Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  During his early years at UCLA, Wooden had felt persecuted (his word) because he did not have the resources to build a winner. Now he had more than he needed. An NCAA title. A new arena on the way. A strong local recruiting pipeline. When he had taken the job, UCLA was dwarfed by USC’s shadow. Now people back home were suggesting it was time to replace Forrest Twogood because he couldn’t beat UCLA. It was true that Hazzard, Hirsch, and Slaughter were graduating, but Goodrich and Erickson were coming back as seniors, Freddie Goss would be eligible for his final year, and McIntosh and Washington had proved they could be championship-level performers. The Bruins’ freshmen team, led by Edgar Lacey, had gone 19–1. Indeed, the final buzzer against Duke had barely sounded when Goodrich told Jerry Norman that he expected the Bruins to be back in that game for his senior year.

  When Wooden delivered that postgame warning to his players, he was also talking to himself. He had seen how winning a championship devoured coaches like Pete Newell at Cal, Phil Woolpert at San Francisco, and Ed Jucker at Cincinnati. All of them had been so worried about meeting expectations that it drove them to an early retirement. When the Bruins returned to Los Angeles, they were feted like champions, because Hollywood loved a happy ending. But when the credits rolled and the house lights came up, all that remained were Wooden and his three-by-five cards. He hunkered down in his little office and began to build his lesson plans for the road ahead.

  At one point during their annual spring talks, Wooden looked up at Jerry Norman and said, “Winning that title was the worst thing that could have happened to us.” Norman thought he was kidding. Turns out he wasn’t.

  PART THREE

  Autumn

  20

  J. D.

  A few days before the 1964 NCAA tournament began, Wooden was working in his cramped, temporary office space when he heard a knock at the door. In walked J. D. Morgan, who had taken over as athletic director the previous July after Wilbur Johns retired. Wooden was not in a chatty mood. He was busy putting together the basketball team’s budget for the upcoming year, which Johns had always required him to submit by April 1.

  Noticing the pile of papers on Wooden’s desk, Morgan asked the coach what he was doing. When Wooden told him, Morgan walked over to the desk, grabbed the papers, and, without a word of warning, dumped them into the wastebasket. “I’ll take care of the budget,” he said. “You get your team ready for this tournament. If your spending gets out of line, I’ll let you know.”

  The new boss may have been ten years Wooden’s junior, but there was no question who was in command. Wooden was already familiar with Morgan’s bluster and bombast, as well as his brilliance. When Wooden first came to UCLA in the fall of 1948, Morgan was the assistant tennis coach under Bill Ackerman, and he and Wooden got to know each other over the years during casual faculty lunches in the student union. “He was a very dominant, aggressive type of person. Very outspoken and very forceful,” Wooden said. “I found that J. D. had a tremendous retentive memory in regard to sporting events, scores, and various things of that sort. Of course, he was very certain that he was correct. He was very outspoken in that manner. We found that he was usually right, so there would be no point in arguing with him in regard to a date or a score.”

  Morgan carried 240 pounds on his five-foot-eleven frame. His imperious manner was the opposite of Wooden’s, yet Wooden had to respect his coaching abilities. As UCLA’s tennis coach, Morgan had led his teams to seven NCAA championships, making him by far the most successful coach at the school. He had also brought a rare ferocity to an otherwise genteel sport. His team’s spring conditioning regimen was so arduous that the Los Angeles Times once suggested that UCLA’s football players should be glad they played for Red Sanders instead of J. D. Morgan.

  Fred Hessler, who broadcast UCLA sporting events on the radio, first noticed Morgan in the early 1950s when J. D. was ejected from a UCLA basketball game for heckling officials. “I was sitting there during a time-out and I said to the guy sitting next to me, ‘Who’s he throwing out?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s J. D. Morgan, the assistant tennis coach,’” Hessler recalled. “He didn’t enjoy it too much when I used to kid him about this incident later, but he always had a very fierce feeling about UCLA and the officiating. He only saw it one way—his way.”

  For many years, Morgan also served as the university’s business manager. A 1941 graduate of UCLA’s College of Business Administration, he developed an intricate understanding of the school’s financial operations, and that, even more than his acumen as a coach, made him the ideal candidate to succeed Johns as athletic director. Morgan’s hard-charging personality was a tremendous asset in his role as chief fund-raiser for the new campus pavilion. UCLA had just experienced its biggest one-year enrollment increase since World War II, and Morgan wanted the pavilion to match the grandness of the campus and the city surrounding it. The arena was designed to have room for 13,500 spectators, all of whom would have an unobstructed view of the court thanks to a state-of-the-art design that used massive steel frames to support the roof, which negated the need for columns. Wooden requested that the visitors’ locker rooms be the same size as UCLA’s, but aside from that, the pavilion project was a J. D. Morgan operation, like everything else that was now happening inside UCLA athletics.

  Besides assuming control over the budget, Morgan also informed Wooden that from now on, he was going to handle the scheduling. “That was a tremendous load off my shoulders,” Wooden said. Morgan’s remark that he would let Wooden know if his spending got out of line was laughable. Wooden was a penny-pinching Depression baby who lacked any kind of business sense. There was no way he was going to go over budget. “John was never interested in money,” Hessler said. “He would do things like schedule a game at Indiana State, where he had once coached. I don’t think they had more than thirty-five hundred people there.”

  If anything, Morgan wanted Wooden to spend more, especially when it came to recruiting. One of Morgan’s first decisions was to install Jerry Norman as a full-time varsity assistant, which allowed Norman to spend much more time scavenging for players. Morgan also dictated that any time Wooden’s team traveled by air, the players would sit in first class. Those boys were prized assets. He wanted them to stretch their legs.

  Morgan and Wooden had some similarities that helped them get along. They were both raised in the Midwest (Morgan grew up in Cordell, Oklahoma, where he had lettered in four sports), and they had both served in the military (Morgan commanded a navy PT boat during World War II). A devout Presbyterian, Morgan was a moralist who shared Wooden’s devotion to faith. Both men also doted on their spouses. Morgan could be in a red-faced rage in his office, but when his wife, Cynthia, called, he would pick up the receiver and speak sweetly into the phone. “Maybe he was a little tougher on the outside to cover up a certain amount of softness he had,” Hessler said. Wooden and Morgan shared a love for all sports. Most of all, each man recognized how the other could help him. “To me, he was not arrogant but very confident,” Wooden said. “I think he backed it up. It wasn’t a false confidence.”

  Yet their differences were just as stark. During Wooden’s first year at UCLA, he refused to let his starting point guard, Eddie Sheldrake, accompany the team to the Bay Area because his wife was having a baby. Morgan, on the other hand, once told Ron Livingston, who also played basketball for Wooden, that he wanted Livingston to stay with the tennis team in a hotel instead of with his new wife the day after their wedding. Whereas Wooden always sought to maintain a balance between work and family, Morgan regularly toiled in his office late into the night. When he took his family on vacation, he spent most of his time on the telephone. And unlike Wooden, Morgan enjoyed the limelight. He attended the weekly writers’ luncheons and was much more colorful in his remarks than his coach ever was.

  The contrast between their life philosophies was as easy to see as the sign on Morgan’s desk. It read: “Winning Solves All Problems.” Wooden liked J. D. Morgan, but he never liked
that sign. “I’m more inclined toward what Charlie Brown says in the comics,” he said. “‘Winning ain’t everything but losing is nuthin.’”

  * * *

  In the aftermath of his first NCAA championship, Wooden was a man in demand. He received hundreds of inquiries from coaches who wanted to know more about the zone press. He was peppered with invitations to speak at functions, schools, and clinics. He was named “Father of the Year” by the California Father’s Day Council. (Apparently, winning a championship makes you a better dad.) He fulfilled countless requests for autographed copies of his Pyramid of Success.

  His players were in demand as well. One week after the win over Duke, the entire starting five was invited to try out for the United States Olympic team that would compete in Tokyo later that summer. At the time, the NCAA and the Amateur Athletic Union were locked in a scorched-earth dispute over who was going to control amateur basketball. Not wanting to be seen as playing favorites, the U.S. Olympic committee, led by head coach Henry Iba, chose six players from each camp to go to the Olympics. As a result, Walt Hazzard made the team, but Gail Goodrich did not. Wooden was apoplectic. “I saw all those games and the preparations,” he said, “and there was no more outstanding guard that played than Goodrich.” That experience, coupled with Willie Naulls’s omission from the Olympic team in 1956, soured Wooden on USA Basketball for good. “He told me they lied to him,” Goodrich said. “After that, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Olympics.”

  At least the Bruins would no longer be treated like second-class citizens in their hometown. Their new athletic director took a strong stance in negotiations with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission and secured a guarantee that all thirteen home games during the 1964–65 season would be staged at the Sports Arena. No more high school gyms and junior college bungalows for this bunch. Morgan also negotiated increasingly lucrative television contracts with KTLA, and he threatened to pull out of the Los Angeles Basketball Classic unless his USC counterpart, Jess Hill, agreed to alternate the event between the Sports Arena and the soon-to-be-completed Bruin Memorial Activities Center. J. D. was not trying to make friends. He was trying to make money.

  This brought a new set of pressures on Wooden, and he knew he would have to adapt. For example, a few weeks after his team won the NCAA championship, Wooden learned that Goodrich had been drinking heavily at a fraternity party in Berkeley. Goodrich had no idea how Wooden found out, but when he returned to campus, he got a call that the coach wanted to see him in his office the next morning. Goodrich braced for the worst, but it never came. “You know that my rule is if I catch someone drinking, that player is gone,” Wooden told him. “I’d hate for anything like that to happen to you.” It didn’t occur to Goodrich until afterward that the coach never asked him point-blank if the rumors were true. “He was smart enough not to put me in that position,” Goodrich said.

  Keith Erickson committed a much more serious breach when he missed the team’s flight to New York for the Olympic trials because he overslept after spending most of the previous night partying with a buddy. When Wooden returned to Los Angeles, he met with Erickson and told him that he was off the team, although Wooden added he would leave the door open for a possible return in the fall. “He was definitely serious,” Erickson said. “I walked out of there not knowing whether I was going to come back to UCLA.”

  As it turned out, Erickson did play for the United States that summer at the Olympics—as a member of the volleyball team. The squad, which was comprised entirely of players from Southern California, was put together at the last minute and barely practiced before finishing ninth in a field of ten. When the Olympics were over, Erickson returned to campus pessimistic about his chances of playing basketball his senior year. When the big meeting with Wooden came, the coach began by saying, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re off the team.” Erickson’s heart sank. “However,” Wooden continued, “my wife really likes you, and my daughter and son like you, too. So I’m going to give you another chance.” Erickson walked out of Wooden’s office a little more straight, a little more narrow.

  Wooden was a man of principles, but his world was changing fast. His school had a new athletic director, a new television contract, and it was about to have a new arena. It also had a new standard for its basketball program, which Wooden had set himself. His job now was to maintain that standard. It would take more than a little rule breaking for him to dismiss his two best players.

  * * *

  There would be no more sneaking up on anyone. The Bruins began the 1964–65 season ranked No. 2 in the AP poll behind Michigan. They carried their thirty-game winning streak into the new season, which put them within reach of breaking the record of sixty set by Bill Russell’s San Francisco teams. This UCLA team would not include the incandescent Hazzard—he had been selected by the Los Angeles Lakers with the first pick in the NBA draft—but in some ways the Bruins promised to be better. Goodrich would now handle the ball full-time, and he would be joined in the backcourt by Freddie Goss, who returned from his self-imposed one-year sabbatical. Forwards Kenny Washington and Doug McIntosh were ready to be promoted to the starting lineup, and Mike Lynn, a talented six-foot-six sophomore, would join the rotation. Jack Hirsch’s and Fred Slaughter’s skills would be missed, but their departures had the potential to improve chemistry. This machine wouldn’t require quite so much friction to generate heat.

  The start of the season also meant the varsity debut of the much-heralded sophomore, Edgar Lacey, who had proved during his freshman year that he was worth the hype. Yet even though Lacey scored a lot of points, Wooden did not like the way he shot the basketball. Lacey’s form was slow and awkward, and he released the ball from behind his head. Ever the devotee to fundamentals, Wooden believed that Lacey would have trouble making long-range baskets against high-caliber teams, so he worked with Lacey before every practice in an effort to break down his form and rebuild it from scratch. “Edgar seemed comfortable with Wooden,” said Mike Serafin, a six-foot-three sophomore forward on that team, “but I think it was an uncomfortable process.”

  With his genial manner and easy smile, Lacey was well liked by his teammates, but he was essentially a loner. Instead of living near campus, he commuted every day in a beat-up Volkswagen from his home in South Central. “It’s not that Edgar didn’t like white people. He just wasn’t comfortable around white people,” said Goss, who was the only other black player on the team. “He didn’t go out of his way to ingratiate himself to Wooden or the white community or the booster clubs. His ability to accept any kind of discipline from a white man would have been really hard.”

  Lacey gave the Bruins some added offensive punch, but everything revolved around Goodrich, who had added fifteen pounds of muscle over the summer. Wooden and Norman tweaked the zone press to a 1-2-1-1 alignment, but aside from that, little else was changed.

  UCLA opened its title defense in the Midwest, with a game against an unranked team, the University of Illinois. The game was a reality check. Before a feverish crowd at Assembly Hall, the Bruins got knocked on their heels and never recovered. Their press was impotent against an Illini squad that made more than 60 percent of its shots en route to a 52–38 halftime lead. Even when UCLA was able to get a few steals, they did not result in layups because Hazzard was no longer running the point. Goodrich managed to score 25 points, but the Illini ran roughshod and easily won, 110–83. “It was very deflating,” Erickson said. “We were ranked number one again, but we hadn’t done anything. So we were cocky.”

  Fortunately, UCLA had a badly overmatched opponent in its next game—Indiana State, Wooden’s former employer—which it beat by 26 points. From there, the Bruins righted the ship by winning their next four, including a 16-point triumph at the Sports Arena over Oklahoma State. When the Bruins beat Utah by 30 points to win the championship of the Los Angeles Classic, and Michigan took its first loss, UCLA was back on top of the AP poll.

  The season-opening loss to Illinois t
urned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the Bruins could play their games without facing the pressure of trying to stay perfect. Now that Goodrich didn’t have to share the ball with Hazzard, he was liberated to unleash his full bag of tricks. He became the most lethal offensive weapon in America. “I guarded Gail every day in practice, and I never blocked his goddamn shot once,” said Mike Serafin. Lacey, meanwhile, cemented his status as a starter by scoring 20 points in a 9-point win over USC in December. At six-foot-seven, Lacey was the tallest player and best leaper on the team, which is why he was the leading rebounder, but his shooting woes left him as the team’s fourth-leading scorer.

  UCLA’s winning ways continued through conference play. The Bruins survived a couple of close calls, including a 52–50 squeaker against USC, but they finished undefeated in league play for the second straight year. Their only other regular-season loss came at the Milwaukee Classic on January 29, when the Bruins were clipped by unranked Iowa, 87–82, costing them their No. 1 ranking. When the game was over, the Iowa players lifted their coach, Ralph Miller, onto their shoulders and carried him off the floor. Wooden had grown used to such celebrations in Berkeley and Corvallis, but now it had happened in his native Midwest, the area of the country that the Los Angeles Times called “the cradle of basketball” during Wooden’s first season in Westwood. Things were a lot different now, and they would stay that way.

  * * *

  West Coast basketball was still weak compared to the rest of the country, so Wooden had an advantage in the postseason because the NCAA tournament’s regions were arranged by geography, not competitive balance. The Bruins began their title defense in 1965 with a pair of easy wins at the West Regional in Provo, Utah, over BYU and San Francisco. That vaulted UCLA into the NCAA semifinals for the third time in four years. However, a few days before the team left for the championship weekend in Portland, Keith Erickson, who had scored a total of 57 points in the two wins in Provo, was hitting golf balls when he felt a painful twinge. “I was trying to hit the ball as hard as I could, and I pulled the hamstring in one of my legs,” Erickson said. “It was just a great opportunity to be an idiot.” He was the team’s second-leading scorer, but when he got to Portland, it was obvious that he was badly hurt. UCLA would have to rely more heavily on Washington and Lynn if it was going to win two more games.