Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  As it turned out, Slaughter had no trouble beating out Vaughn Hoffman, Wooden’s hot prospect, at center. Thus, the starting five was set—Hazzard, Goodrich, Hirsch, Erickson, and Slaughter. Beyond that, two sophomores emerged as substitutes. They were both southern transplants: Doug McIntosh, a six-foot-six forward from Lily, Kentucky, and Kenny Washington, a reed-thin, six-foot-three guard from Beaufort, South Carolina.

  Washington, who was black, faced a far more difficult transition than McIntosh, who was white. Washington had come to UCLA thanks to Hazzard, whom he had met on the playgrounds while visiting his sister in Philadelphia in the summer of 1961, before his senior year of high school. Hazzard thought so highly of Washington’s skills that he told Jerry Norman to offer the kid a scholarship. To make sure Norman took his advice, Hazzard told the coach that Washington was a sturdy six-foot-five, 205 pounds, and he could shoot better than Gary Cunningham. That was all Norman needed to hear. He signed up Washington sight unseen.

  To get from South Carolina to Southern California, Washington spent three days crouched in the back of a Greyhound bus. When the bus reached Los Angeles, Norman waited for the player Hazzard described to step off. That player never appeared. After a while, Norman spotted the quiet, scrawny, scared-looking kid standing in a corner, and he came to the disappointing realization that this was Walt’s guy.

  Washington could not have been more out of his element. To that point in his life, he had barely spoken to a white person, and he had been taught to look down when he did talk to one. Now, as a freshman at UCLA, he was living with a white roommate. Washington was also confounded by simple technologies like the milk machine in the cafeteria. When he went to a restaurant, he couldn’t tell the waiter what he wanted on his salad because he had never tasted salad dressing. As a result, Washington became a loner, so much so that Hazzard warned him people were getting worried that he would turn out to be another Ron Lawson.

  If Washington expected sympathy from his head coach, he would be disappointed. In his autobiography They Call Me Coach, Wooden described a freshman practice in the fall of 1962, during which he found Washington standing on the side with tears in his eyes. When Wooden asked Washington what was wrong, the youngster replied that he was upset because he wouldn’t get back home to Beaufort for several months. “I said to him, ‘If you don’t shape up, you can ship out tomorrow on the first Greyhound,’” Wooden wrote.

  Washington wasn’t put off by the tough love. He had experienced much the same treatment from his own father, an ex-marine. Wooden was simply preaching the same small-town values Washington had known back home. “He had structure, a philosophy based on fairness,” Washington said. “The same things his father taught him, my father taught me. I felt like a foster child.”

  Hazzard may have stretched the truth about Washington’s size, but he wasn’t lying about his ability. After leading the freshman team in scoring and rebounding, Washington moved up to the varsity in 1963. During those six weeks between the start of practice and the season opener, the Bruins worked feverishly on their new defense. “I had never heard of a zone press,” Erickson said. “To my knowledge, nobody had ever done it.” Each day, they would climb those three staircases in the men’s gym and, after helping to mop up the gymnastics team’s chalk as Wooden sprinkled his water, they would run themselves ragged.

  Despite being the defending AAWU champions, the Bruins would begin the season unranked in both national polls. Sports Illustrated declined to include UCLA in its preseason top twenty, noting that the team’s “lack of height again makes things tough.”

  UCLA served notice from the start that it would be better than anticipated. Playing before just 4,700 fans at the Sports Arena in the season opener, the Bruins set a single-game school scoring record by embarrassing BYU, 113–71. Hazzard led the team in scoring with 20 points, but the real star was the defense. “Our kids got rattled by their press,” BYU coach Stan Watts said afterward. “UCLA simply threw us out of our patterns and due to our inexperience we didn’t adjust.”

  The Bruins romped over their next five opponents and rose to No. 4 in the AP poll. That set up the most compelling story line in the five-year history of the Los Angeles Basketball Classic. The Michigan Wolverines, who were also undefeated and ranked third in the AP poll, were going to be playing in the tournament. The Wolverines were exactly the kind of team that was supposed to give UCLA problems. Their vaunted front line, nicknamed the “Anvil Chorus,” featured the Big Ten’s leading rebounder, six-foot-seven junior Bill Buntin, as well as six-foot-eight forward Oliver Dardin. Michigan also boasted a dynamic six-foot-five sophomore guard named Cazzie Russell, whose blend of size and skill was already drawing comparisons to Oscar Robertson’s.

  If the folks who ran the Classic had some marketing savvy, they would have arranged for UCLA and Michigan to meet in the final. Instead, the pairings were drawn at random, and the big clash took place in the semis. With 14,241 fans packing into the Sports Arena, UCLA rushed out to a 12-point lead and dominated the first twenty minutes. Cazzie Russell was completely flummoxed by the 2-2-1 zone press. He was whistled for four traveling calls, and he accounted for 7 of his team’s 12 turnovers in the first half. The Wolverines managed to close to within 3 points at the half, but the Bruins exploded yet again early in the second half, building a 68–54 advantage with about ten minutes to play. By the time the game ended, Michigan had committed 17 turnovers, Russell had scored just 11 points, and UCLA had secured a shockingly easy 98–80 win. Illinois coach Harry Combes, who was watching courtside preparing to meet the winner in the final, would later say that for those forty minutes, the Bruins were “absolutely the best precision team I’ve ever seen.”

  Through the season’s first eight games, the Bruins averaged an astounding 93 points. They were emotionally hung over against Illinois, but they scrapped to an 83–79 win and their second consecutive Classic title. Goodrich, who had scored 30 points against Michigan, added 21 more and was named the tournament’s most outstanding player. The nation already knew the Bruins had an All-American-caliber guard in Hazzard. Now it was learning that he had a running mate who was also worthy of that stature.

  In the next week’s polls, UCLA rose to No. 2, trailing only Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats. The Bruins opened league play with a two-game series at Washington State. After squeezing out an 88–83 win in game 1, the Bruins came out in the first half against the Cougars in game 2 and dominated just as they had the previous night.

  When the players got into the locker room for halftime, Wooden followed them inside and made an announcement. “Kentucky has been beaten,” he said. Everyone understood what that meant. The Bruins polished off Washington State in the second half with ease, setting yet another school scoring record in a 121–77 victory. On Monday, it became official. The men who voted in both the Associated Press and United Press International college basketball polls installed Johnny Wooden’s little UCLA Bruins as the No. 1 team in America.

  * * *

  The games were falling into a pattern. Opponents would hang around for a while, but at a certain point they would make a mistake against the press. They would then compound that mistake with a couple more, and before they knew what hit them, the game had broken open. Wooden and Norman liked to call those game-breaking runs “Bruin Blitzes.” Sportswriters started referring to the team as the “glue factory” because of what they did to horses who tried to run with them. “When we first hit with [the zone press], it was an innovation that just shocked people,” Hazzard said. “It was a surprise element, and it had a tremendous psychological effect on other teams.”

  Wooden loved watching those other machines go wobbly. “Passes are intercepted and teammates will sometimes say, ‘Watch your passing,’ and the other will say, ‘Why don’t you meet the ball?’ You’ve got them cussing at each other and they’re not going to function as well as a team,” he said. “You can get well behind but you have to keep the pressure on and have faith in [the press] and n
ot give up.”

  Game after game, week after week, opponents tried their best to slow the Bruins down. On January 10, USC coach Forrest Twogood tried to let his players run with UCLA, only to see his team lose by 20. The next night, the Trojans held the ball for long stretches, but UCLA still won, 78–71. “Every team we face in the conference will try to do the same thing USC did against us tonight,” Wooden said.

  A week later, the Bruins unspooled their most devastating run yet. Playing their primary league challenger, Stanford, in the Sports Arena, UCLA found itself in a battle for most of the night. The score was tied fifteen times, and there were ten lead changes. UCLA led 63–60 with nine minutes to play when—wham!—they blitzed. After hitting a pair of free throws to put UCLA up by 7, Goodrich stole the ball out of the press and fired a pass to Slaughter for a layup. On the ensuing possession, Hazzard stole the ball, pushed up on a three-on-one fast break, and then hit a streaking Hirsch for a score. Stanford tried to bring the ball upcourt again, and once again Hazzard got a steal that led to a 3-point play for Slaughter. It only took one minute, twenty seconds, but by the time the Bruins were through they had scored 13 unanswered points. They coasted home, 80–61. “Endurance and quickness. That’s what’s keeping us up there, especially in those close games,” Wooden said afterward. “I don’t recall ever seeing us break loose the way we did tonight.”

  Goodrich and Hazzard were now well on their way to becoming one of the finest backcourts the game had ever seen. Goodrich was leading the Big Six in scoring at 22.4 points per game, and Hazzard was on pace to shatter Willie Naulls’s UCLA career scoring record. Now 15–0 and still ranked No. 1 in the country, the Bruins were truly in uncharted waters. “Sure, there’s some pressure on us,” Wooden conceded. “The more we win, the more the boys would like to keep it going.”

  After UCLA waxed Cal by 20 points to improve to 18–0, Mal Florence noted in the Los Angeles Times that UCLA’s press “didn’t particularly bother the Bears, but they fell into the Bruins’ tempo and it has become quite apparent that you don’t run with UCLA.” Rene Herrerias, who had succeeded his former boss, Pete Newell, as Cal’s coach, reverted to the old Newell slowdown style the next night. The game wasn’t decided until Hazzard sank three free throws in the final forty-one seconds, allowing UCLA to escape with a 58–56 win.

  Wooden was so stressed out after the game that he went into UCLA’s locker room and vomited, which he said had never happened to him in nearly forty years of playing and coaching. “I had an orange juice and a sandwich and then went right in and got sick,” he said. The old-fashioned war with Cal had brought out the worst in Wooden. At one point, Rene Herrerias saw his senior guard Dan Lufkin barking at the UCLA bench as he ran downcourt. During the next time-out, Herrerias asked him what he was saying. “I’m trying to tell the coach to get off my back,” Lufkin replied.

  As usual, the Bay Area sportswriters took note of Wooden’s sideline behavior. “UCLA’s basketball players took the pressure of possible defeat by California far better than their coaches, Wooden and Norman. That was the general privately expressed opinion by those who saw the teams,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported the next day. “The opinions specifically involved Wooden shrieking at officials Mel Ross and Jim Tunney when UCLA fell behind, his alleged yelling at California players as they went past the Bruin bench and Norman’s grabbing his throat twice, the traditional choke gesture when the referees came to the scorer’s table.” The Chronicle further predicted that “the charge that Wooden yelled at Bear players may be aired at the next conference meeting.”

  Wooden didn’t hide his irritation when the topic of his bench conduct was brought up once again at the weekly Southern California writers’ luncheon. “I’ve won a lot of ball games in the Bay Area, but I could never tell it by reading their newspapers the next day,” he said.

  It had already been a long season, and there were still seven games to go. Increasingly the question was being asked, in Los Angeles and around the country, whether this UCLA squad could go undefeated. Only two teams had compiled a perfect record while winning an NCAA title, San Francisco in 1956 and North Carolina in 1957. Michigan coach Dave Strack was among those who were unconvinced. “They don’t look like any superteam,” he said. Even Wooden claimed to be skeptical. “As soon as we meet a team with a good big center, we may be in trouble,” he said.

  Part of the mystery stemmed from the fact that most people had not seen more than a couple of the country’s top teams. One of the few who had was Aleksandar Nikolic, the coach of the Yugoslavian national team who was spending three months that winter traveling around America to study basketball in advance of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Nikolic was wrapping up his swing with a trip to the West Coast in early February, and he was invited to the Los Angeles writers’ luncheon. When Nikolic told the writers in his broken English that he had seen more than fifty teams during his travels, they naturally wanted to know which he thought was the best. “UCLA,” he answered.

  Really? Why?

  “Is small team,” he replied. “No big man, no big score like Nash of Coach Roop team in Kentucky. But ziss—pardon, my English very bad—ziss is best I see. Because is team.”

  He held up five fingers. “All five. Team. You understand?”

  * * *

  The suggestion that his players functioned like fingers on a hand would have seemed laughable to Wooden. These were the same players who griped to him all the time about not getting enough minutes, or shots, or both. They argued nonstop. When practice was over, everybody went his own way. “Our team play was so good on the floor, you’d think they were the happiest, friendliest people in the world,” Wooden said. “Yet, off the floor, they were not that close.”

  The players, however, saw things differently. They may not have socialized much, but that didn’t mean they didn’t like playing together. The disconnect between their point of view and Wooden’s underscored how times had changed. The days when returning servicemen snapped to attention on Lieutenant Wooden’s command were long gone. These players had no qualms about questioning authority. They spoke their minds, to him and to each other. They fed off friction.

  Signs of discord abounded. Keith Erickson complained about not getting nearly as many shots as Hazzard and Goodrich. When pressed for the reason, Wooden would tell him flatly, “Because they make them.” Wooden tried to emphasize the positive with Erickson—If you get the rebound … outstanding! Now give the ball to Gail or Walter—but it didn’t always work. “Wooden told me that Keith came to him complaining he wasn’t taking enough shots,” Goodrich said. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Keith. You keep shooting.’”

  The carping occasionally broke out into the open. After Sports Illustrated sent a young writer named Frank Deford to cover the Los Angeles Basketball Classic in December, Deford wrote that “no other players in the Classic approached UCLA in displays of anguish and dismay at virtually every call against them. Parleys with the referees went on endlessly.” Deford quoted an anonymous coach who predicted, “Sure, they’re going fine now so everything is rosy. But if they lose a couple, these guys might fold up on themselves.”

  That was precisely what Wooden was afraid of. “Hazzard and Goodrich didn’t get along at all. Erickson and Hirsch were at Hazzard and Goodrich all year long. They felt that they didn’t pass to them enough, that they weren’t getting enough shots,” Wooden said. “It didn’t worsen as the season wore on, but it didn’t lessen, either.… If we hadn’t been having a good year it would have been an untenable thing.”

  Yet once the ball went up, the pieces fit together beautifully. Part of it was blind luck. Since two of the starters, Goodrich and Hirsch, were left-handed, that meant that all four of the players in the front of the zone press could be positioned with their strong hand next to the sideline. The quintet also possessed complementary skill sets—Erickson’s agility, Hirsch’s guile, Slaughter’s jumping ability and keen timing—as well as mind-sets. The prime exam
ple, of course, was the backcourt, where Hazzard’s brilliant passing meshed with Goodrich’s deadeye shooting. “Goodrich can do anything better than Hazzard, including pass,” Wooden said. “But Hazzard will pass.”

  It also helped that the starting five had gotten a year older. That meant another year of understanding Wooden’s expectations. During practice one day, a ball rolled Erickson’s way while he was working on his free throws. Instead of passing it back, the perennially goofy Erickson chucked up a long-distance shot. When the ball went in, Erickson milked the moment by laughing loudly and lying down on the court. He looked up to see his grim-faced coach marching in his direction. “You’re lucky I had a chance to count to twenty before I got down here,” Wooden said. “If I had counted to ten like I usually do, you’d be out of here.”

  Then there was Hirsch—incorrigible, irredeemable, irrepressible, and in so many ways, invaluable. Since Hirsch had spent most of his basketball life learning to score inside against bigger players, he was able to prevent defenses from focusing solely on Goodrich. Erickson said that Hirsch was “brilliant” in his ability to find the best spot on the floor to get a rebound. Wooden agreed. “He picks up more garbage than anyone I’ve ever seen,” the coach said.

  Because Hirsch was already set for life financially, he was not as intimidated by Wooden as the others were. If the coach kicked him out of school, Hirsch could just go work for his dad, which is what he wanted to do in the first place. He reminded Wooden of this often, but Wooden still drew his lines. For example, when Hirsch complained for the umpteenth time about the low quality of the food at team meals—“I’m not gonna eat this slop,” he said—Wooden told him that he should leave the training table and not come back. That was fine with Hirsch. He went to his parents’ house and enjoyed a nice steak cooked by his family’s personal chef. After about two weeks, he decided he wanted to come back, not because he missed the food but because he missed the camaraderie with his teammates. So he went to Wooden’s office to ask if he could return. Wooden made Hirsch practically beg before he relented. For weeks afterward, Hirsch’s teammates would tease him at team meals by asking, “How’s the food, Jack?”