Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Among the players, the reviews on Morgan were mixed. They liked flying first class (while Morgan volunteered to sit in coach), benefited from his business acumen, respected his influence, and appreciated his interest in their academics. On the other hand, they didn’t like his intrusions, and they sure as heck didn’t think he belonged on their bench. “He was a bully and a blowhard,” Kenny Heitz said. “We wouldn’t see him all season until the Final Four, and then he’d be sitting on the bench. One game a ref told him to sit down and shut up, and we all cheered.”

  The relationship between Wooden and Morgan would never have worked if the men did not share a genuine respect. “He’s the greatest fundamental coach ever in the game,” said Morgan, who won eight NCAA titles himself as UCLA’s tennis coach. That did not mean, however, that they were close friends. Their conversations revolved almost exclusively around business. For example, even though the entire country was talking about the Vietnam War, Wooden had no idea how Morgan felt about it. “I don’t think, as a coach under him, it was my responsibility in any way to be concerned about how J. D. Morgan felt about the Vietnam War,” Wooden said. Note Wooden’s use of the phrase “under him.” This was not a partnership between equals. They were a powerful two-man machine, but only one could be the engine. As Gary Cunningham put it, “It was a professional relationship. It wasn’t one you’d call a friendship.”

  * * *

  Could this be the year?

  That titillating question was on the lips of USC basketball fans as the 1970–71 season tipped off. It had taken four years, but Bob Boyd now had enough high-caliber players to dethrone John Wooden’s mighty Bruins. Along with All-America candidate Paul Westphal, now a junior, Boyd returned eleven of twelve players from the group that had shared second place in the Pac-8 the year before. “This is the best team I’ve had since I’ve been here,” the coach said on USC’s first day of practice. “It has the best chance of winning the conference title of any team I’ve had, too.”

  The Trojans began the season ranked seventh in the Associated Press preseason poll, and by mid-January they were No. 3 and still undefeated. Of course, that still left them two spots below the Bruins, who had also breezed through their early schedule unscathed. The only lingering concern UCLA had as conference play got under way was Henry Bibby, whose shooting, normally so dependable, had been thrown off by his move to point guard. In January, Bibby was averaging 11 points per game (down from 15 as a junior) while converting just 38 percent from the floor. Still, Wooden never wavered. “This guy never gave up on me,” Bibby said. “He would talk to me after practice. I remember him telling me, ‘We believe in you. You can shoot.’ If I was the coach, I probably wouldn’t have played me, but he gave me confidence.”

  UCLA was a perfect 13–0 as it embarked on a two-game trip to Chicago in late January. After they dispatched a weak Loyola team by 25 points, Wooden fretted that “right now we are not as hungry as we need to be.” It was a naked motivational ploy for the challenge that lay ahead the following afternoon in South Bend, Indiana, where the Bruins would face ninth-ranked Notre Dame on national television. UCLA’s bus didn’t roll into town until 3:00 a.m. the night before, but sleep deprivation was a minor problem compared to the one posed by Notre Dame guard Austin Carr, who was leading the nation in scoring at 37.8 points per game. Once the game tipped off, Carr was otherworldly, tossing in jumpers from every angle to fuel Notre Dame’s burst to an early 13-point lead. Wooden had hoped Kenny Booker would be able to slow Carr down, but Carr was shredding him so badly that Wooden switched Terry Schofield on him. That worked until Schofield had to leave the game late in the first half because of an injured elbow. Meanwhile, UCLA’s full-court press was so impotent that Wooden abandoned it a few minutes into the game.

  A couple of jumpers from Bibby helped the Bruins trim the deficit to 5 at halftime, and they managed to tie the game at 47–all with 16:40 to play. In the end, however, Notre Dame just had too much Carr. After he burned Larry Hollyfield, a little-used six-foot-five sophomore, for 15 points in the final 6 minutes, Wooden sent in Sidney Wicks for one more try even though he had four fouls. He immediately got called for his fifth. As Wicks stalked back to the UCLA bench, he barked at Wooden, “I told you, Coach! I told you not to put me on him!”

  The final was Notre Dame 89, UCLA 82. The loss snapped UCLA’s nineteen-game winning streak, and it was the school’s first nonconference loss in forty-nine games. Carr finished with 46 points. “There is no one to compare with him man-to-man,” Wooden said. “They outplayed us. They were more spirited. But we are a better team.”

  The loss dropped UCLA to third in the AP poll, and while it was hardly reason to panic, it did take some of the luster off the much-anticipated first meeting with USC. Instead of pitting the nation’s top two teams against each other, the matchup now featured UCLA in the unaccustomed position of being ranked below USC, which was No. 1 in the UPI poll and No. 2 in the AP. (Undefeated Marquette had replaced UCLA as the AP’s No. 1.) The excitement on USC’s campus was unprecedented. Many students camped out the night before tickets were made available, and the game took less than three hours to sell out. They were primed to see UCLA toppled at last.

  For a while, it looked as if UCLA might suffer back-to-back losses for the first time in five years. It was a stark role reversal. Bibby couldn’t hit a shot against USC’s zone (he would finish three-for-twelve from the floor), the Bruins threw the ball all over the gym, and USC converted those turnovers into layup after layup. Midway through the second half, USC owned a 59–50 lead, its biggest of the game.

  After a UCLA bucket cut the lead to 7, Boyd called time-out. Wooden later said he was “very pleased to see” this because it allowed his guys to regroup. Over the next 3½ minutes, the Bruins went on a 9–0 spurt, taking a 61–59 lead on a steal-and-layup by Booker with 5:30 to play. Having watched his team finally seize a lead, Wooden immediately ordered his Bruins to stall. “I knew they wanted to stay in a zone defense to try to prevent fouls, and might not come out to contest us too much,” he said. The tactic worked beautifully. The Trojans scored just one point over the final 9½ minutes, and UCLA emerged with a dramatic 64–60 victory.

  Wooden’s use of the stall provided Boyd with a golden opportunity to rebuke him in the same way that Wooden had criticized Boyd four years before. But Boyd had long ago accepted that he was never going to win a public relations battle with Saint John. “I don’t like stall basketball, but it is legal and I’ll do it when I believe the status of the game dictates,” Wooden said. “I have never said it wasn’t good strategy under certain conditions.”

  Having dodged a bullet in the USC game, UCLA continued to bob and weave its way to victory. Four of the Bruins’ next six wins came by 4 points or fewer. The Bruins’ proclivity for winning so many close games burnished their coach’s mystical aura—so much so that UCLA’s publicity department started applying Red Sanders’s old sobriquet “The Wizard of Westwood” to Wooden. The nickname made Wooden uneasy. He hoped it wouldn’t catch on.

  Wooden knew that there was no magic behind what was happening. He simply had the best players, and he taught them well. There was no better example than Wicks, who had evolved into an efficient, disciplined, intelligent player, all without sacrificing his innate creativity. Wicks relished a challenge. Going up against Cal’s star forward, Jackie Ridgle, in Berkeley, Wicks scored a career-high 33 points to go with 17 rebounds and 5 assists. Defensively, he made life so miserable for Ridgle that Wooden chided Ridgle from the bench, “Hey Jackie, how are you going to keep your scoring average up if your teammates don’t give you the ball?” After another superlative performance by Wicks in a home win over Oregon (28 points, 13 rebounds), Ducks coach Steve Belko called him “one of the greatest college forwards I’ve ever seen. He has the quickness of an antelope, he’s strong as a big cat inside and both his shot selection and his shooting are much better. The only one I can think to compare him with is Elgin Baylor, and Wicks may be better a
t this stage because he’s bigger.”

  Despite all this winning, Wooden continued to complain about the way college players had changed over the years. “In my opinion, they’re not as coachable now,” he said in February. “There’s a rebellion against supervision of almost any sort. To accept discipline for many of them now is almost a badge of dishonor.” At the first sign of trouble—and there weren’t many—Wooden was quick to connect those dots again between the rebellious counterculture and poor performance on the court. After UCLA nearly blew a 10-point lead at Washington before winning by 2, Wooden told his players during a time-out that they had “given in to a permissive society.”

  When Wooden referred to permissiveness, he was invariably talking about sexual promiscuity. Sure, he could bend a little on hair length and dress code, but he could never brook the carnal free-for-all he imagined was taking place around campus. Privately, Wooden cracked that his players would probably “lead the country in V.D.”

  One of Wooden’s most frequent targets on this front was Steve Patterson. He may have been an outspoken, God-fearing Christian, but when the sun set Patterson could be devilish with the ladies. The season was already wearing on Patterson’s psyche. He had spent the early part of his career getting dominated by Lew Alcindor. Now he was hearing from his coach that his subpar play happened because he was spending too much time “catting around.” Wooden levied this charge so often that Patterson’s friends teased him by calling him “The Cat Man” and “El Gato.” Midway through the season, Patterson decided he wanted to quit. Fortunately, as he was heading for his car to leave for the airport, he was spotted by his two best friends on the team, Andy Hill and John Ecker, who spent several hours talking him out of leaving. It was an especially noble effort on Ecker’s part, since he would have benefited more than any other player if Patterson had bolted.

  And yet the UCLA train rolled on. The Bruins had the most talent, the best coach, and they prized winning above all else. This all came together in their rematch with USC on the final day of the regular season. The Trojans had also not lost since falling to UCLA the month before, and so they entered the final weekend trailing the Bruins by just one game in the Pac-8 standings.

  The national television audience that watched in record numbers were treated to another UCLA yawner. During one stretch, the Trojans went seven and a half minutes without a point. At halftime, UCLA owned a 19-point lead, which swelled to 24 early in the second half. The Trojans never got closer than 15 until Wooden emptied his bench. The 73–62 final left Boyd dispirited. “The one thing I feared would happen did happen,” he said. “When we got behind early, we had to abandon any game plan we may have had.”

  Boyd was not lying five months before when he said that this could be his best USC team. In fact, it turned out to be the best team in school history, finishing the season with a 24–2 record. Alas, the question everyone had been asking—Could this be the year?—yielded the same answer as the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. Boyd’s Trojans had risen to unprecedented heights, yet they ended back where they started, always and forever looking up at UCLA.

  * * *

  If there was one man who could relate to Boyd’s predicament, it was Jerry Tarkanian, who had also engineered a rousing revival at Cal State Long Beach. Tarkanian’s 49ers finished the regular season with a 22–4 record and claimed their third straight Pacific Coast Athletic Association title. Yet, because teams were still sent to NCAA tournament regions based on geography, not competitive balance, Tarkanian’s path to the NCAA championship was always obstructed by Wooden.

  Unlike Boyd, Tarkanian developed both a professional and personal admiration for Wooden, even if some of it was begrudging. “I used to watch Wooden’s teams win national championships, and they used to come back to L.A. and land at the airport, and the media would ask him, ‘Coach, what are you going to do now?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m going to take my grandkids to get a milkshake, and then on Sunday, I’m going to go to church,’” Tarkanian said with a chuckle. “And I’ve got to recruit against him.”

  Both teams breezed through their opening games—UCLA stomped BYU by 18, Long Beach cruised by Weber State University and Pacific—to earn a meeting in the postseason for the second straight year. Like Boyd, Tarkanian believed he had assembled his finest team, which featured an All-American-caliber player in six-foot-six sophomore guard Ed Ratleff. As soon as the game got under way, the Bruins knew they were in for a fight. Tarkanian, master of the zone defense, surprised Wooden by deploying a 2-3 formation instead of his usual 1-2-2 trap. That forced UCLA to beat the 49ers with outside shots, and the Bruins went cold. Three of UCLA’s starters—Booker, Bibby, and Patterson—were a combined oh-for-seventeen in the first half, yet UCLA trailed by just 4 points. Things got worse in the second half, as Long Beach built an 11-point lead with fourteen minutes to play. When Wicks went to the bench at that point with his fourth foul, it looked as if the end of UCLA’s championship run was nigh.

  Wooden was furious. As UCLA huddled during the second half, he appeared to lose composure. He glared at his players and shouted, “You guys are a bunch of cock hounds!” Then he walked away from the huddle.

  The players were momentarily stunned. Did he really just say that? They had never heard him use profanity before, and they weren’t sure how to react. After a few seconds of silence, Denny Crum dove into the huddle, delivered some final pieces of instruction, and sent them back onto the court.

  Did Wooden consciously abandon his prohibition against profanity in hopes it would kick-start his team? We’ll never know, because Wooden never discussed it. But that was what happened. UCLA scored 9 straight points and eventually clawed back to a 50–50 tie with six minutes to go.

  The game’s pivotal play occurred when Ratleff fouled out with four minutes left. Tarkanian saw this as more than just a bad break. According to Loel Schrader, the 49ers’ beat writer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, as the Bruins were falling behind, J. D. Morgan started yelling at referee Art White. Tarkanian was convinced that Morgan’s intimidation had led White to make that call—“Only time Eddie ever fouled out in his career”—but regardless of whether that’s true, it put the 49ers in a bind. With the game tied again at 53–all two minutes later, Tarkanian, desperate, went to a delay offense.

  To his surprise, Wooden did not adjust. “I was amazed that he let us stall. He never came out and tried to trap us,” Tarkanian said many years later. Long Beach could have stalled its way until the final seconds, but one of their guards, Dwight Taylor, took a pair of ill-advised jumpers that gave UCLA extra possessions. (“I swear to God if I had a gun, I would have shot him,” Tarkanian said.) That enabled the Bruins to send Wicks to the foul line, where he sank four nerve-rattling free throws to seal the 57–55 win. “Sidney certainly wasn’t one of my better free throw shooters,” Wooden said years later, “but in a clutch situation, if you had to have the free throw, I never had anyone that I’d rather have on the line than Sidney.”

  Tarkanian, like Boyd two weeks ago, was disconsolate. “We did everything we wanted to win,” he said, “except we lost.”

  For UCLA, it was just the latest escape in a season full of them. Tarkanian had seen many of those at close range. He did not believe a man could be so lucky unless there were greater forces at work. “I never saw a coach win so many close games,” Tarkanian marveled many years later. “So many strange things would happen. I think that Wooden was such a nice man who went to church all the time that the good Lord wanted him to win.”

  Did he really believe that?

  “Yes, I do. I don’t think he was lucky. I think the good Lord just said, ‘This is a good man.’”

  * * *

  UCLA was back in the Astrodome, not for a spectacle this time but rather for a chance to win a championship—its fifth straight. In an effort to capitalize on the growing popularity of the tournament, the NCAA staged its culminating weekend inside an indoor football stadium for the fir
st time. Wooden tried to display his usual equanimity, but inside he was wound tight. He had a senior-laden team, and he knew the next year he would have to rebuild mostly with sophomores. If this was going to be UCLA’s last chance to continue its championship string, Wooden wanted his team to pull it off.

  On the afternoon of UCLA’s semifinal against No. 4 Kansas, Cunningham and Crum waited in the hotel lobby for Wooden so they could all walk over to the Astrodome. When Wooden was uncharacteristically late, the assistants checked with Nell, who told them that Wooden had left a half hour before. Figuring Wooden had gotten the meeting time mixed up, Crum and Cunningham went to the arena. They looked for Wooden for a while, but when they couldn’t find him, they went to an upper-level box so they could scout the first semifinal. When they finally met up with Wooden toward the end of the game, they discovered that their boss was royally pissed. “He really got after both of us,” Cunningham said. “He was angry at me, but he thought Denny was the instigator. It was just a screw-up.… It shows the tension of the tournament and the pressure and wanting to win. All of those ingredients you put together, it’s like a time bomb ready to go off.”

  When the game got under way, the anger between the coaches was still simmering. Normally, Crum and Cunningham spoke to the team before the game and during time-outs, but Wooden refused to let them. “He didn’t let us do what we normally do. We couldn’t talk in the locker room or anything,” Cunningham said.

  Midway through the first half, Crum told Schofield to report into the game. It was not unusual for Wooden to delegate substitutions to his assistants, but on this occasion, he objected and sent Schofield back to the bench. When Crum tried to send Schofield to the scorer’s table a second time, Wooden objected again. “He told me to go sit down at the end of the bench because he didn’t want to listen to me,” Crum said. “I said, ‘I’m not going down there, Coach. This is my responsibility. I’m going to sit right here like I always do.’” The two men argued loudly and continued to go at it during a time-out. Bibby stepped in in an effort to calm the two of them down, but it didn’t do much good.