by Seth Davis
Expectations for the team were low, and the Bruins soon showed why, opening the season by losing back-to-back games to unranked BYU in Provo, Utah. The team then returned home for three games at the Sports Arena, winning the first two over Kansas and DePauw before falling to Colorado State, 69–68. The fans were unimpressed—just 1,902 showed up for the home opener—but the media was plenty taken with Walt Hazzard. The Los Angeles Times noted that after becoming “a bit conservative in recent years,” the Bruins were “back in the running game” now that Hazzard was in charge. After the win over Kansas, the Times reported that Hazzard had “delighted the fans with his fancy passing and dribbling in the Bob Cousy manner.”
(Wooden, incidentally, would not have considered this a compliment. Though he spoke highly of Cousy’s gifts, Wooden often said the former Holy Cross star could never have played for him. “He was fancy. I think it’s a good thing they didn’t keep turnovers at the time he played,” he said. “He had all the ability to play for me, but some of those long, behind-the-back passes I wouldn’t have permitted at all.”)
UCLA took a 2–3 record into its annual late December road trip. That season, Wooden added a wrinkle to the schedule. UCLA would begin with a game in Omaha, Nebraska, at Creighton, but instead of keeping his team in the Midwest, Wooden entered the Bruins in a two-day tournament in Texas called the Houston Holiday Classic.
That decision had ramifications he did not anticipate. The trouble started about a week before the Bruins were to leave California, when a few of the players received phone calls from strangers, some of whom claimed to represent the NAACP, asking them not to go. The callers warned that the city was a bastion of Jim Crow racism. The University of Houston’s arena was said to be segregated. The players were warned of picket lines that would be filled with protesters who would not want black athletes in their city. “We got a lot of calls, especially Walt, from newspapers and folks saying, you know they will not allow Negroes to sit in any place in the arena. How do you feel about that?” Larry Gower said. “I lived a very insulated, privileged kind of life. My folks weren’t rich, but I didn’t really understand racism and discrimination fully.”
The situation was just as unsettling for the white guys. “I remember getting a phone call from a student activist on campus asking me not to go on the trip,” Dave Waxman said. “I was sympathetic, but I felt that whatever decision Hazzard and Slaughter made, I was going to support. They wanted to go and play the game.”
At first, the players made light of the situation. When they boarded the plane to Houston following a 2-point loss at Creighton, Hazzard noticed that Johnny Green, his softball buddy, was wearing a cowboy hat. Hazzard asked why, and Green cracked, “When we get down there, I’m on their side.” Hazzard thought it was hilarious.
Things were not so funny after they landed. Instead of heading for the hotel where the other teams were staying, the Bruins’ bus took them to the University of Houston. They were going to be sleeping in campus dormitories. “I remember thinking, this is weird,” Gower said. Wooden never explained why they were staying in a dorm. He didn’t have to.
When the team got to the arena on game night, the players were relieved. Contrary to what they had been told, there were no picket lines out front. Nor was the arena segregated, though the black fans mostly sat together, as did the white fans. During warm-ups the black players were not taunted with racial epithets. Everyone assumed that once the opening tap arrived, it would be just another game.
They were wrong. During the first few minutes of UCLA’s game against Houston, the officials repeatedly whistled Hazzard and Slaughter for personal fouls. The refs didn’t even bother to pretend that the calls were fair. At one point, after yet another foul on Hazzard, Gower heard one of the Houston coaches shout to an official, “You’re doing good! Now get the other one!” Pete Blackman said: “I didn’t hear the refs say anything, but it was so obvious they weren’t going to let Walt and Fred play. We were getting hosed.”
It was never a game. Hazzard and Slaughter spent most of the second half on the bench, and UCLA lost, 91–65. Everyone was in too much shock to say much afterward. “I don’t remember that Wooden said anything whatsoever,” Gower said. “There was no comment after the game about what had gone on. There really wasn’t a lot of comment on anybody’s part.”
The team went back to the dorm and slept. When the players gathered for breakfast the next morning, many of the white players felt trepidation. How would the black guys react? Would they be bitter? Crushed? Would they somehow hold their white teammates responsible? The season was already at a delicate juncture as the Bruins had now lost five of their first seven games, with the first four losses coming by a total 8 points. This trip threatened to tear the machine apart.
When Hazzard, Slaughter, and Gower came to breakfast, however, they showed none of those attitudes. Instead, they joked about what had happened. Their reaction punctured the tension. They made clear that in their minds, all of the players had suffered an injustice, not just the three of them. “They were unbelievable. I was shocked by what I had seen, but they just made a joke out of it,” Blackman said. “Everybody knew it wasn’t a joke, but they were making damn sure that their buddies on the UCLA team, who came from a different background, were included in the experience. Instead of being bitter or negative or withdrawn or any of the things they could have been, they were eighteen-year-old guys who said, Screw it. We’re gonna hang together no matter what. And wasn’t that a crazy experience?”
Wooden did not discuss what happened. Nor did he sit down with Hazzard and Slaughter to make sure their feelings weren’t hurt. He did, however, make a change to his lineup. Shortly before UCLA took the floor the following evening against Texas A&M, Wooden informed the team that Hazzard and Slaughter would not be playing. “We thought it was a powerful gesture,” Blackman said. “And then we went out and played a hell of a game.”
Angry and inspired by what had happened to their teammates the night before, the Bruins took their frustration out on the Aggies. The game was still close midway through the second half, but UCLA broke things open over the last six minutes to win, 81–71, behind 22 points each from Green and Cunningham. The players felt enormous gratification. As they exited the locker room, Blackman, who considered himself quite the poet, left behind a few verses that he had etched onto the blackboard. The last one read: “They laid me out upon the rack / And only half my name is black.”
The accounts from local newspapers in Houston made no reference to the way UCLA’s black players had been treated. They didn’t even report Wooden’s lineup change. However, the press corps in Los Angeles was more inquisitive. When the Bruins returned home, the local sportswriters noticed that Hazzard and Slaughter were missing from the Texas A&M box score. When asked to explain it at the weekly writers’ luncheon three days later, Wooden insisted that there had been “no incidents” in Houston. “My feeling was that we’d be better off not playing them that night,” he said. “The boys told me after the game they were pleased I didn’t play them.” Wooden added that “there was no segregated seating, no picket lines, and no cat calls.” Though the Los Angeles Times revealed that “prior to the trip, considerable pressure was brought on the Bruins by various groups and individuals, urging Wooden not to play his Negro players in Houston,” the coach himself “indicated he didn’t care to enter into any racial discussions.”
Wooden was doing more than just avoiding a controversial topic. He was lying. It was one thing to sidestep a public discussion on race when he was coaching in Indiana in 1948, but he was now living in a time when the issue of how blacks were being treated in America had become an important topic in the nation’s political and cultural discourse. Wooden had been presented with a rare opportunity to advance the cause of justice, but he chose not to do so, ignoring once again the power of his own words. Who, exactly, was he protecting? His black players? The racist referees? Blackman saw Wooden’s evasions as being consistent with his
“dedication to non-pretension,” but in this instance it was also an abdication of responsibility. If Wooden really wanted to help his black players, he would have spoken out against what happened to them in Houston, but he didn’t do so, out of fear that it might disrupt his little machine.
And yet Wooden’s black players did not begrudge his decision. In their eyes, he had spoken quite clearly through his actions. “I can’t think of any of the African American players who played for him who would do anything less than revere John Wooden for what he tried to do,” Gower said. “We understood that with his background, he wouldn’t be as tuned in to the African American experience as someone who came from a more mixed community. He wasn’t going to know who James Brown was, or the difference between the SCLC and the SNCC. But that was all right. You cut him some slack because you knew he was sincere.”
Racial problems aside, UCLA’s trip to Houston proved to be invaluable from a basketball perspective. It was an uncomfortable experience, but it was one that the players had gone through together, and it helped break down some of the barriers between them. “It took our group to another planet in terms of how well we played together. He welded us,” Blackman said. For his part, Wooden was just glad it was over. When asked at the press luncheon whether he intended to bring his team back to Houston soon, Wooden answered no. But, he added, “that doesn’t mean we won’t play there eventually.”
17
“Don’t Be a Homer!”
“Pressure, self-inflicted, is closing in on UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. A monster of his own making, a record of never experiencing a losing season as a college coach, is in jeopardy.…”
Those ominous words appeared at the beginning of an article published in the Los Angeles Times on January 25, 1962. Under the headline “Wooden’s Record Faces Pitfalls,” Mal Florence raised the horrifying specter that Wooden might coach a sub-.500 team. At the time, the Bruins owned a 7–7 overall record and were 3–0 in conference play, yet Florence surmised that “eight of UCLA’s remaining 11 games are with teams which, on paper, at least, figure to beat the Bruins.” That included Texas Tech, the defending Southwest Conference champion, which was coming to town to face UCLA on consecutive nights at Santa Monica City College.
The team had larger issues than a sportswriter’s pessimism. Back in December, three days after returning home from Houston, UCLA had played in the third annual Los Angeles Basketball Classic, a three-day, eight-team tournament at the Sports Arena that had drawn its most prestigious field yet. Five of the teams were ranked in the top twelve of the Associated Press poll, including No. 1 Ohio State. Unranked UCLA beat Army in its first game, advancing to play the Buckeyes in the next round.
Walt Hazzard relished the opportunity to go up against the Buckeyes’ All-American forward, Jerry Lucas, but the evening did not go as Hazzard hoped. The trouble started earlier in the day, when Hazzard missed the pregame meal. After arriving at the arena, Hazzard tried to explain to Wooden that he had gotten stuck in traffic, but the coach would have none of it. He informed Hazzard that he would not start against Ohio State. Wooden inserted Hazzard into the game midway through the first half, but by then, the Buckeyes were cruising to victory behind Lucas’s 30 points and 30 rebounds. The next evening would see the title game between USC and Ohio State, with UCLA relegated to the third-place game against Utah. This time Hazzard started, but Wooden quickly grew displeased with his star player’s showboating style and yanked him again. “He was screaming and yelling at me,” Hazzard recalled many years later. “I didn’t like anyone yelling at me. I was as sensitive as anyone.”
UCLA lost, 88–79, to drop to 4–7. The Bruins were scheduled to have a week off for the Christmas holiday before their next game. That gave Hazzard and Wooden some badly needed time apart, but the break also gave Hazzard the chance to go home and stew. After spending a few days in Philadelphia, he decided he did not want to return to Los Angeles.
Hazzard called his mentor and friend, Willie Naulls, to inform him of his decision. Since Naulls was the one who had brokered Hazzard’s recruitment to UCLA, he felt obligated to offer to contact other schools on Walt’s behalf. But Naulls also told Hazzard of the similar period of adjustment he had gone through with Wooden, and he advised Hazzard to stick it out. Hazzard also told his father he wanted to transfer, but unbeknown to him, Wooden had already called his father before he benched Hazzard for the Ohio State game. When Hazzard told his dad that he wanted to quit, the reverend’s advice was firm. Go back to Los Angeles, he told his son. Play ball. Get good grades. And do whatever the man says.
Hazzard did as his father instructed, and the new year began with some promise. UCLA opened conference play with a two-game sweep of Washington at home and then knocked off Cal in Berkeley by 11 points. And yet the local fans had seen this movie many times before. Wooden’s Bruins always pulled off delightful wins in January and February, but when they moved to a bigger stage in March, they got outclassed by some other West Coast outfit—USC, Oregon State, Cal, San Francisco, whatever. That was the underlying message of Florence’s article. It wasn’t just about the possibility Wooden’s team might lose more games than it won. It was about the growing sense that too often his teams were good enough to raise expectations but not good enough to meet them. “Wooden has dribbled himself into a corner,” Florence concluded. “Maybe that’s the price of success, John.”
* * *
The losing season never happened, primarily because Hazzard breathed new life into Wooden’s old fast break. The quicker tempo unleashed Johnny Green and Gary Cunningham as the prolific scorers they were meant to be, and it allowed UCLA to surge during the last two months of the season. The Bruins shocked Texas Tech in Santa Monica, winning both games by 29 points each, and followed those victories with a 73–59 upset of fifth-ranked USC at the Sports Arena behind Green’s 28 points. After the Bruins beat Stanford, 82–64, on February 10, they brought their perfect 5–0 record in the AAWU (or the “Big Five,” as it was coming to be called) to their two-game series with USC.
It was customary for a USC-UCLA game to be accompanied by some controversy, but this time it came from an unusual source: Wooden himself. During the first half of the Bruins’ upset of USC two weeks earlier, some sideline observers had heard USC cocaptain Ken Stanley yelling, “Lay off of me!” at Wooden as he ran past the UCLA bench. According to Florence, “Wooden had been needling Stanley for allegedly overguarding Gary Cunningham.” The issue of Wooden’s “bench jockeying tactics,” as Florence called them, had been quietly smoldering for many years. When it was raised at the weekly writers’ luncheon preceding the USC series, Wooden stood his ground. “I’ve been singled out, and I sort of question the fairness of this,” he said. “I definitely feel I’ve acted within the bounds of decency. I certainly don’t demonstrate to the crowd like other coaches.”
Wooden’s rough treatment of officials may have been familiar to basketball people along the West Coast, but until then it was largely unknown to the public. It grated on his rivals to know that his private behavior was so at odds with his public persona. “Dallmar and Newell used to tell me that Wooden had this purist image that wasn’t exactly accurate,” said Dan Hruby, who covered the Bay Area schools for the San Jose Mercury News. “Wooden would sit there with his rolled-up program, kind of cover his mouth. When an official made a bad call and ran by him, Wooden would yell at him using some pretty choice terms. Then he’d smile and wave and everybody would say, there’s good old Saint John.”
The truth is, Wooden had been jockeying from the bench ever since he was a high school coach, but it was jarring when other people, especially his own players, first discovered this side of his personality. “I had been practicing for him for almost two months before we had our first game,” Johnny Green said. “Then I get out there and I hear him yelling at a referee who was one of his favorite targets. ‘Come on, Joe, that was a foul! Start calling ’em at both ends!’ I went, Whoa, where did that come from? That’s one
thing that really surprised me.”
That intensity belied the scholarly pose Wooden struck on the sideline. As the players sped back and forth in front of him, he would squirm in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, clutching that rolled-up program in his hand. He often said the program served as a convenient place to jot notes, but it also doubled as a megaphone. His barbs were frequent, precise, and cutting—but never profane. During a typical exchange, a writer sitting courtside heard Wooden bark, “Dadburn it, Joe, you saw him double dribble down there! Goodness gracious sakes alive, everybody in the place saw that!”
Wooden believed this was not only appropriate but an integral part of his job. “I want my players to know I’m behind them,” he said. He also insisted his sideline behavior was no worse—and probably much better—than that of a lot of other coaches. “I don’t stand up and do anything to excite the crowd. That’s one of the worst things coaches can do,” he said. “I don’t say, ‘You’re a homer!’ I’ll say, ‘Don’t be a homer!’ I’ll say, ‘See ’em the same at both ends!’ I’ll say, ‘Watch the traveling,’ or some such.” Furthermore, Wooden added, “No official, no player has ever heard me use a word of profanity.… Of course, I have told referees that I couldn’t tell their tops from their bottoms, which is almost as bad as swearing.”
Wooden believed the criticism directed at him on this front was way out of proportion. “I don’t say I keep quiet. I needle, in a soft-sell way,” he said. “I don’t mean to be questioning their integrity. And yet when I say, ‘Don’t be a homer,’ am I questioning their integrity? I don’t think so because it’s a subconscious thing. And I think if you can get ’em thinking about it, they’ll be less likely to be swayed by the home crowd.”