by Seth Davis
KTLA also committed to producing a weekly half-hour show with Wooden during the season. Wooden was fast becoming a star in a town full of them, especially after he published his first book that fall. He called it Practical Modern Basketball, an homage to the groundbreaking Practical Basketball text that Piggy Lambert had written back in 1932. Wooden’s book laid out all of his teachings in deep detail (and dry prose). He described his overarching philosophies—including an explanation of the tenets that made up his Pyramid of Success—as well as a step-by-step breakdown of how a coach should manage every aspect of his program. He described precisely what kind of socks players should wear, what they should eat before a game, how they should organize their dressing room, and what they should do to avoid colds. (“Instruct the players to rub down briskly after they shower and to dry their hair well.”) Yet for all the intricacies contained in his book, the view of the game that Wooden described was surprisingly simple. He did not worry that publishing this book would give an advantage to opposing coaches because, as he wrote, “there are no real secrets to the game, at least not for very long.” The book enhanced his image as a humble champion.
Alcindor was much the same way, which is why he and Wooden got along so well. Wooden told Alcindor early on that if he scored as many points as he was capable of, it would destroy the team’s chemistry. Alcindor agreed, but they made an exception for the season opener against USC. This was, after all, Alcindor’s first real game. Wooden wanted to strike fear into the hearts of the rest of the conference, not to mention the country.
It helped that Bob Boyd, USC’s new coach, had never seen Alcindor play before. Boyd tried to defend him with a straight up, man-to-man scheme, rotating six-foot-six Bill Hewitt and seven-foot Ron Taylor on Alcindor without any double coverage. He might as well have been back in high school. Time after time, Alcindor’s teammates fed him the ball down low, and he calmly dropped the ball in the basket. With a packed house of 13,800 looking on, Alcindor shot 23 of 32 from the floor and 10 for 14 from the foul line, for a total of 56 points. In his very first outing, he had shattered the school’s single-game scoring record of 42 set by Gail Goodrich in the 1965 NCAA championship game. After UCLA won, 105–90, Wooden told the press, “At times, he frightens me. When he gets it all together, he’s going to be something.”
The two-game homestand the following weekend was even bigger. The opponent for both games was seventh-ranked Duke. Wooden still had a bad taste from his experience in North Carolina the year before. Though he was never one to emphasize winning, he made sure his players knew he expected them to exact full revenge for the way they had been treated by the fans down there. Allen even heard his coach talking trash to some of the Duke players during warm-ups. Lucius can’t wait to get his hands on you. You’re in for a long night, son. “It looked like he was just walking around being John Wooden,” Allen said, “but he was baiting their players.”
Duke coach Vic Bubas may have overlearned the lesson from the USC game. During the first game, every time Alcindor touched the ball, he was swarmed by three Duke defenders. Rather than forcing a ton of shots, Alcindor kept dishing to his wide-open teammates. He scored just 19 points, but Warren had 26 as UCLA won, 88–54. The next night, Bubas assigned just two defenders at a time to guard Alcindor. He scored 38 points in a 107–87 drubbing. “Wooden wanted us to beat ’em bad—and we did,” Heitz said.
The games were so lacking in competitive drama that a reporter asked Wooden afterward if Alcindor might “wreck” college basketball. “There’s no such thing as any one player wrecking the game,” Wooden scoffed. He pointed out that when Bill Russell was at San Francisco, he played in a three-second lane that was just six feet wide, instead of the current twelve-foot lane. So Alcindor couldn’t possibly dominate the way Russell did. Bubas disagreed, surmising that Alcindor might score 80 points one of these days. “I suppose that if I had one game to play against them and my job depended on it, I’d have to slow the pace of the game way down, play a zone defense, hit about fifty percent and hope like the devil you can do some kind of a job on the boards,” Bubas said. “But basically I do not believe in that kind of basketball. We like to go up and down the court.”
The Bruins faced a much stiffer challenge twelve days later at home against Colorado State. The Rams were a strong, veteran, physical team, and with six minutes to play, they trailed UCLA by just 1 point. Alcindor was mesmerized by the way Wooden took control of the end-of-game strategy. The coach was always precise with his language, but Alcindor noticed that under pressure he spoke even more loudly, enunciated even more clearly. Wooden never said the word win, but he sure wanted his team to finish with more points than the other guys. “When it came to winning a game, he went all out. He held back nothing,” Alcindor said. “He didn’t try and break the rules, but within the rules, he was going to try and crush you.”
After UCLA escaped with an 84–74 victory, thanks to Alcindor’s 34 points and 20 rebounds, Wooden sounded relieved that his team had been exposed as less than a juggernaut. “This game proved that we’re going to be down on certain nights,” Wooden said. “Like I’ve been saying all along, we’re a young team and people expect too much.”
The Colorado State game was also the first time—but far from the last—that the referees’ treatment of Alcindor became an issue. Rams coach Jim Williams said the reason his team got into foul trouble was that “Alcindor was being overprotected.” He added, “Alcindor is great. I don’t know what more he could do with the ball once he gets it, but he doesn’t need all that protection.” When Wooden was asked whether Alcindor was overprotected, he replied, “If he was, then I must be blind.”
That question would recur throughout Alcindor’s career at UCLA, but he would not play in many more close games. There were certainly none to be found over the next few weeks as the Bruins steamrolled their next four opponents by an average of 29 points per game. That included USC, which UCLA beat by 24 points in the finals of the L.A. Classic in late December. Poor Bob Boyd. At the very moment he had returned to coach his alma mater, he was met by an imposing center the likes of which the game had never seen. And the Trojans still had two games remaining against UCLA on their schedule. Unlike the first two meetings, those would count in the league standings. Boyd realized that if he didn’t come up with something new, the Bruins would turn his team into a laughingstock, over and over again.
* * *
How badly did Bob Boyd want to win? He was once called for a technical foul for arguing with a referee who had been the best man at his wedding. Boyd knew the biggest reason his predecessor, Forrest Twogood, was let go was that he had fallen so far behind Wooden. USC’s two December losses to the Bruins made him realize just how big the gap was. Boyd was close friends with Pete Newell, the only coach who consistently got the better of Wooden, so he picked Newell’s brain about his deliberate offense. Boyd began teaching that offense to his players on the first day of practice, but he had no intention of revealing it for a game that didn’t count in the conference standings. He decided to save it for the game between USC and UCLA that was scheduled to take place at the Sports Arena on February 4.
The Bruins came into that contest still undefeated and on a roll. Their only hint of a struggle after the Colorado State game had been a 76–67 win at Washington State. At the end of January, they had taken what turned out to be a harrowing trip to the Midwest. First, the team’s flight was delayed by a major snowstorm. The Bruins reached Chicago in time only because J. D. Morgan had convinced the pilot to land the plane in St. Louis, where a caravan of taxis awaited to whisk them to a train station. Only Morgan could pull off such a feat. Despite the horrible weather, more than nineteen thousand people packed into Chicago Stadium to watch the Bruins blitz Loyola University Chicago and Illinois on back-to-back nights by a total of 53 points.
Then there was the touchy matter of Alcindor’s safety. In the days leading up to the much-ballyhooed trip, he had received death threats via two letters t
hat bore Chicago postmarks. UCLA hired a plainclothes officer to protect Alcindor during the trip. Having seldom traveled outside the comfortable bubble of Westwood, the other Bruins finally got a real taste of the bile that Alcindor had been exposed to for most of his life. “The stuff he went through was horrible,” Heitz said. “We’d go through the airport and people would walk by and say, ‘That’s the biggest nigger I’ve ever seen.’ It happened in the arenas, in hotels. It happened all over the place.”
Wooden had grown up in Indiana during the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, yet he had never witnessed such overt racism. He frequently said that his years coaching Alcindor taught him about “man’s inhumanity to man.” One day, as he and Alcindor were walking through a hotel lobby, a white woman who was passing by exclaimed, “Look at that big black freak!” When Wooden tried to empathize, Alcindor told him, “You can say you understand, but you’re an older man, and you’re white. You can never truly understand what it’s like to be me.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Wooden replied. “But I can try, can’t I?”
“Yes, you can try. But you can never really know.”
The treatment made Alcindor’s calm temperament on the court all the more impressive in Wooden’s eyes. The coach had always lectured his players about the importance of an even keel, but no player had done it as well, and under more duress, than Alcindor. His defenders were always smaller, slower, and less graceful, so their only hope was to be shove him around and hope the refs swallowed their whistles. After UCLA knocked off California in Pauley by 18 points in January, Wooden complained yet again that Alcindor was “not getting enough protection” and that several of his traveling calls came after he got pushed. “I’m still amazed at the way Lew can keep his poise in there and not get rattled,” Wooden said.
At this point, Alcindor’s numbers were so overwhelming that the only nit to be picked was the lopsided scores he produced. “How about you? I can’t get interested in college basketball this season,” John Hall wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “UCLA is so good there’s no more sport to it.” In early January, the Saturday Evening Post published an article under the headline, “Can Basketball Survive Lew Alcindor?” Of course, ten years earlier the magazine had asked the very same question about Chamberlain.
Boyd was determined to derail this powerful engine. When the Bruins returned from their trip to Chicago with a 16–0 record, Boyd and his Trojans were ready to spring their surprise. After UCLA jumped out to a quick 7–2 lead, Boyd called time-out. When play resumed, the Trojans went into their Newell-esque offense. Back and forth the ball went, around the perimeter, over and over, with the USC players passing up open shots. The Trojans’ seven-foot center, Ron Taylor, moved to the high post in an effort to draw Alcindor away from the basket, but Wooden told Lew to stay put. As the Trojans continued to pass it around, Alcindor simply stood under the basket with his hands on his hips, occasionally stretching down to touch his shoes.
According to the rules, the team that was behind on the scoreboard was required to force the action. The refs, however, did not know that rule. As Boyd acknowledged later, had it been properly applied the Trojans would have had to make a move. But it wasn’t, so the Trojans were able to go nearly nine minutes without attempting a shot. The home crowd at the Sports Arena booed Boyd mercilessly, but his offense was working. USC led at halftime, 17–14. As Boyd made his way to the locker room, the fans hurled paper cartons at him.
Still, he was committed to the strategy, and the Trojans surrendered their lead just once in the second half. By that time the home fans had become so unruly that Boyd found his athletic director, Jess Hill, and told him to get some more security around his team’s bench. The Trojans actually had a chance to win on their final possession, but Bill Hewitt’s jump shot from twenty feet was off. The second half ended in a 31–31 tie.
From there, UCLA owned the overtime. Sweek gave the Bruins a boost off the bench by providing two steals and a key late bucket, and UCLA emerged with a 40–35 win. Given how close the Trojans had just come to knocking off their rival, Boyd might have reasonably expected a standing ovation. Instead, he needed seven police officers to escort him across the court so he could do his postgame radio interview. “Even Trojan fans told me it was the worst thing they had ever seen,” he said later.
The treatment of the fans, however, was nothing compared to the sharp elbows thrown by his opposing coach a few minutes later. “It was a good game plan and it was executed well, but something like this is bad for the game, and I’ll tell Bob that too,” Wooden said. “I’m not critical of him for using it from a tactical standpoint, only from the standpoint of how much this can hurt basketball.” Asked whether he believed other coaches would attempt the same tactic against his Bruins down the road, Wooden allowed that it was possible. “But I don’t think most coaches will try it,” he added. “Too many coaches think too much of basketball to do it.”
While there was some validity to what Wooden was saying—if every game were played that way, most fans wouldn’t bother watching—his remarks were blatantly hypocritical. This was, after all, the same John Wooden who just thirteen months earlier had also ignored boos and slowed down a game in order to preserve a 9-point win at Cal. Wooden, in fact, had frequently used a stall throughout his career, most notably in 1955 when he brought UCLA’s game at Stanford to a complete standstill, prompting the San Francisco Examiner to publish that photograph of UCLA guard Don Bragg holding the ball under the headline, “Stall-Wart Bruins.” Yet now, after facing the same treatment from USC, Wooden was trying to have it both ways. He wasn’t saying that it was wrong to stall per se, just that it should be done in the proper manner, under proper circumstances, for an acceptable length of time. And who was the great sage deeming what was proper and acceptable? Why, John Wooden, of course.
For Boyd, it was a devastating accusation. He was a relatively unknown coach in his first year on the job, and he had darn near knocked off mighty UCLA. Yet, the most influential coach in the country had just vilified him. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I got branded a staller,” Boyd said many years later. “We ran a deliberate offense with selective shooting and we made seventeen of twenty-four shots, but the L.A. media took John’s position. We weren’t stalling. We were trying to win the damn game.”
The controversy dominated the weekly writers’ luncheon that was held two days later at the Sheraton West hotel, where Wooden softened his tone but held to his opinion. “I want to make it very clear that there was no personal criticism intended and I want to apologize to Bob if he took it that way,” Wooden said. “However, if you want to hear me say I thought it was good, you’re crazy. Is it illegal? No. Is it bad for Bob to use it? No. I don’t profess to be right or wrong. I just think it’s bad for the game.”
As Wooden stepped away from the podium, he was followed by USC’s athletic director, Jess Hill. Seeing that Wooden was headed for the exit, Hill said, “I prefer you stay.” As Wooden took his seat, Hill pulled a newspaper clip from his pocket and read Wooden’s comments aloud. “There is a certain amount of accusation in that remark, and I resent it,” Hill said. “I can’t see anything that happened the other night that wasn’t good for basketball. Bob had my support in everything he did. Any team that attempts to run against UCLA is doomed for devastation. I don’t see much difference in stalling in the last four minutes of the game or at the beginning.”
Reached at home later that evening, Wooden was asked about Hill’s broadside. “I think I’d be belittling myself to comment on his remarks,” he said.
A few other coaches also jumped to Boyd’s defense. “All Wooden has to do when he beats somebody, which is all the time, is talk about his own team’s performance, compliment the efforts of his opponent and drop the subject,” Cal coach Rene Herrerias said. “I notice he didn’t have much good to say about the coaching job done by Bob Boyd. He just criticized the style of play Boyd used in the game. Wooden can’t expect us to lie down
and play dead for him.” Sportswriter Dan Hruby asserted in the San Jose Mercury News that Wooden “has a knack for ungraciousness that is difficult to beat.… Wooden is active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and presents a powerful image, but opposing coaches underline that he is in a class by himself as an official baiter. He sometimes is referred to as ‘St. John’ by the coaching fraternity.”
Two weeks after the USC game, Wooden made his point in a more direct fashion. The Bruins were playing at Oregon, whose coach, Steve Belko, was one of the few coaches on the West Coast who also preferred up-tempo basketball. Having just been eviscerated by UCLA in a 34-point loss in Pauley Pavilion the week before, Belko decided he needed to try something completely different. As soon as the game got under way, he ordered his players to slam on the brakes. Like Boyd, Belko was booed by his own fans, but at halftime his Ducks trailed the Bruins 18–14.
Now it was Wooden’s turn to counter. First, he checked with his boss to make sure it was okay. Morgan gave his blessing. Then, in the locker room at halftime, Wooden told his team, “I want you to hold the ball.” The players were surprised, and more than a little confused. “We didn’t know exactly what he meant,” Shackelford said. “Did he want us to stand with the ball at halfcourt? ‘No, I don’t want you to just hold it. I want you to pass it around, but don’t shoot.’ We were a little mixed up there.”
At the start of the half, the Bruins got the ball and did as Wooden instructed. They passed it back and forth, never cutting, never shooting, over and over again. The crowd, realizing what was going on, now turned on Wooden. But he kept the stall in place, daring Belko to come out of his zone. Belko wouldn’t bite. Two minutes went by, then three, then four. Still no cutting, no driving, no shooting. Finally, after more than nine minutes had passed without either team attempting a field goal, Wooden gave his players the green light to resume their normal game. UCLA won, 34–25, to improve to 19–0.