Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Even if some of the NCAA’s gumshoes were inclined to poke around Westwood, Tarkanian suspected that the NCAA’s president, Walter Byers, would hold them back as a favor to his good friend J. D. Morgan. Tarkanian said that Morgan was “always wonderful to me,” but unbeknown to him, Morgan was working behind Tarkanian’s back to get him in trouble. After Tarkanian was quoted in February 1972 in the Los Angeles Times talking about Leonard Gray, a guard on his team who was traveling to road games despite being ineligible to play, Morgan wrote a letter to an NCAA official to bring the situation to his attention. “Per our telephone conversation of this date [February 1, 1972], I have enclosed the Los Angeles Times article which quotes Tarkanian on Leonard Gray. It is my understanding that Gray has accompanied the team on every trip they have made this year,” Morgan wrote. “Right or wrong, we at UCLA have always interpreted that for an institution to pay for travel, room and board and incidentals to take ineligible athletes to athletic trips was against NCAA rules and regulations.… If this is now allowed would you please let me know.”

  After he retired, Wooden claimed numerous times that the NCAA had investigated his program while he was still on the job. While the NCAA may have done a little snooping—Kenny Heitz recalled that someone showed up in his hometown asking whether Kenny’s father made enough money to buy Kenny the convertible he was driving—the NCAA never formally launched an investigation the way it did with Long Beach. Nor is there any anecdotal evidence to suggest that investigators spent time on campus. “I was never interviewed by the NCAA,” Jamaal Wilkes said. Lucius Allen added: “The NCAA, if they did come around, they did not talk to me.”

  Tarkanian never blamed Wooden for any of this. “It bothers me when I keep reading about how straight they were at UCLA when I know they weren’t, but I don’t think Wooden was behind any of that,” Tarkanian said. “On at least two or three occasions, he told me about Sam Gilbert and how he went to J. D. Morgan, and J. D. told him, ‘You coach the team and let me handle Sam.’ I just don’t know what more he could have done.”

  As more information about Sam Gilbert came to light over the years, some people inside the UCLA athletic department were less willing to lay all the blame at Morgan’s feet. “A Sam Gilbert gets going because it’s tolerated at the player level and at the coach’s level,” said Norman Miller, a UCLA vice chancellor for student affairs. “Once it kind of gets going, it’s difficult for an athletic director to automatically eliminate it or deal with it.”

  Gilbert had his defenders as well. Chief among them was Willie Naulls, who would not have become such a successful businessman without Gilbert’s lifelong friendship. Naulls was also familiar with the stresses, pressures, and inequities that came with being a UCLA basketball player. He thought Gilbert was a huge boon to the program. “These kids are lucky to have Sam because nobody else will help them,” Naulls said in 1982. “Who’s going to help them? Does the athletic department help them? They should. Does the coach help them? He should. But in my experience, they don’t.… They should be kissing [Sam’s] feet for what he’s done.”

  * * *

  Inasmuch as these events unfolded in the summer of 1972, it is fitting that they should suggest the question that has formed the bottom line for every so-called scandal since Watergate:

  What did John Wooden know, and when did he know it?

  There is no question that Wooden knew something. He admitted as much himself. To the players, that was only stating the obvious. “My personal opinion,” Lucius Allen said, “is that Coach Wooden was a very bright man. He was in control of everything. There’s no way that Coach Wooden wouldn’t have some type of an idea of what Sam Gilbert was doing with the UCLA players. It’s inconceivable to say that he didn’t know.”

  It is, however, equally clear that Wooden did not orchestrate any of this illicit activity. Quite the contrary: he objected to it time and again. There is also no evidence to suggest that he knew the full extent to which Gilbert was violating NCAA rules with his players. For more than two decades, Wooden had stayed out of his players’ personal lives. They were his responsibility only during those hours when they were in his gym. If a player wanted to knock on his office door, he was always welcome, but Wooden was not one to insert himself. The lone instance in which he tried to breach that divide was during the fallout from Bill Seibert’s speech, and that had blown up in his face.

  Moreover, Wooden’s players had every incentive to keep him from finding out the seamy details. In the eyes of some, this further removed the coach from culpability. “Coach didn’t cheat. I was offered a lot of stuff on my recruiting visits. I was offered nothing to go to UCLA,” Farmer said. “No one can control everything. When you do what [Wooden] did in a place like L.A., it would have been impossible for any one person to have managed that whole thing without anybody else interfering from the outside. Because everybody wanted a piece of our program.”

  “Had he known about it, I’m sure he would have addressed it, but it was a gray area,” Wilkes said. “You’re not talking about some small college town. You’re talking about Los Angeles. You’ve got a lot going on here. Is Coach responsible to see what cars all his players are driving? I don’t believe it was his job to police the program to that extent.”

  On the other hand, Wooden saw enough to take his concerns to Morgan, to warn his players to stay away from Gilbert, and to confront Wicks and Rowe about their coats. At a certain point, he had to make a choice: he could either keep digging, or he could lay down his shovel. He chose the latter. “I remember we were on a road trip in Chicago, and five guys all got on the bus together wearing matching coats with fur-lined collars,” Greg Lee said. “It was pretty conspicuous. It’s not like Coach was an ostrich about Sam, but he wouldn’t confront the problem.”

  This view is shared by many of Wooden’s former players. “Coach had to look away on certain items in order for this to happen,” Saffer said. “If he was here today and you asked him if he was a saint, he’d be the first one to say no.”

  “Coach never came to me. We never discussed Sam, even up until his death,” Jamaal Wilkes said. “You know, Coach wasn’t the kind of man who looked for problems. I always sensed the reason Coach never addressed it is that he didn’t know how to address it. It never got to a point that he had to deal with it. So he let sleeping dogs lie.”

  Still, even if he is afforded every benefit of the doubt, it is not easy to square the circle between John Wooden, Man of Integrity, and John Wooden, Man Who Tolerated Sam Gilbert. He didn’t know everything, but he knew a lot. He knew enough. Wooden always talked to his players about the importance of standing up for their principles regardless of the cost. This was one case where the cost may have been too high. Should he have done more? “I don’t know,” Farmer replied when he was asked that question. “I’m going to leave that one alone, and I will apologize for that.”

  For his part, Wooden had no trouble squaring the circle. He always said the softest pillow was a clear conscience, and he insisted he slept soundly. Sam Gilbert was not something he created, or coveted, or encouraged, or wanted. By the time Bill Walton joined Wooden’s roster, Gilbert was just one of many distractions that were chipping away at his joy for teaching. As the years went on and more of Gilbert’s transgressions came to light, Wooden’s critics tried to use Gilbert as a cudgel. They argued that it tainted Wooden’s legacy. They may have succeeded in denting the myth, but they never knocked the man off-balance. “I know what the truth of it is,” Wooden said in August 2009, ten months before he died. “I never tried to use Sam Gilbert in any way. I never sent a player to him. I tried to keep players away from him. So people can say whatever they want. My conscience is clear.”

  28

  Streaking

  Bill Walton despised the limelight and cherished his solitude. That’s why he loved the off-season. He could throw on a backpack, hop on his bike, go camping, hitchhike, read, go to Dead shows, smoke weed. Whatever his heart desired.

  Howe
ver, during the spring of 1972, Walton felt compelled to thrust himself into the public eye. In May, President Nixon announced that he was escalating the Vietnam War yet again by ordering the mining of Haiphong harbor. The decision ignited another wave of protests on UCLA’s campus that lasted a full week. Just as in basketball, Walton took up the center position. He served himself up as a wild-eyed, long-haired, six-foot-eleven, redheaded poster child of antiwar expression. “I went to demonstrations, but I made sure not to be in front,” Jamaal Wilkes said. “Bill was in front. That was the difference.”

  It was no surprise to anyone who knew him that Walton would dive in with such passion. As Wooden once said of Walton, “He’s the type who is either totally committed or totally disinterested—no in-between.” Walton could transit from idea to idea, fad to fad, but once he became fixated, he was all in. “I’ve never seen anybody who could thrust himself into causes as wholeheartedly or as fast as Bill,” Greg Lee said. “Boy, could he get excited. He used to come into my room at seven in the morning with his eyes wide open, saying, ‘Let’s go!’”

  In the wake of Nixon’s announcement, Walton went everywhere shouting “Let’s go!” to his fellow students. He attended a rally in front of the ROTC building where Jane Fonda was one of the speakers. He led a march that was supposed to end at the edge of campus but spontaneously extended into the San Diego Freeway. Larry Farmer, who had had more than his fair share of ugly exchanges with racist policemen, was in the crowd that day. “We were closing down traffic, so the LAPD showed up in riot gear. They said we had fifteen minutes to disperse,” Farmer said. “I said, you can have that, because it’s going to take me two minutes to walk back, get in my car, and drive back to the Valley. Because I’m done.”

  Walton and Lee took part in another march in front of the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. The throng then veered into the intersection of Westwood and Wilshire, one of the busiest intersections in the city. Several hundred students sat down and brought traffic to a halt, but it was Walton whose picture was published in the Los Angeles Times the next morning.

  This was precisely the dynamic that bothered Wooden the most. He recognized that Walton genuinely believed in what he was doing, but he also suspected that Walton was allowing himself to be deployed as a tool by the leaders of the antiwar movement. “On the floor, Bill was a leader, but off it he was easily led,” Wooden said. “He was always with a group who used him. He never sees that they’re using him. He’s the one that they want before the cameras. The instigators—were they up there? No, they’re back in the crowd. I saw these things. I understood him and yet never understood him.” Asked about this observation many years later, Walton shrugged and said, “We all use everybody. That’s the way life goes.”

  It all came to a head when Walton joined an overnight sit-in taking place inside Murphy Hall, UCLA’s administrative building. In an effort to prevent university officials from getting to their offices, Walton helped a group of students lift several electric janitor carts and place them in front of the main doorway. When Chancellor Young couldn’t convince the students to leave, he called the police. Within minutes, a group of helmet-wearing cops were on the scene. Walton was among those who refused to leave. He was arrested along with fifty-two other protesters. As he was being handcuffed, Walton shouted, “The whole world is watching!” Then he unspooled a river of profanities at Young.

  Walton and the others were transported to a nearby police headquarters before being shuffled into a paddy wagon that took them to the Van Nuys police station. Later that night, Walton’s brother Bruce bailed him out. As he left the police station, Walton told a radio reporter, “I’m going back to the campus and we’re going to close it down. I will do what I can to help close it down.” A month later, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace and paid a fifty-dollar fine. Young also put him on one year’s probation at the school.

  Fortunately for Walton, his coach was out of town that day, or he might still be in jail. Wooden was speaking at a clinic in Portland, where a reporter from the Independent Press-Telegram of Long Beach reached him by phone. “I was not surprised Bill was involved in the demonstration,” Wooden said. “He is an emotional youngster, and you know where he stands all the time. He is very much against the war.” Wooden added that he did not intend to take action against his center. “That is not in my bailiwick. It’s out of season and a student’s conduct is out of my hands.”

  Wooden was much more disappointed than he let on, and he told Walton as much during a heart-to-heart conversation after Wooden returned to Los Angeles. Wooden’s political views were actually more in line with Walton’s than many people realized. Wooden was a registered Democrat, though he often voted for Republican candidates, including Nixon. Wooden shared Walton’s views about the war, but he vehemently disagreed with Walton’s methods for expressing them.

  “I’m not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I’m going to say I’m opposed to all war,” Wooden said. “But I’m also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights. When you do that, I think you’re defeating your own purpose. Taking over the administration building when there are people who have jobs in there to do, I think that’s not right.”

  As was the case with so many things, the two of them agreed to disagree. “My friends were coming back in body bags and wheelchairs. His friends were sitting in a mansion on the hill,” Walton said. “When everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks.”

  Wooden’s dispassionate attitude toward the antiwar and civil rights movements widened the chasm between him and his players. In their eyes, some actions were so heinous, so unjust, that they demanded a ruckus. Wasn’t the United States of America created out of just such a ruckus? Didn’t it take protests, unrest, and law breaking to end slavery, earn suffrage for women, enable factory workers to collectively bargain? Wooden agreed with those causes, but he didn’t believe in agitating. He believed in conformity. He often counseled his players to see the big picture, but by asking them to curtail their activities to preserve his basketball program, he came off small.

  This was one area where the teacher could have learned more from his students. Wooden would have earned an enormous amount of respect from his players if, just once, he had tried to leverage his celebrity to advance a cause that he believed in. Wooden prided himself on being a man of actions, not statements, but he failed to realize that sometimes actions are statements. “I would say his biggest flaw was not always voicing how he really felt about things openly,” Henry Bibby said. “If he talked about some things, it could have helped society, but he was never the guy to put himself out there to get hit. His thing was, if you don’t have something good to say about somebody, don’t say it.”

  * * *

  Even as they butted heads throughout the spring, Wooden and Walton found themselves on the same side of a different conflict. The United States Olympic Committee wanted Walton to try out for the basketball team that Henry Iba was going to coach at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Walton was concerned about the toll that playing in the Olympics would take on his tender body. He usually played very little basketball during the spring and summer so he could be fresh for the season. If he said yes to the USOC, he would have to leave UCLA for several months, sleep in too-small beds in military barracks, go through a grueling tryout, play a series of barnstorming exhibition games, and then compete in the Olympic tournament.

  Still, Walton wanted to play. So he offered a compromise: let me join the team on the eve of training camp, and don’t force me to play in any exhibitions. He promised he would show up in shape and ready to represent his country. The USOC told him no. So instead of playing for Iba, Walton spent most of his summer hitchhiking with his buddies across North America.

  Wooden had long ago divorced himself from the Olympics, so when the USOC asked him to intervene with Walton, he refused. Ditto for Keith Wilkes, who likewise turned down an invitation to play. “We talked to [Wooden] about
it. He kind of said, ‘It’s your decision,’” Wilkes said. “So I didn’t play. Had he pushed it, it probably would have been different.”

  There was, however, one Bruin who did try out for the team: Swen Nater, who was happy for the chance to play that he would never get as long as Bill Walton was at UCLA. Nater was so impressive in the early going that he displaced Maryland’s star center, Tom McMillen, on the preliminary roster. “All the other coaches and players trying out for the team kept coming to me and asking how in the world do you ever stop this guy,” said Bob Boyd, a close pal of Iba’s who was on the USOC’s basketball committee. “I told them all that Swen Nater was at least one UCLA problem that we at USC have never had the pleasure of worrying about.”

  Nater, however, withered under Iba’s exacting ways. Practices at UCLA rarely lasted more than two hours, yet Iba held two three-hour sessions every day. Even worse, he insisted on having team meals just thirty minutes after practice. Nater could not eat so soon after a hard workout, so he asked Iba if he could eat a little later to allow his stomach to settle. Iba refused. By the end of the second week, Nater had lost nearly twenty pounds. He quit and flew back to California. “I’m sorry it happened,” he said. “I’m really interested in the team. I hope they do well.”

  Nater’s withdrawal only reinforced the suspicion that Wooden was intentionally keeping his players out of the Olympics. He insisted that wasn’t true, but he admitted that “I’m not a very strong, pro-Olympic person to tell you the truth.” For starters, Wooden bemoaned that the discussion around the Olympics always boiled down to how the United States was doing compared to the Soviet Union. “Is that what the Olympics are? Are we participating against just one team, or are we participating against all countries?” He also argued that the Americans should send their professional athletes just like the rest of the world did. Most of all, he did not approve of the manner in which the teams were selected—especially when they had been selected in the past without including two of his favorite Bruins, Willie Naulls and Gail Goodrich.