Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Not only did the Bruins lose, they did so in distinctly un-UCLA-like fashion. They led by 7 points with five minutes to play but were outscored by an astonishing 23–2 margin the rest of the way. Jack Geyer noted in the Los Angeles Times that the Bruins had “turned deliberate.” The team played a consolation game the next day against Brigham Young University, which had lost to Baylor in the other regional semifinal, but Wooden had a low opinion of consolation games. He played his reserves for extended minutes, and UCLA lost by 21. It was a disappointing experience, but it taught Wooden an invaluable lesson. “He never believed in scouting again,” Norman said.

  * * *

  Even as Wooden was turning around UCLA’s basketball fortunes, he and Nell pined for the chance to return to their home state. A perfect opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1950, when Purdue sent three top administrators to Los Angeles to convince Wooden to come back to his alma mater. This was a classier, more straightforward way of doing business than two years before, when the school tried to use back channels to lure Wooden away from Indiana State. The fruits they bore were plenty tempting. Besides offering a five-year contract that would renew annually and more than double his $6,000 salary, Purdue also dangled perks like membership at a country club, a new car every year, a house at reduced rent, and a fully paid life insurance policy.

  Wooden was impressed by the material persuasions, but the clinchers were two basketball assets that UCLA could not match: a full-time assistant coach and a brand-new arena. The Purdue officials showed Wooden designs for the new facility just as Wilbur Johns had done when Wooden interviewed for the UCLA job. Johns hadn’t technically promised Wooden he would have a new pavilion by the end of his three-year contract, but he’d led Wooden to believe that would be the case. Two years later, Wooden could see that was far from happening. The lack of enthusiasm for basketball in Los Angeles made it difficult for the school to raise enough money, and every time someone in the athletic department tried to raise undergraduate fees to finance the project, he was voted down by the student association.

  The decision was easy. Wooden wanted the job. He told the Purdue officials that he would accept their offer as long as UCLA released him from the final year of his contract.

  He asked to meet with Wilbur Johns and Bill Ackerman, the graduate manager of UCLA’s student association. Ackerman, whom the students affectionately called “Mr. A,” was a revered figure on campus. He was also the varsity tennis coach whose squad would capture UCLA’s first-ever NCAA championship later that spring. Wooden considered the meeting a formality, but Johns and Ackerman asked that he bring Nell with him. “They knew what I wanted to talk about,” Wooden said.

  When Wooden made his request, his bosses didn’t quite say no. They did, however, remind Wooden that he was the one who had insisted on a three-year contract as a condition for his coming to UCLA. We thought you were an honorable man, they told him. You promised to be here for the full three years. We’ll let you out if you want, but it won’t be the right thing to do.

  We thought you were an honorable man. The words gnawed at Wooden, just as Johns and Ackerman knew they would. “I guess they had learned enough about me in the first two years that they probably had me there,” he said. Nell still wanted him to leave—in her mind the failure to build the pavilion justified the breach—but Wooden knew his bosses were right. Besides, Purdue had now come calling twice in a three-year span. Surely they would call again.

  Amid much public speculation, UCLA made a formal announcement that the coach was staying put. “For a number of weeks it has been more or less common knowledge that there was some question of Coach Wooden’s remaining at UCLA because of other offers,” Johns said in a statement. “It pleases me to announce that Coach Wooden has decided to remain at UCLA. We all hope his tenure will be happy and permanent.” The Los Angeles Mirror reported that UCLA kept Wooden by giving him a ten-year contract and assuring him of “provisions of a new pavilion.” That first part was incorrect—the contract was actually a permanent three-year deal that automatically renewed at the end of each season—but the promise of the pavilion was an essential part of Wooden’s decision. “I like it here,” Wooden said. “My family likes it here and so I chose to stay.”

  In truth, the Woodens were bitter that UCLA had placed such shackles on them. The episode reinforced their strong desire to move home as soon as possible. “I was irritated to say the least. Though I understood their position at the time, I thought it was unfair,” Wooden said. “But I fulfilled my contract. In the back of my mind, I said, ‘Yes, I’ll fulfill it. Then I’ll probably fly the coop.’” The near loss of Wooden prompted the student varsity club to circulate a petition a few weeks later calling for the immediate construction of a new basketball pavilion on campus. “If there is no hope of a new pavilion,” the petition read, “there is no hope of keeping Wooden.”

  * * *

  The tension between John Wooden and Jerry Norman continued to percolate during the 1950–51 season. It finally boiled over in January as the Bruins were trying to unshackle themselves from a stretch in which they had lost five times in eight games. As Wooden was addressing the team before the start of practice, he spotted Norman lying on the floor with his head on a ball and talking to a teammate, not paying attention. This time, Wooden didn’t just boot Norman out of practice. He booted him right off the team.

  In reporting Norman’s suspension, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote that Wooden had dropped Norman from the team “temporarily” because of the player’s “attitude.” Though the paper indicated Norman probably would be back in a few days, he ended up being gone for two weeks—and it would have been longer if it hadn’t been for Eddie Sheldrake, who by that point had grown friendlier with Wooden than any other player. Sheldrake had also become close with Norman’s parents, who treated him as one of their own after Sheldrake’s father died. Norman needed to be convinced to come back to the team, and Wooden needed to be convinced to take him back. Sheldrake brokered the rapprochement.

  From then on, Norman toed the line and emerged as a dependable backcourt starter. Sheldrake, meanwhile, remained the ace of the squad, lighting up Stanford for a school-record 38 points in February. But UCLA’s defense was even more porous than before. The Bruins were giving up more than 64 points per game, up from 53.5 the previous season, and they surrendered 90 points during an especially bad loss to Long Island University in December. Yet, despite their suspect defense, the Bruins finished the regular season in a tie with USC for first place in the Southern Division. That set up a one-game play-off between the rivals, which UCLA won by 8 points.

  Alas, the season ended in Seattle, where UCLA lost two straight games to Washington in the PCC play-offs. It didn’t help that Wooden had to bench the incorrigible Ridgway in the second game for all but the final thirteen minutes. “Ridgway was being disciplined,” Wooden explained without revealing specifics. “I played him in the late stages of the game because he saw the light in a talk we had at halftime.”

  Unfortunately, over the summer of 1951, Ridgway suffered a debilitating head injury while working under a car that fell off its jack. He was unavailable for the 1952–53 season. (Ridgway would return a year later and complete his final two seasons, but he never regained the all-conference form he showed as a sophomore.) That meant the team would need more production from Norman, who was now a senior and the undisputed team leader with Sheldrake having graduated. Norman responded like the gamer he was, spurring UCLA toward yet another division title. After Norman lit up Stanford for 34 points in mid-February, the Indians’ coach, Bob Burnett, said, “Stop Norman and you can stop the Bruins.” Wooden also recognized that this heretofore frisky colt had finally matured into a thoroughbred. “Norman has been our spark,” he said. “We didn’t see eye to eye on some things last year, but I believe that Jerry has now whipped himself.” Asked by a reporter about his “two-week vacation from the basketball team” the year before, Norman replied, “Mr. Wooden and
I just had a few differences, so we had a heart-to-heart talk. I wasn’t working too hard in practice, for one thing, and Mr. Wooden didn’t like it. So he told me what he thought and I told him what I thought and we reached a compromise. We decided to do things his way.”

  The Bruins prevailed over Washington in the 1952 PCC play-offs to capture their second conference title in Wooden’s four seasons. But they were visited by more bad luck. Because so many college students around the country had left school to serve in the Korean War, the NCAA had temporarily permitted freshmen to play varsity sports. And so Don Bragg, a six-foot-four forward from San Francisco, was able to join Wooden’s roster. Even though he was a freshman, Bragg was UCLA’s leading scorer during the regular season, but following the PCC clincher over Washington, he broke a toe as he exited the shower. Bragg’s mishap left him severely hampered for the Bruins’ opener against Santa Clara in the NCAA tournament’s Western Regional in Corvallis, Oregon.

  The NCAA tournament field had expanded from eight to sixteen teams, but once again, the Bruins’ stay was short. With Bragg on the bench, the other Bruins suffered some early foul trouble, and Wooden was forced to insert Bragg into the game midway through the second half, but he was clearly hobbled. UCLA made just twenty of its eighty-five shot attempts and fell, 68–59. Wooden took the loss hard. “It was one of our worst games in quite a while,” he said. “I thought our kids were right, but they didn’t play like they were.” The next day, UCLA lost to Oklahoma City, 55–53, in the Western Regional’s consolation game. John Wooden may have accomplished great things during his first four seasons at UCLA, but he was now 0–4 in NCAA tournament play.

  The loss to Oklahoma City also marked the end of Jerry Norman’s college playing career. It had been a wild ride, but he left school more mature than when he came in, and even he had to admit that Wooden deserved much of the credit. Now it was time for them to go their separate ways; Wooden had another team to teach, while Norman was bound for the navy. Neither would have guessed that this talented, obstinate, profane, keenly intelligent nonconformist would someday be more responsible than anyone besides Wooden for launching a basketball dynasty at UCLA.

  12

  L.A. Story

  A $6,000 annual salary did not go far in a place like Los Angeles. During his first four years at UCLA, Wooden worked mornings as a dispatcher for a dairy company in the San Fernando Valley. “After all the trucks made their deliveries and came back, I would call the next day’s orders, sweep out the place, and head over the hill to UCLA,” he said. “Why did I do it? Because I needed the money.”

  That the UCLA basketball coach needed to hold down a second job illustrated just how little the sport mattered on the West Coast. UCLA did not even provide Wooden with a full-time assistant. Ed Powell doubled as an assistant baseball coach alongside his basketball duties. Wooden’s other assistant, Bill Putnam, also served as an assistant athletic director. After Powell left in 1952 to become the head coach at Loyola University, his replacement, Doug Sale, assumed his duties with the baseball team.

  Moreover, there was scant interest in basketball at the grassroots level. This was a common lament of Wooden’s during those early years. “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re from Iowa. Did you know this state does not have a high school basketball championship tournament? Can you believe that?’” said Bob Seizer, who was an undergraduate reporter for the Daily Bruin. During a media luncheon in 1950, Wooden pointed out that his son, Jimmy, had played organized basketball in Terre Haute beginning in the sixth grade. In Los Angeles, he said, Jimmy could only play in a loosely organized club program until he got to high school. “The better basketball players in the Midwest are no better than our basketball players in the far west,” Wooden said. “But there are many more of the better class players in the Midwest than we have out here. Back there you just about must have an indoor game. Basketball is it. Out here fans and boys can be outdoors all the year around. That splits basketball interest with other activities. Basketball suffers.”

  Such comments fed the impression that the coach was not long for Westwood. As much as Sale enjoyed being Wooden’s assistant, he would quit two years later to take a high school coaching job in Northern California because he feared Wooden would soon accept one of the many offers he was getting from midwestern universities. Wooden didn’t try to talk Sale out of leaving. The best he could do was promise that if he did take one of those offers, Sale could come along with him. “I told him I don’t want to go to the Midwest because it’s too far from my family,” Sale said. “He said, ‘Well, that’s your decision.’”

  The low salary, the lack of a full-time assistant, a deficient grassroots pipeline—all of these impediments would have been more bearable if Wooden’s teams had an adequate place to play. There seemed to be no end to his frustration on this front. Every year brought another futile push to give Wooden the pavilion he had been led to believe was coming. In 1952, a member of the school’s faculty committee on finances recommended that the project be financed by raising the annual student fee by four dollars, but the students rejected the idea, as they had rejected similar appeals in the past. Wooden was quoted in the Daily Bruin arguing that a pavilion was “feasible, advisable, and possible,” but it seemed as elusive as ever.

  And yet as uncomfortable as Wooden was in the men’s gym, his opponents had it much worse. In the Los Angeles Times, Jack Geyer dubbed it the “B.O. barn,” and the nickname stuck. Since the Bruins were generally in better physical condition than their opponents, they were virtually unbeatable there. During Wooden’s first three years, his teams won forty of the forty-two games they played in the gym. “It was nothing but murder in there. Like walking into an oven,” said veteran PCC referee Al Lightner.

  Bill Leiser, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, called the UCLA gym “an unfair handicap.” The Bruins’ advantage was so pronounced that a conspiracy theory took hold, accusing Wooden of intentionally turning up the heat. At the very least, opponents suspected that Wooden did nothing to alleviate the sauna-like conditions. “They wouldn’t open the windows,” said Ken Flower, a forward at USC. “In fact, our alumni would try to get them to open windows, and they wouldn’t do it. It was unnaturally hot, but they liked the home-court advantage.” Ron Tomsic, who played for Stanford, said that his coach, Bob Burnett, also told his players that Wooden manufactured those conditions. “He heated that place up like you couldn’t believe,” Tomsic said. “We referred to it as the sweatbox. Our coach claimed he did this on purpose because it was more conducive for his players.”

  Wooden thought the accusations were ridiculous. “There was no way, as far as I know, that the heat could be turned on in the place. I don’t think there was any heat, as a matter of fact. It was just when the crowds got in there, it was warm,” he said. Yet he did not go out of his way to dispel the conjecture. “It didn’t displease me that other teams felt that it was a sweatbox. We didn’t do anything to change their feeling,” he said. “I wanted them to dislike coming in to play. The more they felt that they couldn’t win there, the less likely they were going to win there.”

  Each season the Bruins played a few home games outside the men’s gymnasium, but those venues weren’t much better. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was built for hockey games and ice shows, with the hockey boards visible around the perimeter. The games occasionally had to be halted so workers could mop up condensation. The Olympic Auditorium was the best facility in town, but that was USC’s home floor. Even when the Bruins played a different opponent there, most of the crowd rooted for them to lose.

  Each day before practice in the men’s gym, Wooden swept the floor to clear the dust left by the gymnasts. One time Wooden tripped over a gymnast while pacing the sidelines during practice. Later in his career, Wooden said he believed he had developed what he called a “persecution complex” during this time. It was hard to blame him. “When I look back on my first years [at UCLA],” he said, “I don’t know how I got anything do
ne.”

  * * *

  John and Nell might have felt lonely in the big city, but they were far from alone. Unbeknown to them, the Woodens had joined a large migration of midwesterners who flooded into Southern California during the middle of the twentieth century. They reached Los Angeles just as it was undergoing a population explosion that was transforming it from a loosely connected group of burgs into a bona fide metropolis.

  It was a propitious time for him to come to UCLA. The school’s undergraduate ranks were swelling with the return of World War II veterans, who could afford to attend because of the GI Bill of Rights. In the fall of 1947, a year before Wooden got there, some 6,200 veterans enrolled. They accounted for 43 percent of the student body, which had grown from 5,000 to more than 14,000 in six short years. (The number would climb to 17,000 by 1960.) The increased enrollment and ballooning tax revenue enabled UCLA to expand its campus in rapid fashion. Fifteen new buildings were erected between 1945 and 1950, including a library wing, an engineering building, a law school, and additions to the men’s and women’s gymnasiums. This reflected the education boom across the city, where the public school system was adding a new building every week.

  It took several years, but the Woodens slowly found pockets of friends, which made the place feel more like home. A few months after he and Nell arrived, Wooden walked into a restaurant that was owned by a local man named Hollis Johnson. The place was a cozy neighborhood eatery in the back of the Westwood Drugstore that would have fit right in on Main Street in Martinsville. The two men struck up an immediate friendship, and Wooden started eating there regularly. “I’m just a common person,” Johnson said. “I guess maybe he wanted to get hold of somebody who’s common.”

  Wooden craved such small, comfortable routines. When he wasn’t dining at Johnson’s grill, he would meet a few friends at Pete Lilly’s restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He also met some fellow Christians through his role as a deacon at a church in Santa Monica. Little by little, year by year, he and Nell developed something resembling a social life. “There was an old guard that was part of the UCLA community before the Woodens came out here. Those people took them into their bosom,” Betty Putnam said. “I really think Los Angeles came to him rather than the other way around. And of course, nothing makes friends better than winning.”