by Seth Davis
Of course, if the USOC wanted Wooden’s players on its team, there was an obvious solution: make him the head coach. This should have been obvious anyway. Wooden was by far the most prominent basketball coach in the country. Yet he was never given the job. Wooden later claimed that he was offered a position as an assistant if he would bring Walton along, “but I wouldn’t go on Bill’s coattails.” He did indicate, however, that if he had been asked to be the head coach, he would have accepted. As to why that never happened, Wooden said, “I really can’t answer that. I don’t know. There was a time when I would have been delighted to have been considered to be an Olympic coach, but as time went on, it was too late. I liked Mr. Iba very much, but I honestly feel that I’d like to see them change the coach every four years.”
Wooden might have had a better chance to coach in the Olympics if he had been part of the good ole boys’ network. Iba and Wooden got along fine, but they were never close. One friend of Iba’s revealed that he used to make snide comments about Wooden in private. “He called him ‘Johnny Two-Faced.’ Said he had a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other,” this person said.
No doubt this stemmed from professional jealousy, but it was also because Wooden was simply not a social animal. Even Gary Cunningham and his wife rarely shared a meal with John and Nell. Pete Newell recalled a time during the national coaches’ convention when he and a couple of buddies came back to their hotel after a night on the town and ran into John and Nell stepping off the elevator in the lobby. “It was pretty funny, but that’s the way John was,” Newell said. “He was not one of the guys. He kept himself separate.” Jerry Tarkanian added, “I remember one time when I was at junior college, all the coaches were pissed off because John brought Nell to the convention, and all the coaches like to go to the convention and chase broads. Nell was sitting with John in the lobby checking out all of this.”
An anonymous coach expressed a similar resentment to a Los Angeles Times reporter. “Wooden is a completely different person than what he appears,” the coach said. “Most of the coaches don’t like him because he’s never really been one of the guys. He doesn’t have to be a bad guy like the rest of us, but he doesn’t have to remain apart from us, either.”
Wooden loved to sit around with other coaches and talk about the game at length, but he preferred to do it in coffee shops, not bars. If a coach was in the Iba-Newell inner circle, or if he ended up in the Pac-8 conference and saw up close how bitterly competitive Wooden could be, that coach was more likely to form a negative opinion of him. For someone like Tex Winter, who fit both criteria and had played at USC, that was triply true. “Johnny Wooden … has another side that most people don’t know about,” Winter said. “Among his colleagues, Wooden wasn’t very popular, and he was never voted to the board of directors. That’s because he was kind of arrogant. He’d never let his UCLA players participate in the coaches’ All-Star game, and he never went out of his way to help anybody.”
In retrospect, Iba might have erred by refusing to accept Bill Walton’s compromise. In the gold medal game in Munich, the Americans lost for the first time ever at the Olympics. It happened via one of the most controversial endings in the history of sports. The United States appeared to have won the game by a point on two free throws by Illinois State guard Doug Collins, but the secretary-general of the International Basketball Federation intervened to grant the Soviets not one but two additional chances at a game-winning basket. They finally succeeded on a layup that followed a full-court heave. The Americans were so devastated that they refused to accept their silver medals at the postgame ceremonies.
Like everyone else who saw the game, Wooden thought what happened was a travesty. Yet he disagreed with the Americans’ stance. “I was disappointed that our players did not accept the silver medals,” he said. “There’s no disgrace in coming in second, regardless of what happened to us. A lot of things are unfair in athletics, just as they are in business and life. But if the ruling is made against you, you accept it.”
The man was nothing if not consistent. A terrible wrong had been committed, but that was no reason to protest.
* * *
He was awoken in the middle of the night by a sudden sharp pain in his chest. His first thought was to wait for the pain to subside, but when it wouldn’t go away, he went to the hospital. At first, the doctor told him he believed he was having a gastrointestinal issue, but just to be sure, he wanted to perform an angiogram. The results showed that this was no ordinary gas problem. John Wooden was having a heart attack.
As heart attacks go, this one was relatively minor, but it forced Wooden to stay in the hospital for six days in December 1972. For the first time in his coaching career, he would have to miss a game.
Needless to say, this was big news all over Los Angeles. It was also a terrible jolt for his players. For all their bitching, Wooden was the reason they had come to UCLA. Two months before, they had opened practice by celebrating the start of Wooden’s twenty-fifth season in Westwood. The Bruins had already won their first three games by comfortable margins. Everything was coming so easily, but now they didn’t know how to react.
“I think we were shocked,” Walton said. “When you are a great young athlete, you think you’re invincible and you’re immortal and that nothing bad is ever going to happen to you. Then all of a sudden, we lost our coach. It was a huge blow.”
Walton and Wooden had continued to be at odds over politics and the war. During one of Wooden’s lectures, he had suggested that a more effective means of agitating would be for Walton to write a letter to an elected official. Walton thought this was a splendid idea. So he went into Wooden’s office, grabbed a couple of sheets of stationery with the UCLA Basketball logo, and wrote a petition on behalf of the entire team asking President Nixon to resign. (Walton concluded the letter to the president by writing, “Thanking you in advance for your consideration in this matter.”) Walton asked each player to sign the petition and then brought it to Wooden. He could see a pall come over the coach’s face. “You’re not going to send this, are you?” Wooden asked. Walton assured Wooden that he was. Wooden shook his head in disappointment, but he never told Walton he couldn’t mail the letter.
As soon as Walton got the news about Wooden’s heart attack, he hopped on his ten-speed bicycle and pedaled down to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Wooden was touched. “I don’t have blind reverence for authority,” Walton said. “People I respect earn my respect. Coach Wooden has earned it.”
With Wooden temporarily out of action, it was left to Gary Cunningham and Frank Arnold to coach the Bruins during their home game against the University of California Santa Barbara on December 16. The Bruins won by 35 points. Five days later, Wooden returned to practice looking “wan and slow,” according to a published report. He said he would have to adjust his lifestyle—no more huge banana splits after games, and his doctor wanted him to exercise more—but otherwise he pronounced himself ready to get back to work. “I’ve always told my players to be quick but don’t hurry,” he said, “but my doctors have told me that I can’t follow my own advice. I can’t be quick or hurry.”
Wooden’s latest health scare revealed just how stressful his life had become. He talked openly about it during several lengthy interviews with two Los Angeles Times reporters, Jeff Prugh and Dwight Chapin, who were writing a book about his life. After Wooden was discharged from the hospital, Prugh explained to his readers that life for the Wizard of Westwood was not as magical as it appeared. “He lives a lonely, at times tormenting existence—more so, perhaps, than most realize,” Prugh wrote. “The question is not necessarily whether John Wooden is fit for the turbulence surrounding him. That question already has been answered by his doctors, who have allowed him to resume his coaching duties. At issue now, however, is how many of those responsible for that turbulence truly understand how difficult it is for John Wooden.”
Wooden always said that he received more criticism after winning his f
irst championship than at any previous point in his career. With each passing title, the volume got turned up another notch. “I don’t know whether winning is always good,” he said. “It breeds envy and distrust in others, and overconfidence and a lack of appreciation very often in those who enjoy it.”
All of this took an especially hard toll on Nell. “I learned to accept things, but she didn’t,” Wooden said. “We talked about it. She said it’s very difficult. I said it’s not difficult. That’s when we get stronger, when things are difficult.” Nell was so bothered by the nitpickers and naysayers that she tried to push Wooden toward an early retirement. “These last few years haven’t been the happiest in our lives,” she said during the summer of 1972. “Fans are so greedy. They’re dissatisfied if we win a championship game by only five points. That’s why his children want him to get out. If he loses, a lot of fans are going to say he’s too old and has lost his touch. You learn to condition yourself to critics. If he hadn’t, he would have broken sometime during the last eight or nine years. But they do have an effect.”
Wooden’s children noticed this effect as well. “I think the years of the national championships were hard on all of us,” Nan said. “Daddy’s job wasn’t fun for us. It really wasn’t.”
Their situation might have been more tolerable if UCLA were paying Wooden a sum commensurate with his value, but that was not the case. As the 1972–73 season began, Wooden’s salary remained just $31,000. That was a ridiculously low amount, especially since earlier that fall, Wooden had been enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, for his coaching achievements, making him the first man to be inducted as both a player and a coach. By contrast, Jerry Tarkanian had just left Cal State Long Beach to coach at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for a salary reported to be $70,000. (Taking the Vegas job provided Tarkanian with a convenient exit before the NCAA’s hammer came down on Long Beach. Shortly after he left, the NCAA found twenty-six violations in football and basketball recruiting and placed those programs on three years’ probation.) In fairness to Morgan, he earned only $35,000 per year himself because of UCLA’s policy to keep athletic salaries in line with those of the professors, but that didn’t make it more palatable to Wooden’s family. Since everyone knew Wooden was too humble to ask for a raise, Nell and their children believed that Morgan should have come to him. “All I can tell you is that Mom especially was really angry about that,” Nan said. “She would argue with Daddy about it, but Daddy would always say, ‘I’ll never ask.’ Our question is why wouldn’t UCLA have done something about it?”
Moreover, Wooden pursued just a fraction of the opportunities that came his way to earn ancillary income. He gave a few paid speeches and ran his camps, but he was hardly rolling in it. At one point, Wooden was offered a huge sum to endorse the company that made basketball floors out of tartan. He turned it down because he didn’t like their courts. “There was a time if my dad had endorsed a shoe it would have made my mom happy,” said Wooden’s son, Jim. “Mom was in support of that because everybody else was doing it.”
In Wooden’s first game back following his heart attack, he coached the Bruins to a win over Pittsburgh, their fiftieth straight victory. (During halftime, Wooden was presented with Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year Award, which he shared with Billie Jean King.) UCLA was now just eleven wins away from breaking the NCAA’s consecutive wins record, set by the University of San Francisco during the Bill Russell years. If the Bruins kept winning, they would break the record at Notre Dame on January 27, 1973. Wooden tried to downplay the chase for as long as he could, but once the Bruins were just two wins away, he gave up. “There’s no sense trying to soft-pedal it,” Wooden said on the team’s flight to the Midwest following UCLA’s fifty-ninth straight victory. “The players are well aware of the record and they’d like to have it.”
By this time, Wooden wasn’t just an icon. He was an industry. The book written by Prugh and Chapin, called The Wizard of Westwood, hit the shelves that fall. Besides cementing forever the nickname that Wooden despised, the book revealed him to be a gifted, disciplined, but somewhat flawed man—just like the rest of the human race, as it turned out. Jim Murray wrote that the book amounted to “a case against sainthood.” Prugh and Chapin had revealed for the first time that, contrary to popular belief, the coach actually did suffer a losing season, at Dayton High in Kentucky. (The authors did not discover that Wooden had had a second losing season a few years later, at South Bend Central.) This was no minor detail. Many stories about Wooden had included the claim that he had never had a losing season anywhere. It was part of the Wooden myth, and he had never corrected it. The Wizard of Westwood also included lengthy passages about Sam Gilbert, the first time journalists sought to explore his influence in greater depth. The authors never flat out asserted that Gilbert was an NCAA rules violator, but it was not hard to infer from their reporting that he could be.
In the months before publication, after sitting for multiple interviews with Prugh and Chapin, Wooden heard from various friends that they had been contacted by the authors and that the book was taking a negative turn. A second book, Tony Medley’s UCLA Basketball: The Real Story, was also published that fall. Even though it was written by a former sports editor of the Daily Bruin, Wooden was furious at what he regarded as an unfavorable slant, and he told Medley so. With these two books on their way into the marketplace, Wooden felt the need to rush out his own autobiography in December. The title, They Call Me Coach, was a direct riposte to the notion that he was some kind of spellbinding wizard. Wooden’s book sold much better than the others, thanks largely to his aggressiveness in promoting it through his television show, store signings, and high-profile interviews. “This may sound crazy,” Tommy Curtis said, “but when Coach did that book, that was the first time I ever realized it was a business. Before that, to me, basketball was just a hobby.”
Such was the circus surrounding UCLA as it headed for its date with destiny. The Bruins tied the record of sixty straight victories on January 25, with an easy win at Loyola. Wooden was in a good mood during the bus ride to South Bend. As he sat in his customary seat up front next to Nell, the players blasted Rolling Stones music from a boom box. When someone asked Wooden what he thought about Mick Jagger, the coach replied, “I wouldn’t turn him on, but he doesn’t bug me.”
Notre Dame, and the record, loomed. The Fighting Irish were unranked, but they were clearly on the rise under their young, brash coach, Richard Phelps. He went by the nickname “Digger” in homage to his father, who owned a funeral home in upstate New York. Like every other coach in America, Phelps badly wanted to beat Wooden. Unlike every other coach (except for those in the Pac-8), Phelps had the chance to do so twice a year—on national television, no less—thanks to the long-term deal struck between the two schools and TVS.
A graduate of Rider College, the thirty-two-year-old Phelps had been plucked out of the high school ranks to be an assistant at the University of Pennsylvania under Dick Harter, who was now coaching at Oregon. During his first head coaching stop, Phelps engineered a quick turnaround at Fordham, which he coached to a 26–3 record in 1970–71. Now he was trying to do the same at Notre Dame. The Irish had gone 6–20 in his first year, and they were 7–8 entering the UCLA game. Phelps studied Wooden like a student cramming for the biggest exam of his life. He brought a fighter’s attitude to the battle. When the Bruins jumped out to an early lead, Phelps shouted at Wooden, “I’m not calling time-out! I read your book! I’m not calling time-out!”
Wooden ignored Phelps’s antics, but he could not ignore the Notre Dame players. Phelps told his guys to get as physical with UCLA as the referees would allow. After watching Irish center John Shumate throw one too many elbows at Walton, Wooden marched down to the Notre Dame bench and told Phelps that Shumate better knock it off. “If he doesn’t, I’ll send in Swen Nater, and then you’ll really see something,” Wooden barked.
“It’s a two-way street,�
� Phelps shot back.
In the end, UCLA won 82–63 for its sixty-first consecutive triumph, a new NCAA record. Phelps was gracious in defeat, handing Wooden the game ball at center court. (Asked afterward what his exchange during the game with Wooden was about, Phelps joked, “He asked me if I had read his book.”) Wooden took the microphone and, true to form, soft-pedaled the moment. “This isn’t the greatest thing that’s happened on this day,” he told the crowd. “It is my granddaughter’s birthday, but the most important thing is that this was cease-fire day in Vietnam. That’s much more important than this.”
After the game, Wooden did something truly historic: he opened his locker room to the press. His players were jubilant, not just because they broke the record but because they had done it on the road, in a heated environment, against a good team. They relished their role as dynastic villains. “We like pressure,” Walton said. “I know I thrive on it. And I like hostile crowds. They make me want to play better.”
In the postgame press conference, Wooden waxed philosophical. “I’m very happy about it, but it doesn’t compare with winning your first national championship. It’s the continuation thing that makes you proud,” he said. “I’ve had many blessings in this game of basketball. I’m one of the fortunate ones. I think for many years I was a very poor tournament coach. I think I’m better now.”
Wooden was glad to get the record behind him, but he felt bad about his exchange with Phelps. He wrote a letter of apology that somehow (wink wink) wound up in the hands of Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Frank Dolson, a frequent Wooden critic, who published its contents. “I owe you and John Shumate an apology and hope you will accept it in the spirit it is offered,” Wooden wrote to Phelps. “I acted hastily without thinking clearly and taking all things into consideration and, as usual, actions from emotion are seldom with reason.” He also added this postscript: “Please convey my feeling to John. He is a fine young man and an outstanding basketball player and I did him an injustice.”
