by Seth Davis
* * *
At the traditional Sunday press conference for the semifinal coaches, Wooden sounded like a man unburdened. “When I got wind of the Saturday morning papers in Los Angeles, I made the decision,” he said. “I feel much better now that the announcement has been made. I was sort of pent up inside. I wasn’t being able to be completely honest with my friends.” Wooden answered a few more questions about his retirement before cutting them off. “Isn’t it about time that we talk about the important thing—the basketball tournament?”
His opponent in the final, Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall, was happy to oblige. “There’s no way we can come up with anything like what’s involved in John Wooden’s resignation,” he said. “Still, it won’t dampen our spirits.” Hall also joked that he should get the UCLA job because he had already been foolish enough to follow Adolph Rupp. “There’s no sense destroying two people,” he said.
Kentucky had a major advantage over UCLA in size, experience, and depth. Playing alongside four seniors were three bruising, six-foot-ten freshman centers: Rick Roby, Mike Phillips, and Dan Hall. The Wildcats also featured a rising star in six-foot-five freshman guard Jack Givens. Kentucky posed such a formidable challenge that on Sunday Wooden conducted a walk-through of Kentucky’s trapping defense and four-corners offense. “Never before had we done this, but we had to,” he said.
When the game began, Wooden was unusually tight. As he feared, his Bruins had all kinds of problems with Kentucky’s size. Usually, Marques Johnson could overcome a height disadvantage with strength and quickness, but this was one occasion where he was overmatched. When Kentucky built an early 6-point lead, Wooden replaced him with Drollinger.
From there, UCLA made its move. With Drollinger playing the game of his life, UCLA erased its deficit and fought toe-to-toe with the Wildcats. There were fifteen lead changes and five ties in the first half alone. Rather than stew on the bench, Johnson found himself cheering Drollinger’s every move. “It wasn’t like I wanted Ralph to cool off and not play as well so I could get back in there. I was genuinely happy for Ralph,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t about me and my minutes and this and that. It was like, we need to win this game by any means necessary. Ralph’s doing the job. I’m glad not to have to battle those big dudes. Go, Ralph, go.”
Following the intermission, UCLA slowly started pulling away. With just under twelve minutes to play, Washington scored off an offensive rebound to give the Bruins a 10-point lead, their biggest of the game. Now it was Kentucky’s turn to come back. The Wildcats shrank UCLA’s lead from 74–67 to 76–75 with under seven minutes to play.
On the ensuing possession, Meyers drove hard to the bucket and crashed into Kevin Grevey, Kentucky’s senior captain. When Hank Nichols, a thirty-eight-year-old official who was working his first championship game, called Meyers for a charge, Meyers slammed the ball on the floor in disgust and shouted, “I didn’t touch him!” Nichols then slapped Meyers with a technical foul.
Wooden went ballistic. He thought the charge call was wrong, and the technical was atrocious. As he screamed “You crook!” at Nichols, Wooden walked several feet onto the court. Arnold and Cunningham had to restrain him, with help from Meyers. “That’s the only time I can remember that happening,” Arnold said. Nichols recalled that when Meyers slammed the ball on the floor, “I thought it was going to hit the ceiling.” Nichols added that it’s probably a good thing in retrospect that Wooden’s assistants, as well as the other referee, kept Wooden from walking any closer to him. “I was a cocky rookie,” Nichols said. “I don’t know what I would have done if he had gotten on the court.”
The sequence gave Kentucky a chance to break the game open. But Grevey, a 76 percent foul shooter, missed two free throws—one for the technical, the other a front end of a one-and-one for the foul. Kentucky retained possession because of the technical but turned it over again when James Lee was called for an offensive foul. The Wildcats could have scored 5 unanswered points. Instead they scored none.
The game stayed tense the rest of the way, but UCLA never relinquished its lead. When the horn sounded, John Wooden had his tenth NCAA championship courtesy of an 82–75 victory. He was immediately engulfed by photographers and television cameras. The UCLA band played “Thanks for the Memories.” McCarter embraced him and said, “I hope you have a nice life.” A Bruin cheerleader cut down one of the nets and hung it around Wooden’s neck.
Wooden’s final game served as one last affirmation of everything he tried to teach about basketball. He only used six players, yet they outperformed Hall’s eleven. Every cog did its part to help the machine fulfill its mission. McCarter had 14 assists. Meyers scored 24 points, grabbed 11 rebounds, and provided his customary emotional leadership. Drollinger fought through Kentucky’s burly young centers en route to 13 rebounds and 10 points. Trgovich added 16 points and held Kentucky’s star guard Jimmy Dan Conner to 9. Washington finished with 28 points and 12 rebounds and was named the game’s Most Outstanding Player. Even Johnson, who only played twenty-three minutes and was just 3-for-9 from the floor, snared several key rebounds down the stretch to keep the Wildcats at bay.
Best of all, the Bruins were champs because they were quicker than Kentucky, but they didn’t hurry. “We went out with the idea that the more we ran them, the better we’d be,” Drollinger said. “Coach Wooden’s basic philosophy is that the best quality a player can have is quickness. It will beat strength every time.”
There was no pretense of dispassion when Wooden walked into the postgame interview room. The press gave him a hearty standing ovation. “I guess to say that I thought we would go this far would be stretching the point, but I did think we had a chance,” he said. “Yes, I’m sad. Sad that I’m leaving the youngsters and all the wonderful associations I’ve made. You men, my coaches, other players and coaches. I haven’t agreed with you on everything, but we all agree on our love for this game.”
As for his future plans, Wooden said he would like to continue working at UCLA in some capacity. He wanted to stick to his daily five-mile walk around the track, “so I’m going to ask J. D. Morgan if I can have a locker.” He also said he would do whatever he could to help his successor, whoever it may be. Asked if he would consider returning if the program fell on hard times, Wooden replied, “UCLA basketball is not going to fall on hard times.”
It was left to the press to take full measure of the man before them. During the just-completed twelve-year span, Wooden’s teams won ten NCAA titles and put together two epic streaks—seven straight national championships and eighty-eight consecutive wins. His records in the sport would forever be unequaled and unsurpassed. “It may be an over-exaggeration to call Wooden the best coach in the history of team sports, but not by much,” Ken Denlinger wrote in the Washington Post. “Keep in mind that Vince Lombardi never had to win an NFL championship without Bart Starr or Paul Hornung, and Red Auerbach was blessed with Bill Russell in the decade he became a genius in the NBA. Wooden has won with dominant guards, dominant forwards and dominant centers, most of whom were coveted by every other major-college coach before they chose UCLA.”
Most important, Wooden had accomplished all of that during a period of immense social change. The pressure of being on top eventually got to him, but not nearly as viscerally as it did for so many other great coaches. The ten championships aside, John Wooden’s greatest victory may well have been his ability to emerge from all that tumult without losing sense of who he was—not a perfect man but a very good one, a teacher more than a coach, a Christian, a husband, a father, anything but a wizard. He was going out a winner, but what mattered more was that he had been successful, even if he was the only one who understood the difference.
He tried to teach that lesson until the very end. “I’d like to be remembered as a person who tried to do his best, I guess,” he said on the night of his grand finale. “A man I’ve admired for so long, Tony Hinkle of Butler, never got the recognition he deserved because his
won-lost record wasn’t that great. But no coach ever got more out of his players. It’s hard to keep things in perspective sometimes, but we ought to try.”
* * *
After Wooden left the interview room, he stood in a hallway outside the Bruins’ locker room and held court some more with reporters. Denny Crum, whose team had defeated Syracuse in the third-place game, waited for his former coach to finish. Crum was standing next to Wooden when a well-heeled alumnus walked up to offer his good wishes. “Congratulations, Coach,” the man said. “You let us down last year, but this made up for it.”
You let us down last year. It was all Crum could do to hold himself back. “I could have punched the guy,” he said.
The comment summarized the sad irony of John Wooden’s career. The very years that produced the greatest coaching record in the history of college sports were in many ways the unhappiest years of his life. Even with his health issues, Wooden could have coached a little while longer. He was still one year short of the mandatory retirement age, and the 1974–75 season proved he was as good as he had ever been. Four of the six players he used in the championship game were returning, and he had signed another top-flight freshman class. Yet, as he put it, he quit not because he wanted to but because he had to. “If it were just coaching, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Nell said. “But it’s all the things together that are getting him uptight. He had to get out from under the pressure. I think that was the biggest thing. When you reach a certain age, it’s hard to take those things anymore.”
In the decades that followed, Wooden frequently told the story of that booster’s remark. He did so with a twinkle in his eye—It was amusing to me, very funny. Didn’t bother me at all—but that was not the truth. He expressed his real feelings the following morning at breakfast, when he relayed the exchange to Marques Johnson and Richard Washington. As Wooden spoke, Johnson got one last glimpse of the fierce warrior dude. “He was hot,” Johnson said. “He was saying, ‘I’m just tired of it.’ He was real frustrated. We told him, ‘Coach, go ahead. Have a good life.’”
In the end, that booster may have done him a favor. If there was any lingering doubt, that man erased it. When John Wooden walked out of San Diego Sports Arena that night, he knew that he had made the right decision. He did his best. He had peace of mind. It was time to bow out.
PART FOUR
Winter
31
Clean Gene
“Coach Bartow’s office. Coach Wooden speaking.”
The new era of UCLA basketball sounded a lot like the old one. During Gene Bartow’s first few months on the job in the spring and summer of 1975, he shared his office with the previous occupant. Neither man was thrilled with the arrangement, which was J. D. Morgan’s idea, but it proved to be symbolic. No matter how hard he huffed, no matter how hard he puffed, Bartow could not escape the great man’s shadow.
The office, like everything else around UCLA, was a paean to the Wooden dynasty. Dozens of trophies occupied the shelves. Framed magazine covers hung on the walls. Though Wooden was completely surprised by Morgan’s decision (he had assumed that his successor would be Denny Crum), he lent his imprimatur to the hire. When Bartow walked into Pauley Pavilion three days after UCLA’s championship win over Kentucky to meet the press for the first time, Wooden was right by his side. A photograph published inside UCLA’s media guide for the 1975–76 season showed Wooden handing a basketball to Gene Bartow. The message was clear: handle with care.
Wooden’s understated ubiquity was of a piece with his declaration that he wasn’t really “retired”; he had simply stopped coaching UCLA’s basketball team. That allowed him some well-earned rest. He and Nell spent a weekend in Banff, Alberta, between John’s appearances at coaching clinics in the Pacific Northwest. “Nobody knew me,” he said. “I was doing the daily five-mile walk every morning. It was nice in October and everything was so beautiful. Never had a nicer vacation.” Later that month, they took a two-week Caribbean cruise.
Besides that, Wooden remained as active as ever. He was in high demand on the lecture circuit, and for the first time in his life, he had the opportunity to make some real money, although much of what he earned went into trust funds he set up to pay for his grandchildren’s education. He and Nell moved out of their modest Santa Monica apartment and purchased an equally modest condominium just over the hill in Encino. The condo had a small den, which Nell decorated herself. She took framed photos of all ten of his championship teams and hung them on the wall in the shape of a pyramid.
Wooden also derived a great deal of income from his basketball camps. This created yet another problem for Bartow. Even though UCLA was supposedly a more prestigious job than the one he left at Illinois, Bartow’s salary was roughly the same at $33,000. At Illinois, however, Bartow was able to supplement his earnings through radio and TV shows as well as summer camps. When he got to Los Angeles, however, he discovered that there was not much of a market for him to do those shows. He started his own camp, but there was no way he was going to compete with Wooden’s. “I would always get a kick out of when the secretary would take a call and say, ‘Do you want your son to be in Coach Wooden’s camp or Coach Bartow’s camp?’” Bartow said. “The choice was pretty obvious to me.”
The start of practice should have provided Bartow with a clean break from the past. Instead, it became just another occasion to celebrate the Wooden mystique as the school feted him with a combination retirement and sixty-fifth birthday party inside Pauley Pavilion. It was a bona fide Hollywood extravaganza. Bob Hope served as emcee. (“Who else would grow alfalfa in his garden so Bill Walton could have a decent lunch?”) Frank Sinatra sang a few numbers. Dozens of former players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, and Lucius Allen, were on hand. The school presented Wooden with a pale blue Mercedes-Benz sedan, a gold watch with ten encrusted diamonds (representing his ten NCAA titles), and four lifetime tickets to UCLA home games. The varsity band played the fight song. The glee club sang “Back Home Again in Indiana.” Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed it John Wooden Day. When the night was over, the crowd of nearly seven thousand serenaded the guest of honor with “Happy Birthday” and “Auld Lang Syne.”
Wooden was touched. “This is the most memorable evening of my athletic career,” he said. “The two great loves of my life are my family and UCLA.” After reminiscing about his early years working in the dusty old men’s gym, Wooden called his wife to the podium. “You have always been with me since I would see you up there in the high school band holding a trumpet,” he said. “Next to my family, I feel closest to my players. I am sorry if I ever hurt any of them. I never meant to. There is no player I haven’t loved.”
With that, Wooden whisked his bride to yet another coaching clinic, in Atlanta, followed by that cruise through the Caribbean. Bartow was relieved that Wooden would finally be out of sight for a few weeks, but that didn’t mean he would soon be out of anyone’s mind. “I figure this nostalgia for Coach Wooden will pass in about a year, as long as UCLA keeps winning,” Bartow said. “But they love him here, don’t they?”
* * *
November 11, 1975, was a big day for Gene Bartow: the first time he took the court at Pauley Pavilion for a game as UCLA’s coach. His team was only playing an exhibition against a touring team from Australia, but he was still pleased when they delivered a 32-point win.
When the game ended, a reporter approached the man sitting in section 4A, fifteen rows behind the Bruins’ bench, and asked him what he thought. “I don’t think I left the cupboard bare,” John Wooden said.
Wooden did Bartow no favors with that remark. With one turn of a phrase, Wooden solidified the perception that if UCLA won another NCAA championship, it would be because he had stocked the program with great talent. If it didn’t, well, it must be because the Bruins were not well coached.
The comment also revealed just how protective Wooden was of his image. For all of his accomplishments, he was still the same insecure kid who grew u
p poor and lost his savings in the Depression. Wooden had spent a lifetime building up his legacy. Now that he had stopped coaching, it was important to him that he not only maintain his image but continue to burnish it.
For Bartow, there would be no easing into the job. UCLA, which entered the 1975–76 season ranked No. 2 in the AP poll, was going to open with a nationally televised game against No. 1 Indiana in St. Louis. Much of the coverage surrounding Bartow’s debut centered on his stylistic similarities with Wooden. Like Wooden, Bartow was a native midwesterner who didn’t drink, didn’t swear, went to church, and doted on his wife. They were Clean Gene and Saint John. Below the surface, however, there were real differences. For starters, Bartow made it clear he would allow reporters in his team’s locker room, so long as it was okay with the players. Bartow’s practices were also looser, more fun. They often ended with dunk contests. “He makes you want to play more than Coach Wooden did,” said Gavin Smith, who was a junior guard that season. “There’s more encouragement.”
Many of Bartow’s changes, however, did not go over so well. He told Marques Johnson from the start that he wanted him to shoot twenty to twenty-five times per game, which Johnson feared could hurt the team’s spirit. Though Bartow hired Larry Farmer as an assistant to maintain a tether to the program’s past, he also brought in Lee Hunt, who had worked as his assistant the previous five years in Memphis and Illinois. Bartow and Hunt put together detailed scouting reports of UCLA’s opponents, which represented a cultural shift as much as a tactical one. “The scouting report was worded like this kind of Beverly Hillbillies, homespun language,” Johnson said. “‘This guy’s tougher than a buzz saw, meaner than a junkyard dog,’ I remember Gavin Smith being like, ‘Buzz saw? What the fuck is that?’ Lee Hunt, he was a great guy, but he had this saying, ‘If you do that, it’s gonna be River City every time. Just think about River City.’ It was hard to embrace, put it that way.”
