn’t speed Newell up, he figured he should try to slow his racehorses down. His personnel mandated it. “This could be the tallest and also the slowest Bruin team I’ve had,” he said two days before the first game of the 1957–58 season. What’s more, he realized that other coaches around the league, especially Newell, were figuring him out. “They caught up with the fast break after a while, so we altered it,” Wooden said. “I switched to a safety fast break. We didn’t abolish it completely. We just ran it more cautiously.”
Ironically, UCLA’s roster that season would include the swiftest athlete Wooden would ever coach. He was Rafer Johnson, a six-foot-three junior guard who was best known for having broken the world decathlon record his freshman year as a member of UCLA’s track team. Johnson had played four games for UCLA’s freshman basketball team, averaging better than 10 points, but he stopped playing so he could focus on track. Now he was back to playing hoops, but his speed on the track did not translate well. “Rafer could run a lot faster than he could dribble,” his teammate, Ben Rogers, said. “If he had concentrated on basketball, he would have been a pretty good player.”
The other coaches in the PCC were also catching up to Wooden in the recruiting department. This was not hard to do. Wooden could be persuasive with prospects when they were in his company, but he refused to leave Southern California to find them. “I would not do that. I made that clear when I came here,” he said. “My family comes first. I would not go away to scout. I would not be away from home. I refused to do that, and I didn’t have assistants do that.”
The school was still not providing the Bruins with their own home court, but fortunately the city of Los Angeles stepped in to fill the void. The city announced in the fall of 1957 that an architect’s designs had been completed for a multipurpose arena that would host home games for USC and UCLA, among other events. The arena’s site—commonly referred to as “the hole”—was located next to USC’s campus. That made it less than ideal for UCLA, but it was better than Venice High School.
With his program suffering from a dearth of talent, Wooden was forced to mine the junior college ranks. He brought in six such transfers that fall, including a high-scoring, hard-nosed guard named Denny Crum,
a six-foot-one San Fernando Valley native who had been the region’s leading junior college scorer at Los Angeles Pierce College. Despite that pedigree, Crum did not warrant a hard sell from UCLA’s coach. During his campus visit, Crum spent several hours with Wooden and his players, waiting for the coach to deliver his pitch. Finally, during a team meal Wooden looked at him blankly and asked, “So are you coming or not?”
The fall of 1957 also saw the return of that old nonconformist, Jerry Norman. After serving a three-and-a-half-year hitch in the navy, Norman had taken a teaching and coaching position at West Covina High School, where Cat Wooden was the principal. A year later, Jerry was hired to teach in the physical education department at UCLA. Wooden asked if he would moonlight as the freshman basketball coach. Norman and Wooden may have butted heads when Norman was a player, but Wooden was not one for holding grudges, and he knew that Norman had a sharp basketball mind. He also knew Norman was a fierce competitor, just like him. “Jerry was a natural,” said Bill Eblen, another former player who joined the freshman staff the same year that Norman did. “He was very intense, very volatile, but he was technically a very good coach. He was different from Wooden, but he still used the same philosophies.”
The 1957–58 season would mark UCLA’s next-to-last campaign in the Pacific Coast Conference. In the wake of the scandals and resulting sanctions, the regents and trustees at UCLA, California, and USC formally decided to withdraw from the league effective the summer of 1959. Washington and Stanford followed suit.
