Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  “He was a referral service,” Steve Patterson said in 1982. “I needed some tires. He’d call up and say, ‘This boy needs some new tires. Give him a good deal.’ And you’d get a good deal. It was like he knew everybody in anything. And he wouldn’t ask them, he’d tell them, and they’d do it. It was astounding.”

  The locus for all of this activity was Gilbert’s lush abode. When the players were there, they mingled as if they were just a part of the family. “Swen Nater stood right on that diving board carrying my grandchild,” Rose Gilbert said years later, nodding toward the pool while sitting in her living room. “Swen was a big kid. Are you kidding? Now that I think about it, it was dangerous.” Rose was as much of a commanding presence in that house as Sam was. “She was like Wooden, only louder,” Kenny Heitz said. She helped the boys with their homework and otherwise graded papers while they made themselves at home. Wilkes said, “I always figured a guy who married someone that sweet can’t be all bad.”

  Sam Gilbert loved to wash players’ cars—he was a stickler for cleanliness—and he was a handy craftsman from his days as an inventor. When Wilkes told Gilbert he was having trouble sleeping, Sam helped him build a sturdy, large-framed bed. “It’s still my favorite bed,” Wilkes said.

  Gilbert tried to argue that his relationships were not limited to star basketball players, or even athletes in general. He described himself as a selfless philanthropist just trying to make the world a better place, favor by favor. “At the moment, I’m helping put a couple of Chicano and black kids through law school. Those kids have nothing to do with athletics,” he told Time magazine in 1974. That posture did not hold water with people who knew him best. “Sam Gilbert wasn’t doing it for chemistry majors. He was doing it for basketball players,” Greg Lee said. “I wonder if he’d be doing it if UCLA were an average team and getting five thousand people a game.”

  To call all of this an open secret would not do it justice. It wasn’t even a secret. Gilbert’s relationships with UCLA basketball players made him one of the most well-known people in Los Angeles. No less an authority than legendary columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Gilbert was “almost as important to the program as Pauley Pavilion” for convincing Allen and Alcindor to stay. When the Bruins played in the 1969 NCAA championships in Louisville, Gilbert took the entire team out to dinner. The nickname that Allen bestowed on Gilbert stuck so well that Sam eventually got a license plate for his car that read “PAPA G.” Rose’s read “MAMA G.” On game nights, Gilbert sat in his premium front-row seat in Pauley Pavilion, brandishing his trademark fedora and a broad smile. This was not a man who acted as if he had something to hide.

  * * *

  To be sure, not every prominent former player interviewed for this book acknowledged that Gilbert provided what the NCAA would consider to be improper benefits. “He never did anything illegal with me. We got summer jobs, but everybody got summer jobs. We didn’t get anything extra,” said Henry Bibby, who used Gilbert as his professional agent after graduation. Sidney Wicks also insisted that Gilbert never gave him financial assistance while he was at UCLA. “I took a loan out while I was going to school, which I was definitely qualified for. I worked different jobs. I didn’t need Sam for that,” he said. “Everybody tried to smear the guy. He was really cool. He treated us like we were his kids.” When Bill Walton was asked about NCAA violations allegedly committed by Gilbert, he replied, “I’m unaware of that.”

  Still, Walton readily admitted that he held great affection for the man. “Sam was a great fan,” he said. “He was smart, intelligent, tough, fierce. He loved UCLA, loved basketball, loved life, loved business, loved people.” Walton found Gilbert to be a kindred spirit, while Gilbert found Walton to be a naive megatalent who could help him expand his influence. While Walton was playing for UCLA, he characterized Gilbert as “sixty-one going on twenty-one. He’s just a great dude.” When Walton told Gilbert he wanted to move off campus, Gilbert arranged for him to stay at a guest house at a wealthy friend’s property in Brentwood. Walton later claimed that he didn’t need basketball in his life, which prompted Patterson to rejoin, “He’s living in the guest house of a $150,000 home in Brentwood for $150 a month. If he wasn’t Bill Walton, basketball player, he wouldn’t be there.”

  Walton became a regular visitor at Gilbert’s house. Asked if those were fond memories, Walton smiled and said, “I like to eat.” Once, after scarfing down a huge Thanksgiving dinner at Gilbert’s house, Walton ate an entire pumpkin pie with a quart of ice cream on top, just because someone dared him. Walton slept over often, though as Gilbert explained it, “We have six bedrooms and Bill Walton has yet to sleep inside. He comes up with his bedroll and disappears into the bush. We see him only when he comes in to take a shower and eat.”

  Walton didn’t even wait to graduate from UCLA before he tapped Gilbert to be his “financial advisor.” From the moment Walton joined Wooden’s varsity, he faced constant entreaties from professional franchises dangling lots of money if he left school early. Before his sophomore year was over, Walton publicly identified Gilbert as his representative. “[Teams have] called my parents and my brother because I don’t have a phone and don’t want to be bothered,” he said. “I’ve told my family to refer them to Sam Gilbert.”

  Walton later explained that he used Gilbert for this purpose because “I knew nothing about business. He was the only guy who I knew that did. I had no experience. That was not my parents’ world.” Walton’s parents were similarly grateful for Gilbert’s influence. “Sam’s friendship has meant a lot to my son,” Ted Walton said. “I rate Sam Gilbert an A-plus.”

  Walton’s older brother, Bruce, an offensive lineman on UCLA’s football team, was also treated like family. Gilbert’s son, Michael, recalled an incident when Bruce was staying with the family at their cabin in the mountains. Michael was awakened at two in the morning by a rowdy party being held across the street, and he marched outside in hopes of quieting it down. At first, the party continued, but to Michael’s surprise the people suddenly scattered. “As I turned around, here’s Bruce standing behind me in the driveway in his skivvies with a tennis racket in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. He must have weighed about three hundred pounds,” Michael said. “I burst out laughing, because I had no clue he was there.”

  When Sam later requested an autographed photo from Bruce, he signed it, “Maybe it’s corny, but I love you.”

  The players who spent time with Gilbert saw just how visceral he could be when handling his business. “I was in his office and listened to him go down the list of people and let them know they owed him money,” Farmer said. “To see that other side of him, where he was very cold, was abrupt.” While Gilbert was able to connect with black players who grew up outside Los Angeles, many of the well-to-do whites who grew up locally were less impressed. When Gilbert heard that Kenny Heitz was headed for Harvard Law School, he took Heitz to lunch and offered to help him find a job. Heitz was put off by his aggressiveness. After Gail Goodrich joined the Lakers, he was told by several people that Gilbert had bragged that Goodrich once worked for him during the summer, which was not true. “Sam was a pain in the ass. He had the answer to everything,” Goodrich said. Andy Hill was especially turned off. “I’m Jewish. I grew up around guys like this. I saw right through him,” Hill said. “I thought he was a two-bit phony. He was a narcissist and a self-aggrandizer. He’d be really happy that you’re asking about him, too. This is Sam’s dream come true.”

  Even players who hobnobbed with Gilbert grew weary of his blandishments. After Nielsen graduated, he ran into Gilbert while shopping at an art store in Westwood. When Gilbert offered to buy him the print he had selected, Nielsen declined. “If I could save a few hundred dollars on something I was buying, that was one thing, but I wasn’t looking for a handout,” Nielsen said. Wilkes suspected that if he needed even more help from Gilbert he could get it, but he also decided not to go there. “I wasn’t that stupid. I knew it wasn
’t just altruism that motivated him,” Wilkes said. “I only wanted to go so far with it.”

  * * *

  John Wooden had never heard of Sam Gilbert until after UCLA won its first NCAA championship in 1964. Wooden was used to seeing wealthy alumni magically appear at the first sign of success—and vanish at the first sign of failure. He claimed that when Gilbert tried to initiate a friendship, “I just as politely, as courteously as I could, cut it off.” After that, the two of them might say hello to each other once in a while, but their interaction was virtually nonexistent.

  Like the public, much of what Wooden knew about Gilbert came through what he read in the newspapers during Alcindor’s contract negotiations. Now, Gilbert’s burgeoning relationship with Walton was thrusting Sam even further into the spotlight. This was a problem for UCLA. The school’s string of national championships had brought a great deal of scrutiny. As Wooden mentioned while taking exception to Doug Krikorian’s snide remark about the weak schedule, there were a lot of people in and out of basketball who would love nothing more than to knock the program down a few pegs from its “plateau of excellence.” Now, Wooden was facing the possibility that some two-bit rogue booster might jeopardize all that he had built.

  Wooden was first asked about Gilbert by a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1972. He was clearly uncomfortable. “I personally hardly know Sam Gilbert,” he said. “I think he’s a person who’s trying to be helpful in every way that he can. I sometimes feel that in his interest to be helpful it’s in direct contrast with what I would like to have him do to be helpful. I think he means very well and, for the most part, he has attached himself to the minority-race players. I really don’t want to get involved in saying much about that, to be honest with you.”

  Wooden quietly voiced his concerns to some of his players. “During my freshman year, Coach made a comment about who we were hanging around with,” Farmer said. “He said something like, ‘I know a lot of you like to hang out with your uncle, but we just need to be careful.’ He said ‘uncle’ not ‘papa,’ but we all knew what he meant.” Wooden later claimed that he once confronted Wicks and Rowe about their sharp new clothes. “They had jackets, leather jackets,” Wooden said. “[I said] where did you get those? Who sent you there? [They said it was] Sam. You didn’t get the same price everybody else got if Sam sent you.… Of all my years here, he’s the only one I really worried about as far as recruiting. The only one.”

  Still, Wooden never tried outright to forbid his players from associating with Gilbert. Even if he had, it’s doubtful they would have listened any more than they listened to his warnings about interracial dating. “You’re concerned with the ones who are friendly with your players, but I can’t tell Sam Gilbert or anyone else to stay away from my players,” Wooden said. “I can’t pick their friends for them, but I can tell my players to be careful. You can’t accept money or gifts, and if you do, you’re putting yourself and all of us in a vulnerable position.”

  In Wooden’s mind, the only thing he could do was take his concerns to the one man who was even more strong-willed and powerful than he: J. D. Morgan. Wooden wasn’t telling Morgan anything he didn’t know. Morgan was, after all, a former PT boat commander who boasted that he was on top of every detail in his department. He wasn’t naive. Byron Atkinson, a former dean of students, said in an interview for Morgan’s oral history that J. D. “knew full well” that UCLA athletes were selling their game tickets, but “he turned a blind eye to that.” A much bigger problem like Sam Gilbert was not going to escape Morgan’s discerning eye.

  Morgan asked Gilbert to meet him at his office several times to ask him to dial back his involvement with the players. “J. D. was constantly in trouble with Gilbert. He constantly had him in his office, constantly trying to get him to keep his hands off our kids,” Atkinson said. “He tried to twist Gilbert’s tail a dozen times because he knew what was happening over there. [But] Gilbert’s a pretty crafty character.”

  Morgan again met with Gilbert in Houston during the final weekend of the 1971 NCAA tournament. The effect of that talk was the same as it ever was—which is to say, no effect at all. “I know J. D. talked to him. I talked to him. We told him to stay away from our youngsters,” Wooden said. “Well, we’re not going to be able to tell him what to do. He’s going to do what he wants to.”

  Wooden and his acolytes have argued that in the final analysis, it was Morgan’s responsibility to shut Gilbert down, and therefore it was Morgan’s fault that he didn’t. “We did not want Sam Gilbert to be a part of our program. We felt he might do some things that were improper for the players,” Gary Cunningham said. “Coach went to J. D. and was concerned about Sam Gilbert’s intervention with our players, and J. D. told him that he would take care of it. What happened after that, I don’t know, but Coach was a very believing person.”

  Apparently, Morgan did not want to push too hard. In the first place, Gilbert was a wealthy and influential booster, the kind of man the program depended on for fund-raising. Morgan also likely (and accurately) sensed that Gilbert had damaging information that could hurt the program if it became public.

  There was, however, a deeper reason for Morgan’s reluctance to lay the hammer down: he believed Gilbert was involved in organized crime, a perception that Gilbert cultivated. When Gilbert got angry with someone, he sometimes suggested that he could push a button on his phone and two men would come through the door and throw the person out the window. When Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel The Godfather was published in 1969, friends sent Gilbert several copies, which he displayed prominently in his office.

  Whether or not Gilbert was actually “connected” did not matter. What mattered was that Morgan was convinced that he was. “J. D. believed that he was a member of the so-called Miami Mafia, and that he either had or was capable of committing physical violence and perhaps murder,” former UCLA chancellor Charles Young said. “I remember him saying to me in that deep voice of his, ‘Chuck, you don’t know about Sam Gilbert. Do you want to end up on a block of concrete at the bottom of the ocean?’ J. D.’s view of him was that if you cross Sam, you’re likely to be killed, literally. It’s the only time I’ve seen J. D. kind of shaken.”

  * * *

  And so the Sam Gilbert Show continued. As word of his activities spread, Wooden’s coaching colleagues became annoyed, to say the least. It was bad enough that Wooden was kicking their asses year after year. Now they were hearing that, far from being squeaky clean, his program had the same dirty laundry that theirs did. For many years, these coaches had been told that Wooden wasn’t just a great coach but a good man. A teetotaling, church-going, nonswearing, nonsmoking paragon of rectitude. Saint John. Now, it turned out that he, too, kept a little devil tucked into his pocket.

  Bob Boyd saw much of this happening right before his eyes. “I knew Sam to talk to, but I had no relationship with him,” Boyd said. “Sam was belligerent. He didn’t care what anybody said. He was going to do what he wanted.” Boyd also claimed that Stanford’s coach, Howie Dallmar, “couldn’t stand John because of Sam. For Howie not to like somebody was very strange.” Abe Lemons, the ever-quotable coach at Oklahoma City, liked to joke that Gilbert was the most important building block in Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. Pete Newell also quietly fumed. “I remember Dad talking about Sam Gilbert and how he was getting away with murder down there,” Newell’s son, Tom, said. “That was the one thing that really bothered Dad.”

  No coach was more bothered than Jerry Tarkanian. Like Boyd, Tarkanian was forever being compared unfavorably to Wooden, on and off the court. Tarkanian’s proclivity for recruiting players off inner-city playgrounds had earned him a reputation for being a shady recruiter, which he believed was grossly unfair. Unfortunately, Tarkanian could be his own worst enemy. When the NCAA launched an investigation into Cal State Long Beach’s football and swimming programs, Tarkanian wrote a pair of columns for the Long Beach Press-Telegram excoriating the NCAA’s policy of selective enforcement. Not
ing that Western Kentucky’s basketball program was under investigation, Tarkanian wrote in the fall of 1972, “The University of Kentucky basketball program breaks more rules in a day than Western Kentucky does in a year. The NCAA just doesn’t want to take on the big boys.” He voiced the same complaint in another column the following January.

  Predictably, Tarkanian’s words stirred up a hornet’s nest at the NCAA. After his second column was published, Warren Brown, the NCAA’s assistant executive director, fired off an acidic letter to Long Beach’s athletic director as well as the commissioner of the Pacific Coast Athletic Association. “Enclosed for your leisure-time reading is a copy of a newspaper article which I presume was written by Jerry Tarkanian,” Brown wrote. “It always amazes me when successful coaches become instant authorities. As in the case of this article, such instant authorities reflect an obvious unfamiliarity with facts.” Three months later, the NCAA expanded its inquiry to include Long Beach’s basketball program.

  Tarkanian was incensed that the NCAA would train its resources on Cal State Long Beach, when just across town, a school that Life magazine had once billed as the “Athens of Athletics” was so blatantly violating rules. During the 1971 NCAA tournament, Tarkanian’s team happened to run into Wooden’s during a layover at the Las Vegas airport en route to Salt Lake City, where they would eventually meet in the West Regional. “I had this kid, George Trapp. He says, ‘Coach, Coach. Look at them gators.’ I’m going, what the hell is he talking about?” Tarkanian said. “Then he told me it was alligator shoes. Our guys were in Converse shoes, Long Beach State letterman jackets, and jeans. UCLA looks like they came from Wall Street. They were dressed like you couldn’t believe. Our guys look like they came from the Salvation Army. I told the L.A. writers, ‘Look at them and look at us and tell me who’s cheating.’”