Wooden: A Coach's Life
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Wooden rebutted this in his soft-spoken but resolute manner. “Mr. Morgan definitely wanted me to stay around, but if I felt that in a way I was being harmful I wouldn’t stay around at all,” he said. “If I were following someone who had done well, I would welcome having the individual around to counsel me about the players I had inherited.” As for his now-infamous comment about not leaving the “cupboard bare,” Wooden said, “I always said that I did not want to leave the cupboard bare for the next man. I’m sure Coach Bartow looked over the material closely before he took the job. Of course, like the Good Book says, to those whom much is given, much is expected.”
Several years later, Wooden confessed that it was one of his “greatest mistakes” to share an office with Bartow those first few months. “I think he was uncomfortable with my presence,” Wooden said. “Bartow never had any questions to ask about situations. I think I could have helped him if he’d come to me, not in coaching his team but in other areas.”
The Bruins could never win big enough to satisfy Bartow’s critics. Aside from another home loss to Notre Dame, UCLA hummed along until late February, when it lost at home to Oregon by 20 points. The Bruins were still in first place and poised to return to the NCAA tournament, but once again, the fans and the press were all over Bartow. He stopped reading the newspapers but wanted to know what was in them. “We’d be sitting at the breakfast table, and he would say, ‘I don’t want to touch the L.A. Times as long as I live. Can you read that to me?’” Johnson said. “They were tough on his kid and his dog. It just really rankled him.”
UCLA rebounded from the Oregon loss to win its final three regular season games and once again capture the Pac-8 title. For all the tumult, the Bruins entered the 1977 NCAA tournament as the No. 2–ranked team in America. UCLA’s first opponent in the West Regional in Pocatello, Idaho, was No. 14 Louisville, coached by Denny Crum. “This was the only time I coached there where I felt that J. D. felt pressure in this game,” Bartow said. The Bruins overcame a 6-point deficit in the second half to win, 87–79, but their season ended five days later in a 1-point loss to Big Sky Conference champ Idaho State at the West Regional semifinal in Provo, Utah. It was not a happy flight back to Los Angeles. When someone looked over at Bartow staring out the window and wondered if the coach might not ask for a parachute, Chris Lippert, a sophomore forward, said, “He might jump without it.”
Upon arrival back home, Bartow told reporters that he expected to hear from “the kook element.” He pointed out that his 52–9 record over his first two years compared favorably to the 55–7 record Wooden had posted during his final two but added, “Yet I don’t feel good for some reason, and it’s sad. The program hasn’t exactly come apart. I mean, I don’t think I’m the worst coach in America.”
From there, Bartow suffered through a horrible few weeks. Junior center Brett Vroman announced that he was transferring to UNLV because he didn’t like Bartow’s coaching style. During a speech in front of a group of UCLA boosters, Bartow got into a shouting match with several people who challenged him. The Los Angeles Times reported that it had spoken with more than twenty UCLA boosters “and found considerable dissatisfaction with Bartow’s performance, both as a coach and as a recruiter.” While Bartow was being interviewed in-studio by a local radio host named Bud Furillo, he bristled constantly as fans called in to question his coaching. “Hogwash, hogwash,” he said at one point. “I have better things to do than take that kind of garbage.” During a commercial, Bartow took off his headset and walked out of the studio. “I told Bud off the air, ‘If this is just a roast Gene Bartow deal, you don’t need me sitting here,’” he said.
Other schools took note of Bartow’s misery, and a few reached out to see if he would be interested in becoming their coach. Most of the offers did not appeal to him, but there was one that did. The University of Alabama, Birmingham wanted Bartow’s advice about its plans to build an athletic department from scratch. To that point, the school only had club and intramural sports, but it had built a 17,500-seat arena and was primed to begin playing basketball for the 1978–79 season. At first, Alabama, Birmingham was only interested in hiring Bartow as a consultant, but the more the two sides talked, the more they considered the possibility of Bartow coming aboard as athletic director and basketball coach. The salary would be three times what Bartow was making at UCLA.
In June, Bartow asked for Morgan’s permission to interview for the job. While he was accompanying Marques Johnson to New York City, where Johnson was receiving a player of the year award from Sport magazine, two newspapers broke the news of his conversations. That sent Bartow into another paranoid tailspin. He showed up at Johnson’s hotel room late that night wearing sunglasses, a fedora pulled low, and an overcoat with the collar turned up. “He kept saying, ‘The kooks are after me,’” Johnson said. “He had lost twenty-five pounds, and his stomach was chewed to pieces. His wife was unhappy. My dad told him, ‘Hey, Coach, it’s a foregone conclusion. It’s time to get out.’”
Having suffered under the awesome task of trying to follow a living legend, Bartow was now drawn to a polar opposite circumstance—a school that literally had no athletic history. It was too good to pass up, even though J. D. Morgan made a halfhearted attempt to talk him out of it. “J. D. thought a lot of the people who were so critical were coming from the USC camp,” Bartow said. “I told him they were coming from the UCLA camp, and I was going to bail out.” On June 13, 1977, Bartow bade farewell to UCLA, leaving Morgan to search for a replacement.
Having been crucified in Los Angeles, Bartow was eventually canonized in Birmingham. He went on to spend eighteen years as UAB’s athletic director and basketball coach, at one point taking the Blazers to seven consecutive NCAA tournaments. When he retired in 1996, the school hired his son, Murry, to succeed him and renamed its facility Bartow Arena. In his golden years, Bartow became president of the company that ran the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies, and he was named team president. When he died in January 2012 at the age of eighty-one from stomach cancer, he was celebrated not just as an excellent coach but as one of the finest gentlemen the game has known. He was Clean Gene till the very end.
Still, for all that he accomplished in the last thirty-five years of his life, Bartow’s legacy was defined by those two years he spent in Westwood. He will forever be The Man Who Followed John Wooden. Those twenty-six months left many scars but no second thoughts. “I knew it would be difficult following John, but I had no idea of everything it would entail,” Bartow said one year before he died. “Some people would portray this story that I was a bitter and unhappy person at UCLA, but I really wasn’t. The truth is, I never regretted trying it, and I never regretted walking away.”
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The Shadow
J. D. Morgan was not about to repeat his mistake. This time, his first call went to Denny Crum. Now in his seventh year at Louisville, Crum had recently remarried, so he fit more neatly into the image that Morgan wanted to project. More important, Crum had compiled a 139–37 record and had twice been to the Final Four, as the NCAA tournament’s climactic weekend was now being called.
Crum flew to Los Angeles in June 1977 to meet with Morgan. He was ready to take the job until J. D. told him the salary would be around $40,000, barely half of what Crum was making. That was a deal breaker for Crum, who lived lavishly on a 230-acre farm outside Louisville. “When you consider the cost of living, the pay out there is way below par,” he said. After Crum turned him down, Morgan spoke with North Carolina’s Dean Smith, but he also declined.
Having struck out twice, Morgan considered two current UCLA employees. The first was Larry Farmer, but Morgan judged that the thirty-year-old assistant was not ready. He had no such reservations about Gary Cunningham, who had spent the previous two years as UCLA’s director of alumni relations. When Morgan offered Cunningham the job, Cunningham made what he later described as an “emotional decision” and accepted. If anyone could carry on the Wizard’s legacy, it would be his favor
ite former player and assistant. “I don’t consider Coach Wooden a shadow because I was a part of what was achieved at this school,” Cunningham said. “I want him to feel he can drop by my office or attend practice at any time.”
Cunningham reinstituted much of the Wooden culture—the discipline, the team fundamentals, even the 2-2-1 zone press. The Bruins were ranked No. 6 to start the season and played like it, winning every game except the two against their nemesis, Notre Dame, whose coach, Digger Phelps, was justifiably enjoying his newfound supremacy. Because Cunningham was considered family, however, he didn’t face any of the carping that had sliced Bartow to pieces. Mitch Chortkoff reported in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that after speaking with several boosters during a road trip to the Bay Area, Cunningham was benefiting from a deep reservoir of goodwill. “He’s just like Wooden,” one alumnus said. “He even talks like him.”
Unlike Bartow, Cunningham spoke with Wooden often. The same was true for Cunningham’s newly hired assistant, Jim Harrick. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, Harrick had come to California in 1960 to try his hand at high school teaching and coaching, and he got to know Wooden and his staff while working as a director at some of Wooden’s camps. Harrick was an assistant coach at Utah State when Cunningham brought him back to Los Angeles, and he immediately made himself available to drive Wooden anywhere he needed to go. Harrick loved wandering down the hall to visit with Wooden in his shabby little office. On one occasion, when Harrick was venting about the lack of effort by David Greenwood, a six-foot-nine junior who was a preseason All-American in the fall of 1977, Wooden folded his arms, noted that Greenwood was averaging around 20 points and 10 rebounds, and asked, “Well, would you rather have him or not have him?”
Harrick chuckled at the memory. “That’s kind of the way he was,” he said. “He’d come up with these pearls of wisdom all the time.”
By the time the 1977–78 regular season ended, those two losses to Notre Dame were still the only blemishes on UCLA’s record, and the Bruins had completed a perfect season in the Pac-8. Yet Cunningham felt unfulfilled. “I got tired of answering the same questions over and over,” he said. “I’m a multidimensional person. I used to pray that I could sit down and talk to somebody about a book or something.” Even after the Bruins blew a 13-point lead and lost to Arkansas in the West Regional semifinal of the 1978 NCAA tournament, Cunningham was praised in a way that Bartow would not have been. As a reward, he was given a $3,000 raise.
It soon dawned on Cunningham just how much the profession had changed. When Wooden’s seasons were over, he would shut himself in his office, pore over his note cards, take a little vacation, and start preparing for fall practice. Cunningham didn’t have that luxury. A burgeoning summertime grassroots circuit had come to dominate the recruiting world, requiring coaches to be away from home for virtually the entire off-season. “I do see a difference—a great difference—in the amount of time that has to be spent on recruiting,” Cunningham said. “It’s no longer something you do for a period of time. It’s a 12-month job. It’s a hard 12-month job, and the head coach is very involved with it.”
Cunningham’s disdain for recruiting showed as he brought in three nondescript players that fall, only one of whom, Michael Sanders, would become a contributor. Cunningham realized that his heart was not in coaching. Wooden talked him out of quitting, but Cunningham warned Morgan that he would probably have to find a new coach the following spring.
By any measure UCLA was still an elite program, but it would never be elite enough when compared to the Wooden years. When Sports Illustrated ranked the Bruins third in the country before the start of the 1978–79 season, the magazine noted that “its mystique is gone.” No matter what the current team achieved, it would never measure up to the past. To wit, the Bruins went 23–4 during the 1978–79 season and earned a No. 1 seed in the West Regional of the NCAA tournament. (This was the first year the NCAA seeded all of its teams.) Yet a few days before their first game, Sports Illustrated published a lengthy article by Frank Deford revisiting UCLA’s 1964 champs on their fifteenth anniversary. The shadow was long indeed.
The Bruins bowed out in the Regional final with a loss to DePaul. Two days after the season ended, Jim Harrick was hired to be the head coach at Pepperdine University. The following week, Cunningham surprised the public by announcing that he was abdicating Wooden’s throne to return to his former job as vice chancellor for alumni affairs. Later that summer, he would leave UCLA altogether to be the athletic director at the Oregon College of Education, a school of 3,100 in tiny Monmouth, Oregon, where Cunningham would be surrounded by professors, go fishing whenever he wanted, and be home for dinner every night. The UCLA basketball coach used to be one of the most prestigious jobs in all of sports, but now, for the third time in four years, the office was vacant. For Cunningham, leaving was a relief. “My time at UCLA was very rewarding, but the job was not always fun,” he said. “Coach Wooden’s presence was everything. With the master gone, things couldn’t be the same.”
* * *
While the folks hired to replace him were struggling with the big assignment, Wooden was tending to the small details that filled his retirement. That included tweaking the trophy that was to be given to the annual winner of the Wooden Award. The first version included five small statuettes of men in various playing positions, but Wooden didn’t like what he saw, so he asked the Los Angeles Athletic Club to come up with a new one. “They were out of balance,” Wooden said of the player models. “The shooter’s head should be in line with his feet, not in front. The passer was too tight in the arms. Loose, you have to be loose to play basketball.” Referring to the defender who was holding his arms waist high, Wooden joked, “He couldn’t stop me.”
Wooden gave one of his former players, Tommy Curtis, the green light to use his name to start a youth basketball league in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The league was supposed to go national, but it never took off. UCLA also asked Wooden’s permission to lend his name to a new recreation center on campus, and Wooden agreed on the condition that the center would be available for all students to use, not just the athletes. When Wooden accepted invitations to be a guest speaker (his standard fee for a local talk was $1,700), he went out of his way to praise former Bruins who never got much attention while they played for him. “How many of you remember Pete Blackman?” he asked one night while speaking at Orange Coast College. When very few hands went up, Wooden continued, “Isn’t that ironic. He’s with one of the finest law firms in Los Angeles, but if you didn’t play pro ball, you don’t get much recognition.”
Most of all, Wooden hovered as an interested (if detached) observer of the travails facing UCLA basketball. He continued to balk at assertions that his record would never be duplicated. “Before we did it, people said it couldn’t be accomplished,” Wooden said. “In some ways it might be easier to accomplish now because coaches have players for four years [because freshmen are eligible] and, if they’re successful, they can attract others.”
It may have sounded logical to Wooden, but it was hardly realistic. Nobody knew that better than J. D. Morgan. Gary Cunningham’s resignation came at a bad time for him. Though he was only sixty years old, his frenetic work schedule had taken a toll on his body. Three months before Cunningham quit, Morgan had open heart surgery, and his recovery was not going well. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia in early March and was recuperating at home. Still, he made it clear that he would be in charge of finding the next basketball coach. And he knew the man he wanted.
His name was Larry Brown, the charming, tempestuous, brilliant, hard-charging, thirty-eight-year-old coach of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets. (The Nuggets had moved to the NBA in 1976 when the two professional leagues merged.) Brown had been a standout guard at North Carolina from 1960 to 1963 and was a three-time ABA coach of the year. When Morgan offered Brown the UCLA job, he leapt at the chance, even though he had just signed a five-year, $980,000 contract with the Nuggets.
Brown’s first exposure to Gilbert came at a function with the Bruin Hoopsters, the organization of alumni boosters who raised money in support of UCLA basketball. When Brown saw his players drinking alcohol with Gilbert and other boosters, he was appalled. “I would have never, ever thought about drinking in front of my coach,” he said. Instead of confronting Gilbert, Brown tried to establish a personal connection with his players so they would not need to look outside the program for support. Brown also moved them into on-campus dormitories. Brown said he never told his players not to spend time with Gilbert, but it was clear that he did not approve. Gilbert was none too pleased. He later remarked to a reporter that he could “cut [Brown’s] nuts off and he wouldn’t know it until he pulled his pants down.”