Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Seibert had frequently complained to his teammates about Wooden, but that was hardly unusual. Lots of guys complained about Wooden. Still, nobody knew Seibert’s intentions when he took his turn at the podium. He began by saying that if the purpose of this exercise was to describe his experiences at UCLA, then he wanted to be honest and say that he had, in his words, “an unhappy experience.” The room fell silent. “I was like, wow, Bill, do you really want to say this?” Bibby recalled. “I think that was the consensus of everyone there.”

  Seibert then laid out all the reasons why he had not enjoyed playing for John Wooden. Much of it was centered on his lack of playing time, but he had broader complaints as well. Seibert spoke about what he perceived as “unequal treatment,” as well as “double rules standard” and a general “lack of communication” between the coaches and the players, especially the end-of-the-bench guys. He talked about the hotel water fight the previous season in Chicago, when Sweek and Wicks, the primary culprits, went unpunished while Seibert and the other reserves were suspended. He told of a time when he and another reserve got caught with a television on in their room on game day and were told they couldn’t play that night, but a starter who was caught with a girl in his room went unscathed. Seibert claimed that the trainers spent much more time helping the guys who played than the guys who didn’t. As Seibert spoke, his mother started to cry. His father stood up and shouted at him to sit down. But he kept right on talking. “It was,” said Enberg, “the most uncomfortable I have ever felt in my life.”

  Sitting at tables right in front of the dais, Seibert’s teammates experienced a range of reactions. On the one hand, they were mortified. On the other hand, they agreed with him. “I don’t think he showed very much class in that situation, but the things he said were pretty much true,” Ecker said. “The players who were sitting on the bench felt like they were unjustly treated.”

  As Seibert spoke, Terry Schofield was overcome by a kaleidoscope of emotions—shock, amusement, jealousy, awe. He couldn’t believe that Seibert had the guts to say those things in such a formal setting—“Everyone’s in a coat and tie and they’re happy, and this guy just gets up and lays a turd in the punch bowl,” he said—but despite the awkwardness of the moment, Schofield found himself rooting on his teammate. “I got the chills. He had the courage to say what he said because there wasn’t anything he said that wasn’t true,” Schofield said several decades later. “I knew how he felt because I was a failure just like him. I didn’t play, either. Bill was basically trying to say, ‘I’m not a failure. I have some dignity left here, and let me tell you how difficult it has been to maintain my dignity.’ It took real balls to do what Bill did. He challenged the king in his court.”

  Seibert spoke for just under ten minutes, but it seemed a lot longer. When he was through, there was a smattering of boos from the audience, but the other UCLA players, including the freshmen, rose in unison and gave him a standing ovation. This was an even bigger rebuff to Wooden than the one Seibert had just dealt—and Wooden took notice. It was one thing for a lone, little-used reserve to voice his bitterness about not playing. But for all of the players to give him a standing ovation gave Seibert’s remarks credibility.

  The ovation was largely misconstrued. It was not necessarily an endorsement of what Seibert had done, nor was it planned in advance. Rather, it was simply a spontaneous, poignant gesture of solidarity for a teammate. “Nobody said, ‘Let’s stand up,’” Ecker said. “It was more the feeling of, oh my God, Bill Seibert has put himself out on a limb. He’s going to get creamed if we don’t support him.” Wicks added, “He spoke from the heart. I felt for him.” The freshmen had no understanding of whether Seibert’s complaints were justified, but they instinctively followed the lead of their older teammates. “I thought it took a lot of courage to say what he said,” recalled Larry Farmer, a freshman forward. “Speaking for myself, that’s why I stood up. I didn’t stand up to piss Coach off, although I’m sure it did.”

  Once Seibert and the other players sat down, Wooden came to the microphone. He showed a grace that Seibert had lacked. Wooden said he was sorry that Bill was so unhappy, but he had always encouraged his players to speak their minds. From there, the evening limped to a close.

  Seibert briefly spoke to Wooden after his remarks. “He seemed hurt, for reasons you can imagine. He said it was mostly because his wife and family were hurt,” Seibert said. A week later, Seibert revealed that he had begun writing the speech four days before the banquet and that he did not consult with anyone before he delivered it. “I just decided to tell my experiences about UCLA basketball. The speech wasn’t written in anger,” he said. He also conceded that his reference to a lack of communication was the part of his speech he directed most toward Wooden. “I had hoped it would be received as constructive,” Seibert said. “I did not want it to be a mean speech toward Coach Wooden, because he has many qualities that I greatly admire. As Kenny Heitz used to say of him, he’s the greatest coach in history at working with a team during practice.”

  That was clearly a backhanded compliment. The implication was that Wooden only cared about his players as players, not people. “I don’t think I would have played anyone on the team any differently, except to maybe let the reserves play more in some of the games that were not close,” Seibert said. “What I would suggest, however, is that the coaching staff spend more time with each individual and tell him what his role on the team was. The aim of the team was to win, and that was the definition of success.”

  Wooden was far more angry than his immediate public reaction indicated. He wasn’t just furious with Seibert but at the other players as well. He believed some of them had to have known what Seibert was going to do and had probably encouraged him. “I think it really hurt him inside,” Ecker said. “It hurt his integrity, his own vision of himself. I don’t know how much of what he heard really sank in.”

  The players would soon find out just how mad the coach was. The following morning, Denny Crum pulled Schofield from his 8:00 a.m. class and brought him to Wooden’s office. When Schofield got there, Wooden and Cunningham were waiting. The three coaches grilled Schofield at length. Wooden listed all the ways in which he believed Schofield was undermining the team, calling him a left-wing activist, a bad influence on his teammates, and a malcontent who would probably be better off quitting the team. “Wooden just unloaded on me,” Schofield said. “To some degree, what the coaches said was true. I was very unhappy.” Schofield started to cry and swore that he had no idea that Seibert was going to give that speech, but he didn’t sense that Wooden believed him.

  The next day, Hill and Ecker were called to Wooden’s office to face the same inquisition. “I was like, wait a minute. Everyone was giving him a standing ovation. Why are you singling us out?” Hill said. Ecker likewise refused to take blame for Seibert’s stunt. “I didn’t put him up to it, and I could say that with all honesty,” Ecker said. “I wanted to stay on the team.”

  Schofield, Hill, and Ecker were incensed at Wooden’s behavior. Their teammates reacted the same way when the three of them shared their stories. All of the returning players met at Sidney Wicks’s house to talk about what Wooden had done. They continued to meet among themselves, and when Wooden got wind of those conversations, he started calling in other players as well. His message was the same: if you feel the same way Seibert does, then you should quit the team.

  In the midst of all this acrimony, the national crisis over the Vietnam War was reaching critical mass. Just a few days before Seibert’s speech, President Nixon had revealed in a nationally televised address that he was escalating the war into Cambodia. That ignited yet another wave of bitter campus protests. And on the day of the basketball banquet, a student protest at Kent State University turned tragic when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on the protesters, killing four students and wounding nine others.

  The Kent State massacre, as it came to be called, spurred a rash of violent demonstrations on ca
mpuses around the country. UCLA was no exception. Two days after the shootings, a hundred riot-equipped officers from the Los Angeles Police Department moved from an off-campus command post to the old men’s gym. Students and faculty members reported seeing officers on a “window-smashing march” through the campus, arresting people indiscriminately. For the first time in school history, UCLA’s administration declared a state of emergency and shut down all campus operations. The next day, Chancellor Charles Young called for a convocation to be held inside Pauley Pavilion, where he addressed more than eight thousand listeners. Young conceded that Nixon’s decision to push into Cambodia represented a “crisis of authority,” but he also sought to defuse the tension on campus. “I cannot see how the problems of Cambodia, Vietnam or Kent State can be solved by turning UCLA into another battlefield,” he said.

  The basketball players were determined to do their part. They wanted to leverage their celebrity in support of the cause that had consumed their friends and fellow students. So they wrote, signed, and mailed an angry letter to President Nixon in care of his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, a UCLA alumnus and fund-raiser (not to mention a friend of Wooden’s). The letter began: “We, the undersigned, are 13 UCLA students (12 players and a student manager) who wish to express our grave concern and disapproval over the President’s policy of expansion of the immoral, genocidal and imperialistic war the United States is now waging in Southeast Asia.” It concluded by demanding immediate withdrawal from Cambodia, rapid de-escalation from Vietnam, a public investigation into the killings at Kent State, and “the end of harassment of youth by the Nixon-Agnew Administration, by those in authority at the federal, state or local level.”

  Sam Gilbert, who, unlike Wooden, shared the players’ political views, tried to get the letter published in the Los Angeles Times, but the paper declined. Somehow, Wooden got hold of the letter and again summoned Hill to his office to voice his displeasure. At first, Hill tried to deny that he had written it, but it did him no good. He was not going to fool a former high school English teacher.

  In Wooden’s mind, all of these dots were connected: long hair, shaggy sideburns, student protests, letters to the president, societal chaos, players wanting to know why and not how. It had caused a joyful night to be upended by a selfish kid who was bitter that he didn’t get to play more. Wooden was growing tired of adapting to all this change. He was tired of being cast as an evil symbol of the establishment. Now, it was his turn to protest.

  Hill, Ecker, and Schofield were the targets of Wooden’s ire because they, along with Steve Patterson, had been the most passionate adherents of counterculture causes. Unlike Patterson, however, Hill, Ecker, and Schofield did not play a lot. Moreover, Hill and Ecker had gone to the same high school as Seibert. That’s why Wooden assumed they were in cahoots. “I felt from the actions of some of the players they seemed to be real pleased that someone was taking a grab at the establishment,” Wooden said. “Some of those players had previously done some things that had indicated that they were anti-establishment.… Most of the players were embarrassed [by what Seibert did] but the particular ones who were singled out seemed to be smirking. The ones I could see seemed to be delighted.”

  After weeks of talking among themselves, the players decided to request a meeting with Wooden so they could air their grievances. Sam Gilbert made arrangements to secure a hotel conference room, but when J. D. Morgan got wind of those plans, he decided to host the gathering in his office. The atmosphere was tense. Wooden opened by saying that he wanted to know whether any of the players in the room agreed with what Bill Seibert had said. He set on the table a notebook in which he had written the players’ names in alphabetical order. (With Wooden, there was always an order.) He started to go down the list and ask each man to speak.

  The first to be called on was Rick Betchley, a soft-spoken sophomore guard. Betchley mumbled that he didn’t really have any complaints other than maybe a few double standards. Before Wooden could even get to the next name, the players jumped in. The complaints came rapid-fire from every corner of the room. “He was kind of flabbergasted by it all,” Ecker said. “We emphasized over and over, ‘We are not here to hurt the UCLA basketball program. We are here to iron out some of the problems. We’re after the same thing that you are.’”

  The exercise was painful but healthy. Wooden did his best to listen, but he did not change his mind. “Some members of the team felt that I should not have called those men into my office. I still think I was right in doing it,” Wooden later told the author Tony Medley. “I don’t think they got the straight dope from the players that I called in. I think they inferred to the other players that I asked them to quit, which I did not. I said, ‘If you feel that way, I think you’d be better off to quit.’”

  The main complaint was that Wooden’s actions had been so at odds with the posture he had always assumed. In the players’ minds, he was now attempting to control their lives outside of basketball—and they did not welcome it. “I told him we came to UCLA because we wanted him to coach basketball, not coach our private lives,” one player described as a “prominent Bruin” later told Sports Illustrated. “He had been trying to divide and harass us. Wooden has always said we were students first and players next, but he never considered what the ramifications of that are, that as a basketball coach he can’t control our identities.”

  Eventually, it was Wicks who salved the wound during the meeting. “You shouldn’t feel threatened by this,” he told Wooden. “We’re here as a team and you taught us that.”

  In the end, nothing was firmly decided. Wooden still believed he had treated Seibert and the other benchwarmers fairly and respectfully. “A player gets the treatment he earns and deserves,” Wooden said. “If I treated them alike, they’d know I was lying to somebody. Seibert felt he had the right to do what he did, but the boy took advantage of the situation. I didn’t feel it was in good taste or polite or good manners, either.”

  In the weeks after the crisis passed, Wooden reflected on all that had happened. He had learned some important things and, as always, would do his best to adapt. Yet, his faith in his core philosophies emerged unshaken. “All I want to know is, have I been fair?” he said. “Not have I been right, because I know I haven’t always been. But have I been fair? I think I have. I always remember to do my best, and I have peace of mind.”

  A few months after Bill Seibert roiled Wooden’s world, he asked his now-former coach to write him a recommendation letter for a teaching position in Australia. Wooden agreed. He was, after all, never one to hold a grudge. Seibert got the job, and life inside Wooden’s cloistered church went back to the way it was before. That is, with one exception. UCLA never held a spring banquet for one of Wooden’s teams again.

  26

  The Redhead

  Denny Crum knew that Wooden did not like to leave Los Angeles to recruit, so he had to take his case to a higher authority. He told Nell one day in the winter of 1970 that John wouldn’t be home for dinner. That way, when Wooden tried to object, Crum could tell him that Nell already knew about it, so he had no excuse not to go.

  If Crum was going to take such drastic measures, the player had better be good. Really, really good. When Wooden said he was skeptical, Crum told him, “You didn’t question me on these other guys we’ve got. Why would you question me here?”

  Crum drove Wooden to the airport, where the two of them hopped on a twenty-minute flight to San Diego. They drove to a basketball game at Helix High School in the suburb of La Mesa. At first, Crum was concerned Wooden couldn’t concentrate on the game because he was besieged by people wanting his autograph. Finally, toward the end of the game, Crum asked his boss what he thought of Helix’s center. “Well he is pretty good, isn’t he,” Wooden replied. For the coach, that qualified as overwhelming enthusiasm.

  Bill Walton was better than pretty good. He was the best center ever to come out of California. Walton cut quite the colorful figure back then. Bushy red hair, spind
ly arms, wobbly legs, tender knees, bursting with boundless, infectious, youthful energy. Walton might not have been a nationally known phenom like Lew Alcindor, but the folks out west knew all about him. “He’s the best high school player I’ve ever seen,” San Diego State coach Dick Davis said. “He’s probably a better shot blocker at this stage than Alcindor was.” After watching Walton in action, Wooden said he was “as good a prospect at this stage of development as anyone I have ever seen.”

  Walton must have been something special to warrant a rare twofer from Wooden: an out-of-town scouting trip and a home visit. But by the time Wooden arrived at Ted and Gloria Walton’s modest home later during Walton’s senior season, the recruitment was essentially over. Walton had been enamored of Wooden ever since he saw the coach speak at a basketball camp in San Diego six years earlier. UCLA’s championship win over Michigan in 1965 was the first basketball game Walton had ever watched on television. The Bruins were scrawny and quick, just like him. He loved their teamwork, their ball movement. Walton attended Lew Alcindor’s final game in Pauley Pavilion during the 1969 NCAA West Regional, and he wore number 33 at Helix High School in Alcindor’s honor. “I was,” Walton said, “the easiest recruit UCLA ever had.”

  Some two hundred colleges had contacted Walton and his family in hopes of landing him. They brandished all kinds of grand promises, many of which strayed well outside the bounds of NCAA rules. “Let your imagination run wild and you still wouldn’t come close,” Walton said. Only four coaches made it into the Waltons’ home: Notre Dame’s Johnny Dee, USC’s Bob Boyd, San Diego State’s Dick Davis, and Wooden. Fittingly, the coach who left the strongest impression was the one who promised the least. “I won’t even promise you’ll make the team,” Wooden told Walton. “First, you’ll have to prove you are a fine young man with good personal values. Then you’ll have to demonstrate you can do well in the classroom. If you can do that, we’ll give you a practice jersey and allow you to try out.”