Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Wooden was pleased that there was so little agreement. “As long as so many coaches feel there are so many ways to beat the zone press,” he said, “that means no one is really sure.”

  For all their theories, those coaches failed to understand the two most important things about the zone press. First, the main reason it worked was the personnel executing it. Wooden rode two All-American guards to those back-to-back NCAA titles, and he had an Olympic-level athlete playing the pivotal rear position. Second, none of the coaches grasped that the true purpose of the press was to force the tempo. Even if all their geometric theories enabled their team to beat the press for layups, that would have been okay with Wooden. As long as the opponent played faster than it wanted to, Wooden believed his better-conditioned players would gain the advantage over the final minutes.

  There was something else missing from the story: an acknowledgment from Wooden that the zone press was not originally his idea. In fact, Jerry Norman’s name did not appear anywhere in the article, an omission that did not go unnoticed back in Westwood, least of all by Norman.

  The world would soon see how much the zone press—or any defense, for that matter—would depend on having quality personnel. Not only did UCLA have to replace Goodrich and Erickson, but the team would also have to begin the season without Freddie Goss, whose back ailment still had not been definitively diagnosed, though doctors suspected he had a blood infection. That forced Wooden to start Mike Warren, and the smooth little point guard from South Bend proved to be a stellar find. Warren had been recruited primarily to be a setup man, but he scored a combined 51 points as UCLA routed Ohio State and Illinois in its first varsity games in Pauley Pavilion.

  As would be the case throughout the season, however, the Bruins were a much different team away from home. That became obvious when they hit the road for a much-ballyhooed two-game series with Duke, which was ranked third by the AP and fifth in the UPI poll. The first game took place on Duke’s campus in Durham, and the second was held at the Charlotte Coliseum. UCLA was undermanned and overwhelmed, especially without Goss, and the Blue Devils swept the Bruins by 16 and 19 points. It was UCLA’s first back-to-back losses in more than three years. The trip also disgusted Wooden for reasons beyond what happened on the court. This was UCLA’s first foray to the South since its ill-fated trip to Houston four years before. While the Bruins did not have to deal with segregated hotels or racist referees, they were confronted by a handful of fans who brought Confederate flags to the games and shouted racial taunts at UCLA’s black players. “I said I won’t go back to this place again, and I never did,” Wooden said years later. “Not because of the coach, not because of the players, but because of the fans. Particularly [their behavior] toward the black players.”

  The losses dropped UCLA to No. 8 in the AP poll. The Bruins beat Kansas in Pauley by 7 points in their next outing, but after losing to Cincinnati by 6 points in Chicago, they dropped out of the rankings altogether. (The national polls only ranked ten teams back then.) They did not look anything like a team destined to win a third straight NCAA title.

  Meanwhile, Alcindor and the freshmen were having no trouble with their opponents. Wooden instructed Cunningham to leave his starters in the game until the waning minutes, regardless of the margin. The final scores looked like typos: 119–43, 152–49, 108–74. “He wanted the scholarship guys to play and get experience,” Cunningham said. “There were a lot of games that year that I was kind of embarrassed about the lopsided score.”

  Wooden remained committed to racehorse basketball, but he was also willing to slam on the brakes if he thought it would earn his team a win. After beginning conference play with routs of Oregon State and Oregon at Pauley, the Bruins hit the road and found themselves leading Cal by just 3 points with seven minutes to play. Wooden ordered his players to stall. When Cal coach Rene Herrerias answered by letting his team sit back in its zone defense, Wooden had his guys play keep-away. The boos rained down from the crowd, but Wooden instructed his players to hold the ball for more than two minutes before resuming their regular action. The tactic worked as UCLA won, 75–66, behind Mike Lynn’s game-high 25 points.

  The Bruins weren’t so fortunate the next night as they lost at Stanford, 74–69, ending their thirty-five-game conference winning streak. Bay Area fans savored the chance to kick a little sand in the face of the bullies from down south. Paul Zimmerman wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the win over UCLA had made Stanford coach Howie Dallmar a local hero. “Basketball followers have built up something of a hate for coach John Wooden and his Bruins here [in the Bay Area],” Zimmerman wrote. “Not all of it is predicated on the team’s outstanding success. They accuse John of making belittling remarks to opposing players during games as they pass the UCLA bench, and also of intimidating the officials.”

  UCLA lost two of its next three games to fall to 11–6. The team was clearly struggling to carry the mantle of being the two-time defending champs. After UCLA’s 1-point loss to Washington State on February 5, Cougars coach Marv Harshman told Wooden that the Cougars had played their finest game of the season. “He said they were fired up—something I’m getting tired of hearing,” Wooden said.

  Wooden suspected that something else was ailing his club. He confessed to one of his freshmen, Lynn Shackelford, that he believed the varsity players had never recovered mentally from the pounding they had suffered in that exhibition. “This team has been one of the most difficult teams I’ve ever had to coach because we started off the season by losing to the frosh,” he told Shackelford. “They’re keeping it inside themselves but you know that just really killed them.”

  UCLA followed the loss at Washington State by winning its next three games, only to lose back-to-back games at Oregon State and Oregon. The Bruins’ AAWU record was now 7–4, and even though they would end the regular season with four straight wins (including a two-game sweep of USC), they still finished in second place. Not only did that keep UCLA out of the NCAA tournament for the first time in three years, but it also denied the Bruins an opportunity to play those games in Pauley Pavilion, which was hosting the NCAA’s West Regional in its very first year of existence. (Assist, J. D. Morgan.)

  As for Lew Alcindor and his fellow freshmen, they did not lose a game all season. The closest they came was against USC, when the Trojans’ freshmen held the ball during every offensive possession. UCLA scored a season-low 28 points in the first half, but when USC freshman coach Bill Mulligan abandoned the stall midway through the second half, UCLA pulled away to win, 72–44. Afterward, Mulligan insisted that his team had “played them the only way you can play them.” He also confessed that during the first half, an angry fan approached the USC bench and asked Mulligan for his money back.

  Wooden knew that he could expect more stalling once Alcindor moved up to the varsity. But Wooden also knew that his team would face more of the bugaboos that were getting under his skin: Expectations. Pressure. Maximum effort from every opponent. Maximum energy from every crowd. All of it was playing out under the gathering assumption that if the Bruins didn’t win a championship—indeed, if they didn’t win three championships—then the whole Alcindor experiment would be labeled a bust. Al Wolf of the Los Angeles Times captured the coach’s predicament in a column that was published under the headline “Pressure’s on ‘Poor’ Wooden.” It read: “If you drop a pin in Azusa, John Wooden will jump a foot in Westwood. He’s that jittery these days. The UCLA basketball coach, instead of basking in the happy thought that long and silent Lew Alcindor will move up from the frosh to the varsity next season, desperately is attempting to fight off the whammy, hex and evil eye.” Acknowledging Wooden’s reminder that Wilt Chamberlain did not win a title at Kansas, that Oscar Robertson did not win a title at Cincinnati, that Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek only won one title at Ohio State, and that Cazzie Russell couldn’t even bring Michigan back to the NCAA semifinals that were taking place that weekend, Wolf countered that Alcindor would be surrounded with much grea
ter talent than any of those players were. The only acceptable outcome, therefore, was perfection.

  There was no getting around it. The bar was going to be set impossibly high. “You can’t get off the spot, John,” Wolf concluded. “And how many other coaches would like to have your problem!”

  * * *

  Since Stretch Murphy, his old Purdue teammate, was Wooden’s only frame of reference for how to play with a true center, it was time for the teacher to go back to school. Wooden spent most of the spring and summer of 1966 calling around the country to learn everything he could about a low-post offense. He called his old nemesis Henry Iba, who had won two NCAA titles with seven-foot center Bob Kurland. He called George Mikan, the three-time All-American center at DePaul who went on to star with the Minneapolis Lakers. He called Mikan’s college coach, Ray Meyer. He called Adolph Rupp and Wilt Chamberlain. He often told his players that failure to prepare was preparation to fail, so he made sure he was thoroughly prepared for the 1966–67 season.

  When Alcindor returned to campus that fall for his sophomore year, his outlook had changed, and not for the better. The previous spring, without basketball to provide structure and force him to interact with other students, Alcindor felt intensely lonely during the two months between the end of the season and the end of the semester. There were no more parties, no more efforts to join the campus social scene. It was just him, a few black friends, and his studies. “He seemed a lot more angry when he came back that summer. He just became remote,” Kenny Heitz said. “We spent a lot of time running around during our freshman year, but after that, there was not much of a personal relationship with me and him.”

  Alcindor’s lifestyle made it easy to cloister himself. Over the summer, he had worked in the publishing and recording divisions of Columbia Pictures in the studio’s New York offices. He had gotten the job courtesy of an influential UCLA alumnus named Mike Frankovich, and his responsibilities were so minimal that on some days, Alcindor would check in at the front desk to let them know he was there, and then walk directly to a freight elevator and head home. He earned $125 per week, not exactly a king’s ransom, but enough to allow him to save up and buy a 1958 Mercedes for $1,100. Now that he had his own wheels, Alcindor was free to live with Edgar Lacey in a small apartment in Santa Monica. But that proved to be too expensive, so the two of them moved to Pacific Palisades and, later, back to Westwood, where they rented a maid’s quarters in a condominium. Basketball star or not, Alcindor never seemed to have enough money in his pocket.

  Wooden and Alcindor were not particularly close, but Alcindor respected his coach. When Alcindor bragged to Wooden about how good his grades were, Wooden reminded him that he still had three long years remaining to get his degree. “He knew when to stick his finger in the bubble,” Alcindor said. “He let some of that hot air out, let some of that pride and arrogance dissipate into the air where it belonged.”

  That November, Wooden invited Alcindor and Allen to his home for Thanksgiving. Even though they got lost and arrived an hour late, Wooden was a gracious host, chitchatting with the boys about school, their hometowns, current events—anything besides basketball. Those kinds of exchanges, however, were rare. Neither player craved social time with their coach. He was there to teach them to play basketball, nothing more, nothing less.

  There was, however, another adult who became Alcindor’s mentor beginning that fall. Willie Naulls had finished his ten-year career with the New York Knicks, San Francisco Warriors, and Boston Celtics, and he had returned to UCLA to pursue a degree in economics. Naulls was working his way into the city’s business community, and like Jay Carty, he asked Wooden if he could help out in practice. Naulls took an interest in Alcindor where Wooden didn’t and couldn’t—as a fellow black man who understood the pressures, expectations, and confusion that came with being a star basketball player at UCLA.

  With Alcindor’s varsity career set to get under way, the school could no longer keep him under wraps. On the first day of practice, UCLA held a press conference to introduce the team. Of course, the only person the press wanted to talk to was Alcindor, partly because they had never been able to interact with him before. The first question, naturally, was about his height. “I’m seven feet one and three-eighth inches tall. I weigh two-thirty,” he said quietly.

  Needless to say, the expectations for this team were off the charts. The Bruins were tabbed as the No. 1 team in both the AP and UPI polls. Alcindor was on the cover of a plethora of national magazines, including Sports Illustrated’s season preview issue, where he appeared on a foldout cover under the banner, “The New Superstar.” Wooden was already fretting his team couldn’t possibly live up to all that hype, so imagine his chagrin when he lost not one but two upperclassman starters for the season. The first was Edgar Lacey, who had season-ending surgery to repair a kneecap he had fractured the previous season. (The loss was a double blow for Alcindor, since Lacey was his best friend on the team.) The Bruins would also have to play without Mike Lynn, who was suspended for the season after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of credit card theft.

  With two upperclassmen waylaid, Wooden was faced with the frightening specter of a starting lineup that included four sophomores and one junior (Warren). As good as Alcindor was, he would need help from his teammates, especially Lucius Allen, who had been the second-best player on the freshman team the year before, averaging 22.4 points per game. Like Alcindor, Allen considered Wooden a very good basketball coach, but he did not swing by his office to shoot the breeze. “Jerry Norman and Willie Naulls were the guys I confided in, not Coach Wooden,” Allen said. “If you were going to talk with Coach Wooden privately in his office, that was not going to be pleasurable.”

  Like Alcindor, Allen was also coming to terms with issues of race and society. “In those days, we walked around with a chip on our shoulder. We weren’t gonna take anything from Whitey,” Allen said. Once in a while, when Wooden would refer to Allen as his “boy” (as he did all his players), Allen would bridle. Wooden would only smile and say, “Of course you’re my boy, Lucius.” Yet, even in his chippiest moments, Allen never once questioned Wooden’s intentions. “I never felt anything racist from him—ever—as much as I tried to bring it into the fold.”

  When Allen heard that Wooden regularly schooled his former players in shooting contests, he grabbed Mike Warren and gave it a try. “He just whipped the crap out of us,” Allen recalled. “He talked the whole time he was beating us. ‘Now, listen guys, this is how you shoot a jump shot, okay? Watch this release and—oh, that went in, didn’t it.’” Wooden also got the better of Allen on the pool table. Allen spent many hours in his dormitory shooting stick when he should have been studying. He even got good at hustling the other students, letting them win a game or two and then trouncing them when real money was on the line. Wooden happened to see Allen and Alcindor shooting pool during a road trip and cracked, “Aww, that’s niche-picking.” When Lucius dared him to pick up a cue, Wooden virtually ran the table. “When he missed, he never left me in position where I could make a shot,” Allen said. “At the end, he winked at me and said, ‘Now, Lucius, if I can beat you, you don’t have much chance to make a living at this game. I suggest you go to the library.’”

  * * *

  With the core of the team set, it was up to the rest of the squad to find their place within the machine. “You knew Kareem, Lucius, and Mike were going to get minutes,” Heitz said, referring to Alcindor by the name he would later adopt, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “The rest was like a street fight.” Shackelford was a shoo-in at forward. His size and long-range shooting made him an ideal complement to Alcindor’s low-post prowess, and his participation in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes didn’t hurt him in Wooden’s eyes. Heitz started at the other forward spot, but he had to fight off two other sophomores, Jim Nielsen and Bill Sweek, for minutes. Alcindor came to enjoy the comic relief those frat boys provided, especially on the road, although it took some time for him and Sweek
to warm up to each other. “We had a total disconnect at first,” Sweek said. “I was a West Coaster, free-living surfer, doing crazy pranks in the dorms. He was sophisticated and serious. I remember the first time he told me I was racist or something, I said, ‘Man, you don’t even know who I am. Until you really know me, I don’t think that’s fair.’”

  The 1966–67 season was shaping up to be unlike any that the school, or the sport, had experienced. As usual, J. D. Morgan was ready to pounce. Since he was assured of a sellout crowd every time UCLA played at Pauley Pavilion, he loaded up on home games. Moreover, he had secured yet another contract with KTLA-TV. The movie actor Gene Autry had purchased the station from Paramount, and he wanted KTLA to emphasize sports. Morgan negotiated a five-year, six-figure contract that would enable KTLA to broadcast a variety of UCLA sporting events. The problem was, Morgan also had an obligation to the school’s radio network to keep most of the basketball games off live TV. So he came up with an ingenious solution: on the nights when KTLA was forbidden from showing the basketball games live, it was permitted to air those games on tape delay. That meant that the local news had to refrain from announcing UCLA scores on its evening newscasts, or at least give viewers a warning that the final score was about to be revealed. To call the games, KTLA hired a thirty-year-old health education teacher and assistant baseball coach at San Fernando Valley State College who had done some sports announcing on radio while he was an undergraduate at Central Michigan University and later as a grad student at Indiana University. The young fellow’s name was Dick Enberg.