Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Those index cards may as well have been stone tablets. Once Wooden crafted his master plan, he became its servant. “A lot of coaches have a tendency to stay with one facet of practice too long,” said Doug Sale, a former assistant. “His theory was, I’ll hit it today, and if we don’t get it completed, we’ll come back to it tomorrow.”

  Wooden may have carried a gentlemanly aspect, but he evinced the authoritarian air of a former navy lieutenant. “I can’t imagine too many coaches being that organized and that precise,” Roland Underhill said. It helped that during those first two decades at UCLA he operated in a culture of conformity. “We never questioned his authority. We never questioned his ability,” Gary Cunningham said. Banton added: “This wasn’t a rebellious time. I can’t imagine a guy getting a bunch of parking tickets or a bunch of players smoking marijuana or something. There wasn’t a big drug culture at UCLA.” Wooden applied the same laws of learning to his basketball classes that he once applied to his English classes: explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and then repetition, repetition, repetition. “I’ll never forget hour after hour working on a pivot,” said Jerry Evans, who had been a freshman during Wooden’s first season in 1948–49.

  There was no playbook at UCLA because there were no plays. Wooden’s high-post offense allowed players two or three options for each exchange, but it was up to them to make those decisions. In this respect, Wooden remained a disciple of James Naismith, who believed that coaches were unnecessary, perhaps superfluous. Wooden often said a coach only made four or five real decisions during a game. “It disgusts me to see all these cartoons of raving maniac coaches,” he said. “There is far more overcoaching than undercoaching in basketball. It’s a great game, an intricate game, but we should not make it complicated.”

  To Wooden, the games were just the final exams, the coach a proctor. Practice was where the real work got done. Everything he did during those workouts was predicated on quickness. If a player did something Wooden liked, he would bark, “Good! Now do it faster.” Wooden also preferred to serve up his advice in small, individual portions rather than addressing the team as a whole. He was never one for meetings. They just slowed things down.

  On game days, the players would have the same meal precisely four hours before tip-off: steak or roast beef broiled medium, baked potato, three pieces of celery, fruit cocktail. That was to be followed by a ten-minute walk. Afterward, Wooden wanted his players to lie on their hotel beds in the dark and try to sleep. No reading, no television, no telephone calls. He wanted them rested for the game, but most of all he wanted them to believe they were doing the exact right thing to prepare for it. That was the whole point—belief. Wooden told his players every day that they were in better shape than their opponents. Were they really? Maybe, maybe not. But in his mind, if they believed they were, then they were.

  If there was a Holy Grail to be seized through all those routines and all those drills during all those hours of practice, it was this: balance. In every sense of the word. “The one word that my players will hear from me more than any other in practice is balance,” Wooden said. “It can be mental balance. It can be emotional balance. It can be rebound balance. It can be defensive balance. It can be offensive balance, which is most important. So balance entails all things. You don’t have a team without balance.”

  His quest for this grail could be compulsive. Wooden liked the scoring to be evenly distributed throughout his lineup. On defense, he insisted that his players’ hands stay close to their bodies and their heads directly above the midpoint between the feet. He wanted their heads in the right place in a broader sense, as well. He lectured that their top priorities should be, in order, family, religion, school. Only then, if there was time left over, were they to concentrate on basketball. His practices were ultraserious—heaven forbid he should catch someone fooling around—but he balanced that by ending with something fun, like a free throw contest.

  Wooden even wanted to see symmetry in the jersey numbers. (His own number back in Martinsville was 99. He was quite proud of that.) At UCLA, the guards wore their numbers in the 20s, the centers were in the 30s, the wings were in the 40s, and the forwards were in the 50s. He never issued a number like 31. “A three and one look off-balance, and I like balance,” he said. Late in his career, Wooden boasted that he had charted 36,820 shots attempted by his players over a nineteen-year period at UCLA. His lineups generally featured two guards, two forwards, and one center. The guards combined to take 41.4 percent of the shots, the forwards took 39.4 percent, and the centers took 19.2 percent.

  His use of language, which many of his players believed was his greatest asset, reflected his emphasis on balance. For example, he wanted passes to be crisp but not hard. His players should have fun but not be foolish; be spirited but not temperamental; be clever but not fancy; and above all else, move quickly without hurrying. He did not deliver inspirational pep talks, Knute Rockne–style. Sometimes he conducted his pregame meeting with the lights dimmed low. “I wanted the business-like approach covering the essentials and not try to get them all fired up,” he said. “I wanted them ready when we started play and not to lose their fire warming up or in the dressing room.”

  The same held true for after games. Wooden did not conduct lengthy postgame meetings. If the Bruins won, he warned the players not to celebrate excessively. If they lost, he encouraged them not to “get their dobbers down.” Either way, when they left the locker room, they should betray no indication of whether they had won or lost. “I never want my players to feel that winning a basketball game was any great accomplishment, and losing a basketball game was nothing to be dejected about,” he said.

  No wonder Ron Lawson said playing for Wooden felt like a job. He was hardly the first and wouldn’t be the last. One of Wooden’s few close friends in the profession was Stan Watts, who coached at BYU from 1949 to 1972. When asked if he could recall any humorous anecdotes about Wooden, Watts replied, “John’s not the flippant type. He’s pretty serious. He doesn’t see much humor in basketball other than winning.” That was why Wooden refused to play tournaments in Hawaii as most western coaches did. “I love to play those teams that just came back from Hawaii. I love to play ’em,” he said. “That’s when I’d like to play them all. I just don’t think it’s conducive to the development of your basketball team. I’ve had a lot of pressures put on me to go there. A lot of coaches use it for recruiting devices. I’ve had many players ask me, ‘Are you going to go to Hawaii?’ I tell them we’re not, but we are going to go back to the Midwest.”

  Wooden could be brutally inflexible. In the days leading up to a season’s first game, he would decide which seven players were going to comprise his rotation. (Sometimes he would choose eight, but most of the time he capped it at seven.) There might some tweaking along the way, but for the most part, once that decision was made, the rotation was set for good. After Wooden retired, a former player asked him what he did if his seventh- and eighth-best players were essentially equal. Wooden responded that he would pick one because either way he couldn’t be wrong, even though it surely felt wrong to the player who wasn’t chosen.

  By the time he reached his fifties, Wooden had left most of his hot-headedness back in South Bend. His players marveled at his even temperament. He was a walking, breathing flat line. Sure, he occasionally lost his composure—an outburst here, a kick in the behind there. But the reason those moments are so memorable is that they were so rare. Not only could Wooden correct a player without screaming; he could sometimes do it without saying anything at all. He always maintained that a coach’s best motivator was the bench. “If I see a boy giving up the baseline [on defense], I take him out for the rest of the half,” he once said. “They don’t like that.”

  Wooden’s consistency amazed his players more than anything else about him. It was as if the man were a machine himself. “I played varsity for three years and observed him every day in practice. He never once disappointed me in terms of hi
s demeanor, his speech,” said Bob Archer, who played at UCLA from 1955 to 1959. “He was no-nonsense and strict, but he never humiliated people. There was always a kindness underneath his austere exterior. You can’t fake that.”

  “The day before my last game as a senior, I ran the same drills I did as a freshman,” Pete Blackman, another former player, said. “So over and over again, you were forced to do these precise things. He was very intense and uncompromising. He made it clear what he expected of you.”

  Bobby Pounds said it best: he was a man of actions, not statements. Wooden told his players not to use profanity, so he never used it himself. He asked them to quit smoking, so he did the same. He told them they were never to criticize a teammate—That’s my job, I’m paid to do it, pitifully poorly I might add—and he wanted them always to be on time. (Time was of the essence. If you’re on time, you don’t have to hurry.) “There are lots of things I suggest my players do, and a few things I demand they do,” he said. “They learn that I stick by my demands.”

  As long as Wooden stayed focused on the process, the small details, then he had faith that the big picture would come into focus. He never talked about the score, rarely mentioned the word “win.” As long as his players reached their potential, well, there was no reason to get their dobbers down. “He was just a master teacher,” Archer said. “He could have taught medicine. He could have taught carpentry. He could have taught English, and he would have done it the same way.”

  It wasn’t always evident in the win-loss column, but Wooden learned a great deal during that first decade and a half at UCLA. He got a little better every day, and if his players matched his persistence, they got better, too. There was, however, a price they had to pay. To become a part of his program, a young man had to surrender his individuality, and that’s not easy for a college student to do. When a player named Vince Carson decided to transfer, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was leaving because Wooden “handled the team like a machine. Everybody had a function, but he decided what each man would do and that was it.” Carson intended the remark as criticism. Wooden considered it the ultimate compliment.

  * * *

  As was the case for many of Wooden’s players, Willie Naulls’s estimation of his former coach grew in the years after Naulls stopped playing for UCLA. Wooden may not have been the sensitive, attentive father figure Naulls had craved as a student, but he later came to appreciate how well Wooden had taught him the game. After being selected by the St. Louis Hawks in the 1956 NBA draft, Naulls was traded to the New York Knicks, where he flourished as a professional. He would eventually become the first black man to be named captain of a major professional sports team.

  One night in 1959, Naulls was with the Knicks in Philadelphia for a game against the Warriors. The preliminary game that night was a high school contest that included Overbrook High School, the legendary powerhouse that once boasted a gifted giant named Wilt Chamberlain. Naulls sat amazed as he watched Overbrook’s point guard dart and dash through the defense. It wasn’t just the young man’s talent that caught Naulls’s eye. It was his creativity, a flair that can only come through countless hours spent on an inner-city playground.

  When Naulls inquired about the youngster, he grew even more impressed. The kid had terrific grades. He was student body president. His father was a minister. Naulls realized that not only would the youngster be the ideal spearhead for Wooden’s fast break; he would fit nicely into the multihued culture at UCLA.

  Naulls called Wooden to tell him about this young man. His name is Walt Hazzard, Naulls said. He was so convinced the kid could help that he told Wooden that if he didn’t make the team, Naulls would pay for his tuition. Wooden told him that wouldn’t be necessary. “If you say he can play here, that’s good enough for me,” Wooden said.

  Hazzard was naturally thrilled that he had made such an impression on the famous Knickerbocker. For a young black basketball player in 1959, Willie Naulls was the ultimate role model. Even when Hazzard later learned that he didn’t have enough academic credits to enroll at UCLA as a freshman, he was undeterred. He volunteered to attend junior college for a year instead of playing for a different four-year school.

  Hazzard may have been a stranger from the East Coast when he alit in California in the fall of 1960, but he felt right at home—academically, socially, and especially athletically. He spent that first year at Santa Monica City College, and though he didn’t play basketball for his school, he did compete in AAU games around the city. “The first time I saw him was during a summer league game. As soon as he began to perform, I realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t basketball,” said Larry Gower, a black guard from Los Angeles who was a freshman at UCLA that year. “His adjustment to L.A. was almost seamless. Walt was charismatic, and he could be a leader without really being pushy or arrogant.”

  To Hazzard, spin dribbles and behind-the-back passes were basic fundamentals. Needless to say, he was in for a rude awakening when he entered John Wooden’s classroom. Besides being stylistically unpalatable, Hazzard’s trickery gummed up the works in Wooden’s machine. Balls bounced off his teammates’ hands, their chests, even their heads. Oftentimes they flew straight out of bounds. “If you weren’t ready, the ball would hit you in the face and you’d be embarrassed, and Walt would tell you he wasn’t going to throw it to you anymore,” said Dave Waxman, a junior center on that team. Even when Hazzard completed a pass that was fancy (as opposed to clever), it would earn a scolding from his coach. “When we first started scrimmaging, Walt threw a pass behind his back,” Johnny Green said. “The guy caught it and laid it in, but Coach blew the whistle. ‘Gracious sakes, Walter, come here! I don’t approve of those behind-the-back passes!’ Coach said that if you throw the ball and the guy’s open but he drops it, I’m still going to blame you.”

  Hazzard respected Wooden, but he held his ground. He believed he knew some things about basketball that Wooden didn’t. “Walt could look to his left and pass flawlessly to the right. But Coach Wooden felt that if you were going to pass to the right, you should be looking to the right,” Gower said. “In many ways, Coach Wooden had to catch up to Walt, rather than the other way around.”

  Regardless of how frustrated Wooden was, there was little he could do. He simply did not have anyone else remotely as good. He made Hazzard a starter from day one. There may have been a period of adjustment, but for the most part his teammates enjoyed playing with him. “Walt really should be given a lot of credit for revitalizing the fast break, because he could bring the ball down quickly,” Gary Cunningham said. “And if you got open, you got it, man. It was there.” Johnny Green added: “I was glad Walt was there because if they made a basket and started pressing, I’d just give the ball to Walt and say, ‘See ya down at the other end.’”

  It helped that Hazzard was so easy to get along with. He had a buoyant, fun-loving personality. One of his favorite stunts was to throw himself to the ground in the middle of a crowd, lie there while everyone gathered around out of concern, and then pop up with a laugh. (He enjoyed faking people off the court, too.) He became the school’s yell leader at football games. Next to playing ball, the one thing that Hazzard loved most was going to parties. “Walt came to L.A. at a time when the African American community was doing a very sedate version of the twist,” Gower said. “Walt came in doing the version which had his arms going one way and his hips going another way. Immediately, people started watching him. Parties didn’t really become parties until Walt came.”

  Around his basketball teammates, Hazzard was the same way. He played on their intramural softball team. He needled them and they needled him back. Green nicknamed him “East Coast.” He was one of the guys, and he loved every minute of it.

  * * *

  With a new engine in town, every other player had to find his place in the machine. That would be especially challenging for the Bruins’ undersized center, Fred Slaughter. A six-foot-five, 230-pound black sophomore from Topeka, Kansas, Slaughte
r was unusually fast for a man his size. He was the state champion in the 100-yard dash, and he had come to UCLA on a scholarship that was half track, half basketball. As a freshman in 1960–61, Slaughter had developed a fallaway jump shot that enabled him to score over taller defenders. He was the leading scorer and rebounder on a freshman team that compiled a 20–2 record.

  Now that he was a sophomore on the varsity, however, Slaughter had to adapt to a different role. Wooden didn’t need him to score but rather to defend and rebound, and most of all to pass the ball to Hazzard. Slaughter went along with it because he wanted to play, but he didn’t get much explanation from Wooden. “Coach Wooden was interested in the guards. He didn’t care about me,” Slaughter said. “I didn’t feel that Coach didn’t like me. I was fine, but my relationship person-to-person wasn’t as great with him as it was with Jerry Norman. Jerry used to work out with me and play defense against me. He brought the human, caring kind of things for me.”

  Slaughter and Hazzard, the two sophomores, rounded out a starting lineup that also included Gary Cunningham, Johnny Green, and Pete Blackman. That meant Wooden could get back to his racehorse ways. “We’re a running club,” he said before the 1961–62 season began. “Of course, we don’t always bring the ball with us.”