by Seth Davis
Wooden believed that Boyd and Belko were making a mockery of the game. Now he had made a mockery of their mockery. “Their fans were so happy when they did it. I wanted to see how they’d react when we did it,” he said. “In no way did I do this because of what happened in L.A. All I am saying is that it is bad for basketball if it is used game after game. Did anybody who saw the game really enjoy what Oregon did? And what we were doing?”
Belko praised Wooden for using “fine, sound strategy.” As for his own decision to stall from the outset, Belko asked rhetorically, “How else can you possibly play UCLA and expect to beat them?” Meanwhile, Wooden’s claim that his maneuvers had nothing to do with the USC game was silly. A sports columnist for the Oregon Journal named Ken Wheeler called Wooden out for this falsehood. In reference to the counterculture movement that was blooming on so many college campuses, Wheeler labeled Wooden’s move “a sit-in protest of college basketball’s rules.”
The tit for tat forced everyone to adjust. Before UCLA’s next game, one referee quipped that he had been “studying the rule book more this week than I have in the last five years.” Wooden wanted to use a stall the next night against Oregon State, but the players, specifically Mike Warren, talked him out of it. From there, the games unfolded in a more normal manner, but opposing coaches continued to try every tactic they could think of. In advance of his team’s game at UCLA on February 25, Washington State coach Marv Harshman had his players use tennis rackets, stools, and paddles during practice in an effort to simulate Alcindor’s length. It didn’t exactly work: Alcindor scored 61 points in a 22-point UCLA victory. Wooden thought the world of Harshman, a fellow Christian whom Wooden would later call “one of the nicest people the Lord ever made.” That may have been true, but on that night, at that moment, Harshman was just another poor soul who happened to be standing in John Wooden’s way.
* * *
The win over Washington State clinched yet another conference title, and so the only remaining question was whether the Bruins would finish the regular season undefeated. They answered by sailing through their final three games by an average of 31 points, including a road sweep at Stanford and Cal that prompted Wooden to tweak his friends up north. “In my 19 years of coaching at UCLA, it was my most enjoyable weekend in the Bay Area, and that includes summers,” he said.
While Wooden floated above the fray and dictated how his players should act on the court, it was up to Jerry Norman to do most of the advance scouting as well as help the players manage their academics and work through personal issues. He and Wooden enjoyed a productive relationship, but it was hardly a close one. Norman was especially careful not to get on Nell’s bad side. He had seen how she reacted angrily when Fred Hessler interviewed a coach on his radio show who had disparaged Wooden in the past. “You had to be careful around Nell. She could be very reactive to anything she thought might be negative,” Norman said. “It goes back to the whole West Coast–Midwest thing. They didn’t trust anybody from out here. I don’t recall going out after a game with them at any time. He was very close with his family, and he would go home or get a sandwich or something. But there was no social relationship between us.”
By the time the Bruins arrived in Corvallis, Oregon, for the NCAA tournament’s West Regional, the public was beginning to appreciate that this was not just a one-man team. Alcindor’s fellow sophomores, particularly Shackelford and Allen, had complemented him well. The machine was lubricated by Warren, the lone junior starter, whom Boyd called “the equal of any guard ever to play at UCLA.” Articles mentioning Warren invariably referred to his good looks and Hollywood aspirations, but it was his midwestern upbringing that made him the ideal UCLA point guard. He and Wooden were connected by their South Bend roots. Like Wooden, Warren was smart, tough, and respectful. Unlike Wooden, he was an extrovert and a first-class communicator, whether it was with doe-eyed coeds, his fellow teammates, or his taskmaster of a coach. Wooden frequently called Warren the smartest player he had ever coached. It figures that Wooden would ascribe this label to a black player, while he would refer to a white one, Keith Erickson, as his most gifted athlete.
In their first tournament game, the Bruins disemboweled Wyoming by 49 points and then elbowed their way past a scrappy University of the Pacific team by 16. The season culminated in Louisville, where UCLA was scheduled to play No. 7 Houston in the national semifinals. Houston coach Guy Lewis had a nine-man rotation that featured a talented six-foot-five guard in Don Chaney plus six more players who were six foot six or taller—including six-foot-nine junior forward Elvin Hayes, one of the few post players in the country who was even remotely of Alcindor’s caliber.
During the opening minutes, Hayes found himself streaking to the basket on a fast break while Alcindor backpedaled on defense. Most players in that situation either pulled up for a jump shot or retreated, but Hayes took the ball right at Big Lew and stuffed it. “That kind of startled us, because we had never seen anyone challenge Alcindor that way,” Shackelford said. Hayes yapped at Alcindor the entire game. Before he made a move to the basket, he would bark, “Watch this!” Even after Alcindor blocked several of his shots, Hayes kept right on talking.
Guy Lewis had decided beforehand that he was going to do everything he could to limit Alcindor’s scoring. If UCLA was going to win, the other players would have to step up. Alcindor was happy to comply, passing off almost every time he was double- or triple-teamed. His teammates rewarded his confidence as they had all season, with Shackelford leading the way by scoring 22 points on eleven-for-nineteen shooting. Alcindor had only 19 points to go along with his 20 rebounds, but in the end, Houston became just another victim. UCLA won, 73–58.
Hayes finished with 25 points and 24 rebounds, so statistically he got the better of the matchup with Alcindor. He was the only one who seemed to think this mattered. “I beat him one-on-one tonight. I was pleased with myself,” Hayes said. “He’s not what they say he is, either on offense or defense. He’s just got a lot of improving to do. It really irritates me, him getting all that publicity, because it’s not really true.”
UCLA had just one more opponent to vanquish to complete its perfect season. Surprisingly, that opponent was unranked Dayton, which had upset third-ranked North Carolina in the first semifinal. Norman had scouted that game from courtside, and he could tell early on that both teams were inferior to the two that were playing in the nightcap. As usual, Norman was right. Midway through the first half of the championship game, the Bruins led 20–4. They were up by 29 early in the second half. Wooden started clearing his bench with twelve minutes to go, and by the four-minute mark all of his starters were done. The drubbing only bolstered the growing sense that UCLA’s dominance was hurting popular interest in college basketball. This was supposed to be the biggest game of the season, but it was never really a game.
UCLA’s 79–64 victory made Wooden the first man to coach two perfect seasons and just the second (along with Adolph Rupp) to claim three NCAA titles. After the game was over, the Bruins’ comportment was so measured that Sid Ziff wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times that was headlined “Playing for Wooden Is Great, but No Fun.” Ziff wasn’t far off. The Bruins were national champs once again, but the accomplishment didn’t cause them to cry for joy so much as sigh from relief.
23
Game of the Century
As dominant as the Bruins were during their perfect 1966–67 season, Wooden had every reason to expect them to be even more imposing the following year. After all, the entire starting lineup, including Lew Alcindor, was supposed to return. Unbeknown to the coach, however, the team was in danger of suffering two defections that could have derailed those plans. The events that prevented that from happening set in motion a chain reaction that would slowly but inexorably undermine the very integrity of UCLA basketball.
It started as a typical bitch fest between two college kids. Alcindor had once again been feeling lonely and bitter in the wake of winning the championship. As
he vented his feelings to Lucius Allen, he discovered that Allen felt the same way. They railed against the school, the lily-white student body, the unyielding coach who treated them like cogs in a machine. Most of all, they spoke of their loathing for a system that deprived them of the chance to make extra money even as they generated mountains of revenue for their school. Alcindor and Allen complained so much they decided that they had to do something. So they hatched a plan to transfer.
Once Allen started putting the word out that the two of them were thinking of leaving, he was flooded with offers. The most serious conversations took place with people connected to Michigan State, who, according to Allen, were promising to take care of their every financial need. “We were plotting, saying how can we get out of here?” Allen said. “We didn’t commit to anything because we were scared to death of John Wooden. We had that much respect for him, even though we talked about him like a dog.”
During their lowest moments, Allen and Alcindor sought out Willie Naulls, who they knew could relate to what they were going through. “I had a lot of personal contact with both [Alcindor] and Lucius,” Naulls said. “They were unhappy and they came to see me.” Naulls empathized, but he also wanted them to remain at UCLA. So he introduced them to a man who Willie thought would be able to alleviate their problems.
The man’s name was Sam Gilbert. He was a plump, five-foot-nine, fifty-four-year-old real estate developer who lived in the tony neighborhood of Pacific Palisades and worked out of a penthouse office in Encino. Gilbert had been serving as a mentor to Naulls as he was making his transition from pro basketball to business. He was also charming, cagey, and hardheaded. Naulls said that Gilbert “liked to refer to himself as one of the mules of the world. People who accomplish things.”
A self-described “fat little Jewish matzoh ball,” Gilbert grew up in Los Angeles as the son of Lithuanian immigrants. He played basketball for Hollywood High School before attending UCLA, but he had to drop out so he could earn money. Gilbert’s father had owned a small movie studio in the late 1920s, and for a time Sam worked in his dad’s film lab. He later dabbled in inventing before moving into the real estate business, where he oversaw the building of office high-rises and expansive residential communities. Gilbert was one of many entrepreneurs who rode Southern California’s postwar construction boom to a life of great privilege.
Gilbert was an intelligent, worldly man who spoke three foreign languages (French, Russian, and German), wore a Bavarian fedora to UCLA basketball games, and loved to tell stories about his brief career as a middleweight boxer. (“I was grossly mediocre,” he said.) Gilbert might not have pursued a career inside the ring, but his pugilistic attitude served him well in business. “He’s a bundle of dynamite,” Naulls said. “Sam is a heavyweight. He can take care of himself in any situation against any opponents. Whoever attacks him better be ready. Sam doesn’t fear anybody.”
After Naulls had several conversations with Alcindor and Allen about their unhappiness, he asked Gilbert if he could bring the players to his house. Gilbert agreed. Naulls brought them on a Sunday morning, and they bonded over bagels and lox. “I told Lucius, ‘Man, you become instant Jewish,’” Gilbert said. “He took me seriously and said, ‘No offense, but I’ve got enough problems without being Jewish.’”
Gilbert was as charming as he was savvy, as generous as he was ruthless. Once his tough-guy veneer was stripped away, he revealed the soft, gentle heart of a mensch. Gilbert was already a millionaire, so it didn’t seem to Alcindor and Allen that he was looking to make money off of them. They believed he simply wanted to lend advice and ease their anxiety.
“I hadn’t met either of them, but they had told the school they were leaving,” Gilbert said in 1974. “We didn’t even discuss basketball, just people, the world and general feelings. By 2 a.m. they had gotten it all out of their systems.” As an immigrant’s son, Gilbert found he could relate to these boys, despite the differences in their ages and races. “I was an adult who could rap with them on their own level and who understood the black-white syndrome which most schools want to brush under the carpet,” he said. Alcindor concluded that Gilbert “took a genuine liking to me and wanted to see me do well,” while Allen called him “probably the most beautiful person I knew. He was a giving person.”
After that first meeting, the players were welcome to come to Gilbert’s house anytime. They usually went on weekends, when Gilbert laid out a big spread. (“My Jewish soul food buffet,” he called it.) Spending time at that house meant spending time with Gilbert’s wife, Rose, a highly respected English teacher at Palisades High School. The players thought Rose was just like Sam, only tougher. “I told Lewis he should go to Harvard,” Rose said. “He was smart enough.”
When Alcindor and Allen came to the Palisades, they didn’t have to worry about being treated like stars. In that house, Sam was the star. What they found instead was a sanctuary away from the tumult of their daily lives. “They could sit down on the couch and relax or go swimming and nobody would bother them for a signature,” Rose said. “Sam was their father figure, because they didn’t have any, frankly. Coach Wooden was a very good coach, but I don’t think he ever got into the personal life of the kids.”
Gilbert, however, provided Allen and Alcindor with more than just a place to put up their feet. He also helped them with their financial worries. “Sam is everybody’s Jewish grandfather,” Alcindor said. “He could get it for you wholesale.” He started by buying their university-issued game tickets for above face value. Gilbert also squired his young friends around town. They loved how he would drive down the boulevards, point at buildings and say, “That one’s mine.… That one’s mine.”
On those forays around town, Gilbert frequently brought the players into stores that were owned by his friends. The boys didn’t mind so much getting the star treatment there. “We’d walk into a leather shop and he’d say, ‘Lucius, I want you to meet my friend here.’ The guy would say, ‘Oh man, I love UCLA basketball. Tell you what. Anything in here you like, just take it.’ And being a college kid, we found a lot that we wanted,” Allen said. “He had somebody that would give me a jacket. He had somebody that would buy me a pair of slacks. So now I’m thinking, this is more like it.”
The connections were fruitful even if Sam wasn’t around. “I could go to twenty-three different restaurants on the west side, walk in with me and my entourage, Mike Warren, Kareem, and we’d just eat. Didn’t have to pay,” Allen said. “The guy would say, ‘I want you to come here every night. When you come here, it increases my business.’”
Though Allen said that at the time he didn’t think anything was improper about all of this—“I was naïve and stupid”—these arrangements were clear violations of the NCAA’s policies regarding amateurism. Even so, they were commonplace around the country, as evidenced by Allen’s conversations with those people connected to Michigan State, and the NCAA had yet to make it a priority to clamp down on them. In fact, the NCAA had only recently decided to devote its resources to punishing rules violators. For the first forty-five years of its existence, the NCAA did not have any regulatory authority over its schools. It relied on what it called “home rule,” which left it up to the schools themselves to maintain honor. That started to change in 1948, when the NCAA formally adopted what it called a “Sanity Code,” which laid out a set of rules covering financial aid, recruiting, academics, institutional control, and amateurism.
Three years later, the NCAA hired Walter Byers to be its first executive director, and it assigned him to create a national office in Kansas City that would enforce the Sanity Code. In 1952, Byers filed his first case report, which suspended Kentucky’s basketball program for one year because of “pay for participation in athletics,” which its players had received in connection with a point-shaving scandal that had originated at CCNY and NYU, effectively ending the basketball programs at those schools.
Still, it wasn’t until 1964 that Byers put in place an infrastructure
inside the national office that was empowered to investigate schools more thoroughly. Along with establishing a three-member Committee on Infractions, the NCAA for the first time codified a principle mandating that “penalties should be broad if there is a basic institutional pattern of nondeservance, narrow if violations are isolated and institutional dereliction is not involved.” It was in this respect that Gilbert’s relationship with Allen and Alcindor was so dangerous for UCLA. His favors were clearly not isolated. They were part of a pattern that would continue for several years, with no real effort undertaken by Wooden or anyone else at UCLA to stop it.
Not that any of this mattered to Sam Gilbert. He had a low opinion of the NCAA and its antiquated rulebook. “My dad once said that amateur athletics is administered by amateurs,” said Gilbert’s son, Michael. Allen and Alcindor were already steeped in black nationalism, the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning counterculture. They did not need to be convinced about the evils of white repression. “I had very little respect for the NCAA. That was one thing that Sam really helped me understand, how we were being exploited,” Alcindor said. “His whole thing was, don’t hurt yourself but you don’t have to worry about the moral fiber of all this, because there is no moral fiber there. It’s just a façade.”
Besides, Gilbert did not exactly invent the archetype of the overly helpful fan. In many ways, he was a direct descendant of the doctor who came to Piggy Lambert with an offer to pay Wooden’s expenses at Purdue, or the owner of the semiprofessional basketball team from South Bend who convinced Wooden to risk his amateur status during his sophomore year of college. And Gilbert was small-time compared to the New York wiseguys who nearly brought down the entire sport during a point-shaving scandal in the early 1950s. Those same kinds of eager fans, who would come to be known as “boosters,” were likewise at the heart of the football scandals that tore apart the old Pacific Coast Conference.
