by Seth Davis
That’s how Johnny Moore became the second black player whom Wooden recruited to UCLA. Moore was not as outgoing as Pounds, which made the distance between Los Angeles and Gary feel even greater. Sherrill Luke, who was still living in town while pursuing his master’s degree in political science at UCLA, tried to help by inviting Moore to live with him during his first semester, but it wasn’t easy. “Johnny was very quiet, very unassuming. You had to egg him on to engage him in conversation,” Luke said. Luke soon came up with a better idea. Five years before, Luke had moved into the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house, where all the fraternity brothers were Jewish. Luke was the first non-Jewish—not to mention nonwhite—person to live there. So Luke rang up his old fraternity brothers and arranged for Moore to live in the ZBT house as well.
When it came to playing ball, however, Moore was vastly superior to Pounds, not to mention most of the other players in the conference. He was also unfazed by the crowds. When a local sportswriter asked Moore if he was nervous before playing his first game in a packed gym, Moore shook his head and said, “No, sir. My last game in high school was in front of eighteen thousand people.”
Wooden did not involve himself in the personal lives of Pounds and Moore any more than he did for his white players. They would have to adjust to college life on their own. “I never talked to him where it was just him and me, but I didn’t need to. I was getting along fine,” Pounds said. Nor did the presence of blacks stir much notice among the white players, even though during many of their road games Pounds and Moore were the only black people in the gym. For example, Moore became very close with a white teammate, Bill Johnston, who used to take Moore to his parents’ house for dinner. The two of them shared their thoughts on every topic under the sun—except race. “We talked about our families and school and classes, but we didn’t talk about black and white,” Johnston said. “I don’t know why. Maybe we should have. It just didn’t come up.”
Pounds felt no need to discuss the issue. He had come to UCLA for one reason: to get a degree. The only way he was going to accomplish that was by listening to John Wooden. “He was as intense as you could be. There was no screwing around,” Pounds said. “I remember he said it behooves you to pay attention. That’s where I learned that word. When he said behooves, something important was coming up.”
There was only one occasion when Wooden had no choice but to address the issue of race. It happened during Christmas break in 1951, when UCLA went on a three-game swing through the Midwest. The trip began with a huge game at Kentucky, which was ranked No. 2 in the AP poll. Because the hotels in Lexington were segregated, Pounds and Moore would not have been able to stay with the team. Rather than splitting up his players, Wooden arranged for the Bruins to stay in Cincinnati, ninety miles away. UCLA rode to Lexington by bus, got walloped by 31 points, and then rode back to the hotel after the game. Wooden never explained why they were staying so far away, but he didn’t have to. “There was no big announcement or anything, but word filtered out,” Jerry Evans said.
As the Bruins rolled into town that night, Pounds noticed a public bus driving alongside. All the black passengers were seated in the back. It was the first time he had come face-to-face with Jim Crow. “It scared the shit out of me,” he said. “I thought to myself, Yup, Mom was right. I’m glad I don’t live here.”
* * *
Pounds returned to school in the fall of 1952 for his senior season. The team was less experienced and supposedly less talented than it had been the year before, but as they entered the final week of the season, the Bruins trailed California by just one game in the Southern Division. Wooden’s four-year streak of finishing in at least a tie for first was in jeopardy. Los Angeles Daily News columnist Ned Cronin sounded the alarm. “Fame is fleeting and Johnny stands on the brink of being a has-been,” Cronin wrote. “He’s like a batter who hits a homer the first time up. The only way to go from there is down, sooner or later.” Forget about how inept the program had been before Wooden got there. He had proved he could win, so he was expected to keep winning. This might not have fit his own definition of success, but the California sportswriters didn’t share his view on that any more than did the parents of his high school students in Dayton, Kentucky. It was bound to intrude on Wooden’s peace of mind.
The streak did, in fact, end when the Bruins were swept by USC in their last two games, ending the season with a 6–6 league record, good for third place. Wooden gained some solace a few weeks later when his childhood chum Branch McCracken coached Indiana to its second NCAA championship with a 1-point win in the final over Kansas. Wooden attended the game in Kansas City, but he couldn’t help but feel bittersweet. “Johnny was the first person in my dressing room [after the game],” McCracken said. “He ran straight at me and jumped up and put his arms around my neck. He said, ‘It looks like I’ll never win an NCAA. We get so far and then something always happens.’”
UCLA’s prospects seemed brighter as the Bruins entered the 1953–54 season. Pounds was gone, but four starters were back, including Moore, now a junior. Wooden also added two talented black sophomores from Southern California. The first was Morris Taft, a six-foot-two guard who had won all-city honors at Los Angeles’s Polytechnic High School and all-state honors during his one season at Compton Community College.
From the start, Wooden got along well with Taft, but the coach would have a much more complicated relationship with the other black prodigy who joined the team. Willie Naulls was a six-foot-five center with strong hands, an ample waistline, and boundless potential. Because of his physique, Naulls was given the nickname of Willie the Whale, but on the court he moved like a shark. In fact, Naulls was so good in high school that up and down the West Coast, coaches who had been reluctant to recruit blacks offered him scholarships. If they were going to integrate their programs, they were damn sure going to do it with a player of his caliber.
Naulls came close to attending the University of California, but he chose UCLA because several UCLA alumni assured him that they would take care of all his financial needs. One man even gave Willie about $1,500 cash during his recruitment. When Willie’s mother, who was a devout Christian, heard about the illicit payments, she marched her son into the man’s office and made him return the money. “My mother doesn’t think that I should accept this money, and neither do I,” Willie said.
His mother made him say those words, but he didn’t really believe them. Naulls expected that the other alumni would deliver on their promises once he enrolled in college. He could not begin his freshman year until the second semester for academic reasons, but once he got to Westwood, he learned that those promises would go unfulfilled. When Naulls complained to Wooden, the coach told Naulls he knew nothing about such arrangements. Besides, they were against NCAA rules.
That’s not the only disappointment Naulls encountered. He had chosen UCLA without realizing that the school did not offer housing for blacks on campus. Nor did he realize just how segregated most of Westwood was at the time. (Naulls spent his formative years in the mostly white community of San Pedro, thirty miles south of Los Angeles.) Naulls had had a strained relationship with his father, but he was close with his mother, and he recognized in Wooden the same devotion to Christian ideals. He hoped, even assumed, that once he got to UCLA, Wooden would provide the paternal guidance he had never received from his own dad. On this, too, his expectations were unmet. “When a boy leaves home for the first time, his coach becomes a father figure, a guy you should be able to go to with your problems and your questions,” Naulls said. “With Wooden, you don’t feel you can do this.”
Because he was broke, Naulls decided he would have to hustle to make ends meet. At that time, the athletic department reimbursed athletes for their textbooks. Naulls enrolled in extra classes, got reimbursed for the books, and then he returned them to the bookstore and pocketed the refunds. Eventually, Wooden caught wind of the scheme and called Naulls into his office for a brutal tongue-lashing. “Gracious sakes al
ive, Willie, what were you thinking?” Wooden said as Wilbur Johns looked on. “I know your parents didn’t raise you to be this way.” Naulls was sure he was going to be expelled, but when the meeting ended with no such penalty, Naulls realized he was in the clear.
A few months later, Naulls again was called onto the carpet in Wooden’s office after he accrued more than a dozen unpaid parking tickets. When Naulls complained that the only reason he got so many tickets was that he couldn’t find any place to park, Wooden retorted, “Welcome to student campus life here at UCLA. You do not deserve any special parking privileges.”
Class dismissed.
* * *
Aside from these confrontations, Naulls did not have much contact with Wooden after he enrolled for that first semester at UCLA in the spring of 1953. He joined the basketball program the following fall. Since Naulls had enrolled as a second-semester freshman, he was allowed to play for UCLA’s freshman team for one more semester, but Wooden surprised Naulls by inviting him to join the varsity for the second game of the season, even though Naulls’s conditioning was poor because he had not competed for a year. “Our team will be helped and will improve when Naulls gets into shape,” Wooden said. “I have high hopes for Willie.”
Willie the Whale tipped the scales at a cool 262 pounds when he started his college career by scoring 11 points in a 45-point rout of Arizona. UCLA won three more times before returning to Lexington, Kentucky, for a holiday tournament. They played two games there, losing to La Salle and defeating Duke. This time, instead of busing back and forth to Cincinnati, the team stayed in Lexington in what was usually a segregated hotel. The hotel’s manager wanted Taft, Moore, and Naulls to sleep separately on the basement level, but Wooden insisted that all of his players have the same accommodations. So the entire team slept in the basement. They also sat together that night in a segregated movie theater.
During the Bruins’ second game of the tournament, Naulls heard one of the Duke players call out his defensive assignment by pointing to Naulls and shouting, “I got this nigger over here.” Naulls was especially furious because the player seemed to have no idea he had uttered a hateful slur. Naulls maintained his composure until late in the second half, when on a drive to the basket, he elbowed the guy in the mouth as hard as he could. As the Duke player stood bleeding and complaining to the referee (who had not seen the elbow), Wooden glared at Naulls but said nothing. Naulls believed he had earned Wooden’s respect for retaliating in such a controlled fashion. Wooden, in turn, earned Naulls’s affection for refusing to bend to the strictures of Jim Crow.
The warm feelings would not last long. The Bruins began the conference portion of their schedule with a two-game series at California. During the first half of the first game, Wooden surprised Naulls by ripping into him for throwing a behind-the-back pass. “No fancy stuff out there!” he yelled during a time-out. When the players walked onto the court, Naulls asked Johnny Moore what the coach had meant. The soft-spoken Moore shrugged his shoulders and said, “Two hands on the ball will get you more playing time.”
Naulls spent nearly the entire second game on the bench. Not coincidentally, UCLA lost. Even Willie’s teammates were surprised, teasing him by asking if he had stayed out too late or something.
Naulls was angry and confused. It was bad enough that Wooden had benched him, but the coach didn’t even bother to explain the reason why. At that moment, Naulls needed his coach to be a man of statements, not just actions. But that was not John Wooden’s way. “I was tremendously insulted because he never even discussed it with me,” Naulls said.
When UCLA returned home from Berkeley, Naulls went to the men’s gym and cleaned out his locker. On his way out, he found the team’s trainer, Ducky Drake. To Naulls, Drake was the anti-Wooden—a warm, compassionate, easygoing fellow who spent many hours talking about life while he taped Naulls’s ankles. Naulls briefly explained to Drake what had happened, and he told Drake that he was leaving UCLA for good.
As Naulls sat in his mother’s home and stewed, he wondered if Wooden might be a racist after all. In a memoir written decades later, Naulls described the profound hurt he felt that night. “I mumbled to myself, My own father didn’t know what I was thinking. So how could this White man, who never invited me to his home or asked me anything about how I felt, deign to know what I was thinking?” he wrote. “If he thought that little of my character, well, he could play those players with whom he was more comfortable—those who were readily accepted into Westwood housing.”
A few days later, Wooden surprised Naulls by calling him at his mother’s home to apologize and to ask him to come back to the team. Naulls sensed the gesture had come at Drake’s behest, but he agreed to return anyway. He played sparingly in the following game, which the Bruins lost to USC, but the next night against the Trojans he had his best outing as a collegian, scoring 16 points to help the team snap a three-game losing streak. A writer from the Los Angeles Examiner reported that “Willie Naulls, the talented Bruin rookie who had shown nothing except size in his early appearances … for the first time indicated the greatness that is in store for him.”
* * *
That greatness was on display often during January and February 1954. UCLA reeled off eight more wins heading into the season-ending series at home against USC with the Trojans trailing the Bruins by just one game in the Southern Division standings. The season was headed for a dramatic climax, but the day before the series began, Naulls had yet another unpleasant experience with Wooden.
That day, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy story by Jack Geyer under the headline “Wooden’s Threat Builds Sizzling Fire Under Huge Willie Naulls.” The article attributed Willie’s turnaround not to his own diligence and talent, but rather to the heavy-handed tactics of his coach. The story began by re-creating a discussion that supposedly had taken place between Wooden and Naulls in the locker room before his breakout game against USC the month before. “Tonight’s your chance, Willie, your last chance,” Wooden had said, according to Geyer (who had obviously been told this account by Wooden). “But the first time I see you getting shoved around or not scrapping you’re coming out of there. And you might not get back in the rest of the year.” Geyer, who described Naulls as “a shy, soft-spoken Negro lad,” reported that the player had been a “new man” since the contentious tête-à-tête.
Naulls found the article deeply offensive. As he recounted in his memoir, he believed it was evidence that “[Wooden] and the media had a field day at the expense of Willie, the Big Black Whale. And they gave Coach the credit for my performance in our winning effort.” The episode also fed Naulls’s suspicion that the real reason Wooden did not permit his players to talk to the press was so the coach could build up his own image. In that belief, there was a nugget of truth. Wooden was still shaped by having lived through the Depression, always sensing that his career could go belly-up if he didn’t live up to the high expectations that he himself had set.
Despite his anger, Naulls pressed on, but the season would end in heartbreaking fashion. After dropping the first game to USC, 79–68, the Bruins lost the second when Trojans guard Chet Carr hit a ten-foot shot in the waning seconds to give USC a 1-point victory and the Southern Division title. Naulls finished the season as the team’s leading rebounder. He also averaged 8.5 points per game.
Naulls never forgot how Geyer’s article made him feel. And he never forgot the coach’s failure to provide the emotional support he craved. “Oh, Wooden is the best college coach of all time. Really, he’s a professional college coach,” Naulls said in 1972. “But I don’t think he does much to make the college experience more beneficial to his players. His Pyramid of Success and things like that imply that he spends a lot of time in the development of men, not just in basketball and fundamentals. But he doesn’t. I certainly needed a lot of help in other directions, and I didn’t get it.”
Naulls may have felt frustrated by Wooden—again—but this time he made no attempt to quit. H
e had come a long way over the course of the season, and it didn’t matter whether that was despite Wooden or because of him. Nor did Wooden reach out before the start of the next season to talk to Naulls about what they had gone through. The coach had much bigger problems by then. A powerful force was emerging in Northern California, and no amount of running would enable Wooden’s racehorses to overtake it.
14
The Dons
The word was starting to get out: UCLA had a special player, and potentially a special team. The Bruins had entered the 1954–55 season unranked by the Associated Press, but when they won their first two games by a total of 64 points, they entered the poll at No. 13. They were poised to become the dominant team in the West—until, that is, they hosted the University of San Francisco on December 11, 1954.
The occasion gave the Bruins their first glimpse of the Dons’ frighteningly gifted center, a gangly, sprightly, six-foot-nine, left-handed sophomore from Oakland named William Felton Russell. This was not a typical, plodding post player like most centers of the era. Despite his imposing physique, Russell was a competitive distance runner and world-class high jumper, and he possessed the foot speed of a much smaller guard. His ability to quickly and repeatedly bound high above the rim enabled him to deploy methods of defensive basketball that nobody had ever tried. Russell was the first college player who not only dominated the game but actually changed it. And he stood, quite literally, in UCLA’s path.
For once, Wooden’s willingness to recruit blacks hadn’t given him a competitive advantage. Russell was one of three black players in Dons coach Phil Woolpert’s starting lineup that day. (The other two were K. C. Jones and Hal Perry.) Woolpert was much less rigid than Wooden, too. He allowed, and sometimes encouraged, his players to dunk, including during warm-ups. As the UCLA players climbed the steps of the men’s gym, they could hear the squeals of delight coming from their own fans as Russell and his mates glided in their layup lines for dunk after dunk. When the Bruins reached the court, they, too, stood in awe—so much so that Wooden ordered them back into the locker room, where he upbraided them for being so impressed.