by Seth Davis
Alcindor managed to keep his drug use on the down-low, but Lucius Allen was not so lucky. At the end of his sophomore season, he was pulled over for speeding, and the police found a small bag of marijuana in his pocket as well as in his glove compartment. Sam Gilbert bailed Allen out of jail and found him a criminal lawyer, who managed to get the charges dropped a month later because of insufficient evidence. Since it was the off-season, Allen was not suspended from the team, and he never spoke to Wooden about it.
If Wooden had any inkling his players were using illegal drugs, he certainly would not have approved. But as with everything else, he believed their private lives should remain private. The only time he insinuated himself was when their behavior threatened to trip up his machine.
That concern prompted him to call Mike Warren to his office one day for an uncomfortable conversation. A white man had called Wooden to complain that Warren was dating the man’s daughter. The man made it clear that if Wooden didn’t keep Warren away from the girl, then he would. “He didn’t stop me,” Warren said of Wooden, “but man, how about telling me my life is in danger? How’s that for a hint?”
Wooden had the same talk with Kenny Heitz when he learned that Heitz was dating an Asian woman, though Heitz believed Wooden only did that so Warren wouldn’t think he wasn’t being singled out. This was one more way in which Wooden was woefully disconnected from the times. “Interracial dating was just starting,” Heitz said. “Wooden was a very cautious man. He would have had no earthly idea that every black guy on his team was banging every white girl on campus. These guys were like candy to them.”
Wooden had no objection to interracial dating himself, but he worried about the reactions of those who did, reactions that could disrupt the delicate balance in his program. “I would discourage anybody from interracial dating,” Wooden said. “I imagine whites would have trouble dating in an Oriental society, too. It’s asking for trouble, but I’ve never told a player who he could or couldn’t date.”
Wooden’s attitude on this front confirmed his players’ belief that his overriding concern was for their welfare as players and nothing more. “His relationships with blacks have no meaning,” Warren said shortly after he graduated. “The coaching staff was seriously interested only in us playing, studying and keeping out of trouble. Our individual progress in terms of maturing as black men was of no concern. It’s all superficial, the same kind of dialogue every day.”
All of those rules, from the dress codes to the requirement to be clean-shaven to the forbidding of phone calls the night before the game, were designed to stave off rebellious influences. In some areas, like interracial dating, Wooden was out of step. In others, his cocoon building was the only thing that allowed his program to survive.
For example, Wooden insisted that players acknowledge each other by pointing when someone made an assist. He believed it created unity. The players bought in. “There was no room at UCLA basketball for racial tension. It was always left in the locker room,” Heitz said. “I’m telling you, I passed Kareem a shitload of shots when he was at his angriest-young-black-man period, and I never didn’t get acknowledged for it. I never had a black guy refuse to pass me the ball. It was a meritocracy that Wooden created. It was the one thing we never questioned.”
With every win, with every championship, Wooden was held ever higher aloft by the silent majority who regarded him as a standard bearer for a forgotten time, when nobody smoked pot or protested a war, when college basketball players wanted to know how and not why. In a lengthy profile published in the New Yorker during Alcindor’s senior season, the esteemed sportswriter Herbert Warren Wind described Wooden as an “anachronism.” Wooden, he wrote, was “an island of James Whitcomb Riley in a sea of Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, Terry Southern, and Jerry Rubin—and, I would think, the right man in the right place.” Wind noted that when he asked Wooden what his favorite poems were, he answered while “smiling with an edge of shyness.” Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its balancing reminder that the paths of glory would end at “th’inevitable hour,” topped the list.
And yet while the smallest disruptions could still set Wooden off—he blew his top when several of his players showed up for a team photo wearing Adidas shoes instead of their university-issued Converse—he was willing to adapt where necessary. When he spotted the university’s chancellor wearing jeans and a turtleneck to work, he dropped his requirement that the players wear blazers and ties on the road. “All I ask is that you be clean and neat,” he said. When Wilt Chamberlain, who had just been acquired by the Lakers in a trade, objected to the suggestion that he was hard to handle—“I am not an animal, I’m a man. You don’t ‘handle’ a man”—Wooden called his publisher and asked that in future editions of Practical Modern Basketball, the chapter headed “Handling Your Players” be changed to “Working With Your Players.” It was a small detail, but it reflected a larger reality. The times they were a-changing. Wooden could either change with them, or he would risk getting left behind.
* * *
The divorce from Edgar Lacey was messy, but Wooden was correct that it would streamline his team. After returning from New York at the end of January 1968, UCLA blew through the Pac-8 and completed another perfect conference season. Their one close call came on February 9 at Oregon State, where UCLA won, 55–52.
UCLA entered the NCAA tournament in dominant form, but not as the No. 1–ranked team in America. That honor still belonged to undefeated Houston, and it irked UCLA’s players to no end. Yes, they had lost in the Astrodome, but it came by a single bucket, on the road, with their best player obviously hobbled. Alcindor took a copy of the Sports Illustrated cover that read “BIG EEEE OVER BIG LEW” and taped it to his locker. He and his teammates hoped they would have the chance to play the Cougars again.
The question of whether Alcindor would boycott the Olympics was cleared up in late February, when the U.S. Olympic Committee announced that no UCLA players would be participating in the trials in Albuquerque. Alcindor insisted he wasn’t boycotting for political reasons; he said playing would set him back academically and financially, since he relied on the summer to make enough money to get him through the academic year. Members of the U.S. Olympic Committee asked Wooden to intervene on their behalf, but he refused. “The national championship team always is the bulwark of the United States Olympic basketball squad, and UCLA is providing little or no cooperation whatsoever,” an anonymous Olympic administrator was quoted as saying. “It’s a disgrace the way they are letting their players run out on this international showcase.”
At least the matter was cleared up before the start of the NCAA tournament. By the time the postseason began, the Bruins were playing the best basketball of any team Wooden had coached—and they knew it. Sports Illustrated observed that “Edgar Lacey’s quitting has not appeared to hurt appreciably.… Everybody gets to play more, boosting morale.” After defeating New Mexico State and Santa Clara at the West Regional in Salt Lake City, the Bruins got their wish: a rematch with top-ranked Houston, in the semifinals.
Traditionally, Wooden barely scouted opponents, and he had never devised strategies geared to beat one team, much less a single player. But given how Hayes had carved up his team in the Astrodome, he was open to Jerry Norman’s suggestion that they design a defense to stop him. They decided to use a diamond-and-one, the same alignment Purdue had used to limit Alcindor in the season opener.
This time, UCLA would have the de facto home-court advantage as the NCAA tournament culminated at the L.A. Sports Arena. Elvin Hayes boasted that UCLA wouldn’t “play us as close now as they did then,” and Adolph Rupp predicted that “Houston [will go] all the way because UCLA is too complacent and overrated.” Wooden, however, refused to indulge in mind games. “Revenge is something I don’t harbor,” he said. “I believe if I don’t harbor it, my boys don’t harbor it.” In an effort to keep out distractions, Wooden was again the only coach among the four semifinali
sts who did not allow reporters into his team’s dressing room.
The Sports Arena was filled mostly with Bruins fans, who cheered lustily when UCLA won the tip and sprinted to a 12–4 lead. After Houston rallied to within 20–19, the Bruins uncorked one of their patented blitzes, outscoring the Cougars 17–5 over four minutes and fifteen seconds. They never stopped. UCLA led by 22 at halftime, then by 28, then by 39, and finally by 44 with six minutes to play. Only then did Wooden see fit to empty his bench, and the Bruins cruised home to a 101–69 win. Sideline observers suspected, with good reason, that Wooden might have been running up the score. The final margin was redolent of some of Alcindor’s old freshman games, only this one had come in the NCAA semifinals, against the undefeated No. 1 team in the country. It was truly a performance for the ages.
“I feel like a dead man,” Houston coach Guy Lewis said afterward. “That’s the greatest exhibition of basketball I’ve ever seen.” Wooden added his own thinly veiled shot at Rupp. “We knew we were better than some of the Houston players thought we were, and not as complacent as some coaching peers of mine thought we were,” he said. The win sent UCLA into an anticlimactic meeting with fourth-ranked North Carolina in the final, where Alcindor had 34 points as UCLA romped to a 78–55 win, prompting Tar Heels coach Dean Smith to call the Bruins “the greatest basketball team of all time.”
Unlike the year before, the Bruins felt joy in winning their second straight title, primarily because they had humiliated Houston along the way. “The game against North Carolina counted a whole lot, but the win last night over Houston was the most satisfying victory,” Alcindor said. Now that the tournament was over, Alcindor could show his true colors—literally. He emerged from the UCLA locker room wearing a multihued African robe, with red, orange, and yellow stripes and swirls. The giant garment, which Alcindor called his “dignity robe,” hung just below his knees. When Wooden saw what Alcindor was wearing, he smiled.
Mike Warren’s UCLA career was over, but Alcindor and his fellow juniors were set to return. Lucius Allen was the first to predict an unprecedented third straight title, but Wooden demurred when asked about the possibility. “It’s difficult to do, very difficult,” he said. “Look back through the history of the NCAA. Isn’t it difficult?” Maybe so, but by that point the public had grown accustomed to watching Wooden’s teams make the difficult look easy.
* * *
When Jerry Norman followed through with his promise to leave UCLA in the spring of 1968, he did so with a sour taste in his mouth. It stemmed from a comment Wooden had made after the win over Houston. When asked about the decision to use the diamond-and-one, Wooden told the press that Norman had originally suggested they use a box-and-one on Hayes, but Wooden changed it to a diamond-and-one. That bothered Norman because he had always preferred the diamond formation to the box. “A box-and-one wouldn’t have made sense. It would have taken Alcindor away from the basket,” Norman said. “The defense we used was exactly the one that I drew up.” He never said anything to Wooden directly, but Wooden later heard that Norman was annoyed, and that his wife, June, was even more ticked off. “She never thought that Jerry got enough credit,” Wooden said. “Maybe he didn’t, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I know I tried personally to always give credit to assistants.”
For all they had been through over their two decades in the trenches, Norman liked Wooden, and he respected Wooden’s ability to teach the game. But Norman didn’t buy into the growing story line that Wooden had transformed into some kind of coaching savant. The way Norman saw it, Wooden won more often now because he was coaching better players—players whom Norman had recruited. “I don’t mean to sound derogatory, but if you look at Wooden’s record, he was at UCLA fifteen years and never won anything,” Norman said. “Then all of a sudden we started to win. Why did we win? Overnight he became a genius? It was pretty much the same stuff over and over, but you’re telling it to different players.”
Wooden promoted Gary Cunningham to varsity assistant and hired another former UCLA player, Denny Crum, who had been coaching at Pierce College, to fill Cunningham’s spot with the freshmen. Before his new staff could get to work, however, the program suffered a second crushing departure when Lucius Allen was arrested a second time on two felony counts of possession of marijuana. This happened in May 1968, exactly one year after his previous arrest. Sam Gilbert again fixed Lucius up with a criminal lawyer, but there was no way UCLA could let Allen back on the team, especially since he was also lagging on his academics. Allen dropped out of school without saying good-bye to Wooden.
With both Allen and Warren gone, UCLA was shorthanded in the backcourt. Bill Sweek was the lone returnee with experience. The team added a six-foot-three junior college transfer named John Vallely, but the dearth of perimeter experience meant Wooden would not be able to deploy his full-court press as extensively as he had in the past.
On the flip side, Wooden was getting ready to coach perhaps the best frontcourt in college basketball history. Alcindor, Shackelford, and Heitz were back, and they were being joined by three elite sophomores: Steve Patterson and Curtis Rowe, who had anchored a UCLA freshman team that had gone undefeated, and Sidney Wicks, a former all-city player at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles who had spent a year shoring up his academics at Santa Monica City College, where he set a single-season scoring record by averaging 26 points per game. Socially, Alcindor was entering his own season of adjustment. He had now lost his two best friends on the team in Lacey and Allen, but instead of sulking and withdrawing even further, he broadened his horizons for the first time. Wicks and Rowe were now the only other blacks on the team. Not only were they two years younger; they were also boisterous and flamboyant—very different from himself. So Alcindor spent more time with Mike Lynn and Bill Sweek, as well as with Bob Marcucci, a white student manager who had been close with Alcindor when they had lived in the same freshman dorm but who had not been so during their sophomore and junior years. Alcindor had become an aficionado of martial arts after studying his freshman year with an accomplished instructor-turned-movie actor from Hong Kong named Bruce Lee, and he shared his love of kung fu movies with his white buddies. “The wheel came around the second time for me. It was very satisfying to reconnect with Kareem,” Marcucci said. “We spent time going to movies and jazz clubs. It was cool.”
Even outsiders noticed this more content, more open-minded Alcindor. “The nonchalance he displays on the court is not new, but his amiable, easy-going manner in public certainly is,” Jeff Prugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “The face lights up in a ready smile. The demeanor is cool, but cordial. The feelings surface more quickly and are expressed sometimes good humoredly.” Some of this was the result of natural maturation, but there was another reason Alcindor was evincing a sense of inner peace. Over the summer, he had made a fundamental change in his life. He had converted to Islam.
True to form, Alcindor did not come to this decision lightly. He had first become intrigued by Islam during his freshman year at UCLA, when he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Like Malcolm, Alcindor eschewed the teachings of Malcolm’s original mentor, Elijah Muhammad, whose strain of American-bred Islam included rants about white devils and exhorted violent retribution. Rather, Alcindor was drawn to Islam’s more traditional, eastern-based doctrines, what Alcindor referred to as “the real Islam.” And he identified with its monotheistic tradition.
While living and working in New York City during the summer of 1968, Alcindor studied at a mosque on 125th Street in Harlem. Having explored the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, Alcindor immersed himself with the Sunnis, mostly because that’s what Malcolm was. For two straight weeks, he took instruction each day beginning at 6:00 a.m. He formally converted in late August and was given the new name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which means “noble servant of the powerful One.” It was a far more gratifying experience than he would have had if he had competed in the Olympics.
Alcindor did not intend to share t
he news of his conversion with his teammates or his coaches. That is, until the Bruins took a road swing through the Midwest in December for games against thirteenth-ranked Ohio State and fifth-ranked Notre Dame. (The rankings had expanded that year to twenty teams.) On the long bus ride between Columbus and South Bend, Alcindor started talking religion with Steve Patterson, a born-again Christian who had started a church-based student group. When Patterson argued that the only way for a man to reach Heaven was through Christ, Alcindor challenged him. “What about all those people in Africa who never heard of Jesus?” he asked. “Are they all going to hell?” Patterson answered that they were, and pretty soon the debate got heated.
Yet an amazing thing happened from there. Instead of getting even hotter, the conversation cooled into a thoughtful, civil exchange. Soon, Patterson and Alcindor were joined by Don Saffer, who was Jewish, and Terry Schofield, who was Catholic. Other players shifted to that part of the bus, where they continued to engage in a dialogue about the presence of God, the meaning of life, the shared values of differing religions. When Wooden heard what was happening from his seat up front, he moved closer as well. He didn’t say much, adding a few bits of information here and there. Mostly he listened. Finally, Alcindor revealed that he had become a Muslim. Much to his surprise, the players and coaches weren’t put off. Instead, they were curious, open-minded, and wholly accepting. “I didn’t know who the hell Malcolm X was,” Sweek said. “I didn’t know anything about Jim Crow. I didn’t know about any of this stuff. I learned a lot through him.”
