by Seth Davis
Once I was afraid of dying
Terrified of ever-lying
Petrified of leaving family, home and friends.
Thoughts of absence from my dear ones
Brought a melancholy tear once,
And a dreadful fear of when life ends.
But those days are long behind me
Fear of leaving does not bind me
And departure does not hold a single care.
Peace does comfort as I ponder
A reunion in the yonder
With my dearest one who is waiting for me there.
For Andy Hill, the chance to travel with Wooden to speeches and book signings did wonders for his peace of mind. It also enabled him to see a softer version of the hard-edged man he had played for. One day as Hill was driving Wooden home, Wooden turned to him and said, “Have I ever told you how much I love you and how much I appreciate doing this book with you?” On another occasion after they had breakfast, Hill drove Wooden back to his apartment. When the doors opened, Hill extended his hand as he always did, but this time Wooden ignored it, moved toward Hill, and gave him a hug.
Even after all this time together, Wooden still had the capacity to surprise. His speaking engagements usually ended with a question-and-answer session, and though Hill got used to hearing the same questions over and over, one day someone asked a question that Hill had never heard before: What would Wooden have done if Bill Walton had refused to get that haircut? Was he really going to put him off the team? Hill perked up. He wanted to know the answer himself.
“Well,” Wooden said. “Bill sure thought so.”
Hill chuckled. “I thought, he’s ninety-five years old,” he said, “but if you’re sitting at the table playing poker with John Wooden, you still don’t get to see the hole card.”
* * *
Even well into his nineties, Wooden managed to feed the public’s insatiable demand for his stories and ideas, feeding the image that he was a wise and near-perfect man even as he expressed discomfort that people were making so much of a fuss. He coauthored books with Swen Nater and Jay Carty. He was the subject of numerous television specials and a critically acclaimed HBO documentary. There was even a doctoral thesis written about him by Marv Dunphy, who was working toward a physical education degree at BYU. Dunphy spent dozens of hours interviewing Wooden, his former players, and his former assistants. When he showed Wooden the manuscript, Wooden returned it with numerous markings that corrected spelling and punctuation errors. Dunphy was mortified that the coach had spent so much time doing that. “That’s okay,” Wooden told him. “I enjoyed it.”
Like many compelling storytellers, especially the ones who tell stories about themselves, Wooden sometimes had trouble separating fact from fiction. For example, he frequently claimed that he called time-out in the late stages of NCAA championship games specifically so he could remind his players not to celebrate excessively. Yet not one player who was interviewed for this book could recall him ever doing that.
Wooden also repeated his false claim that he had only been called for two technical fouls in his entire career. Actually, the story varied. Sometimes it was one, sometimes it was two. Sometimes it was two except on one of them, “the official thought that I said something that somebody behind me said. But I kept it.” Wooden also liked to describe himself as a lot more even-keeled than he really was. “I can say honestly, and I’m very sincere about it, the pressure didn’t bother me. If you are affected by outside pressures, that’s a weakness.”
The story of Walton’s arrest also improved over the years. During many interviews, including the ones for the HBO documentary, both Wooden and Walton described in vivid detail how Wooden had bailed Walton out of jail and then spent the whole car ride back to Westwood arguing with Walton about what he had done. It was a great story, except Wooden was actually in Portland at the time.
If anyone challenged Wooden on Sam Gilbert, he would counter by saying that he was “pleased that years after I retired, the NCAA came in and checked and found nothing that took place during my years.” Not true. He also insisted that he had made himself available to talk to his players about sensitive, non-basketball issues. “I tried to ask the players anything that was personal in their family,” he said. “I wanted my players definitely to know that I was very interested in them as a person, not just a basketball player.” Lucius Allen shook his head when he heard that Wooden had made this claim. “It’s interesting that he deluded himself into thinking he was that way, but he wasn’t,” Allen said. “All the humor came out after we left. When we were there, I did not like that man very much.”
These were small fibs compared to the revisionist history Wooden performed on two key episodes in his life. The first concerned the 1948 NAIB tournament, where Wooden’s player from Indiana State, Clarence Walker, became the first black man to participate. Because that episode occurred sixteen years before Wooden won his first title at UCLA, many people, including his closest friends, never knew about it until he started mentioning it in books and interviews. While it is clear that Wooden behaved admirably in scores of situations where he was confronted with racial injustice, and while there is no doubt that Walker had great affection for him, it is equally clear that Wooden exaggerated his role in desegregating the tournament.
For example, in an autobiography called My Personal Best, which was published in 2004, Wooden wrote, correctly, that Indiana State turned down an invitation to play in the tournament in 1947. He also correctly stated that when the Sycamores qualified to play the following year, the team was asked to leave Walker in Terre Haute because of the racial ban. From there, Wooden’s narrative deviates from reality: “I informed the committee that the Sycamores would not attend [in 1948] and gave my reason. They offered a compromise: ‘Walker can play in the games, but he must not be seen publicly with the team. He must stay in a private home away from the other players. He must not attend publicity functions with the Sycamores.’ I felt this humiliation was worse than leaving Clarence behind in Terre Haute. The answer was easy: No.” Wooden went on to write that he changed his mind after the NAIB rescinded its racial ban, and only then because the NAACP implored him to go.
He told this version often. “I refused because they wouldn’t let him [play]. Then they broke the rule, so he could come,” he said on Charlie Rose in 2000. In a videotaped interview for the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 2001, Wooden repeated that “we were invited again [in 1948] and I refused. Finally they said I could bring him but he couldn’t stay in the hotel with us, and I refused again. I was approached by the NAACP and Clarence’s parents, and they wanted me to go. He stayed with a minister and his wife in Kansas City.” In 2002, Wooden told Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star that he had “refused to go to the [1948] tournament if Clarence couldn’t go. He was part of the team, and that was that.”
However, the official record, including Walker’s diary, makes clear that while Indiana State did decline an invitation to play in the 1947 NAIB tournament, the school accepted its invitation the following year before the racial ban was rescinded. Moreover, the NAIB’s decision to lift the ban had nothing to do with Wooden. Rather, it was because the eastern universities had protested to the U.S. Olympic Committee, which in turn threatened to take away the NAIB’s invitation to the Olympic trials. Only then was the rule changed, and only then did Wooden decide to take Walker.
Then there’s the yarn Wooden spun about his decision to retire. He began embellishing this story almost as soon as it happened. In the new and improved version, Wooden claimed that he had not even considered stepping down until after the Bruins had secured their overtime win over Louisville in the 1975 NCAA semifinals. He said the idea struck him like a lightning bolt in the moments after the game was over. Here’s how Wooden described it in his 1997 book Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and off the Court:
As I headed across the court through the thousands of well-wishers and fans, I
found myself for the first time ever after a game not wanting to go in and face the hundreds of lights and mikes and reporters asking the same questions over and over. I could predict what they would ask. Suddenly I dreaded the thought of doing it again. I had never experienced that before.
While I was walking to the dressing room, I thought, “If this is bothering me now, after a beautiful game like this, well, it’s time to get out.” I just knew it at that instant.
After describing the scene where he broke the news to his players, Wooden wrote: “Nobody knew I was going to say it. My assistants didn’t know. My trainer didn’t know. Nellie didn’t know. I didn’t know it myself until just before I said it. But I knew it was time.”
That was pure fiction, but Wooden stuck to this story the rest of his life. He described it the same way for the HBO documentary. In 2000, he told ESPN, “Two minutes before, I had no intention of retiring for two more years. Gary Cunningham about fainted. Mr. Morgan, my [athletic] director, spent most of the night trying to talk me out of it, but it came that quickly. No one had any idea, even my wife. There were tears of joy from her.”
Wooden was a compulsive planner. The idea that he would make such a momentous decision on the spur of the moment stretched credulity past its limit. The record is clear that he had discussed his decision with J. D. Morgan, Gary Cunningham, Nell, Fred Hessler, and others at various points during the 1974–75 season. And Morgan had offered the job to Gene Bartow in February. Unlike the Clarence Walker episode at Indiana State, Wooden couldn’t claim that the years had fogged his memory. He just preferred to tell a better story than the one that actually happened.
* * *
There was one last example of this pattern that was especially hurtful to the UCLA family, and that was the way Wooden whitewashed Jerry Norman from the historical record. This really bothered the men who played in that era, for they knew that without Norman, Wooden’s championship dynasty might never have gotten rolling. “Jerry never got any credit. Most people don’t even know who Jerry Norman is,” Jack Hirsch said. “The reason nobody gives him credit was because Wooden didn’t give him enough credit.”
Initially, Wooden did cite Norman as the person who came up with the zone press. While interviewing with Jeff Prugh for a three-part series for the Los Angeles Times in 1969, Wooden acknowledged that he only implemented the press after “much prodding” from Norman. “One of my greatest strengths is the fact that I’ve had good assistant coaches. Jerry wasn’t a ‘yes man,’ by any means,” Wooden said. “We haggled for a long time over whether we should use the press. Frankly, I didn’t think it would work. I felt that because college guards are so much better ball-handlers than high-school guards, it was difficult to believe that college teams could not handle it.”
It appears that Wooden did not realize how remarkable that revelation would seem to the public, because he rarely made it again. “I spent forty hours interviewing Wooden and he never mentioned Jerry,” said Tony Medley, the former Daily Bruin sports editor and author of UCLA Basketball: The Real Story. “Jerry got the players, he did most of the strategy, but he’s the forgotten man. The fact that Wooden won’t give him any credit upset me and upset a lot of people who know what happened.”
Wooden maintained this pose for the remainder of his life. In one of his many authorized biographies, The John Wooden Pyramid of Success, he said, “As far as the pressing defense was concerned, if [Norman] says he suggested that, I don’t remember it. I think he suggested that I stick to it.” Wooden later said in his oral history for the Basketball Hall of Fame that the 2-2-1 press was solely his idea: “I decided to stick with something that had been very successful for me at Indiana State and high school. That was a pressing defense. I looked at the personnel that I had and said I’m going to stick with it.”
Norman watched all of this unfold with a mixture of frustration and bemusement. He didn’t read Wooden’s books, but he would see interviews Wooden gave over the years where he shaded the truth. “He said a couple of things after I left where he tried to take credit for some things that he had nothing to do with, which I didn’t feel was right,” Norman said. “Like, I read one time where Wooden talked about recruiting, and he said we used to get five letters on every player that we would recruit. We didn’t get any letters on anybody. I don’t know why he’d say things like that. His main focus in life became creating and enhancing his image.”
Still, Norman is not a bitter man. He made a lot of money in the world of finance and set himself up with a beautiful house in Brentwood. He cherishes his UCLA relationships and has worked hard with Eddie Sheldrake to organize large-scale annual reunions. He insisted there were no hard feelings, but when he called Wooden “the greatest P.R. person in history,” it did not sound like a compliment.
“I’ve never been critical of him in this regard,” Norman said. “My only answer is that some coaches will give credit to whoever they want to give credit to. Some coaches are more secure and don’t mind doing it, and other coaches are less secure. That’s my take on it.”
No one was more upset about all of this than Sheldrake. Jerry Norman was like a brother to him. Sheldrake tried to address the matter with Wooden, at one point suggesting that Wooden write a book specifically to thank all the people who helped him—Norman most of all. Wooden balked. Sheldrake and Wooden were such good friends that Wooden asked him to be a pallbearer at Nell’s funeral, but Sheldrake’s crusade on behalf of Norman damaged his relationship with Wooden’s children. In advance of a ceremony at UCLA to recognize one of their championship teams, Sheldrake wrote a tribute to Norman that included a list of all the players Norman recruited. Sheldrake wanted it to be included in the UCLA program, but he said that idea was scuttled because Nan Wooden objected.
“I was always hurt because I was there when Jerry really turned the thing around. I was hurt that Jerry couldn’t get more of the credit, because it was deserved,” Sheldrake said. “Wooden didn’t give much credit to Jerry in his books. That part I can never really understand.”
The lingering rift was a sore spot with a lot of their mutual friends. “There was adversity between the two of them, but I’m not going to touch that. I know too much about it,” Gary Cunningham said. Fred Slaughter added, “Jerry Norman has not gotten the credit he deserves. He recruited me. He’s the one who brought the human, caring side of things for me.” Freddie Goss agreed that “Jerry Norman has never been given the credit he deserves,” but he believed that Wooden would have promoted Norman more if Norman had beseeched him. “Jerry never asked,” Goss said. “Maybe Jerry felt like he shouldn’t have to ask.”
Asked in 2009 whether he and Norman parted on good terms, Wooden acknowledged, “Yes and no. I don’t know how to answer it, really.… All I know is that his wife never thought that Jerry got enough credit in the days when he was an assistant. Maybe he didn’t, I don’t know. It’s hard to say.” Yet when it came to writing the story of his own life, the English teacher was never at a loss for words. In Wooden’s final book, A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring, he described an assistant coach who sounded a lot like Jerry Norman. But in describing himself, Wooden once again strayed into fiction. “One assistant suggested that we bring back a zone press,” he wrote. “We’d used it a few years previously but had phased it out. When we resurrected it at the assistant’s suggestion, it ended up taking us to our first National Championship, in 1964. I really tried to make a point of praising him to the press after that event because he’d had the courage to suggest something outside the status quo.”
No one who knew John Wooden well would claim that last part was true, but in the end that didn’t matter. The man owned ten NCAA championships, and history is written by the winners.
* * *
The fact that Wooden lived so long was of particular benefit to the players who left UCLA feeling ambivalent, even bitter, about their time there. Fortunately for them, even into his nineties Wooden remained alive, sharp, and always just a p
hone call away. He was generous with his time because he loved hearing from them. He never made them feel that they were imposing. “If I was in the area, I’d call him from a pay phone and ask if I could come by,” Johnny Green said. “He’d say, ‘You’d be in trouble if you didn’t.’”
Don Saffer was one of the many who traveled a circuitous route back to Wooden’s classroom. He had quit the team toward the end of the 1968–69 season (“I did not try to talk him out of it,” Wooden told the press), so Saffer was understandably nervous when he approached Wooden to apologize at a reunion ten years later. “I didn’t make a fuss about it. I just wanted to be part of the group,” he said. Saffer had recently become the headmaster of a private boarding school, so he and Wooden were able to share their common experience as educators. After that awkward first meeting, Saffer and Wooden corresponded regularly. “It was a godsend that I patched it up with him long before he died,” Saffer said.
Gary Franklin also left UCLA with hurt feelings because of his lack of playing time. “I had a feeling of resentment over that, like I wasn’t really part of the team,” he said. That is, until the day Franklin picked up one of Wooden’s books and found his name listed as one of the players who Wooden said was more valuable than the public understood. At Wooden’s ninetieth birthday celebration in 2000, when UCLA dedicated the floor in Pauley Pavilion in his and Nell’s honor, Franklin chatted with Wooden and decided he wanted a more meaningful relationship. From that point forward, he called Wooden, had breakfast with him, went to church with Wooden and Kenny Washington, and visited the condo often. “I can’t tell you how thankful I am that he lived so long,” Franklin said. “I tried to make up for lost time.”
