Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  At UCLA, the specter of the rogue booster was established long before Gilbert came along. Earl Schulz, the former Cal guard who was named all-city in Los Angeles in 1957, recalled that after he decided he was going to Cal, a UCLA alum picked him up after class, drove him around Beverly Hills, and regaled him with promises of cushy jobs at local movie studios. “He asked me, ‘What do we have to do to get you over to this school?’” Schulz said. A few years later, Walt Hazzard and Freddie Goss frequently ate for free at Hollis Johnson’s restaurant, which happened to be where Wooden, a man of devout habit, had his own lunch every day. “Any time we were hungry, Walt and I would go there and Hollis would fix it up and bring it to us in the back alley,” Goss said. “We didn’t see that as big. What’s a hamburger and a milk shake?”

  The same moneyed crowd that slipped the players five bucks for rebounds during the Hazzard-Goodrich years were still treating players to events around town. “There was always some rich guy that was willing to take you to a game or something,” Kenny Heitz said. “I saw Sandy Koufax’s perfect game from a second-row seat because some travel agent took us. Was it against the rules? I have no idea.” Long before the Bruins were playing in Pauley Pavilion, players were selling their university-issued tickets for face value or more. “It was usually a manager or a trainer, and they’d ask you if you wanted your tickets for the home game,” Mike Serafin said. “It was pretty neat to have sixty or eighty bucks, and you could go out. It wasn’t until about twenty years later that I thought about that and wondered, was that even legal?”

  Freddie Goss found his own Jewish grandfather in a man named Al Levinson, who owned a major steel company based in the Compton neighborhood where Goss grew up. Levinson took such good care of Goss that Goss called him Uncle Al. Levinson, in turn, called Freddie “Preacher” because of his straightlaced Christian upbringing. Any time he wanted, Goss was allowed to walk into Levinson’s posh Bel Air home, raid the fridge, turn on the TV, and make himself comfortable.

  To help Goss with his money problems, Levinson “hired” Freddie to work at his office. “He gave me ten dollars an hour to study and make straight As. That was big money in 1960,” Goss said. “I remember he had a picture of Marilyn Monroe and a stock ticker in his office. I’d go there every day to study after school.” Goss said he never discussed this arrangement with any of his coaches, but Wooden knew who Levinson was. When Goss had to spend Thanksgiving in the hospital his senior season while recovering from that mysterious back ailment, Wooden and Levinson visited him together, along with a judge who Goss assumed was in Uncle Al’s pocket.

  Levinson’s association with UCLA ended abruptly when J. D. Morgan accepted the $1 million gift from Edwin Pauley to finance the on-campus pavilion. Levinson had been led to believe that his name would be on the building. Goss did not learn about the rift until the night that the arena was christened with the Salute to John Wooden and freshman-varsity game starring Alcindor. “Al wasn’t there. I didn’t know there was a falling out,” Goss said. “I got upset. I left Pauley Pavilion, drove to Bel Air, went to Al’s house. He said, ‘What do you want, Preacher?’ I asked him why he wasn’t at the game, and he told me J. D. Morgan had dogged him around. He never went to a game after that. There was a big void because there was no big booster around until Sam Gilbert came along.”

  In the years before Willie Naulls brought Alcindor and Allen to Gilbert’s house, Sam had been just another benign friend of the program, buying tickets from players and helping them get jobs around town. Keith Erickson remembered him as one of the guys who stood outside the locker room handing out oranges and apples. Mike Serafin had a similar recollection. “When I was a freshman [in 1963–64], the entire freshman team went to his house, played pool, and had dinner,” he said. “There wasn’t anything more to it than that.” Gilbert developed a particularly close friendship with Don Saffer, a six-foot-one Jewish guard from Westchester, California. “He was my angel,” Saffer said. Saffer collected tickets from a few of his teammates and gave them to Gilbert, who sold them above face value and gave Saffer the cash.

  Still, that was child’s play compared to what Gilbert was now doing for Alcindor and Allen. The players knew they had to keep Wooden from finding out, which wasn’t hard because he rarely inquired about their personal lives to begin with. “He was on his own little island. The assistant coaches, the alumni, the Willie Naullses, they made things happen. They left Coach out of the loop,” Allen said. “I can’t think of an alum that would have enough gall to go up to Coach Wooden and tell him there was something illegal about his program. Coach was just too far along on the other side of that.”

  If anything was going to jeopardize that, it would be Gilbert’s audacity. Since he felt no shame about what he was doing, he didn’t see any reason to hide it. The radio producer Bob Seizer, the former Daily Bruin writer, once found himself in Sam Gilbert’s office after meeting someone for lunch in the same building. Gilbert complained that too many other UCLA players were asking for the same kind of help he was giving to Alcindor and Allen. “He said, ‘If I buy Lew Alcindor a leather jacket, the whole team wants ’em,’” Seizer recalled. “He said he was going to get twenty guys to chip in. I said to my partner, Is this guy nuts? Does he know what will happen if that gets out?”

  Jerry Norman had known Gilbert as one of many UCLA alumni who helped players get jobs, which was allowed under NCAA rules. He grew suspicious when Alcindor called him one day from Gilbert’s office. Norman delivered a gentle warning to Lew. “Look, I don’t tell you how to live your life, but the little bit I know about this guy Sam Gilbert, if I were you, I’d be very careful,” Norman said. “Down the road—maybe not this year, but at some point—he’s going to want to extract his pound of flesh.”

  Alcindor disregarded that advice. For him, Gilbert was a godsend. He didn’t just help Alcindor with his money problems; he also taught Alcindor the basics of business and economics, about budgets and investing and tax advantages and long-range planning, concepts that Alcindor’s own working-class father could never have imparted. “Sam introduced me to the language of finance,” Alcindor said. “He said it was like knowing what the pick and roll is.” Alcindor and Allen took such a liking to Gilbert that they started calling him “Papa Sam,” or “Papa G,” or just plain “Papa.” “Sam was like my surrogate father,” Alcindor said several years later. “I certainly discussed with him a lot of things I wouldn’t discuss with my father.”

  Would Alcindor and Allen really have transferred to Michigan State if Naulls had not introduced them to Sam Gilbert? Allen thought so. “If not for Sam Gilbert, Kareem and I were going to Michigan State as a package. It was a done deal. Michigan State at that time knew how to take care of their ballplayers and I’ll just leave it at that,” he said. “We didn’t think there was any chance we’d be taken care of like that at UCLA because of who our coach was.… My stipend was ninety-two dollars a month, and I was living in Westwood, California. I came from a part of Kansas City that I was very fortunate to get out of. Sam Gilbert and the alumni buying my tickets allowed me to live and buy food and clothes.”

  In later years, Alcindor contended that all of that talk about transferring was just that—talk. “I feel like that had a lot more to do with being homesick than being a realistic option. Transferring would have really been a setback,” he said in 2006. “When you’re 19 years old, you think the world is your oyster and they better serve it up quickly. It wasn’t being served quickly enough. That’s all it was, teenage angst.” That was also the story that Alcindor gave to Wooden. “From what Alcindor told me later, no one had any influence, Sam Gilbert or anyone else, about … the possibility of leaving,” Wooden said years later. “I don’t think they discussed it seriously.”

  In Giant Steps, however, Alcindor gave the possibility more credence. As long as their coach and their Papa remained in separate silos, Allen and Alcindor could make Westwood their home. “Sam steered clear of John Wooden, and Mr. Wooden gave him
the same wide berth. Both helped the school greatly,” Alcindor wrote. “Once the money thing got worked out, I never gave another thought to leaving UCLA.”

  * * *

  While Allen and Alcindor were being sucked into Sam Gilbert’s orbit, John Wooden was jetting around the country to speak at coaching clinics. New York, Georgia, Alabama, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, out and back, out and back. Wooden had long avoided clinics, not because he didn’t want to share information but because he preferred to stay at home with his family. He had also been experiencing intense pain from a ruptured disc in his lower back, a hangover from his days in the navy. Wooden decided to put off surgery, but all those trips in a cramped airplane seat didn’t help. Still, he felt obligated. “If you don’t go when you’re winning, they say you’re high hat,” he said. “They put a lot of strain on you. Without realizing it, I had worn myself down.”

  It hit him after he had an anniversary dinner with Nell in August. As he was driving home, Wooden’s world suddenly started spinning. “I felt this must be the way you feel if you get drunk,” he said. He asked Nell to drive home, where he climbed into bed. At around 3:00 a.m. Wooden woke with a headache so painful that he thought he might be having a brain hemorrhage and told Nell to call an ambulance. Wooden spent the next ten days in the hospital, and he convalesced at home for an additional three weeks. “I walked down to the ocean every day with my little walking stick and talked with the other old people,” he said with a chuckle. “I made a lot of friends down there.”

  Though Wooden’s condition was officially (and nebulously) diagnosed as exhaustion, his symptoms indicate a classic case of vertigo, which sometimes strikes middle-aged men even when they are fully rested. Whatever the cause, it was fitting that this episode occurred just as Wooden was about to begin the most dizzying season of his career, one filled with splendid highs, discouraging lows, and lots of vertiginous turns in between.

  The first twister had touched down in late March 1967, when the National Basketball Committee of the United States and Canada, which regulated college basketball, passed a rule that made it illegal for a player to touch the ball when it was in “the ring cylinder.” In other words, players could no longer dunk. The change was immediately interpreted as a device to limit Alcindor, much as the committee’s decision to widen the free throw lane from six to twelve feet a decade earlier had been aimed at Bill Russell. Wooden fed that impression—“There is no question that the rule is designed to curtail the ability of one player,” he said at the time—but in actuality that was just a psychological ploy. After he retired, Wooden, who had been a member of the rules committee for five years, revealed that the change was actually made because too many rims had been bent by players who were dunking during warm-ups. “I’m not guessing on this. I know from when I was on the rules committee,” Wooden said. Still, this change became known as the “Lew Alcindor Rule,” though the man for whom it was named was unfazed. “It appears that people are trying to make it a small man’s game,” Alcindor said. “It makes no difference to the big man. You can change it to a layup very easily.”

  Alcindor delivered another tremor in November, when he attended a local meeting of the Black Youth Conference. The conference had been convened by Harry Edwards, a twenty-five-year-old associate professor of sociology at San Jose State College who was trying to organize a boycott of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. About 120 other black athletes were present, but Alcindor naturally drew the most attention. As a result, he was deluged with hate mail, and the school was so overwhelmed with phone calls that Wooden arranged a press conference so Alcindor could address the proposed boycott. Alcindor insisted he had not made up his mind about the Olympics, and Wooden, no fan of the Olympics himself, likewise insisted he wouldn’t try to make up his star player’s mind for him.

  Wooden also came closer than he realized to suffering a different kind of loss. Jerry Norman was getting tired of the coaching life—the hours, the stress, the little pay. He had been working part-time with some friends in the finance industry and was ready to move into that business full-time. J. D. Morgan talked Norman into staying, but Norman warned him that it would probably be his last year in Westwood. “Coaching was not a good profession on families, especially in those days,” Norman said. “Part of it was because we had won so much. I finally made a decision it wasn’t worth it.”

  As the 1967–68 season got under way, Wooden realized he had yet another complication: too many good players. This was a high-class problem, but it was still a problem. UCLA returned every significant member of the squad that had enjoyed a perfect season and won the NCAA title. To that mix, the Bruins were adding two very talented returnees: Edgar Lacey, who had sat out the previous season while recovering from a fractured kneecap, and Mike Lynn, who was back from his year-long suspension. The team also added six heralded sophomores.

  Lacey was especially eager to rejoin the fray. This was his senior year, and he hoped—expected, really—to join his close friend Lew Alcindor to form the best frontcourt in the country. Lacey was so excited that he turned down a chance to sign a contract with the Boston Celtics, who had selected him in the sixth round of the NBA draft, even though Jerry Norman had advised him to consider signing. “Edgar had never played anything but around the basket for us before Lew came up. The pros were taking a big gamble on him,” Norman said. Lacey, however, was determined to take the floor for UCLA. “My jump shot is back from the dead,” he proclaimed. “I worked on my outside shooting all summer and I’ve taken a healthier attitude toward playing defense.”

  The problems, such as they were, manifested from the very first game, a much-publicized contest at Purdue, which had invited its most famous alumnus to christen its brand-new, fourteen-thousand-seat field house. The Boilermakers also unveiled their celebrated sophomore guard Rick Mount, a six-foot-four native of Lebanon, Indiana, who was already being described as one of the best shooters of all time. Mount did not disappoint. After UCLA built a 12-point lead midway through the second half, Mount started drilling shots from all over the court en route to a game-high 28 points.

  The Bruins showed an alarming lack of poise. When Lacey missed a few shots and Lynn committed three quick turnovers, Wooden replaced them with Jim Nielsen and Lynn Shackelford. Purdue coach George King used an odd defensive formation called a diamond and one, in which a single defender played Alcindor man-to-man while the other four formed a diamond-shaped zone. Alcindor scored just 17 points, and the Boilermakers kept things close going into the final minute.

  Wooden put Lacey back in with three minutes to play, but with twenty-nine seconds on the clock he committed a foul on Mount, and then earned a technical foul for arguing the call. So Wooden put Lacey back on the bench. The extra free throw allowed Mount to tie the game at 71-all. On the ensuing possession, Mount missed a fifteen-foot attempt that could have put the Boilermakers ahead. Alcindor grabbed the rebound and immediately fired a pass ahead to Shackelford, who found Bill Sweek streaking down the wing. Sweek caught the ball and launched a shot from twenty feet. It swished through just as the buzzer sounded, giving UCLA a 73–71 victory. The delirious Bruins piled onto Sweek while the Purdue fans tossed debris onto the court. The game made Wooden feel light-headed all over again. “Well, I’m glad that’s over,” he said afterward.

  Despite the poor performances by Lynn and Lacey, and despite 18 points from Shackelford off the bench, Wooden was intent on keeping his rotation intact. “I don’t panic easily,” he said. Even so, in the games that followed, he continually shuffled his lineup while also rotating in Heitz and Sweek. For the first time in his career, Wooden was more worried about hurt feelings than what was best for the team. “I made a mistake,” he said years later. “You don’t make three men happy by having three starters. You make three unhappy. You’d be better to make two happy and one unhappy.”

  The basic problem Wooden faced was that his most gifted players did not make for the best fit. Lacey and Lynn might have possessed a lot o
f individual talent, but the player who complemented Alcindor best was Shackelford. He was the best shooter (especially from deep in the corners) and the most willing to play a supporting role. Wooden could see the resentment building. “It was obvious as far as practice was concerned that Lynn and Lacey were buddying up,” he said. “They said they each thought they were better ballplayers than Shackelford.”

  Lacey and Wooden never fought openly, but at close range, the tension was percolating. “I remember one practice when Edgar made a bank shot from the high post. Wooden made a joke and said something like, ‘Edgar, you’re our best bank shooter from that position.’ Kind of sarcastic,” Gene Sutherland said. “Edgar looked at him and said, ‘You noticed that?’ I thought, what’s going on with those guys?” Jay Carty added, “You could tell on the floor that something was going on. Lacey wasn’t as engaged.”

  And yet UCLA was so much more talented than its opponents, it was able to roll on without losing a game. In December, the Bruins walloped their only ranked opponent, tenth-ranked Bradley, by 36 points, and then captured the Los Angeles Classic at the Sports Arena. They were 8–0 entering conference play in the Pacific-8 (as the AAWU was now being called), and immediately swept Washington State and Washington in Pauley by a combined 60 points. That was followed by a 30-point win at Cal, where Alcindor set a Harmon Gym record by scoring 44 points.

  During the final minutes of that game, however, Cal center Tom Henderson accidentally stuck his finger in Alcindor’s left eye. Alcindor asked to be taken out. At first he thought it was a minor scratch, but later that night he awoke in excruciating pain. He called Ducky Drake, who immediately took him to a local hospital. The injury was described as an “extremely superficial abrasion,” and the doctor who examined Alcindor said he expected it to heal within forty-eight hours.