by Seth Davis
If anyone should have been put off by Alcindor’s conversion, it was Wooden. He was a white, middle-aged man who served as deacon in his church, never missed a Sunday service, and shared Patterson’s devotion to Christ. Yet Wooden had no objection at all to Alcindor’s newfound faith. He knew Alcindor would not make such a profound decision without researching it thoroughly. “It could have been a point of contention between me and Coach, but it wasn’t,” Alcindor said. “He was curious to know what Islam was all about and really showed me the utmost respect in giving me the ability and responsibility of making my own choices.”
That bus ride through a cold midwestern night did more to fortify their bonds than any win could. “It’s the most memorable moment of the years I spent at UCLA,” Heitz said. “It was a bunch of guys really talking, no barriers. It was just deeply special.” For Alcindor—for Abdul-Jabbar—it was the moment his fellow students finally became his teammates. The first time they really felt like brothers.
* * *
The good vibrations found their way onto the court. UCLA opened the 1968–69 season with its most challenging nonconference slate in years. The Bruins beat tenth-ranked Purdue at home by 12 points in the opener, with Curtis Rowe emphatically announcing his arrival to the varsity by scoring 27 points off the bench. They won both games on that midwestern trip over Ohio State and Notre Dame. The latter game was part of a new annual nationally televised series brokered by J. D. Morgan and Eddie Einhorn. The series helped continue to stamp UCLA as a national brand while also giving Notre Dame visibility to build its basketball profile.
From there, the Bruins steamrolled over nine unranked teams, culminating with a 100–64 laugher over once-mighty Houston at Pauley Pavilion. As had often been the case in the past, however, those scores belied rising tensions. Wicks was a primary source. He was playing a lot of minutes, but he couldn’t understand why inferior athletes like Patterson and Shackelford were starting ahead of him. Unlike so many sophomores, Wicks wasn’t intimidated by Wooden in the slightest. He had no compunction about knocking on the coach’s office door and asking point-blank why he wasn’t starting. “People say we butted heads,” Wicks said. “I like to say we expressed ourselves.”
Wicks also made his displeasure known to Shackelford. “It wasn’t a friendly type competition with Sidney,” Shackelford said. “He was very frustrated. There would even be passing comments about the fact that I couldn’t jump and run and he was so superior. What he didn’t realize was that I was a much smarter player in pressure situations.” Now a senior, Shackelford had been through this before, and it was wearing him out. All the responsibilities of playing for UCLA, the pressure, the expectations, the grinding, exhausting practices … they were all taking a physical and mental toll. “I was getting very tired of playing basketball at UCLA,” Shackelford said. “It was becoming more of a job. My last year wasn’t as exciting as it should have been.”
Little wonder the players embraced every opportunity to blow off steam, especially on the road. During the trip to Chicago, Bill Sweek pulled a prank on some of the benchwarmers by stacking a water bucket on the door of their hotel room. When they opened the door, the bucket drenched them. That led to a bigger water fight, which prompted the hotel manager to write a letter of complaint to the school. Even though Wicks and Sweek were involved in the water fight, it was the three little-used reserves—Terry Schofield, John Ecker, and Bill Seibert—who bore the brunt of the punishment. They did not play at all the next four games, although they weren’t playing that much in the first place.
During a trip to Washington in February, Wicks and a few other players sneaked out of the hotel and went to a party in Seattle. They brought some girls back to their rooms. Wooden found about it. (He always found out.) After the team got back to Los Angeles, he addressed the matter in the locker room. “I understand some of you had girls in your hotel rooms,” he said. “If you didn’t, you are free to go. If you did, I want you to stay behind.” Most of the team got up to leave—including Wicks. Wooden called out to him. “Sidney, are you sure? I will not tolerate a liar.”
Chastened, Wicks sat down. “That’s the kind of guy Sidney was,” Shackelford said. “He wanted to be a big stud guy, but deep down he wanted to be John Wooden’s friend.”
After delivering a stern lecture, Wooden dismissed the players but asked Marcucci, the student manager, to stay behind. When he started to tell Marcucci that he should hold himself to a higher standard because he was an extension of the coaching staff, Marcucci blew his top. “I kind of got into it with him. ‘You have all these double standards,’ and all that stuff,” he said. “I thought he was going to boot me off the team, but one of the most amazing things about coach was that he did listen to people, even in the heat of battle. We got a chance to air it out. Then he just said, ‘Okay, Bob, go to practice.’”
This version of Wooden was far different than the one the public was used to seeing. “He’s a genius as a coach, but we all wonder how he got the kindly grandfather image,” an anonymous player told Sport magazine. “To the outside world he’s always smiling and very modest, like a nice old man. But we see him as he really is when he plays the role of the coach. He can be tough, uncompromising, totally humorless.”
It was only a matter of time before the pressure affected the team’s play. It started with a game on January 24 against unranked Northwestern in Chicago Stadium. For the first time since the Astrodome, the Bruins trailed at halftime, 45–35, but they turned on the motor midway through the second half to win, 81–67. Two weeks later, they found themselves in another dogfight, this time at home against Washington. The Huskies’ coach, Tex Winter, slowed the pace so well that UCLA again found itself trailing at halftime, 33–29, before winning, 62–51. Two weeks later, UCLA nearly lost at Washington, where the Bruins trailed for most of the night before taking their first lead with just over seven minutes to play. UCLA won, 53–44, but this was a team that was trapped in torpor.
It was a sad state of affairs. Here they were, undefeated again, ranked No. 1 in the country, perfectly positioned to mount a run at a third straight NCAA title, and yet everyone was feeling the strain, Wooden most of all. He had an older team now, and those upperclassmen were not as cowed by him as they once were. (After he retired, Wooden was asked who was harder to coach, black players or white players. He replied, “Seniors.”) Don Saffer’s playing time had dwindled so much that he decided to quit the team. “His feeling was that I wasn’t giving him enough of a chance,” Wooden said. “I did not try to talk him out of it.”
Wooden also had several blistering confrontations with Kenny Heitz. When Wooden received an anonymous letter that aired some of the team’s dirty laundry, he assumed that Heitz had written it and confronted him after a pregame meal. Heitz had not, in fact, written the letter, and he resented the accusation. “I just completely lost it. I was like, ‘You are out of your mind,’” Heitz said. “I went to my room and I’m thinking, shit, I’m never going to play here again.”
Heitz was supremely intelligent—after graduation he would enter Harvard Law School—and he was not shy about offering suggestions. During a game at Oregon State, he suggested to Wooden that he switch offensive roles with John Vallely because Vallely was a much better shooter. It worked so well that Wooden later credited Heitz to the press. But when Heitz offered another idea at halftime a week later, Wooden erupted. “He walks into the locker room and just starts taking me apart in front of everybody,” Heitz recalled. “‘So you get your name in the paper and you think you’re coaching the team, huh?’” Heitz was so fed up that he took off his shoes and socks and resolved not to go back out for the second half. “Then Denny Crum came back in and said, ‘Just get dressed and go out out there and be a good teammate,’” Heitz said. “Five minutes later, I was back in the game.”
Alcindor was feeling the tension as well. Before a home game against Washington State, he came down with a migraine so intense that the doctor wouldn’t allow
him to warm up until fifteen minutes before tip-off. “It’s got to be the constant pressure he’s under right now. He can’t even talk to a friend or anybody else and not have to answer questions about what he’s going to do about pro basketball,” Wooden said. Wooden admitted two days later that he got into his guys during halftime of their home game against Oregon on February 22 because he didn’t think they were playing with enough passion, even though they would go on to win by 34 points. “I may have to assume that demeanor a little more often, but it’s not good to have to verbally lash a team to keep the pressure on it,” he said. “You don’t talk natural fight into people. That’s inborn.” The Bruins may have been on their way to making history, but they weren’t having a whole lot of fun doing it.
* * *
Wooden hardly recognized what he had wrought. His unparalleled ability to teach the game had coincided with an enormous influx of talent as well as a burgeoning television industry. It was enough to make a guy lose his balance.
One day during Alcindor’s senior season, Wooden found himself at the weekly writers’ luncheon sitting next to Freddie Goss, who had just been hired as the head basketball coach at the University of California, Riverside. Goss got the job largely on Wooden’s recommendation, but at the luncheon Wooden tried to talk Goss out of a career in coaching. “He talked about how J. D. Morgan was putting pressure on him to win. He told me point-blank, ‘Freddie, this is no life. You should be like Jerry and get out of it,’” Goss said. “When I went to UCLA to play, the team had just gone 14–12, but he never acted like I gotta win or they’re gonna fire me. He looked at coaching basketball as a way to teach ethics. At some point, it became this fast-moving train, and he didn’t know how to get off.”
Wooden wasn’t exactly unhappy; he did like to win, after all. But his program had become a monster, and it was all he could do to keep from being devoured by it. “I can honestly say that I received more criticism after we won a championship than I did before we won one,” he said. “That’s why I’ve always said I wish all my really good friends in coaching would win one national championship. And those I don’t think highly of, I wish they would win several.”
During those unsettling times, Wooden drew stability from Nell. She was the one thing in his life that he could depend on. She always traveled with the team, sat next to her husband on buses and airplanes, and had quiet dinners with him while other coaches and their wives were socializing with each other. He loved their little routines. She washed his hair, packed his suitcase, picked out his clothes.
The pressures of his job took an especially hard toll on her. Nell could never brook criticism the way he could. To her, everything was personal. She resented intrusions into their privacy. She rarely consented to interviews, and if they were out to dinner and a fan came up to the table and said, “Coach, I’m sorry to bother you,” Nell would sharply tell the person, “Then don’t.” Denny Crum said, “Nell demanded respect and you gave it to her. As far as he was concerned, she hung the moon.”
None of it helped her to quit smoking. That was a lifelong battle she would never win. “From the time I got there, she looked unhealthy. She always seemed very frail,” Goss said. “I took my wife to New York to see them play in Madison Square Garden. Coach and Nell were sitting in the lobby. Nell must have smoked a pack of cigarettes right in front of us while he was holding court.”
Wooden tried not to let on that the pressure was bothering him, but people noticed. Joe Jares of Sports Illustrated observed that “the impression one gets after spending some time with him is that he has not particularly enjoyed the Alcindor years.” Over dinner with Jeff Prugh for a lengthy, three-part series that was published in the Los Angeles Times during Alcindor’s senior season, Nell confessed, “I sometimes wonder if it’s all really worth it.” Wooden told her, “Yes, dear. It’s like I’ve told you before. The good far outweighs the bad.” But he also confessed that the weight of expectations had been wearing on him. “Once you’re number one, people are never satisfied with anything less,” he said. “I’m not crying. I’m just saying what it’s like.”
The games were the worst part. This was the opposite of how it was for Wooden’s players, who saw practice as something to survive in order to get to the games. Wooden lived for practice, but when game night came, he could only sit in his seat squirming, clutching his program, barking at the referees, trying to evince a serenity that was at odds with the churning within. “I may appear calm. I strive to be calm. I strive to keep my players calm. But inside, I am not calm,” he said. “It does not matter how many games we have won. You always want to win this one, too. And no matter how confident you are, you know you may not win. So you suffer until you have won.”
The suffering prompted Wooden to wonder whether it might soon be time to retire. Two months after his team won the 1968 title, Wooden admitted to the Daily Bruin that he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted to keep his job. “I have thought a lot about it. Until the last year or two, I planned on coaching until I was sixty-five,” he said. “I’m fifty-seven now and I’m thinking that as far as head coaching, I’d like to do it about three more years.… The last two years have been tremendous from a winning standpoint, but they have been my most trying years for a number of reasons.”
It was all he could do to steal a few quiet moments. Oftentimes, before practice began, Wooden would come to the floor early wearing his standard gym shorts, zipped-up jacket, and sneakers and ask Marcucci to shag for him while he shot underhanded free throws. “We would chitchat a little bit, but I could see he was thinking about a lot of stuff,” Marcucci said. “Now that I look back on it, I’m convinced it was a way for him to mentally get away from the pressure. Just be by himself in the middle of Pauley, just him and a manager, shooting free throws.”
The less fun a team is having, the worse it usually plays. That was certainly the case for UCLA on the last weekend of February, when they went to the Bay Area with a chance to clinch the Pac-8 title. They did so, but not before needing double overtime to beat California, which had come in having lost seven of its last nine games.
Before they could get to the NCAA tournament, they had to play their annual series with USC, beginning with Friday night’s opener at the Sports Arena. USC had lost ten games that season, but the Trojans put up a much bigger fight than UCLA was expecting. Once again, the Trojans executed Bob Boyd’s deliberate offense beautifully. USC did not attempt a field goal for the first six and a half minutes, and the game stayed close to the wire. The Trojans appeared to have won when guard Steve Jennings sank a layup to put USC up 47–45 with four seconds remaining, but Shackelford answered with a miraculous thirty-foot buzzer beater—his first shot attempt of the game—to send the game into overtime. It took until the second overtime for UCLA to put USC away, 61–55. Boyd called it “the toughest loss I’ve ever had.”
The Bruins had every reason to expect the Trojans to come into Pauley Pavilion the next night devastated and deflated. Instead, they were ready to finish what they had started. Once again, USC had a chance to win in the final minute. With the score tied at 44–all, Boyd had his players dribble until there were just nineteen seconds left. Then he called time-out and drew up a play for Ernie Powell, his senior guard. The play worked to perfection as Powell drilled a jumper from twenty feet away.
This time, UCLA had no miracle answer. Wicks’s last-ditch shot attempt clanged off the rim at the buzzer, and the USC players and fans were soon celebrating wildly on the court. The Trojans had won, 46–44. Alcindor’s last regular season game at Pauley turned out to be the first one he had lost there and just his second loss overall since he had come to UCLA. “Our players weren’t fired up,” Wooden said afterward. “Maybe this loss will help us, put us in good shape for the tournament. At least I hope so.”
The loss ended a fifty-one-game winning streak at Pauley, a seventeen-game streak over USC, and a forty-five-game streak in the conference. Most of all, the loss chipped away, if only a li
ttle, at the Bruins’ aura of invincibility just as they headed into the NCAA tournament.
It had been a long time since Wooden had occasion to visit an opponent’s locker room to congratulate them on beating his Bruins. When Wooden got there, he found Boyd standing on a chair and shouting jubilantly to his players, “They’re damned lucky we didn’t beat them twice!” The players serenaded Boyd with a chorus of “Who’s the coach of the year?” Wooden waited patiently for Boyd to notice him, and then he shook Boyd’s hand. It was just one more sign of how unbalanced his world had gotten. Recounting the scene a few days later, Wooden groused to a reporter, “When winning becomes that important, I’m getting out.”
* * *
The loss to USC was not Alcindor’s final game in Pauley Pavilion because J. D. Morgan had arranged for UCLA to host the 1969 NCAA tournament’s West Regional. The Bruins’ first opponent was New Mexico State, which had used a slow pace to hang close with UCLA the year before. This time wasn’t so close as UCLA won, 53–38. A 90–52 thrashing of Santa Clara sent the Bruins back to the national semifinals in Louisville, Kentucky.
With each passing year, the NCAA tournament was becoming a bigger deal, and Wooden’s Bruins were the main reason. The interest from television had become so high that for the first time, the final weekend games were moved to a Thursday–Saturday schedule because the TV folks believed that not enough people would watch on a Friday night. Wooden, however, still would not allow his players to talk to the press, a decision unpopular with the sportswriters as well as with NCAA officials. “Maybe I am overprotective, but the three years haven’t been easy,” Wooden said. “I think these boys are taut.”
By the time the Bruins got to Louisville, they didn’t want to win the title so much as get it over with. That sapped them of their competitive edge, and it nearly cost them in their semifinal against Drake. UCLA immediately ran out to an 11–2 lead, but from there the Bruins seemed to relax. Wooden was particularly annoyed with Bill Sweek, whose playing time had dwindled the last few weeks. When Sweek missed a defensive assignment midway through the first half, Wooden parked him on the bench. Sweek seethed. “I was a senior. This was my eighty-ninth game,” he said. “I didn’t think I needed a lesson at that point in time.”