Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Indeed, Wooden’s experience during World War II taught him to appreciate capricious good fortune. After all, if it weren’t for that inflamed appendix, it could have been him, not his college buddy, who died on the USS Franklin. Wooden survived a similar brush with death many years later. He had been scheduled to attend a coaches’ clinic in North Carolina, but he postponed his departure from a Saturday to a Sunday. The connecting flight he was supposed to take crashed between Atlanta and Raleigh. Everybody aboard was killed.

  Whenever UCLA got on a winning streak, Wooden kept everything the same. He wore the same suit over and over. The menu for the pregame meal never changed. “I don’t think I ever looked at it as being superstitious,” Wooden said. “Subconsciously, certain rituals may give you a little more peace, a little more calmness, a little more serenity. If you have a feeling that doing a certain thing is going to be helpful to you, then it probably will be.”

  Wooden was full of such odd revelations. The players quickly figured out just how much he loved westerns. Whenever the team was on a road trip, Wooden usually took them to see one in a movie theater. On a bus ride or team plane, he could be found flipping through a paperback from that genre. The players knew that on Tuesday nights, practice would end a little early because the coach wanted to make sure he got home in time to watch Wyatt Earp on television. He loved it when the good guys won.

  He wasn’t funny, but he could be witty. When he cracked wise, it was often at someone else’s expense. “He made fun of you in a way that sliced you up and made everybody laugh but didn’t kill you,” said another former player, Bill Johnston. Wooden was also quick on his feet. As the team was traveling through an airport one day, Wooden was leafing through a magazine and came across a centerfold of a scantily clad woman. He turned and discovered a group of players smirking at him. “Look,” he said, pointing to the page. “Blue shoes.”

  Then there were the many occasions when Wooden surprised his boys with his prowess at the pool table. The players could not believe this teetotaling goody-goody was so proficient at a game that was usually played in dingy bars. “We used to play snooker down at the bowling alley. I thought I was a decent player at it,” Denny Crum said. “When he found out, we went over to the student union. It was unbelievable how good he was. You would’ve never known he played a game like that.” Pete Blackman likewise recalled a trip to the Midwest when the players were shooting some stick and Wooden happened by. “Somebody said, ‘Here, Coach, give it a try.’ He ran the table,” Blackman said.

  Wooden did not boast of his exploits at billiards any more than he bragged about his accomplishments as a basketball player. The only glimpses the players saw of the India Rubber Man came through an occasional demonstration in practice. When Wooden put on a shooting exhibition, the players laughed at his antiquated form, but darn if that ball didn’t keep going in. During a team meal one night, as the players regaled each other with tales of their toughness, Wooden let drip a piece of his past. “You know,” he told them, “one time when I was playing pro ball, the referee threw the ball for the center jump, and the two centers punched each other. Didn’t even bother going for the ball.” That ended the conversation.

  Wooden could be just as eloquent in the things he didn’t say. He did his best to live by his father’s admonition never to speak poorly of someone else. One day, Wooden was talking to a local newspaper columnist about a former UCLA player who had recently fathered a child out of wedlock and been sent to jail. The columnist disparaged the young man for a few minutes and then asked the coach what he knew of him. “I understand he’s a good father,” Wooden said.

  The main reason Wooden’s players didn’t know him better is that there were so few opportunities to spend time with him away from the court. “They had my home phone number, but for the most part they didn’t come to our home,” Wooden said. If a player wanted to get to know Wooden better, it helped to have a common interest. Stan Andersen barely got off the bench when he was on Wooden’s teams in 1958–59 and 1959–60, but he frequently ran into the coach while he was reading quietly by himself in a Westwood bookstore. “I was an avid reader. I probably talked to him more often in the bookstore than I did on the court,” Andersen said. “He recommended to me a book on photography, which I really enjoyed. When we played at the Sports Arena, I’d want to ride in the car with Wooden just to get into conversation. For me, his biggest strength was his intellect.”

  It was for that reason that Wooden liked to proctor his players’ exams on road trips. He could have delegated that task to an assistant, but by doing it himself, he was showing his players how deeply he valued education. He was also interested in what they were studying. After proctoring an English literature exam one night, he asked the players what they had written about. They told him it was a poem that included the word diadem, but none of them knew what that word meant. “He told us what it was,” Johnston said. “It’s a crown, and you couldn’t elaborate on the poem unless you knew what the hell it was. So we learned vocabulary from the UCLA basketball coach.”

  Wooden operated in a jock culture that was addled by cigarettes and liquor, yet he was the straightest of straight arrows. It was not easy to relax around a man who was so rigid. “There were people who didn’t like John very much because he was a little bit austere, a little bit removed,” said Bob Murphy, a longtime radio broadcaster for Stanford. “He was very polite and somewhat withdrawn, but he was always very thoughtful.”

  Wooden’s program was an extension of that straight arrow. He wanted his players looking clean-cut and clean-shaven. He conducted impromptu spot checks on their lockers because he wanted “to see they’re not getting slovenly.” (Though first he had to teach them what slovenly meant.) He did not want gum wrappers or wads of tape lying around. If the players didn’t throw their orange juice cartons in a trash can, he would refuse to give them juice for a couple of days. Wooden loved to brag about how often he received compliments at the way his boys had left their locker room so clean.

  By the early 1960s, Wooden had been teaching basketball for nearly thirty years, and he had many former players who were husbands and fathers, lawyers and doctors, businessmen and teachers and ministers. If they wanted to get to know their old college coach better, they found that he was far more emotionally available than he had been during their playing days. This was especially true of the former players who became teachers themselves. When Wooden’s first star player at UCLA, George Stanich, told him that he wanted to go into education, Wooden sat next to him on a flight to a road game and filled several sheets on a legal pad with suggestions. After Stanich graduated, Wooden spent an entire day driving him sixty miles each way to interview with the superintendent of schools in Oxnard, California. Stanich didn’t get that job, but he later became a basketball coach at a local junior college. Every few years, he would find himself in a bind that would prompt him to call on Wooden. “He never gave me the answer to my questions, but he gave me situations that he had experienced that were similar and told me how he dealt with them,” Stanich said. “On my way home, I would know what I had to do.”

  Another of Wooden’s first players at UCLA, Barry Porter, joined his staff briefly as a freshman coach. “If I would ask him something, he would invariably ask me what I thought first, to get my point of view,” Porter said. “He was truly interested in me and wanted to learn.” Later, when Porter left coaching and started his own carpet cleaning business, Wooden was one of his first customers.

  Wooden’s memory was incredible. He never forgot a name or a face, and he could spit out details of games that his players had long forgotten. If a former player wrote him a letter, Wooden wrote back. If someone wanted to have lunch, Wooden found the time. If a player asked him to speak somewhere, the answer was always yes. And if one of them happened to show up at a UCLA game, he was treated like royalty. “One day after I graduated, I went to the Sports Arena and walked in on the team at halftime,” said Mike Hibler, who played center at
UCLA from 1951 to 1954. “I wasn’t sure if I should be there, but he welcomed me in when he was giving his speech. That’s just how he was. He loved his boys.”

  * * *

  “We’re going to try to get on the break and run like we did in the old days,” Wooden said in the fall of 1962. His Bruins were beginning the season with a rare dollop of respect: Sports Illustrated ranked UCLA No. 17 in its preseason college basketball issue. The magazine asserted that “if UCLA is going to have problems, it will be up front,” but the presence of Walt Hazzard warranted the ranking. “He has the ability to hit men who don’t even realize they’re open,” Wooden said.

  Besides the promotion of Gail Goodrich and another heralded guard from Los Angeles, Freddie Goss, from the undefeated freshman team, Wooden received an unexpected gift from George Stanich. Now the coach at El Camino College, a nearby junior college, Stanich had reached out to Jerry Norman to let him know he had a player named Keith Erickson who might be able to help. The kid couldn’t shoot a lick, but he was as gifted an athlete as Stanich had ever coached. Since Erickson was also a terrific baseball player, Norman arranged for him to come to UCLA on a half-baseball, half-basketball scholarship. “That way if I didn’t make it in either sport, neither would lose a full scholarship,” Erickson said. “That’s how much confidence they had in me.”

  Erickson’s real passion, however, was volleyball. He grew up by the ocean in the town of El Segundo, and he spent much of his free time at the beach. With all this energy devoted to sports, Erickson had little time—and even less interest—left over for academics. He often joked that he majored in eligibility. Erickson liked to goof around in practice, but while Wooden got mad at him a lot, he rarely stayed that way. “I’m very fond of Keith,” Wooden said. “I like spirited basketball players.”

  Besides, Wooden had another new player who was giving him even bigger headaches. Jack Hirsch was a spindly, Jewish, six-foot-three forward who had spent his childhood on the hardscrabble streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. When Hirsch was fifteen, his father moved the family to California, where he became wealthy through his ownership of a chain of bowling alleys. By the time Hirsch was a senior at Van Nuys High School, he was an all-city basketball player who planned on attending Cal State University in Northridge, but he was encouraged by his father to visit UCLA. When Norman brought Hirsch into the men’s gym in the spring of 1960 to meet the head coach, Hirsch was not impressed. “He was mopping the floors,” Hirsch said. “My first thought was, God, he’s an old man.”

  The old man was equally unimpressed. Wooden got one look at Hirsch’s wispy frame, took measure of his cocky attitude, and decided on the spot that he wasn’t fit for UCLA. “Come back to me when you’re ready,” Wooden said. Hirsch was livid. “I walked out of there and said, I’m going to show him. He’ll see what kind of player I am.”

  After spending a year at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, where he played center and averaged 28 points per game, Hirsch was inclined to quit school and go into the family business, but his father cajoled him into going to UCLA by promising to quit smoking cigarettes. (Hirsch enrolled and his dad quit—for a week, anyway.) Once basketball season began, Hirsch wondered if he had made a mistake. “I was totally unprepared for Wooden’s work ethic, his morals, all that stuff,” he said.

  He was also unprepared for Wooden’s coldness, which Hirsch witnessed firsthand after he ripped up his ankle during the first month of practice. “I was lying there and Wooden said, ‘Can somebody get him off the court? I’m trying to hold a practice here.’ I mean the pain went to the top of my head,” Hirsch said. “I had the feeling at that point that he didn’t give a shit about me.”

  Hirsch spent most of the 1961–62 season on crutches. He didn’t bother going to practice, and Wooden never once called to see how he was doing. After his ankle healed, Hirsch thought about transferring to Cal State, Northridge, but Norman talked him into coming back to practice for the last couple of weeks. He competed well enough that both he and Wooden realized he could make a contribution—that is, if they could learn to coexist. “He was always abrasive, but he was very smart,” Wooden said. Hirsch added: “I was probably the first person that challenged Wooden by being obnoxious and arrogant, which comes from Brooklyn. You know, like you can’t tell me what to do, you son of a bitch. I was just as tough as he was in some respects.”

  One of the ways Hirsch tested Wooden was by calling him “John” or “JW.” When he was feeling especially cheeky, he might call him “Woody.” Hirsch’s teammates were stunned by his audacity. They were even more surprised that Wooden abided it. “I never asked the players to call me ‘Coach’ or ‘Mr. Wooden,’ but he’s the only one who didn’t,” Wooden said.

  The coach was less forgiving of Hirsch’s tardiness. One time when Hirsch was barely a minute late to practice, Wooden literally slammed the door on him. After Hirsch complained the next day, Wooden tersely replied, “Jack, you should discipline yourself so others don’t have to.” The lesson stuck. “With him, there was always deprivation,” Hirsch said. “He was depriving me of doing what I enjoyed most, which was playing basketball with my friends.”

  Such was the combustible mix that took the floor for UCLA during the 1962–63 season. The six-man rotation featured three blacks and three whites (including one Jew) who had little in common except a love for playing ball. They also lacked a true home court—still. Shortly before the season began, UCLA learned that the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had allocated most of the Sports Arena’s Saturday night slots for the winter to the Los Angeles Lakers and to the Los Angeles Blades, who played in the Western Hockey League. Aside from their three games against USC and the Los Angeles Basketball Classic, the Bruins would have to play all but one of their home games at Santa Monica City College, which barely held two thousand fans. The last game would take place at the men’s gymnasium, the old B.O. barn. It was not a happy situation.

  Once the games got under way, Wooden realized that his team could be devastating when it got the running game going. During the opener against Denver, UCLA sprinted out to a 10–1 lead and won by 29 points. Two weeks later, the Bruins hung 101 points on Oklahoma, just 7 points shy of the school’s scoring record.

  On the other hand, Wooden suspected that the Bruins were going to have problems against teams that had a big, scoring center and could slow the tempo and dominate the boards. Their size deficiency was especially glaring when they struggled with their shooting—as Goodrich did in those first three games, when he made just four of his thirty shot attempts. “My guards can’t hit anywhere past 15 feet,” Wooden lamented. “On the other hand, my forwards can’t hit from ten.”

  Still, the team had a respectable 7–2 record heading into the Los Angeles Basketball Classic in late December. Stanford was the only team in the tournament that was ranked in the top ten of a national poll. But the Indians lost to USC in their first game, allowing UCLA to emerge as the winner by beating Colorado State in the final. “I don’t want to schedule them for three years,” said St. Louis coach John Benington, whose team lost to the Bruins by 19 points in the semifinals. “They don’t have the big man, but they have superior talent and an excellent bench. Come to think of it, I don’t think they even need the big man.”

  They were still awfully young, however, so they were bound to experience growing pains. That was especially true for Goodrich. “There were nights when I’d come home from practice so tired I’d be lucky to get my clothes off,” he said. Late in the first half of UCLA’s conference opener at Washington, Goodrich dribbled the ball downcourt on a three-on-one fast break and tried to throw a behind-the-back pass, just as he had seen Hazzard do many times. Except Hazzard usually completed his passes. Goodrich’s attempt sailed out of bounds. During halftime, Wooden came at Goodrich hard and low. “He let me have it,” Goodrich said. “That was the last time I threw it behind my back in college.”

  Despite Goodrich’s struggles, Wooden kept him in th
e starting lineup, even though Goss was playing much better. When a reporter privately asked him why, Wooden replied, “Freddie has a better attitude. Gail sulks if he doesn’t get to start.” That may have been true, but it did not solve Wooden’s numbers problem in the backcourt, where he had three players for two spots. “That whole year we struggled because Wooden didn’t know who to play,” Goss said. “If those guys didn’t get the proper amount of playing time, they would say something to him, or their parents might say something. Especially Gail’s parents. His father was at practice every day.”

  UCLA lost both of its first two league games at Washington, but the team quickly rounded into form and won the next five. The main reason was Hazzard, whose playmaking was much more under control than it had been as a sophomore the year before. He emerged as the primary scorer. After he torched USC for 27 points in back-to-back games the first weekend of February, Trojans coach Forrest Twogood called Hazzard “the most complete college basketball player in America.”

  Meanwhile, Wooden’s preseason concerns over rebounding were proving to be unfounded. The players were tougher than he’d realized, and their quickness allowed them to benefit from Wooden’s rebounding philosophy, which favored pursuing the basketball over boxing out. When UCLA beat Colorado State in the finals of the Los Angeles Basketball Classic, they outrebounded the Rams 58–42, even though Colorado State’s front line featured players who were six foot six, six foot eight, and six foot nine.