Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  The team was dealt a bad blow before practice began. While visiting his sister in Santa Barbara in the fall, Marques Johnson became violently ill with vomiting, chills, and diarrhea. He felt better after a few days, but when he could not regain his appetite or get rid of his fatigue, he checked into the UCLA medical center. A blood test found that Johnson had contracted hepatitis. For weeks, he lay in a hospital bed and watched his weight plummet. At first, he wasn’t sure he would ever play competitive basketball again, but he returned to practice in November as an older, wiser sophomore. “Basketball is still very important, but it’s not the ultimate thing now,” he said. “I just want to enjoy life because I realize as easy as someone snaps his fingers, I could get sick again or hurt and never play another minute.”

  Johnson’s lengthy hospital stay also gave him the chance to spend extended quiet time with his head coach. He was never the type to stop by Wooden’s office just to chat—“I was caught up in the whole Wooden mystique. I kind of kept my distance.”—but there was no mystique in that hospital room. Just two men, one old and one young, shooting the breeze about basketball, life, family, whatever. When Johnson came back, he saw the coach in a different light. “He was still Coach Wooden with the reverence and all that stuff, but I felt at ease around him,” Johnson said.

  By the time Johnson rejoined the team, Wooden had done something that he had rarely done in the past: he made Dave Meyers team captain for the entire season. Johnson could have resented that maneuver—this was supposed to be his team, after all—but he didn’t. “It was probably better,” Johnson said. “Dave became the All-American. He was an incredible leader. He played with so much passion. Now he could restore order and make it about the team again.”

  * * *

  For the 1974–75 season, Wooden’s salary was $32,500, a laughable sum but still the most he had ever been paid. For the last time in a season of last times, Wooden sat down at his desk and made his game-by-game predictions. He decided his Bruins would go 23–3 but fail to win the national championship. Wooden sealed the paper in an envelope and stowed it in his desk without telling anyone. He was getting good at keeping secrets.

  Wooden suspected he might have been overly optimistic after the season opener against unranked Wichita State. The Bruins needed Drollinger to give them 21 points and 14 rebounds, both career highs, to win, 85–74. “Either we’re not as good as I thought we had the potential to be, or we played a fine club,” Wooden said. It turned out to be the latter. From there, UCLA reeled off five straight home wins by an average margin of 19 points.

  The last of those victories came over Notre Dame in a game in which the Bruins had trailed by 19 points in the first half. Digger Phelps had caused quite a stir in the weeks leading up to that game. He had recently authorized a book called A Coach’s World, a diary of Notre Dame’s 1973–74 season written by Larry Keith of Sports Illustrated. The book included some incendiary observations about Wooden. “I have tremendous respect for what he has accomplished as a player and as a coach,” Phelps was quoted as saying. “Nevertheless, I disagree with many of the things he does. Everyone realizes Wooden has mastered the game; he acts as if he invented it as well.”

  Phelps went on to call Wooden “sanctimonious” and took him to task for his bench jockeying: “While Wooden sits on the bench clutching that silver cross in his hand, he’s also riding officials and players worse than any other coach I have seen. I warned Shumate today not to walk past the UCLA bench during time outs, because I don’t want Wooden taking verbal shots at him. That’s so bush-league for a man of his stature, yet no referee has the nerve to reprimand him.”

  Publicly, Wooden shrugged off those comments. “Certain people are always looking to rap someone who’s at the top,” he said. Privately, he was irate. He called Phelps and asked why he had said those things. According to Wooden, Phelps replied, “Don’t worry about that stuff, John. I just did it to sell books.”

  “I hung up on him,” Wooden said.

  For a long time, Wooden expressed a mixture of bemusement and pique, seasoned with a dash of condescension, at the way Phelps and the Notre Dame faithful turned a 1-point regular season victory into a cause célèbre. Phelps’s former assistant, Dick Kuchen, once bragged to Wooden that Phelps and his staff spent an entire year scouting the Bruins before their historic win. “I said, ‘Gosh, Dick, if you’d have spent that time on some of the other games, you would’ve won all those other games you lost, wouldn’t ya? How’d you work out that you were gonna score the last twelve points against us?’” Wooden said. “They made a crusade out of it, but I liked that. I used to tell my players, ‘They’re making a crusade to beat you. What does that mean? They respect you. They think it’ll be great to beat you. Let ’em celebrate if they happen to beat us, like they won the national championship. Then we’ll go ahead and win the national championship.’”

  After scoring that very satisfying win over Notre Dame in Pauley, the Bruins hit the road to play in the Terrapin Classic at the University of Maryland. Lefty Driesell asked to spend some time with Wooden, so Wooden invited him to his morning exercise. “He walked so fast, the next day I could hardly walk,” Driesell said. UCLA defeated St. Bonaventure in the first game to advance to the final against Maryland, and in that contest Wooden made yet another unconventional move: he called time-out to make a strategic adjustment. Driesell had just switched to a three-guard offense, so Wooden responded by inserting Johnson, who was still working his way back into the rotation as a reserve. Johnson scored 11 of UCLA’s final 15 points, and the Bruins won, 81–75.

  Despite his recovering health, it was not easy for Johnson to deal with not starting. He expressed his anger one day during practice when he dunked over Drollinger during a fast-break drill. To Johnson’s surprise, Wooden said nothing. However, when sophomore forward Gavin Smith dunked later in that same practice, Wooden blew his whistle. Goodness gracious sakes alive, Gavin! Don’t ever do that again or you’ll never play another minute for UCLA! When Johnson asked Wooden later why he hadn’t said anything to him when he dunked, Wooden said he was just cutting him some slack. “He knew I had been sick and that I was doing it to release my pent-up frustration,” Johnson said. “Gavin was just doing it to flaunt his jumping ability.”

  Wooden was enjoying himself in a way he hadn’t for some time. Even a pair of losses in January—by 4 points at Stanford, by 6 at Notre Dame—couldn’t sour his mood. “To say I’m pleased with the play of every individual would never be true,” he said. “But I am pleased with the effort of every individual this season, and that hasn’t always been true.”

  Wooden was less pleased when the NCAA’s basketball committee announced a pair of rule changes in early January. The first was a decision to expand the NCAA tournament from twenty-five to thirty-two teams, which meant that for the first time ever, the NCAA would award at-large bids to teams that had failed to win their conference titles. Many coaches and writers had been arguing for this change for several years, but the tipping point was the 1974 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) tournament championship game, when No. 1 NC State beat No. 4 Maryland 103–100 in overtime. It was one of the best-played, most exciting games in college basketball history. While NC State went on to win the NCAA championship, Maryland could not play in that tournament at all and had to settle for an invitation to the NIT, which it turned down. Wooden had long argued against adding at-large teams, and he wasn’t happy to be overruled. “I thought all along that we play the conference to determine who was going to get in the NCAA tournament,” he said. “Teams that don’t win the conference, I don’t think should be in.”

  That was a minor annoyance compared to the other rule change. The committee had determined that from now on, every coach was required to open his locker room to the press within ten minutes of the conclusion of all NCAA tournament games. The committee’s chairman, Davidson College coach Tom Scott, made clear that the rule had been passed with one man in mind. “Wooden has been a problem, as you
know,” Scott said. “If he’s there this year, we’ll have that dressing room open.”

  Wooden took exception to that remark. “I don’t think the press as a whole would say that [I’ve been a problem], except on this one thing,” he said. “I just think that’s a poor place to have a great number of the press in, but if they make it a rule, why, it’ll be done.” After he left coaching, Wooden frequently claimed that Scott’s comment was part of the reason he decided to retire, which was unfair considering Wooden had already made his decision before the rule was changed.

  After the loss at Notre Dame, the Bruins reeled off six straight conference wins, only one of which came by more than 12 points. Their 89–84 win over USC at Pauley Pavilion marked a historic threshold: the all-time series between the schools was now officially tied. It had taken Wooden a mere twenty-seven years to erase the forty-game advantage the Trojans owned when he came to Westwood.

  Wooden remained sanguine even after he suffered the worst loss of his UCLA career, a 103–81 rout at the hands of his good friend, Washington State coach Marv Harshman. “I’m very happy for Marv, and I’m very disappointed for my own team,” Wooden said. “I can’t say we were jobbed. We weren’t out-lucked. It was a good beating.”

  Wooden was finding that he had the exact opposite problem from a year ago. Now, his players were too agreeable. “They’re competitors in their own way, but not violent competitors,” he said. “It’s possible they don’t have the fiery spirit that might [make them] better.” Still, Wooden was not going to let himself get caught up in whether or not he was satisfying expectations. It had taken him to the age of sixty-four, but he was finally following his father’s counsel not to worry about things he couldn’t control. “It’s human nature, I suppose. Anything short of winning all our games is not enough for some people,” Wooden said. “The same is true of the people who used to say we won by such big margins it was boring. Now they’re wondering why we don’t win by more. At one time, that would have bugged me. I accept it now.”

  * * *

  John Wooden had already made a long and compelling case that he was without peer when it came to teaching the game of basketball. The 1974–75 season served as a convincing closing argument.

  Yes, he had two of the country’s better forwards in Meyers and Johnson, but for most of the season, Johnson was a shell of his former self. Besides, no one would claim those two belonged in the same class as Alcindor and Walton. They weren’t even Hazzard, Goodrich, Wicks, or Wilkes. Yet the Bruins stayed among the college basketball elite because they were better schooled in the fundamentals of the game. They weren’t the most talented students. They just had the best teacher.

  This was becoming so obvious, even Wooden’s most bitter rivals had to acknowledge it. “He put high-profile players together effectively,” Bob Boyd said. “It wasn’t always easy, but in the end he produced his desired results.” Dick Harter added, “The most important thing in basketball is getting players to play unselfishly and play well with each other. I can’t remember any UCLA player taking a selfish or a bad shot. When you think about it, John had a lot of very nice guys like Dave Meyers and Marques Johnson, and he had some pain in the asses like Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe. Walton could be obnoxious. John got them all to play well together.”

  Since most sportswriters and opposing coaches were unable to solve this riddle, it was left to a pair of psychology professors to make a clinical study. The two professors—one from the University of Hawaii, the other from UCLA—charted several dozen of Wooden’s practices during the 1974–75 season and published their findings in the January 1976 issue of Psychology Today magazine. The professors came up with ten different categories of communication (Instructions, Hustles, Praises, Scolds, etc.) and assigned everything Wooden said to one of those. The most frequently cited category by far was Instructions, which the psychologists defined as “verbal statements about what to do or how to do it.” That accounted for 50.3 percent of things Wooden said. The professors calculated that overall “at least 75 percent of Wooden’s teaching acts carry information.”

  The researchers were also taken by the qualitative change in Wooden’s demeanor once practice began. This was the “walking contradiction” that Marques Johnson and his teammates had come to know so well. “The whistle transforms Wooden,” they wrote. “He becomes less the friendly grandfather and more the Marine sergeant … [and he] scolds twice as much as he rewards.”

  What those psychologists witnessed was the result of a lifetime of small, almost unnoticeable advancements. Wooden truly lived the credo that hung on his office wall: It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. After all these years, he was still learning, still improving, one three-by-five index card at a time. “You look back at my practice program for the last year or the year before and there wouldn’t be much difference,” he said. “But go back ten years and you’ll find a lot of change. I make small changes regularly almost without realizing it. If you go back twenty to twenty-five years and look at one of my schedules, you’d wonder how I ever got anything done.”

  One thing that Wooden had learned is that he could relax his ultraserious demeanor just a little. His friends were well aware that he had a sense of humor, but to his players this was a major revelation. “My sophomore year, he loosened up,” Johnson said. “He kind of opened up, and we opened up to him. There was a lot more of back-and-forth joking.”

  For instance, one day, Raymond Townsend, a freshman guard, was messing around and taking half-court shots after practice. In previous years, Wooden might have ripped into Townsend for horsing around, but on this day he only asked for the ball. Using his patented 1930s-style two-handed set shot, Wooden drilled his first attempt. “Child’s play,” he said and walked away.

  Johnson thought he was going to get an earful when Wooden spotted him shooting pool in the student union one day. Instead, Wooden asked to borrow his stick. Shifting around the toothpick clutched between his teeth, Wooden bent over and started rattling balls into the pockets. “He made five or six in a row, maybe more,” Johnson said. “The cue ball would spin and snake up to the next one. Boom. Spin and snake up to the next one. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Then he handed me the cue and walked out. Didn’t say a word. Didn’t say one word the whole time.”

  Wooden also liked to tease Johnson about his hair. Johnson wore a thick Afro, but he matted it down extra tight for practice and games. Every so often, Wooden would walk up to him, pull at a strand, and smirk when it stood straight up. “That was his way of saying, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re not fooling me,’” Johnson said.

  McCarter was a prime target for Wooden’s needle. Besides being the team’s only vegetarian (though he ate at the training table), McCarter sported the headband-and-dark-glasses look favored by his idol, Jimi Hendrix. McCarter was also a martial arts enthusiast who went through a series of kung fu moves to get ready to play. Once, before a game at Oregon State, McCarter was making his slow-motion hand and leg contortions when Wooden sneaked up behind him and started mimicking his moves. McCarter had no idea why his teammates were laughing so hard until he turned around.

  During another trip to the Northwest, Wooden was riding the team bus when he asked Dick Enberg to come sit next to him. Enberg thought he was going to get a lesson on the intricacies of basketball, but instead Wooden asked, “Do you like poetry?” Startled, Enberg said yes. For the rest of the ride, he and Wooden (well, mostly Wooden) spoke about different poets and different eras, with Wooden reciting some of his favorite verses.

  There was, however, one person hovering in the background who could disrupt Wooden’s serenity. Sam Gilbert remained embedded as ever in the program, despite J. D. Morgan’s efforts to pry him away. The two men continued to have heated discussions in Morgan’s office. “You could hear J. D. shouting out the door,” Frank Arnold said. “J. D. was very strongly telling Sam to stay away, don’t get involved. I know that from the inside.”

  Arnold heard Gilber
t’s name bandied about when he came to UCLA in the spring of 1971 but didn’t know much about him. A few weeks later, Arnold was sitting with Wooden and a few players at a UCLA track meet. When one of the players mentioned he needed some help with a problem, Arnold suggested he go see Sam Gilbert. Wooden nudged Arnold hard with his knee. After the meet, Wooden told Arnold, “Never do that again. And stay away from Sam Gilbert.” Arnold did as he was told. “I knew Sam from a distance, and that’s all I wanted to know about him,” he said. “I had a very low opinion of Sam. Any kind of high-end booster like that isn’t good for any program.”

  That did not stop Gilbert from continuing to befriend Wooden’s players. Marques Johnson read about Gilbert in The Wizard of Westwood but did not meet him during his recruitment. After Johnson started playing for UCLA, some upperclassmen took him to one of Gilbert’s famous weekend barbecues. Johnson soon became a regular visitor. “It wasn’t anything crazy. We’d go over and play paddle tennis and just hang out all day. There might be fifteen, twenty people between players and their girlfriends,” Johnson said. “You’d have Rose, the kids, and the grandkids swimming, dogs chasing the tennis balls into the pool. It was a real wholesome picture.”

  Gilbert lavished on Johnson the same less-than-wholesome favors he provided for everyone else. “There was no cash ever. He never paid rent or bought cars or anything, but he would get me discounts on things like tires,” Johnson said. “The one thing I got [for free] was buckskin heavy jackets and leather coats from a clothing guy that he knew.”

  Though Gilbert boasted that he never took a fee for serving as the players’ agent, his affiliation with the team obviously enhanced his standing in the business community. There were many times when Gilbert would take Johnson and a friend, usually McCarter or Washington or both, to attend some high-class function in Los Angeles. “That would happen two or three times a month,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have to pay for the food.”