Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Lacey said. “I quit.”

  This was not the first time a player had told Wooden he would quit. Most of the time, they cooled off after a day or two and returned to practice. When Lacey failed to show up later that day or on Wednesday, Wooden asked Mike Warren to see if he could convince Lacey to come back. It didn’t work.

  At the heart of the dispute was the question of whether Lacey did, in fact, indicate to Wooden that he didn’t want to go back in the game. An anonymous player later told Sports Illustrated that “Lacey shook off Wooden’s motions to re-enter the game,” but that was not how Norman and Neville Saner, Lacey’s roommate on the road, remembered it. “I was sitting close to Edgar. I remember him saying to Norman, ‘Can I get back in?’ My impression was he definitely wanted to get back in the ball game,” Saner said. Lacey’s former teammates also had a hard time believing Wooden’s version. “I can’t imagine that was true,” Lynn said. “Edgar was very proud and competitive. He would do anything for the team. It certainly wasn’t Edgar’s fault that Elvin had a great game. Somehow, he ended up taking the brunt of that, and it was fairly public. He was a pretty sensitive guy, so he didn’t take that very well.”

  Fourteen years before, when Willie Naulls pulled a similar stunt, Wooden called Naulls at home, apologized, and asked him to come back to the team. If he had done the same with Lacey, he might have come back as well. But Wooden never even tried. “If he kicked you out of practice, you had to ask to come back,” Allen said. “Because he was in control.”

  Alcindor was especially dismayed. Not only was he losing a capable teammate; he was losing his best friend, and his coach wouldn’t do anything about it. Alcindor kept waiting for Wooden to explain himself to the team or apologize to Lacey. Instead, he referred to the matter obliquely by saying things like, “We all know that not every player can play every game, but that shouldn’t upset them. There are a lot of things involved.”

  The situation deepened Alcindor’s suspicion that Wooden, whom he otherwise regarded as fair and honorable, had a blind spot. He suspected that Wooden favored players who, in Alcindor’s words, were “morally right to play.” Exhibit A was Lynn Shackelford. He was an active member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a model citizen who always showed up on time and said the right thing. Alcindor believed Lacey and Lynn were more talented than Shackelford, yet because Wooden viewed Shackelford as morally superior to the other two, he was the one who got the most playing time.

  By Wednesday, the rift between Wooden and Lacey had spilled out into the public. The Bruins were headed to New York for a high-profile pair of games at Madison Square Garden against Holy Cross and Boston College. This was Alcindor’s big homecoming, another marketing ploy by J. D. Morgan that generated $60,000 for the school. When asked why Lacey wasn’t making the trip, Wooden explained that Lacey had not practiced in two days. He also conceded that he had not spoken with Lacey since Tuesday morning. “Had he joined us [on Wednesday], he would have made the trip, but he cannot go with us now,” Wooden said. “I think it would be ill-advised to dismiss him now because he is hurt enough already. He has to sit down and think it all over. I can understand how he feels. I hope he can think it over and come back.”

  Lacey was finally reached by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday night. “It’s his move,” he said, referring to Wooden.

  Wooden sounded more contrite during a press conference in New York on Friday morning, the day of the Holy Cross game. “He’s just very quiet and sensitive, and if I had known he felt this strongly about it, I would have put him back in against Houston,” he said. Even with Alcindor still hampered by blurry vision and suboptimal conditioning, UCLA easily dispatched Holy Cross, 90–67, before beating Boston College by a more modest 13 points on Saturday night.

  After the Bruins returned home, Lacey remained AWOL and wanted to stay that way. He finally unloaded his feelings about Wooden to Jeff Prugh of the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve never enjoyed playing for that man,” Lacey said. “That [Houston game] was the last straw. It all started my sophomore year when he tried to change the mechanics of my shooting.… And now, I have no one to blame but myself for staying this long. He has sent people by to persuade me to reconsider, but I have nothing to reconsider. I’m glad I’m getting out now while I still have some of my pride, my sanity and my self-esteem left.”

  Lacey was still wounded by Wooden’s suggestion that he did not want to go back in the game. “That statement is too foul for words. With about eight minutes to go in the game, I asked Coach Norman, ‘Am I going to go back in the game?’ The answer was negative,” Lacey said. “I think a lot of it is because he wanted to play Shack. He is sacrificing my ability and Mike’s ability to promote Shack.” Lacey added that he felt “misused” in Wooden’s offense—“Ever since I’ve played for him, he has always discouraged me on my shooting”—and he left little doubt that he did not intend to rejoin the squad. “I’m sick and tired of being appeased by the coach. He’s on the brink of ruining my confidence. I think I’m better off getting out now.”

  When Prugh told Wooden what Lacey said, Wooden asked, “You aren’t going to print any of this in the paper, are you?” Told that the answer was yes, Wooden indicated that he felt bad about what was happening, but he insisted he would not reach out to Lacey the way he had done for Naulls. “I’m never going to run a boy down,” he said. “He should come back because I think he’s making a mistake. I have never said anything but that he’s the best forward we have. I wish he’d think it over. Regardless of how he feels about me, I do care about him.”

  And yet how was Lacey supposed to know that? At that moment, he needed Wooden to tell him that he cared, but Wooden was not capable of expressing himself that way. It was simply not how he was raised. Wooden’s father was loving, but he was a stoic man not given to gestures of affection, physical or verbal. The most revered adult male of Wooden’s youth, Earl Warriner, had once whacked his backside with a paddle in front of the entire school and later denied him the chance to play a game because he had shown a hint of obstreperousness. Piggy Lambert ran Wooden ragged and shamed him into turning down the chance at a more comfortable life. These men—always, they were men—had given John Wooden his primary education. Love was supposed to be shown, not expressed. Life was supposed to be hard, not easy. When the problem arose with Edgar Lacey, Wooden applied what he had learned thirty or forty years earlier. But times had changed, and his players had changed with them. Wooden might have seen that if he hadn’t been so stubborn.

  Even to those people who had detected friction between Lacey and Wooden, the depth of Lacey’s antagonism was shocking. “It seemed out of the blue. I didn’t see anything developing,” Norman said. Even Neville Saner said he had “no inkling” Lacey was that unhappy. “I was surprised Edgar quit,” Saner said. “I thought he would hang in there.”

  At the next day’s writers’ luncheon, Wooden was still taken aback by what Lacey had said. “I can’t help but believe somebody might be putting words into his mouth,” he said. “With some boys, you can tell when they feel this way, but I had no indication of this from Edgar. All I can say is I’ve never had a cross word with him, and I consider him to be a fine person.” As for the comment that set Lacey off, Wooden said, “My remark was correct, and I stood behind what I said, but oftentimes, you can be correct but be better off not having said it.”

  This was just the latest manifestation of the strain that Wooden had been experiencing ever since Alcindor arrived. “Last year was difficult, my most trying year in coaching, and now there have been a couple of things to happen that I didn’t anticipate,” he said. “I know a lot of coaches will say they would like to have the problems I have, but it’s not all gravy with this kind of record. The only worse thing is when you are losing all the time.”

  In truth, Wooden suspected that the team would probably be better off without Lacey. As talented as Edgar was, he simply did not complement
Alcindor as well as some of the other players, nor would he ever accept that fact. Maybe, with one less player to worry about keeping happy, Wooden’s machine could function a little more smoothly. “We lost a potentially great player,” Wooden said later. “But a potentially great player who isn’t playing that well is not a great player.”

  Still, Edgar Lacey was not some robot or mechanical cog. He was a flesh-and-blood human being, a sensitive, proud young man with hopes for a future in pro basketball. Now those hopes had been dashed. After he quit UCLA, Lacey played a couple of years for an AAU team called the Kitchen Fresh Chippers, and he spent a season with the ABA’s Los Angeles Stars. But that was it. This local legend, the best scorer in the history of Los Angeles high schools, a man who had been one stroke of a pen from being a member of the great Boston Celtics, was essentially through with basketball. It wasn’t all Wooden’s fault, but Lacey certainly felt that it was. And he wasn’t alone. “Wooden ruined the boy’s life,” Walt Hazzard said. “He just destroyed Lacey.”

  The messy departure left some residual damage in the locker room, especially among the black players who were closest to Lacey. “I didn’t like the way Coach Wooden handled it, probably because Edgar was a close friend of mine, so I’m probably biased in my assessment of that,” Alcindor said years later. Lucius Allen called it “one of the few times that our master psychologist went too far. Edgar had been there for four years. He was one of the guys who had to be treated gently. You should know your people better than that.”

  For all their complaints about Wooden’s rigid ways—We talked about him like a dog—the players had come to depend on his strong, steadying hand. Wooden was their anchor in a world that was falling prey to unrest, disobedience, injustice, violence. Now, for the first time, he had let them down. It made them feel a little dizzy. “It caused us to do a lot of self-checking, because John Wooden personified goodness, piety, integrity, all those things,” Allen said. “If you can’t trust John Wooden, who can you trust?”

  24

  Kareem

  Despite all the money his team was generating for UCLA, John Wooden’s salary remained just $17,000 in 1968. To supplement his income, he ran several youth basketball camps around Los Angeles. Wooden was hands-on and detail-oriented at the camps, just as he was at his regular job. In many ways, he enjoyed working more there than UCLA. “When I have my summer basketball school out at Palisades High School, they’re eager to know how to do things,” he said one day during an interview in his office. “You don’t find that so much in the college players. The college players are more blasé.” Getting up from behind his desk, Wooden demonstrated the proper way to fake a pass one way before throwing it another. “If you just tell your youngsters that, the college players will say, ‘Aw, why do we do this? I’ll just throw him the ball.’ They must know why.” Sitting down again, Wooden added, “If it hadn’t been for the war, I don’t think I’d have left high school coaching. I enjoyed it very much.”

  It was understandable why Wooden would want to turn back the clock. Through no fault of his own, he had found himself cast as an avatar of ancient values in a rapidly changing world. That was not a comfortable position for a conservative, fifty-seven-year-old midwesterner who prized his consistency.

  The campus culture in which Wooden now operated didn’t just encourage students to question authority. It urged them to confront and topple authority wherever it existed. With his gym shorts, zipped-up UCLA jacket, whistle, and old-fashioned strictures, Wooden was the very embodiment of the establishment. He and his players occupied the same space but lived in different worlds. “I really respected him, but I don’t know that like was in the equation,” Kenny Heitz said. “We had a bunch of guys who had really good relationships with our fathers. Wooden became that old guy we couldn’t please.”

  That distance appeared greatest to the players who saw little action in games. “Wooden was running this basketball machine. He was aloof, as far as I was concerned,” Neville Saner said. The impression was reinforced during practices, when players like Saner watched Wooden drill his top seven or eight players while the scrubs were left to work with the assistants. “To me, he was like a businessman coach,” Gene Sutherland said. “We were like boss and employee. I never really felt close to him.”

  Wooden faced a Catch-22. If he stuck to his ways, he appeared out of touch. If he bent, he was a hypocrite. Lew Alcindor posed an especially touchy problem. His size alone warranted his own set of standards. From doorways to airplanes to bus rides to hotel rooms, Alcindor needed special accommodations. Plus—and this was more to the point—he was really, really good. If Wooden was going to bend for anyone, it would be for him.

  For example, UCLA had a rule that if a player was late for the team airplane, he would have to find his own way to the game. It was one of the reasons why J. D. Morgan had called UCLA athletics “the last great bastion of student discipline that exists on this campus.” However, the school’s radio announcer, Fred Hessler, recalled that on one occasion when Alcindor failed to show for a flight to the Northwest, Morgan called Vic Kelley, the school’s sports publicist, and told him to go to Alcindor’s apartment and bring him to the plane. “J. D. realized these places were sold out in the Northwest because of seeing [Alcindor],” Hessler said. “He was going to see that our star attraction got there.”

  The other players noticed this slippage. Where Wooden saw necessary accommodation, they saw a double standard. “Wooden had this dress code for a team meal, and then one day Lew and Lucius showed up in jeans, and he didn’t say anything. It was like, okay,” Heitz said. Before Alcindor, the menu had always been precise: steak, potato, melba toast, celery, milk. “Somewhere along the way, out of eleven players, you’d see eight glasses of milk and three Cokes,” Don Saffer said. “They were for Lucius, Mike, and Lew. The rest of us didn’t want milk, but that’s the way it was.” Sometimes, Alcindor might not show up for a meal at all, yet nothing happened. These were small things, but Wooden was the one who had said they were big.

  When the players complained—and this being the sixties, they felt free to do just that—Wooden conceded their point. Alcindor was a special player. He deserved special treatment. “Two of his teammates made some remarks to a reporter that I gave him special privileges,” Wooden said. “Breakfast, for example. He got a couple of glasses of orange juice and they’d get one. True. Then they said I let him room alone while they always had to room with someone else. But you don’t find two king-size beds in the same room.… I told one of these players, you’re lucky he’s here. I wouldn’t have you if he wasn’t here.” To Wooden, it all made perfect sense. “If we have only a few good shoes,” he said, “I guarantee you Lew’s going to have good shoes.”

  When Lynn Shackelford was asked by a writer from Sport magazine what would happen if a player was late for curfew, he replied, “It all depends on how you’re playing. It’s been a lot looser since the big man came.” Bob Marcucci, the team’s student manager, said there was a running joke on the team: “If you’re going to break a rule, do it with an All-American.” Don Saffer followed that rule, and it still almost cost him. During a road trip to Chicago, Saffer and Mike Warren slipped out of the hotel to take some local girls to a movie. (“Everywhere we went, there were taps on the door for Mike,” Saffer said.) When Saffer returned by himself to the hotel two hours after curfew, he found Ducky Drake waiting in his room. “Do you want to go home tonight or tomorrow?” Drake asked. Saffer broke down crying, and Drake gave him a pass. Warren, however, didn’t face any consequences, even though he didn’t return until several hours later. “You have to be realistic,” Saffer said. “I knew there was a pecking order.”

  Nobody was more realistic than the guys at the top of that order. “We black players knew that as a unit we had a lot of power,” Warren said. “We did a lot of things that would not have been tolerated otherwise. Before the season, Coach Wooden told Alcindor and me that our hair had grown a little too long last year and
suggested that we cut it closer this year. We didn’t, and nothing happened.”

  Part of this was Wooden’s nod to progress. “I realize I’m not as strict as I used to be,” he conceded, “but society isn’t as strict, either.” Still, for a man who had always espoused the virtue of standing by one’s principles, it was jarring to see him abandon them to accommodate the better players. Wooden had expectations to meet and arenas to fill. He wasn’t going to leave his star player at home just because the guy was a few minutes late for the plane. Not anymore, anyway.

  The challenge would grow steeper as the culture became more permissive. That included the arrival of a new element in campus social life: drugs. Marijuana had been virtually unheard of just a few years before, but in a flash, it was everywhere. “It happened pretty quick,” Mike Lynn said. “You went from having a frat party where everybody was drinking beer, to a couple of years down the road where a lot of guys were smoking pot.”

  Alcindor was no stranger to this world. In New York City, marijuana had been a staple of teenage black culture, although it was a white student at Power Memorial who first introduced it to him. He didn’t feel much effect the first couple of times he tried it, but after church on Easter Sunday 1965, he went to a friend’s house, and together they pounded the pipe so hard that Alcindor nearly coughed his lungs out. He felt high, really high, for the first time, and he liked it.

  As was the case in New York, marijuana first made its presence known in Los Angeles in black neighborhoods. That’s where Edgar Lacey, a Compton native, developed his habit. When Alcindor came to UCLA, the weed bonded them as much as basketball did. “Edgar and Kareem were tight on the smoking thing,” Freddie Goss said. “They were the only two guys doing it when I was there.”

  It wasn’t until he got to UCLA that Alcindor first experimented with LSD. He bought two tabs from a friend at $2.50 each, but he didn’t take enough the first time to really feel the effects. The next time, he took an entire tab, and he was flying. After a few more acid trips, however, Alcindor decided he didn’t like it and pretty much stopped. Still, LSD was all around him. One day, a pair of students who had taken LSD came upon him and thought he was an hallucination. Alcindor found it hilarious, one of the few times he didn’t mind strangers becoming fixated on his height.