Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  The Sycamores continued to roll through the 1947–48 season. By the middle of February, they were 13–2, and with nine games remaining they were just 200 points from breaking the season scoring record set by the previous year’s team. Duane Klueh had already broken the individual scoring record he had set as a freshman, and on the surface the team appeared not to have a care in the world. But there was one person among them who was enduring a private struggle. That was Clarence Walker, the team’s lone black player.

  Walker had been a track star in high school before coming to Indiana State, where he won a spot on the basketball team during tryouts his freshman season. He was well liked by his teammates, but he was not very well known. “He was an intelligent, smart kid, and rather quiet,” Klueh recalled. Jim Powers described Walker as “very quiet, very distinguished. Kept everything to himself.”

  Unbeknown to his teammates, Walker suffered intense anxiety from having to deal with the Jim Crow segregation laws that were a normal part of life in Indiana. Walker didn’t feel as if he could express his feelings to his coach or his teammates, so he poured them into the only outlet he could find: a typewriter. At the start of the season, he began writing a journal that would chronicle his sophomore season at Indiana State. The Walker who emerges from those pages is confused yet wise, pained yet resilient, chastened yet hopeful.

  Walker titled his journal “Mr. J. C.”—as in Jim Crow. “I have decided to keep an account of the numerous incidents occuring [sic] in the 1947–1948 basketball season at Indiana State Teachers College,” he began. “I am the only Negro on the team. I encountered some very severe setbacks in the 1946–1947 season at the same college. The most severe was my not going to New York … because I, among many, was born a Negro.”

  Walker’s reverence for Wooden was palpable from the first page, despite the coach’s decision the previous year to leave Walker home for the New York trip. “My opinion of Johnny Wooden, the coach of our basketball team, is that he is a wonderful coach,” Walker wrote. “He is brilliant in knowledge of basketball. As far as I know, he is not bias [sic]. I realize the fact that he is obligated to someone else. If all people were in mind as he is in character, I think Mr. J. C. would be trivial.”

  In the journal, Walker described a litany of slights that occurred as the Sycamores racked up wins. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Walker stayed behind in Terre Haute while the rest of the players went home, and Wooden referred him to the owner of a local restaurant for meals. On Thanksgiving morning, Walker went there to have breakfast, but the restaurant owner asked him to eat in the kitchen. He decided to take his food home instead. “I do not think I am too good to eat in anybody’s kitchen,” Walker wrote. “I know my presence is not preferred in the proper part of a café, and I figured eating at home would be just as well.” Not surprisingly, Walker expressed a low opinion of the town of Terre Haute, which he described as an unsanitary “J. C. place” populated by outdoor toilets.

  Whenever Walker traveled with the team outside Terre Haute, Mr. J. C. followed. On one occasion, the players ate at a drugstore during a trip to South Bend to play Notre Dame. The waiter took everybody’s order but Walker’s, and it was only when the team manager intervened that Walker finally got served. During another trip, to play at Marshall, Walker had to stay apart from the team at a Negro hotel called the Allen. “It was pretty nice,” he wrote. “We lost by an upset.”

  During a tournament that Indiana State hosted in early January, the Sycamores played Southeastern Oklahoma. As Walker battled for a rebound, he heard the opposing coach shout to his player, “Jerk that nigger’s head off!” Walker wrote of how his coach rose to his defense: “Mr. Wooden heard him and told him, ‘Why don’t you go back to Oklahoma.’ After the game, Mr. Wooden went into their dressing room and there was a big argument.”

  Only once did Walker mention witnessing racism from a teammate. It happened in the locker room in mid-February, following a 70–66 win over Valparaiso. As Walker was momentarily hidden behind a dressing rack, one of the Indiana State players, Don McDonald, started singing “eeny-meeny-miny-moe.” Not realizing Walker was within earshot, McDonald said, “Catch a nigger by the toe.” There was an awkward silence when McDonald realized Walker heard him, but Walker bore him no animus. As he wrote in his journal, “Mac’s hometown is known to dislike Negroes. However, Mac is a very congenial and easy to get along with fellow. I find myself not being affected by such [things] as much as I used to.”

  Walker’s teammates were surprised to learn many years later just how torn he was. “We probably should have been more sensitive and known the pain that he was feeling that turned up in his writings,” Duane Klueh said. “But we didn’t really know. We just went out and played basketball and enjoyed him.”

  The slurs and slights were minor scrapes compared to the emotional injury Walker sustained after that win over Valparaiso in February. He was standing in the locker room when he noticed a piece of paper being passed around for the players to sign. He later learned it was an entry form for the NAIB tournament in Kansas City. Nobody asked Walker to sign it, and he soon learned why. Wooden and the school had decided this time to accept the invitation, but because of the ban against black players, the team was not taking Walker. “I asked Wooden what the dope is on the Kansas City tournament,” Walker wrote. “In his suave but candid way he told me, of which I expected that it was in the charter or in some written rule, that Negroes could not play.” It was the second time Wooden had let Walker down in this fashion.

  The news of Indiana State’s return to the tournament after a one-year hiatus was made public eight days later. “Indiana State’s Scrappin’ Sycamores return to the thicket in the National Intercollegiate cage championship at Kansas City this year. Coach Johnny Wooden told us about it on Friday,” sports editor Bob Nesbit wrote in the Terre Haute Sunday Tribune on February 22. “The team drew an invitation last year, but was unable to accept due to a conflict with college final examination.” A week after Nesbit’s report, the school issued a formal announcement. “Twelve players have been certified to represent Blue and White,” the Tribune article read. “Ten of these boys will make the trip.” The newspaper listed the names of the ten players headed to Kansas City but offered no explanation for why Clarence Walker’s was not among them.

  On an intellectual level, Walker understood why Wooden had made the decision. As he wrote at the beginning of his journal, he recognized Wooden was “obligated to someone else.” But he was deeply wounded. Wooden may have believed that the NAIB’s racial ban was wrong, but he didn’t believe it strongly enough to stand up for Walker, either in public or in private. Once again, Walker had nowhere to turn but his typewriter. “This is the second big opportunity which hurt me in a peculiar way. The first one rendered me most unstable for almost a week,” he wrote. “This one didn’t hurt as much because I had made up in my mind that one was enough. Yet when they come, believe me, it is hard to take.”

  Walker would have been justified in being angry with Wooden, yet he never expressed disappointment in his coach. In his view, Wooden was just another instrument of authority who was on his side until it was inconvenient. He may have liked Wooden personally, but the turn of events left Walker despondent about his prospects as a young black man living in a racist country. “Let’s be frank,” Walker wrote, “can a boy of age or at any level in life be proud he is a Negro? The thing he aspires to do can be done, I mean the opportunity comes, but cannot be taken, not because I am not capable or my ability is not up to par, but only because I am a NEGRO. God bless this inane world.”

  * * *

  Fortunately for Walker, there were some influential people on the East Coast who were willing to fight for him in a way that Wooden was not. When Manhattan College’s athletic director learned of the NAIB’s rule prohibiting Negroes from competing in the tournament, he requested that it be changed, even though Manhattan did not have any blacks on its roster. After two days of exchanging telegrams, the NAIB infor
med Manhattan that it was too late to repeal the rule for that year’s tournament, so Manhattan withdrew and the athletic director publicly stated the reason. The NAIB then offered its spot to Siena College in Albany, but that school also turned the invitation down because of the racial ban. Long Island University did the same.

  The battle might have ended there but for a man named Harry Henshel, who was a member of the U.S. Olympic basketball committee. One of the reasons the NAIB tournament was so prestigious was that the champion was invited to compete at the U.S. Olympic trials in New York City in late March. (The other teams invited were the two NCAA finalists, three teams from the Amateur Athletic Union, the winner of the National Invitation Tournament, and a YMCA team.) After reading about the protests made by the New York schools, Henshel sent a telegram to the Olympic committee’s chairman recommending that the NAIB champion be dropped from the Olympic trials unless the ban was rescinded. Suddenly, the members of the NAIB’s executive committee had a change of heart. They conducted a quick poll by telegraph, and on Friday, March 6, two days before the tournament was due to tip off, they announced that the prohibition had been removed.

  The development did not make a huge splash back in Terre Haute, warranting only a mention deep in Bob Nesbit’s Sunday column reporting that the change “enabled Wooden to shift his squad at the last moment and take Clarence Walker, the East Chicago speed merchant, on the trip. Wooden revealed to Nesbit that he had been told Walker probably would be the only colored boy playing in the meet.”

  However, the news was a big deal in Kansas City, where the prospect of the tournament losing its connection with the U.S. Olympic trials was cause for much concern. No outlet followed the events with more interest than the Call, Kansas City’s most prominent black newspaper. Though the paper’s sports columnist, John I. Johnson, was pleased by the end of the Negro ban, he was realistic about the reasons behind the decision. “We would like to report that the committee saw the injustice of its racial prejudice bars and voluntarily voted to remove them, thus showing to the world that the motivation came from a spirit of fair play and sportsmanship. But this is not true,” Johnson wrote. “We can’t shout glory, glory for the rescinding committee as we would like to do, for their act was somewhat forced, and the hallelujahs belong to others.”

  Those “others,” alas, did not include Clarence Walker’s coach, but by then Walker didn’t much care. In his journal, he announced the reprieve in matter-of-fact language. “At the last minute, I was sought by coaches, friends, etc., and the reason being that I was to go to Kansas City, Mo., to play in the NAIB tournament,” he wrote. “Mr. Wooden readily understanding the situation got in contact with me and talked the deal over.”

  * * *

  On their way to Columbia, Missouri, where they were going to spend the night before completing the trip to Kansas City, the Sycamores stopped to eat lunch at a local restaurant. Shortly after the players ordered their food, a woman approached Wooden and told him that Walker couldn’t eat there. Wooden replied that if Walker couldn’t eat there, none of them would. “You can’t leave,” the woman protested. “You already ordered.”

  “Watch us,” Wooden said. And they left.

  “I thought they might get some local policeman or something but they didn’t,” Wooden said. “To the best of my knowledge that’s the only problem we had. I didn’t expect any there because we had checked in advance.”

  The hotel where the team was staying in Columbia was segregated, too, but since there were no Negro hotels or private homes available, the hotel allowed Walker to stay in a storage room next to a bathroom in the basement. This was a demeaning arrangement, but Wooden apparently felt he had no choice but to go along. The hotel staff rolled in a cot and placed it next to some broken furniture. Walker had a fitful night because of the noise emanating from a sorority party upstairs. At around 2:00 a.m., a group of boys used the bathroom next to Walker’s space. “About ten minutes later, they all cleared out but believe me they did not take everything with them,” Walker wrote in his journal. “The aroma coming from the bathroom through a furnace inlet was unbearable. I had to get up and shut the inlet off. One can guess how much sleep I got.”

  Once the team arrived in Kansas City, Walker again had to sleep in a separate hotel. Things were not much better for him inside Municipal Auditorium. Before Indiana State’s first-round game, he was in the bathroom at the arena with a teammate named Dan Dimich when he heard a member of another team ask, “How did you guys happen to have a nigger on your team?” Making history was no fun.

  The NAIB’s Negro ban officially ended in the first round when Walker made his entrance during the first half of the Sycamores’ 72–40 win over St. Francis, but you’d never know from reading the city’s two major newspapers that something significant had occurred. The only evidence came from the box score, which noted that Walker had scored one goal, made one free throw, and committed zero fouls. Even the fans, to their credit, were nonchalant. “I can’t remember anybody booing him or anything like that,” Klueh said.

  The fans were plenty excited, however, about the tournament, which had grown significantly since its inception ten years before. It was so prominent that Brigham Young University, which had won its conference, turned down its automatic invitation to the NCAA tournament to come to Kansas City. (The league’s runner up, Utah, went in BYU’s place.) This promised to be the most wide-open field the NAIB had ever assembled. Even though Indiana State had gone 23–6 during the regular season and had almost won the tournament two years before, nobody considered the Sycamores a threat to win it. On the eve of the opener, the Kansas City Star named twelve teams it considered to be headliners. Indiana State was not among them. Even after the field had been whittled over two days from thirty-two teams to sixteen, a poll of five sportswriters determined that six other schools were the favorites.

  The group of teams that came to Kansas City reflected just how prevalent fast break basketball was becoming. Piggy Lambert’s vision for the game was finally taking hold. After the first day’s action, the Star reported that out of the sixteen teams that had played that day, Kirksville (Mo.) Teachers College was the only one that “used defensive basketball in earnest.” The sport was getting faster, with scoring inching higher and higher. “One observer went so far as to remark that they’d have to change the name of the game to ‘run and shoot,’” the article noted. “The main reliance of modern basketball teaching is on making points and letting the defense be a potent offense.” It was assumed that this trend would not sit well with the coach who lorded over the sport. “Hank Iba would have a field day giving pointers to the sixteen teams which played opening day. The old master of the ball control school would have seen nothing familiar in the eight games. Not once did a team honestly freeze the ball to protect a lead.”

  The Hurryin’ Sycamores fit right in. The faster the pace, the more the games played into their hands (not to mention their well-conditioned legs). For the rest of the tournament, Indiana State’s games followed the same pattern: the opponents built a big lead, and the Sycamores came storming back late in the second half. The machine was working exactly as its engineer had designed it.

  When Indiana State won its first two games with dramatic second-half comebacks, the local writers finally took notice. “The Sycamores uphold the old Indiana basketball tradition that the last half is the most important,” read the next day’s account in the Kansas City Star. “The Sycamores have what might be termed average height for a basketball team. They have plenty of speed and their attack is tricky and hard to stop.”

  The team saved its most dramatic comeback for its semifinal contest against Hamline University from St. Paul, Minnesota. As a crowd of around eight thousand looked on, Indiana State built a 12-point lead in the first half, but Hamline charged back to claim an 11-point advantage with eight minutes left in the second half. Indiana State slowly carved into the deficit but still trailed by 2 in the final seconds. Klueh’s attempt at a g
ame-tying shot fell short, but he was fouled. He sank two clutch free throws to send the game into overtime. “I wasn’t a great free throw shooter,” Klueh said. “I don’t remember if Wooden said anything to me, but he was a very optimistic guy. He’d give you that smile, and when you got there, you were confident that whatever you were doing was going to be okay.”

  In the extra session, Hamline took a 1-point lead into the closing seconds, and once again Klueh had the ball in his hands. As the clock was winding down, Klueh flung a running, underhanded shot toward the backboard. The gun went off, and then the ball bounced off the board and dropped through the net. Ball game. Klueh’s teammates were delirious. They rushed the court, hoisted him onto their shoulders, and carried him to the locker room.

  The win vaulted the Sycamores into the championship game against Louisville. There would be no more overlooking this undersized bunch. “The Indiana team has thrilled fans on successive nights with a second half rally that has all the elements of a horse opry chase,” read the story in the next day’s Star. “The Sycamores—and they should really have a name more fitting their run-for-cover break—have pulled two out of the fire and now stand on the threshold of a title.”

  The local press was also finally starting to focus on the intense, bespectacled man on Indiana State’s sidelines. Wooden was a full sixteen years removed from his senior year at Purdue, and memories of his playing exploits were already fading. In introducing Wooden, the Star reminded its readers that when the Sycamores had reached the NAIB finals two years before, they had been coached by Glenn Curtis. “The coach now is John R. Wooden,” the paper wrote. “Wooden is a protégé of Curtis and helped Curtis win the Indiana state high school basketball championship for Martinsville High. Wooden later achieved All-American honors at Purdue University under Ward (Piggy) Lambert.” The newspaper mistakenly reported that Wooden “is still considered the best dribbler to come out of Illinois high schools,” but it paid him the ultimate compliment as a coach: “Whatever else Wooden teaches his team, one thing is certain. The boys don’t know when to quit.”