Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Wooden never told his players what politics they should have, nor did he ever reveal his own. (“What were his politics? I don’t think he had any,” Hill said.) Yet, he repeatedly cautioned them against getting too swept up by the tumult, not because he disagreed with the movement’s views but because he feared it would penetrate his sacred cocoon. When Wooden heard that Wicks and Rowe had joined UCLA’s Black Student Union, he pulled them aside and gave them a gentle warning. As Wicks later recalled, Wooden told them, “I’m not telling you what to believe. You have to follow your hearts, but you can’t allow any of this to interfere with your education or playing basketball.” Wicks said, “We had to refrain from being too active after that. It was hard, but we understood.”

  If Wooden hoped that Alcindor’s departure would diminish expectations for the coming season, he was disappointed right away. The Bruins were ranked No. 1 in the UPI’s preseason poll and No. 4 in the AP poll. It wouldn’t take long to find out whether those rankings were reasonable. UCLA’s first opponent, Arizona, had been picked to win the Western Athletic Conference. The Bruins beat them by 25 points, with Wicks leading the way with 21 points and 15 rebounds, and all five starters scoring in double figures. “Everybody is doing something now,” Arizona coach Bruce Larson said.

  Clearly, though, the team was operating with a smaller margin for error. That was evident in the Bruins’ next game, at Minnesota. Stymied by the Golden Gophers’ zone defense, the Bruins trailed by 7 points with just under five minutes to play. Vallely rescued them with four straight jumpers from the corners to propel them to a 72–71 overtime win.

  Over the next three months, UCLA vacillated between easy blowouts and narrow escapes, but they always won. Meanwhile, with J. D. Morgan wielding his magic, vast television audiences followed their exploits. That included a home game against Notre Dame on January 3 that was televised nationally by Eddie Einhorn’s TVS Network. (UCLA won, 108–77.) The Bruins ran their record to 21–0, but that included several close shaves. They needed a ten-foot baseline jumper from Wicks to squeeze by Princeton, 76–75, and they barely squeaked by Oregon State (in Pauley) and Bradley (in Chicago Stadium) by 1 and 3 points, respectively. Playing at Washington State on February 9, the Bruins came out flat and found themselves down by 13 in the first half, yet they still clawed their way to win 72–70.

  At least the games were interesting again. They were also more aesthetically pleasing. UCLA had returned to its racehorse ways, with blitzes and crisp passes and beautiful teamwork. Wooden showed how he had evolved into a savvy game tactician, toggling between man-to-man and zone defenses, depending on the circumstances. If teams tried to zone his club, Wooden ordered his players to stall. When UCLA held the ball for thirteen minutes without taking a shot during a home win over Washington, even the fans in Pauley Pavilion booed him. These close games should have caused Wooden more stress, but, like his players, he was galvanized by the challenge of trying to win without Alcindor. “I’m like any fan, I guess,” he said. “I feel like I have something to do. I feel more alive. It’s been a long time.”

  Wooden especially enjoyed coaching a team that was balanced again. If one of the players was about to have an Alcindor-esque scoring night, Wooden would collar him. “He thought that would breed selfishness and envy,” Bibby later said. “There were nights when I was well on my way to scoring thirty-five, but he would pull me out.” The sense of urgency made for a happier locker room. “The esprit de corps was, frankly, not good last year,” Vallely said. “This year it seems like we’re playing real basketball, the way we grew up playing it. It’s a lot more fun now.”

  In pulling all these great escapes, Wooden knew his team was playing with fire. With each win, he could see his players were becoming complacent, less engaged. He could also see the usual signs of friction starting to emerge. One troubling pattern was the way the team was breaking down along racial lines. The strife was nothing compared to the broader clashes that were ripping the country apart, but it festered nonetheless. The players generally got along, but outside of basketball, each man socialized with the guys who looked like him. Wooden tried to break this pattern by assigning blacks and whites to room with each other in the hotels, but midway through the season, the players asked if they could resegregate. “We were right in the middle of the civil rights movement, and it was not very cool to be white,” Terry Schofield said. “There were a lot of racial problems on the team. It wasn’t quite reverse racism; it was more subtle than that. I’ve never been black, and I’m sure that under the circumstances that was not an easy thing. But it was one of the least happy experiences I’ve had.”

  Meanwhile, Wicks and Rowe continued to test Wooden’s authority. When Wooden received a report that they had skipped an early-morning music class, he told them at practice that he didn’t want it to happen again. The next morning, Rowe called Wicks to say he had been out late the night before and wanted to skip the class again. Fearing another reproach from Wooden, Wicks convinced him that they should go. When they got to class, they found Wooden waiting for them.

  Wooden had returned to his old substitution patterns as well. Even during blowouts, he rarely pulled his starters until the very end, and when he did, he usually didn’t play more than one or two other guys. That made life difficult for the players who were not in the top six or seven, many of whom started to feel as if they didn’t matter. Andy Hill, for one, noticed that whenever he made a good play in practice, Wooden tended to chastise the starter for having “permitted” the play rather than praising Hill for making it. “I respected him an awful lot, but I didn’t feel he liked me very much,” John Ecker said. “He wasn’t a guy to come out and talk to us a lot personally.”

  Wooden could be funny when he wanted to be. Once, when Denny Crum was boasting about his prowess at playing cards, Wooden confirmed to the players that Crum was indeed a terrific player. “From here,” he said, pointing at his nose, “to here,” pointing at his chin. The players retold that story for decades. The joke was memorable because it was so rare.

  Still, Wooden had seen really unhappy teams before, and this was not one of them. As long as UCLA kept winning, the team’s internal issues would remain insignificant. “We were just so good at every position,” Bibby said. “When you’re that good, you could have problems and still win.”

  * * *

  Their luck finally ran out on February 21 in the twenty-second game of the season. Playing Oregon at McArthur Court in Eugene, UCLA lost, 78–65. Seeing that the frenzied Oregon fans were shuffling to the edges of the court, waiting to celebrate the victory, Wooden walked down the sideline with a minute to play and shook hands with Ducks coach Steve Belko. “It’s going to be a little wild at the end,” Wooden said. “So I thought I’d say congratulations now.”

  As usual, Wooden found much to like in losing. He hoped it would restore balance. “Subconsciously, a team that has won as many as we have this season might get a little fat-headed,” Wooden said. “This hurts our pride, but it is probably good for us.”

  The loss to Oregon also forced his players to confront the budding tensions. Later that night, Bibby and Vallely talked into the wee hours of the morning. Bibby promised to speak to Rowe and Wicks, Vallely said he would talk to Patterson, and over the next several days, the players cleared the air. They coalesced for a simple reason: they wanted to prove that they could win a title without the big fella. “We had some underlying problems that we just had to iron out,” Vallely said. “When you’re winning, you don’t do anything to change.”

  Even after the loss, the Bruins still held a two-game lead for first place in the Pacific Eight, and they would clinch the title the following weekend at home by throttling Stanford and Cal by a combined 44 points. Wooden believed his players were so worn out, physically and mentally, that he gave them two days off for the first time that he could remember. He hoped that this respite would rejuvenate them for the season-ending series with USC as well as the NCAA tournament.

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p; As it turned out, however, the layoff had the opposite effect. In the Friday night game at Pauley Pavilion, the Bruins opened up a 10-point lead, forcing Bob Boyd to switch from his standard zone to a man-to-man defense in the second half. UCLA still led by 12 points with less than seven minutes to play, but the Trojans’ defensive pressure started taking its toll, and the Bruins uncharacteristically lost their poise. The Trojans’ hero that night was Paul Westphal, a six-foot-four guard from Torrance. Westphal was a rarity, a Southern California native who chose USC over UCLA. “It’s more of an achievement to beat Coach Wooden than to win for him,” Westphal said. After USC won, 87–86, Wooden conceded, “I thought our loss to Oregon was good for us, but I don’t know about this one.”

  UCLA should have come out blazing the following night at the Sports Arena, but once again, they were desultory as USC built an 18–8 lead out of the gate. Wicks was so bad that Wooden yanked him. As Wicks sat down, Wooden stuck his face right in front of Sidney’s and blistered him. Wicks, as usual, answered in kind. Wooden let Wicks marinate on the bench for four minutes, an eternity given the way Wooden had substituted (or rather, not substituted) all season.

  The ploy worked. Wicks played angry and inspired in the second half, and the result was his finest effort in a UCLA uniform. By the time the buzzer sounded, he had scored a career-high 31 points, including 18 in the second half. UCLA won going away, 91–78. “He’s the best forward in college basketball,” Boyd said.

  The win was just the momentum boost UCLA needed heading into the 1970 NCAA tournament. The Bruins’ first opponent in the West Regional in Seattle was California State College, Long Beach, whose second-year coach, Jerry Tarkanian, had built a 245–19 record in six years as a junior college coach. At thirty-eight years old, Tarkanian was much closer to his players, in both age and temperament, than Wooden was to his. His success at recruiting from inner-city playgrounds also generated an unflattering buzz about his ethics. “As a recruiter, his critics call him devious, ruthless, crooked,” Jeff Prugh wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

  It wasn’t easy building a basketball program in UCLA’s backyard, but Tarkanian developed a fondness for Wooden. “When we had those sportswriter luncheons, I would try to get there early so I could sit next to him and pump him a little bit about what he would do in practice,” Tarkanian said. “He was very gracious.” In the days leading up to the game, Wooden heaped praise on Tarkanian, especially for the innovative 1-2-2 zone defense that he used. Wooden had seen Tarkanian lecture on the zone several times at clinics. “He has no superior, to my knowledge, as a zone coach,” Wooden said.

  Long Beach came into the game unranked but owning a 24–3 record and a nineteen-game winning streak, the nation’s longest. Tarkanian believed the game would reveal where his program stood with respect to its crosstown neighbor. The answer did not please him. UCLA forced the 49ers to commit 19 turnovers, built a 22-point lead, and cruised to an 88–65 win. “It just goes to show you how far our program has to go,” Tarkanian said. UCLA had an even easier time the next day against No. 16 Utah State, winning 101–79 to earn a trip to the national semifinals in College Park, Maryland.

  As always, Wooden ran a closed shop when it came to the press. He was accessible and genial with writers, but his players were off-limits. No other coach was permitted that luxury. “We tell them to go around in twos and not speak to strangers,” he quipped. After UCLA defeated No. 5 New Mexico State, 93–77, in the semifinals, Aggies coach Lou Henson admitted that, after losing to UCLA in the tournament for the third consecutive year, “you get a complex after a while. If anybody has a mystique, it’s Coach Wooden.”

  UCLA’s opponent in the championship game was fourth-ranked Jacksonville. The contest was instantly cast as a sixties-style culture clash writ small. UCLA was square, old school, establishment; Jacksonville was hip, rebellious, cool. Dolphins coach Joe Williams was the opposite of Wooden, a young and dapper coach who let his players wear the clothes they wanted, grow their hair long, and wander in late for practice. Williams even let them design their own warm-up routine, which they turned into a Harlem Globetrotters–style trick show. Dwight Chapin characterized the match-up in the Los Angeles Times as “discipline against devil-may-care, the Establishment against the Age of Aquarius.”

  The basketball contrasts were just as stark. The Dolphins boasted the closest thing college basketball still had to Alcindor in Artis Gilmore, a seven-foot-two center who was the nation’s leading rebounder. He was joined up front by seven-foot Pembrook Burrows and six-foot-ten Rod McIntyre. Wooden had always preferred speed over size, but he recognized that the Dolphins’ frontcourt would present a problem. Right before the teams went out for pregame warm-ups, Wooden drew out the starting lineups and defensive assignments as he always did on a chalkboard in the locker room. Wicks was surprised to learn that he would be guarding Gilmore.

  In the early going, it looked like a foolish strategy. Wicks stationed himself in front of Gilmore, as Wooden had always taught his players to do, but Gilmore was so big that all his teammates had to do was lob the ball over Wicks’s outstretched hand. Gilmore capitalized again and again, scoring 14 of Jacksonville’s first 31 points and staking the Dolphins to a 9-point lead midway through the first half. Wicks tried to riposte by attacking the basket on offense. He was called for two quick charging fouls in the first four minutes.

  Wicks was frustrated. He was angry. And he believed Wooden was wrong. During a television time-out—this was a new concept; the game was stopped artificially so NBC could air commercials—Wicks told Wooden he wanted to play behind Gilmore on defense. All season long, the two of them had told each other exactly what they thought, whether it was in the quiet of Wooden’s office or in full view against USC. Now, Wicks was testing his coach again. Wooden passed. He gave Wicks the go-ahead to make the adjustment.

  It was an inspired act of trust, and it paid off wonderfully. The next time Jacksonville came down on offense, Wicks allowed Gilmore to receive the pass. When Gilmore turned to lay the ball in, Wicks leapt up and swatted it away. He blocked Gilmore’s shot four more times. Wicks admitted later that several of those blocks should have been called as goaltends, but Gilmore was visibly shaken. At the other end, Wicks continued to attack—he even dunked once, conceding the disallowed basket in order to make a statement—but he managed to stay out of foul trouble.

  Gilmore never recovered, going more than sixteen minutes without a field goal. Overall, he made just nine of his twenty-nine attempts. UCLA uncorked a miniblitz late in the first half, rattling off 9 straight points to take a 5-point halftime lead it never relinquished. Besides scoring 17 points, Wicks garnered more rebounds than Gilmore, 18 to 16, the first time all season that Gilmore had been outclassed on the boards. When Wooden was questioned afterward why he didn’t remove Wicks when he had those two early fouls, Wooden replied, “No matter how good a player is, he doesn’t help you sitting on the bench.”

  True to form, Wooden left his starting five in the game until there were two minutes remaining. The balanced numbers pleased him: Rowe led the way with 19 points, followed by Wicks and Patterson (17 each), Vallely (15), and Bibby (8). As a team, the Bruins garnered 50 rebounds to Jacksonville’s 38. (Speed over size, indeed.) The final score was 80–69.

  It turned out that UCLA was not much different from “Lew-CLA.” Sure, the Bruins had lost twice during the 1969–70 season, and five of their twenty-eight wins had come by 3 points or fewer. Yet at season’s end, they still came away with their fourth straight national championship and their sixth in seven years. The establishment had won again. “I don’t know about the UCLA mystique,” Joe Williams said afterward. “To me, it’s more like the Johnny Wooden mystique. He has been here a lot more often than any of his teams.”

  This was one title that Wooden was not “relieved” to win. This was an achievement to revel in, to savor. “This might be the most gratifying championship ever for John,” Nell said. (How nice to have so many championships to sift
through and compare.) Wooden was so happy that he agreed to open his locker room to sportswriters. The horde was several times greater than the one that gathered in Kansas City for his first title in 1964. The scene was a fitting testament to the machine that Wooden had built over the previous six months. The Bruins were a true team again. They won because of their balance. “Right now, if Alcindor was on the team, who would the reporters be talking to?” Rowe said. “Look around the room. The reporters are with five people. That’s beautiful.”

  * * *

  The city of Los Angeles responded to UCLA’s latest championship with a smile and a yawn. When the Bruins’ plane touched down, there were only about two thousand fans at the airport, a fraction of the throng that had welcomed them in the past. Nor were there any spontaneous bonfires on campus like the ones that had greeted Alcindor’s first two titles. “It’s better that we’re not fawned over,” Wooden said. “If they made too much of it when we did well, they might make too much of it when we do poorly.” Wooden did, however, get a congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon, which Wooden described as a “a great personal thrill.” Wooden did not appear to mean that as a political endorsement, but it did not endear him in the eyes of his players.

  The school staged its own celebration on May 4, 1970, by holding its annual spring basketball banquet at the Beverly Hilton, with Dick Enberg serving as master of ceremonies. The highlight of this event was the final speeches from the seniors. Each player was given the privilege of stepping to the podium, where he could reflect on his experience and thank the folks who made it happen. There were only two seniors that year, John Vallely and Bill Seibert. Vallely’s speech was pleasant and conventional. Seibert’s was not. A six-foot-six forward who had played locally for University High School, Seibert was one of those rarely used benchwarmers who should have felt fortunate just to be on the team. But he had always been a contentious sort. When he was a freshman, Seibert was kicked out of practice so often for cursing that the players called him “Early Showers Seibert.” Bill Sweek referred to him as “Funky Bill Seibert” because “he’d hurt you with his elbows. He was all over the place.” When Seibert came to UCLA, he was not even guaranteed a place on the team, but Wooden eventually awarded him a scholarship.