Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  That meant Alcindor would be unavailable to play against Stanford the next night. If his teammates were worried, they did a good job hiding it. As the players killed time at their hotel, Nielsen offered his frat buddy Sweek ten bucks if he would jump into the dirty swimming pool with his clothes on. Naturally, Sweek took him up on it. When word got back to Wooden, he called Sweek to his room and ripped into him. He never told Sweek he couldn’t play against Stanford, but that was Sweek’s assumption.

  He assumed right. Without Alcindor or Sweek in the rotation, the Bruins seized the chance to prove to a television audience in five western states that Alcindor’s so-called supporting cast could play a little ball, too. Though the game was closer than the others had been, the Bruins led most of the way. Things got dicey late in the second half, when Lucius Allen threw a hard elbow to the back of the head of a Stanford player. A UCLA fan sitting behind the team’s bench shouted encouragement at Allen for throwing the elbow, but Wooden thought the remark came from one of his players. He wheeled around and barked at his bench, “Who told him to do that?”

  Before the players could speak, Drake said, “Nobody.” Sweek, whose ears were still ringing from Wooden’s lecture earlier in the day, was irritated. He believed that if a lesser player (such as himself) had thrown an elbow like that, he would have been yanked. “I think [Wooden] was frustrated because he needed Lucius to win the game,” Sweek said. “He lost control but he couldn’t yell at Lucius. It was maybe one of the few times I saw some hypocrisy there. Which is worse, jumping into a swimming pool or hitting a guy on the back of the head?”

  Five players scored in double figures, led by Lynn’s 17 points, as UCLA won, 75–63. When they got back to Los Angeles, it became apparent that Alcindor’s eye injury was no minor scratch. He was evaluated at UCLA’s prestigious Jules Stein Eye Clinic, where he had to spend more than three days in a dark room. Alcindor was out indefinitely. Normally, that wouldn’t have been a big deal—it was only January—but there was nothing normal about what was going to happen the following weekend. UCLA was about to play a game unlike any the sport had ever seen. With the eyes of the nation trained upon them, it was imperative that the one man everyone wanted to see would be healthy enough to play.

  * * *

  The seeds for the most significant game in basketball history were planted in 1958 in a dorm room at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. The room served as the “office” for an enterprising young law student named Eddie Einhorn, who had just procured the rights to produce a nationally syndicated radio broadcast of the NCAA basketball championships.

  Why would the NCAA give those rights to a law student with virtually no background in broadcasting? Simple: nobody else asked.

  Einhorn’s network wasn’t much of a network, although it did include WOR in New York. He provided play-by-play himself from the championships in Louisville, the first time the games were broadcast nationally over the radio. The next year, Einhorn pulled off the same feat while watching Pete Newell’s Cal Bears upset Jerry West and the West Virginia Mountaineers. That convinced him of the sport’s potential. Instead of practicing law upon his graduation, Einhorn moved to New Jersey and decided to dive into television.

  Einhorn started a company that he called TVS, for Television Sports. Initially, his strategy was to find big games and pipe them back to the teams’ home markets. In 1962, TVS broadcast the NCAA final between Cincinnati and Ohio State. (Cincinnati and Columbus were the only places where the game was shown live. The rest of the country saw it on tape delay following ABC’s Wide World of Sports.) Within a few years, Einhorn was making deals with individual conferences to develop regional television networks. He also signed up some marquee independent schools like Notre Dame, DePaul, Marquette, and Houston. Along the way, he developed contracts with nearly two hundred stations that reached 95 percent of the country. Because college basketball was still considered a regional sport, where fans were said to be interested only in watching their teams, Einhorn had the field to himself as a national producer.

  The TVS infrastructure was thus firmly in place by the time J. D. Morgan took over as UCLA’s athletic director. Morgan met Einhorn when TVS broadcast some of UCLA’s games in Chicago Stadium. It was the first time Einhorn had done business with someone who shared his vision of college basketball’s potential as a national product.

  As creative and ambitious as those two men were, it took a third person to conjure the spark that set the sport ablaze. Guy Lewis was trying to build a first-rate program as the basketball coach at the University of Houston. Behind Elvin Hayes, a little-known prospect who came to Houston because his home state’s school, Louisiana State University, did not accept blacks, Lewis had brought the Cougars to their first NCAA semifinals in 1967, when they lost to UCLA. Like every other coach in the country, Lewis recognized that UCLA was the gold standard. He wanted to grab a few of those nuggets for himself.

  Lewis pressed his athletic director, Harry Fouke, on the idea of starting a regular-season series with UCLA. Fouke was lukewarm, largely because Houston didn’t have a facility remotely the caliber of Pauley Pavilion. The school’s gymnasium was so small that Lewis’s teams played their home games at Rice University, where the gym held only around 2,500. So Fouke and Lewis took their idea to Judge Roy Hofheinz, the owner of the Houston Astros, who had just erected a spectacular, futuristic indoor stadium called the Astrodome. It is unclear who first came up with the idea of putting a college basketball game in the Astrodome—Lewis and Morgan have both claimed credit—but Hofheinz was an easy sell. This was, after all, the man who also owned Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

  The only principal who wasn’t sold was Wooden. “I thought it would be making a spectacle out of the game,” he said. “I love the game of basketball, and I did not like to see a game turned into a sideshow.” Morgan explained to Wooden just how much UCLA’s athletes, especially the ones competing in minor sports, would benefit from all that revenue. He also told Wooden that the game would be a huge boon to college basketball. Not that he really needed Wooden’s approval. “Morgan scheduled it and then asked me later if I wanted to play it,” Wooden said. “J. D. would do that.”

  So it was decided: UCLA would play Houston in the Astrodome, on Saturday, January 20, 1968, with TVS executing the production. As boffo as that script was, the reality was turning out to be even better. Like UCLA, Houston came into the game undefeated, and the Cougars were ranked No. 2 in both national polls. Hayes, who was averaging 32.5 points and 16.4 rebounds, was Alcindor’s nearest rival. UCLA was the defending NCAA champ and riding a forty-seven-game winning streak. Houston had won seventeen straight. Houston’s sports information director, Ted Nance, had dubbed it “The Game of the Century.” By the time the game rolled around, that felt like an understatement. “People were calling and saying, ‘I don’t care where I am. Just get me a ticket so I can be in the stadium,’” Nance said.

  Now, just a few days before the big event, the entire plot was being threatened by a microscopic scratch on Lew Alcindor’s left eye. As the UCLA team boarded the flight for Houston, Alcindor’s prospects for playing seemed grim. He had emerged from the Jules Stein Institute to practice on Wednesday, but he wore a thick bandage over his eye and worked out for only fifteen minutes. “It is my understanding that Lewis can’t play unless he has permission to have the patch removed,” Wooden said.

  Unlike their last trip to Houston, the Bruins were treated like royalty, with no shoddy dorm rooms or racist referees in sight. In fact, when Alcindor walked into his hotel room, he found that a special ten-foot bed had been made just for his comfort. The words “Big Lew” were painted on the frame. On the day before the game, Alcindor’s patch was removed. His doctor from Jules Stein, who had flown with the team, cleared Alcindor for practice and told Wooden that while Alcindor still had vertical double vision, he wouldn’t hurt himself any more by playing. Once again, Alcindor’s teammates weren’t exactly heartbroken that
he might not suit up. “The whole team wanted to play Houston without him. We were all psyched up,” Heitz said. Wooden himself sensed it might be better for the team if Alcindor didn’t play. But he told Alcindor that he could make the decision himself, at which point the outcome became obvious. Of course he wanted to play.

  By the time the big night arrived, the anticipation was unprecedented. Einhorn had signed over 150 television stations (including one in Fairbanks, Alaska) to show the event live. A municipal dispute had prevented Hofheinz from bringing over the wood floor from the Sam Houston Coliseum, and so he had to arrange for the floor from the L.A. Sports Arena to be disassembled and brought to Houston, piece by piece. That required a relay of truck drivers taking around-the-clock shifts, but the court was put in place with three days to spare.

  Because the Astrodome was not built for basketball, the setup was quirky, to say the least. With the court placed in the very center of the stadium, the nearest seats, which cost five dollars apiece, were more than one hundred feet away. To give the fans an unobstructed view of the action, trenches were dug that went eighteen inches deep and four feet wide for the press, including Dick Enberg, whom J. D. Morgan had insisted be brought in to call the action. Before sending his players onto the floor for tip-off, Wooden told them to make sure they went to the bathroom. It would be too long a walk for them to leave and come back before halftime.

  When the game tipped off, there were 52,693 people jammed into the Astrodome, making it by far the largest crowd ever to watch a live basketball game. (The previous record was 22,822 for a doubleheader at Chicago Stadium in 1946.) That included J. D. Morgan, who sat next to Wooden on the UCLA bench, as he preferred to do for the biggest games. Unfortunately, Alcindor was a shell of himself. He saw two of everything—two balls, two rims, and worst of all, two Elvin Hayeses. The time he had spent lying inert in a dark room had also taken a severe toll on his conditioning. After two or three trips downcourt, Alcindor was completely winded. He later said he felt as if he was running on a football field. Which, of course, he was.

  Hayes, on the other hand, was in world-class form. He noticed from the outset that Alcindor was laboring, so he made an extra effort to beat him downcourt. Wooden had assigned Edgar Lacey to guard Hayes, but Lacey was ineffective. Hayes was big and strong and a pretty good shooter, but the one thing he could not do was dribble. Many of the UCLA players knew that because they had gone up against Houston during the NCAA semifinals the year before, but Lacey had not played in that game. As a result, Lacey gave Hayes too much room to shoot, and the Big E found his stroke early. “You had to get right up next to Elvin and make him put it on the floor and go by you, but nobody told Lacey that,” Heitz said. “When Elvin hit his first couple of shots, his eyeballs got huge.”

  Hayes scored 10 quick points to stake Houston to a 9-point lead. Wooden replaced Lacey with Mike Lynn. According to Wooden, as Lacey walked to his seat, he shook his head at the coach and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” That did not bolster Wooden’s confidence in him. Meanwhile, Alcindor failed to counter. Not only was he missing shots at an alarming rate (for him, anyway), but his lack of wind slowed down UCLA’s fast break. At one point, Mike Warren told Lynn Shackelford that he wanted to ask Wooden to take out Alcindor. Shackelford told him he didn’t think that was a good idea.

  Mike Lynn couldn’t guard Hayes either, so Wooden substituted Jim Nielsen. Nielsen kept Hayes in check the rest of the way, but a lot of damage was done. Hayes scored a remarkable 29 points in the first half, and Houston went into its locker room owning a 46–43 lead.

  By the time the second half got under way, the television audience had grown so much that Einhorn was fielding calls from businesses looking to advertise during the second half. He did the deals over the phone and handed scribbled plugs for Enberg to read over the air. Nielsen continued to contain Hayes while the Bruins chipped at the Houston lead. With Alcindor floundering, much of the scoring fell to Lucius Allen, who made a variety of jump shots despite the odd sight lines. “I shot from spots on the floor. I didn’t look at the rim. That’s why I was able to play the game relatively normally,” he said. Meanwhile, Lacey sat anxiously on the Bruins’ bench, awaiting his return. At one point, he leaned over and asked Jerry Norman, “Am I going back in?” Norman told him to sit tight.

  UCLA finally erased the deficit midway through the second half, knotting the score at 54–all. Houston briefly reclaimed the lead, but with 3 minutes to play, Alcindor tied it again, at 65. Field goals by Hayes and Houston guard Don Chaney pushed the Cougars to a 4-point advantage with 1:53 remaining. Allen made a bucket and two free throws to knot the score once again entering the final minute. By this point, the Astrodome was so loud, Chaney couldn’t hear the ball bounce as he dribbled.

  With 28 seconds left, Nielsen fouled Hayes on a jump shot. Hayes was only a 60 percent free throw shooter, but he made both attempts to give the Cougars a 71–69 lead. The Bruins followed with a rare mental error. Allen drove the ball and spotted Shackelford in the corner, his favorite spot. Only when he tried to feed Shackelford the pass, Warren thought it was coming for him, and he reached for the ball. It went out of bounds, giving Houston possession. “I don’t think I would have made the shot anyway,” Shackelford said years later. “I was too tired.”

  With just a few seconds remaining, the ball went to Hayes on the ensuing inbounds. Displaying his ineptitude at dribbling, Hayes slapped at the ball with just his right hand, but he managed to avoid the defense for several seconds before passing it to a teammate just as the gun went off. The final score was Houston 71, UCLA 69. As the clock expired, the Cougars jubilantly jumped into each other’s arms while hundreds of fans sprinted all the way from the stands to the court. A few minutes later, Enberg found Wooden to get his thoughts on the loss. “We’ve been winning a long time,” he said. “The only thing I think is worse than losing too much is winning too much. Maybe we’ve been winning too much.”

  The game was a disaster for Alcindor, who finished with 15 points on four-for-eighteen shooting, the only time in his college career that he would shoot under 50 percent. When he was asked afterward if his eye was the reason he played so poorly, Alcindor replied, “No. I can’t say what it was. We just lost to a better team.” That was far from true, but Alcindor didn’t want to be seen as making an excuse. Wooden blamed himself for playing Alcindor in the first place. “During every time out, I asked Lewis if he felt he could keep going, and he always said yes,” Wooden said. “I kept him in, but perhaps I was wrong.”

  For all the buildup, for all the hype, the game had actually exceeded its billing. The eyes of the nation were focused on college basketball as never before, and the sport delivered in dramatic fashion. “For the great majority of the audience, the big attraction of the game was, can anybody beat this John Wooden powerhouse?” Enberg said. “They tuned in looking for the upset, and they got it. That’s what made the game so memorable. Had UCLA won, it would have been just another case of the Bruins beating everybody they played.” For several weeks, Wooden received mail complimenting him for his postgame interview. For most of the massive audience watching at home, this was the first time they had heard the man’s voice, the first time they had witnessed the equipoise that had long become familiar to people in Los Angeles.

  The UCLA players knew something that all those millions watching on television didn’t. Wooden wasn’t just being gracious. He was saying how he genuinely felt. He actually seemed happy that his team had been knocked from its dizzying peak. “He came into the locker room smiling,” Shackelford said. “I think he was relieved.” Now that the pressure was off, Wooden hoped his world wouldn’t spin quite so fast. His bride hoped so, too. “I’ll be seeing a pleasant face now,” Nell predicted, “instead of a face that’s about to explode.”

  * * *

  Wooden would need his even keel more than ever in the days that followed. Shortly after he returned from Houston, he attended a meeting of the Bruin Hoopsters, an
alumni fund-raising group. His team had just ended a forty-seven-game winning streak, yet some of the boosters made Wooden feel as if he had let them down. “It brought me back to earth in a hurry,” he said later. To cheer him up, Morgan sent Wooden an article from a 1915 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It was titled “The Penalty of Leadership.”

  Wooden could handle external pressure. Internally, however, his machine was about to combust. The problem was Edgar Lacey, who never reentered the Houston game after Wooden had yanked him midway through the first half. In the dressing room afterward, Allen could be heard asking aloud, “Why didn’t Coach use Lacey?” Lacey felt humiliated. On the bus ride back to the hotel, he sat next to Alcindor and said over and over, “I’m gonna quit.”

  Lacey stewed over the weekend, but he practiced with the team on Monday. The next morning, he picked up a newspaper and read some comments that Wooden had made the day before during the weekly meeting of the Southern California basketball writers. Asked why he never put Lacey back in the game, Wooden replied, “Edgar got his feelings hurt early. He wasn’t effective in our high post and he wasn’t effective guarding his man. He didn’t especially feel like coming back in anyway, so I didn’t feel it was right to use him.”

  Needless to say, John Wooden was no expert on the feelings of most of his players, least of all a stubborn, taciturn young man like Lacey. It was a foolish remark, and Lacey was offended. “He threw the paper down on the floor,” his father, Edgar Sr., said. “He told me he was bouncing up and down on the bench and that he told the coach he wanted to play.”

  Later that morning, Lacey went to Wooden’s office and asked if he really said those words. Wooden replied that he did. “You gave me the impression you didn’t want to play,” Wooden said. “That’s exactly what I told the papers, and I’ll tell you that.”