Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Their children adapted as well. Nan was a pretty and popular student at University High School, where she dated a strikingly handsome blond basketball star named Denny Miller, who went on to play for Wooden at UCLA before leaving to star in the title role in one of the Tarzan movies. Wooden’s son, Jim, also played for University High’s basketball team, although it was a struggle for him to compete in the shadow of his famous father. Jim was a decent enough player, but he wasn’t good enough to play past high school. “He maybe felt that he had expectations from his father that he should have been an outstanding basketball player,” said Ben Rogers, who played for UCLA in the mid-1950s. “I know that caused John some anguish. He felt a little estranged from his son. That’s something I recall him sharing on one occasion.”

  Sadly, Wooden’s mother and father were never an integral part of his new life. They drove from Indiana to visit him shortly after he came to UCLA, but they never visited again. “California was a little too fast for them,” Wooden said. In 1950, Hugh died of leukemia at the age of sixty-eight. The obituary published in the Martinsville Daily Reporter described him as a man with “a genial disposition” who had “made many friends, and had always followed with great interest the athletic and teaching careers of his sons.” Roxie passed nine years later. Wooden’s parents were buried in Centerton alongside their young daughters.

  Fortunately, John did have some family nearby. His oldest brother, Cat, was the principal at West Covina High School, east of Los Angeles. Cat was much more outgoing than his younger brother, and he brought out John’s playful side. John would stride into West Covina High and demand to an unsuspecting secretary, “Who’s in charge of this school?” When told it was Mr. Wooden, John would insist he see this man immediately. Cat would come into the office to see what the fuss was about and then laugh when he saw it was only his little brother.

  John and Nell’s social circle was never very wide. For them, a big night on the town meant eating dinner after a game with Bill and Betty Putnam or with Ducky Drake and his wife. “I don’t know anybody who was a real close personal friend except the guys who worked and played for him. Coach just wasn’t that way,” Sheldrake said. By most standards, Nell was pretty reserved, but she was a lively chatterbox compared to her husband. “She was a cute little peanut. She had a lot of sparkle,” Betty Putnam said. “It wouldn’t bother her to tell a joke with a little sexual innuendo. I think that appealed to John because he was very straight. He would say platitudes and quote people, but I don’t remember him ever telling a joke. He was more pleasant than funny.”

  The Woodens’ aversion to alcohol prevented them from expanding their circle. Nell had grown up around too many Irish relatives who drank and was more stridently antialcohol than her husband. She had no compunctions about expressing her disapproval if someone drank in her presence. “She had definite ideas of right and wrong and good and bad, and she expected that of her children as well as her friends,” Betty Putnam said. “She would not cozy up to people if they didn’t have the same values.”

  Though John was more abiding of other people’s vices, he likewise would not consume alcohol under any circumstances. One time when UCLA was on a road trip to Illinois to play Bradley, he came down with a bad case of hemorrhoids. A doctor offered some medicine, but when Wooden read the label and saw that it contained blackberry brandy, he refused to drink the stuff.

  This puritanical lifestyle also kept Wooden from forming close relationships with his coaching peers. When the Pacific Coast Conference held its annual meetings, John was the only coach who always brought his wife. He rarely went out to dinner with the guys, much less hung out with them late at night drinking liquor and chasing skirts. “When he first came out west he was provincial, a little aloof,” said Pete Newell, who became the head coach at California in 1954. “The coaches he was closest to were the midwesterners, the Branch McCrackens, the Tony Hinkles. He may have considered himself an outsider and some western coaches did, too.” Marv Harshman encountered the same reactions after he took over at Washington State in 1958. “A lot of the coaches said he was stuck up,” Harshman said. “In my opinion he was never stuck up. It’s just that his family was more important to him than being around two or three old coaches who were drinking beer.”

  Unfortunately, Nell’s resistance to alcohol did not extend to cigarettes. John smoked during his first few years at UCLA, but he eventually quit. Nell never could. At one point he got her an appointment with a hypnotist, but it didn’t work. Nell did her best to hide her habit from her husband. She would keep a couple of packs of cigarettes tucked away in her closet, or she would stash them in her purse. If she wanted to smoke, she stepped outside or sneaked off to a neighbor’s house. “She thought she was fooling Daddy, but he knew,” Nan said. John was disappointed, but it was not his style to reprimand her. “He didn’t make a big deal of it. He knew she was trying to stop,” Betty Putnam said. “He was so devoted to her. She could have done anything in the world, and he would have said, ‘It’s okay, Nellie.’”

  One of the reasons Nell smoked was that it calmed her nerves on game night. She kept smelling salts in her pockets in case she felt faint. Though John was notorious for refusing to yank his starters until the final moments of a blowout, Nell was even more paranoid. On a couple of occasions when John mass substituted, she called out from behind the bench, “Too soon!” He would eventually ask that she sit a few rows back.

  Not surprisingly, Nell harbored an especially low opinion of the officials. “She was worse on the refs than he was. She was something,” Art Alper said. “She sat two rows behind the bench and let ’em have it. The referees were never right when they called a foul on us.” During one taut contest against USC, Nell tapped on Ed Powell’s shoulder after a UCLA player was whistled for fouling Bill Sharman.

  “I didn’t think that was a foul, did you?” Nell asked.

  Powell told her he thought it was a good call.

  “Where’s your loyalty?” she snapped.

  “Loyalty has nothing to do with it,” Powell replied. “You asked me a question.”

  Indeed, Nell had little tolerance for any slight, perceived or real, that was directed at her husband. She resented the way UCLA had deceived them about the prospects of a new pavilion. If she felt her husband was getting any kind of short shrift, she spoke up. “Nell could be vicious towards someone who was getting more notoriety than John. Red Sanders was one of those,” Sheldrake said. And heaven forbid someone should outright disrespect her husband’s coaching decisions. That brought on the full force of her Irish temper. “She would not tolerate anything that was negative towards John,” Betty Putnam said. “If anyone ever criticized him or said anything bad, that was the end of the friendship.”

  The rapid growth occurring around Los Angeles began to change Wooden’s mind about the possibilities at UCLA. There may not have been a grassroots basketball scene at first, but he could see that the sport was going to get bigger on campus. This was especially important because Wooden disdained recruiting. In his view, students should want to come to a school like UCLA to get a first-rate education. It was not his job to convince them. He often told friends that he missed working in high school, where there was no need for recruiting at all. You simply coached the kids who showed up in your gym, just as you taught the kids who showed up in your English class. “I hoped each year to get two or three of the top-quality players from Southern California,” he said. “I probably would have had a rough time at some place where you have to go out and get them.”

  As the years went on and the wins piled up, the job offers continued to roll in from his native Midwest. Purdue called again. So did Notre Dame and Illinois. Fritz Crisler, the former football coach and longtime athletic director at the University of Michigan, pleaded for Wooden to come to Ann Arbor. Each time John discussed the matter with his family, his children would protest more loudly. They were teenagers now and had made lots of friends. Besides, they loved the California sun
shine. Who wouldn’t? “You know, this is not a bad place to live,” Wooden said. “It takes a while to get accustomed to it, but once you stop and think, within an hour or two I can be at the ocean, I can be at the mountains, I can be in the desert, I can be at Disneyland. I don’t have to put chains on my tires. I don’t have to put in antifreeze. I don’t have to scrape sleet off my windshield.” Eventually, the other schools stopped calling. “After a few years,” Wooden said, “we were more acclimated to Los Angeles. We became settled.”

  For John and Nell, the big changes were mostly behind them. They would never again move to a different part of the country. At one point Nell wanted a third child, but she miscarried while they were living in Indiana and never got pregnant again. “We had problems, and the doctor said she should never try anymore. I disagreed,” John said. They also had a cocker spaniel, but when he died, it broke Nell’s heart. No more dogs for them.

  He drew strength from her presence and depended on her in every way. She poured his cereal, picked out his clothes, did all his laundry. She even washed his hair. When the team had a road game, Nell packed suitcases for both of them and came along. The only time they bickered in front of the kids was when he discovered she had again neglected to register checks she had written from their bank account. (He finally learned to keep a few extra bucks in reserve.) That aside, even their closest friends never witnessed a hint of marital strife. “They were,” said Betty Putnam, “the strongest couple I’ve ever known.”

  In the end, it didn’t much matter where they lived. Nothing ever really changed between them. In her mind’s eye, he would always be the vigorous young guard who bounced off the floor like rubber. Before each game, John still winked at Nell and flashed the “okay” sign right before tip-off, just as when they were in high school. The only thing that was missing was her cornet. She would forever believe he was beyond reproach and beyond compare. A former UCLA player named Jerry Evans learned that one day when he raved to Nell about a college player he had just watched. When Evans said he had never seen anyone quite as good as this kid, Nell just shook her head and smiled. “You should have seen my Johnny,” she said.

  13

  Willie the Whale

  In the spring of 1950, a six-foot-two forward at Visalia Junior College named Bobby Pounds received a phone call from the head basketball coach at UCLA. John Wooden was calling to tell Pounds that a couple of his players had sung his praises after seeing Pounds play in a recent junior college tournament, and Wooden wanted to know if Pounds would consider playing for UCLA. By coincidence, Pounds was going to be competing in a state championship track meet the following week in Los Angeles, so Wooden invited him to visit UCLA’s campus. A few months later, Pounds enrolled in UCLA as a sophomore, and during the 1950–51 season, he scored a total of 40 points in twenty-one games as a reserve.

  The story was unremarkable save for one detail: Bobby Pounds was black.

  Wooden did not set out to perform a social experiment when he offered Pounds a scholarship. He was not trying to agitate for progress. He was trying to win basketball games. Far from generating fanfare, Wooden rarely spoke about race. Not to his assistants, not to the media, not even to his own players. “He was about actions, not statements,” Pounds said. “He integrated basketball quietly, little by little. If you didn’t see it, too bad. Maybe he didn’t want people to notice.”

  For Pounds, Jim Crow segregation was a distant notion that he experienced only through the descriptions from his parents, who migrated to California from Louisiana before he was born. When Pounds’s grandparents died, his mother refused to take him home to their funerals. “You’re a smart aleck,” she told him. “You’ll get hurt.” Pounds was not immune to racism growing up in Fresno, but his childhood was about as idyllic as a black youngster could experience in America during the 1930s and 1940s. His school, Edison High, was 85 percent white, but the community was a melting pot that included blacks, Germans, Russians, and Italians. Bobby was outgoing and popular. Besides being the star of Edison’s undefeated state championship basketball team, he was also the senior class president.

  Still, because of his race, Pounds had difficulty eliciting interest from colleges. He wrote letters to many schools, including the University of San Francisco and the University of California, but UCLA was the only one to reply. When Wooden called, Pounds said, “I was shocked. Absolutely.” At that point, Pounds knew very little about Wooden, but he knew one important thing about the place where he coached. “Jackie Robinson went to UCLA,” Pounds said. “So I said, I’m going there.”

  Indeed, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, was the best ambassador to the black community that any school could ask for. Years before he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson had captivated black people in California while starring as a running back for UCLA’s football team. Robinson, who entered UCLA as a junior following a two-year stint at Pasadena Junior College, joined Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, the famed “Goal Dust Twins,” to lead UCLA to an undefeated season in 1939. Robinson also became the first athlete in UCLA’s young history to letter in four varsity sports during the same academic year. The other three were track (he won the 1940 NCAA title in the long jump), basketball, and baseball. Surprisingly, baseball was Robinson’s worst sport in college. He played just one season for UCLA and batted .097.

  As a basketball player, Robinson struggled at first in Wilbur Johns’s deliberate offense. (The Daily Bruin said Jackie looked like a “wasted robot” on the court.) Eventually, he flourished and won the PCC’s individual scoring title in each of his two seasons. Still, the league’s coaches declined to vote Jackie onto the PCC’s all-conference first team, which the sports editor of the Daily Bruin dubbed a “flagrant bit of prejudice.” California’s Nibs Price was the worst offender. He left Robinson off his first, second, and third teams when he cast his ballot.

  UCLA’s policy of admitting black athletes was rooted in competition, not altruism. The school was a perennial doormat in almost every sport. In the mid-1920s, when it was still known as California State Normal School and housed on Vermont Avenue, a local black student named Ralph Bunche signed up to play football, baseball, and basketball. Bunche was a decent athlete, but he was a stellar performer in the classroom, graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian. As with Robinson, Bunche’s real impact on UCLA came years after he had graduated, when he served in prominent positions at the State Department and the United Nations. Two months after Bobby Pounds enrolled at UCLA, Bunche became the first black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

  If you were a young black man on the West Coast and you wanted to go to college, UCLA was the place to be. The swift ones wanted to be like Jackie. The smart ones wanted to be like Ralph.

  And so when John Wooden made that first phone call to Bobby Pounds, he was not initiating a tradition of tolerance at UCLA. That had already been well established. Wilbur Johns’s last team had included Don Barksdale, who was the country’s first black All-American and went on to become the first black man to play in an NBA All-Star game. The year before Wooden arrived, UCLA’s undergraduates elected as their student body president Sherrill Luke, a black student who grew up crashing the gates at the Coliseum to watch Jackie Robinson gallop alongside the Goal Dust Twins. Luke’s election made national news. He even received a letter from Harry S. Truman, addressed “From one President to another.”

  As the president of the Associated Students of UCLA, Luke served on the search committee that hired Wooden. He also signed the coach’s paychecks. Luke’s office was located down the hall from Wooden’s, which allowed Luke to encounter a softer version of the man than his players did. “I would say shy and reserved are good descriptive words to apply to him,” Luke said. “He was always a consummate gentleman. He respected the dignity of every individual he ever met as far as I could tell. He had almost an evangelical or a ministerial air about him that made you like him and feel like you could trust him.” />
  For a long time, Wooden’s Bruins were an anomaly inside the lily-white Pacific Coast Conference. During Bobby Pounds’s first season, he was the only black player in the league. Stanford did have one black player on its roster in 1951–52, but USC didn’t suit up its first until 1960. Five years would pass before the Trojans added another. Wooden, on the other hand, had at least one black player on his roster every year starting with Pounds’s arrival in 1950. From 1954 until he retired in 1975, he never had fewer than three.

  UCLA’s reputation with blacks was a major boon in recruiting. During the spring of 1951, Wooden’s assistant, Ed Powell, was visiting his family in Indiana. When a friend mentioned that there was a terrific black player in Gary named Johnny Moore, Powell figured he’d pay the kid a visit. Moore’s parents seemed cool to Powell’s entreaties until his mother noticed that Powell’s wife was sitting by herself in the car, where she was flipping through some old UCLA yearbooks. Mrs. Moore invited Powell’s wife inside and was soon flipping through the yearbooks herself.

  At one point, Mrs. Moore spotted a photograph of Sherrill Luke. She stopped flipping and asked Powell, “You mean there are fifteen thousand students at this school, and out of all these people the student body president is black?”

  “Oh, yes,” Powell replied. “I didn’t want to make that an issue.”

  “Well,” Johnny’s mother said, “this is where he’s going to school.”