Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  “It got back to me that he was not happy with what was going on,” Brown said many years later. “Sam was not a nice man.”

  Brown faced the same problem that previous UCLA coaches, including Wooden, had faced. He had to weigh the costs of taking on Gilbert against the risk of letting him continue. So he tried to find a middle ground. “I feared this guy would tear down the program if I fought him, so I tried to tolerate him,” Brown said. “I was honestly afraid [of] what he would do, and I didn’t want to exclude any booster. But it got very ugly and so uncomfortable.… He didn’t want anyone questioning what he did.”

  Gilbert’s interferences were part of a broader culture of entitlement among UCLA’s supporters that Brown found off-putting. “The first thing they say is it will help you if you speak at our dinner,” he said a few weeks before his first game. “That isn’t the way I would ask for a favor.” Nor did he realize just how astronomical the cost of living was in Los Angeles. Since he could not afford to buy a home on his meager salary, Brown had to live in a 2,200-square-foot house in Brentwood that had been purchased by a group of UCLA alumni and leased to him. His wife, Barbara, took a job at a travel agency to help make ends meet.

  Worst of all, before the season began, Morgan had to retire because of his failing heart. Technically, he would stay on as athletic director until the following June, but his assistant, Bob Fischer, was now calling the shots. When Morgan left, a piece of Brown’s enthusiasm for the job went with him.

  Brown’s first season did not get off to a promising start. The Bruins dropped two straight games in mid-December, a 77–74 decision at Notre Dame and a 99–94 loss to DePaul in Pauley Pavilion. That prompted the publication of a damning Sports Illustrated article (“The Bruins Are in Ruins”) and further embedded the narrative that nobody would ever accomplish what John Wooden had. Brown asked Wooden for advice from time to time, but they did not socialize. “I don’t know if I would call him a friend,” Brown said. “He was larger than life to me.”

  Still, Brown couldn’t get enough of hearing about Wooden from Farmer and Ducky Drake. He about fell off his chair when they told him how Wooden really behaved on the bench. “As an outsider, that was the biggest shock of my life to think he would get on referees,” Brown said.

  UCLA hit its roughest patch in January, losing four out of five games. The main problem was that Brown was still relying on his seniors, even though the freshmen and sophomores were more talented. “I was trying to play all the seniors because I was their third coach,” Brown said. “Larry Farmer said that Wooden would never do that.” Not only did Brown take Farmer’s advice about his rotation; he also went to Wooden to ask for help installing the high-post offense. “His main advice to me was to be myself,” Brown said. “He didn’t tell me to be like him. He said just value the things that I would trust and I would be all right.”

  From there, the season turned around in dramatic fashion. The Bruins won seven of their final nine games to finish fourth in the conference, which was now called the Pac-10 because of the additions of Arizona and Arizona State. In Wooden’s era, that would have ended the season, but since the NCAA tournament had been expanded to include forty-eight teams (over Wooden’s objections), the Bruins were extended an at-large bid. Having been granted the reprieve, they went on a surprising dash through the bracket. They made it all the way to the 1980 national championship game, where they lost to Louisville and Denny Crum, 59–54. Afterward, Sam Gilbert sarcastically congratulated Brown on being the first coach in UCLA history to lose an NCAA final. “I told him I was also the first coach to win five NCAA tournament games at UCLA,” Brown said.

  In his second season, Brown had to rebuild with a young team that featured a six-foot-five center. When the Bruins beat No. 10 Notre Dame in Pauley Pavilion in their second game, Wooden made another tone-deaf remark saying that the 1980–81 team was better than his 1964 champs. “I don’t think he meant anything by it, but I remember thinking, Holy God, how can you duplicate that?” Brown said. That coincided with J. D. Morgan’s death on December 16, 1980, a devastating loss for Brown personally and professionally. “J. D. was so strong that he kept people away,” Brown said. “When he passed away, I sensed a lot of people were trying to get involved.”

  After UCLA finished third in the conference, the Bruins were again invited to the 1981 NCAA tournament. This time, however, there was no miracle run. The season ended with a 23-point drubbing at the hands of BYU in the first round. Brown was feeling the two-year itch. The financial pressures, the expectations, and Morgan’s death made the job a lot less appealing. When the NBA’s New Jersey Nets offered a four-year, $800,000 contract, Brown jumped at the chance to leave.

  * * *

  After needing just four coaches in its first fifty-six years of its existence, UCLA basketball was about to hire its fourth in six years. Many factors had conspired to lay the program low. In 1975, the NCAA set a limit on the number of the maximum allowable scholarships in men’s basketball at fifteen, which prevented programs like UCLA from stockpiling talent. Then there was the rise of cable television. In the fall of 1979, an all-sports channel called Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) was launched in central Connecticut. The network built much of its early programming around college basketball. Now that there was real money to be made from the sport, schools were investing more and more resources. For example, Oklahoma had unsuccessfully tried to lure coach John Thompson away from Georgetown with a salary of $120,000, but UCLA still believed that $50,000 was sufficient. “I know that I couldn’t afford to take the UCLA job,” Arkansas coach Eddie Sutton said. “The package they can offer just isn’t as attractive as many others.”

  For someone to agree to become the coach at UCLA, he had to be motivated by something other than money. That’s why it made sense when Fischer promoted Larry Farmer to be Brown’s replacement. “This is day one of what I hope won’t be a two-year stint,” Farmer said upon taking the job. Nor did Farmer shy away from the inevitable Wooden questions. “Quite honestly, my background will be with John Wooden’s. That’s where my roots are,” he said. “I am family.”

  After two years of freewheeling under Brown, Farmer was intent on restoring Wooden’s disciplined ways. If anything, he took things too far. “If practice is scheduled for 2:30 and a player shows up at 2:31, he doesn’t practice,” Farmer said. “Coach [Wooden], he might let you practice.” That was quite a jolt for the players, who had grown accustomed to dealing with Farmer in his amiable role as an assistant.

  UCLA started the 1981–82 season ranked No. 2 in the country, but the Bruins quickly dropped to seventeenth after losing two of their first three games to BYU and Rutgers. That dispelled any hope that Farmer, or anyone else, for that matter, could return the program to its gloried past. As pessimism set in anew, Wooden lowered his profile. He no longer maintained an office on campus, although he still came to Westwood to do his banking and have lunch. He attended every UCLA home game and did color commentary on some of the Bruins’ cable television broadcasts. When he did comment on what was going on, he continued to fight the conventional wisdom that he had ruined the UCLA job for the coaches who followed him. “Every one of those men left for better jobs more suited to their needs, not because of problems at UCLA,” he said. “Pressure? I’ve known coaches who got out when the cupboard was bare. I didn’t exactly leave the cupboard bare with Marques Johnson and Richard Washington. Give me talent and I don’t give a hoot about outside pressure.” Wooden also scoffed at the suggestion that his successors had been treated unfairly by the press. “I don’t think any of them got much criticism,” he said. “Gracious sakes alive, I had lots of awful letters written about me, too. You just show weakness if you let them get to you.”

  Farmer did his best to remain upbeat. “I have no fears about comparisons with Coach Wooden,” he said. “The tradition doesn’t scare me because I always have been a part of it.” Yet at the very period when his team was facing its early-season s
truggles, the program was about to suffer a much bigger defeat, one that would leave a stain on the program, and the sacred Wooden legacy, for a very long time.

  * * *

  Unlike many former UCLA players, Larry Farmer’s relationship with Sam Gilbert grew deeper after he was through playing. When Farmer’s short-lived effort at a pro career went nowhere and he took a job as UCLA’s graduate assistant, he lived for a while at Gilbert’s house because he wasn’t making much money. Gilbert later lent him rent money to live on his own. Farmer was so grateful, he gave Gilbert one of his NCAA championship rings. He did own three, after all.

  Gilbert’s relationships with other players varied as the years went on. A few, like Willie Naulls, remained tight. Lucius Allen also stayed in close contact because Gilbert was still helping him in ways that Wooden would not. “I felt like [Wooden] could have done a lot more to enhance players’ lives after UCLA,” Allen said. “He would help an athlete get a coaching job or a teaching job because for him, those things were in his view the highest you could do in life. But he would not intervene on behalf of any of his other players to get jobs the way someone like Dean Smith would. Wooden had the clout, but money was not important to him.”

  In a few cases, relationships with Gilbert ended bitterly. After Marques Johnson joined the Milwaukee Bucks, he received a letter from Gilbert claiming that Johnson owed him around $2,000 for “favors” Gilbert had done for him at UCLA. At first, Johnson wasn’t going to pay it, but he decided to pony up and wipe the slate clean. Gilbert pulled the same move on Jamaal (formerly Keith) Wilkes. After his first year in the NBA, when he was named rookie of the year and won a league championship with the Golden State Warriors, Wilkes decided to switch agents. Shortly thereafter, Gilbert sent Wilkes’s lawyer a copy of a derogatory letter that Gilbert had written about Wilkes and sent to the owner of the Warriors. “I saw a whole other take on him,” Wilkes said. “As I would share my story selectively with some of the guys, I started hearing some of their experiences and how he’d keep a little black book on everything he did for you to throw it in your face when he needed to.”

  Few of Gilbert’s relationships with former UCLA players grew more complicated than the one he had once enjoyed with Bill Walton. When Walton first joined the Portland Trail Blazers, Gilbert tried to play the role of handmaiden as much as agent. Larry Weinberg, the owner of the Blazers, recalled spotting Gilbert holding Walton’s laundry outside the team’s visiting locker room at the Los Angeles Forum. When Walton’s situation with the Blazers grew acrimonious in his rookie season, he started castigating Gilbert in public, claiming that Gilbert was “closer to the owners than he is to the players.”

  Moreover, a human wedge had arisen between the two men. His name was Jack Scott, a left-wing radical who was a former athletic director at Oberlin College and the author of a controversial book called The Athletic Revolution. Scott had moved into Walton’s home and was writing a book about Walton’s first year in the NBA. One day, Scott confronted Gilbert with a letter that Gilbert had written demanding repayment of $4,500 to a man whom Scott described in his book as a former UCLA player. (After the book was published, Scott revealed that the player was Walton.) According to Scott, Gilbert exclaimed, “Are you going to use that letter [in the book]? UCLA would have to return four NCAA championships. What I did is a total violation of NCAA rules.”

  When Scott’s book, Bill Walton: On the Road with the Portland Trail Blazers, was published in June 1978, it included that conversation, that letter, and an incendiary quote from the Big Redhead. “It’s hard for me to have a proper perspective on financial matters, since I’ve always had whatever I wanted since I enrolled at UCLA,” Walton told Scott. “I hate to say anything that may hurt UCLA, but I can’t be quiet when I see what the NCAA is doing to Jerry Tarkanian only because he has a reputation for giving a second chance to many black athletes other coaches have branded as troublemakers. The NCAA is working day and night trying to get Jerry, but no one from the NCAA ever questioned me during my four years at UCLA.”

  (Asked many years later about that quote, Walton replied, “I might have said that, I don’t know, but I’m a huge Jerry Tarkanian fan.”)

  The publication of Scott’s book caused quite a few ripples in Los Angeles, especially since it happened just four months after Brent Clark, the former NCAA investigator, had testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations as part of a wider probe into alleged inequities in the NCAA’s enforcement actions. Under oath, Clark stated that after he delivered his memorandum on his interview with Sam Gilbert in Los Angeles, one of his superiors in the NCAA’s enforcement office, Bill Hunt, “called me aside and said, ‘We’re just not going after the institution right now.’” Clark told the congressmen that “the conclusion that I draw is that it is an example of a school that is too big, too powerful and too well respected by the public, that the timing was not right to proceed against them.” In response, Clark’s former boss at the NCAA, David Berst, blasted him. “He lives in a fantasy world,” Berst said. “He came up with zip [on Gilbert].”

  Now that Walton had essentially corroborated what Clark said, the NCAA could no longer ignore the situation. It finally launched a full-scale investigation into Sam Gilbert’s role at UCLA.

  The probe lasted several years while Berst’s staff interviewed dozens of current and former UCLA players, as well as Gilbert himself. They also talked to several players whom UCLA had unsuccessfully recruited. Three of those recruits—Darryl Mitchell, who went to Minnesota; Greg Goorjian, who went to UNLV and later transferred to Loyola Marymount; and Michael Johnson, who also played for UNLV—told investigators that Gilbert had promised that he would provide them with cars if they chose UCLA. In the case of Goorjian, who grew up in Long Beach, the offer came during a visit to Gilbert’s house with other UCLA players while Greg was on an unofficial visit. “It was a Camaro. He said, ‘You give me your season tickets, and you get a car,’” Goorjian said. When NCAA investigators came to Las Vegas to interview him and Johnson, Goorjian had no intention of revealing this—until Tarkanian got hold of him. “Jerry hated everything about UCLA,” Goorjian said. “He just said, ‘Tell ’em everything, Greg. Bury ’em if you get a chance.’ I felt very loyal to Jerry at that time, so I did what I was asked.”

  As the NCAA’s investigation picked up steam, word spread through town. The Los Angeles Times caught wind and published a report in the summer of 1980 detailing suspicious car acquisitions made by four freshman players. The story was accompanied by a photograph of two sleek sports cars driven by UCLA players that were parked outside Larry Brown’s house. By the time Larry Farmer got the job a year later, he and other school officials, along with Gilbert, feared the worst. “The world has become too crass,” Gilbert said. “Every move I make is considered insidious, an NCAA violation by innuendo. If they only knew how many of these UCLA players we kept in school, how many problems wound up here [in his house] and not over in the school’s athletic department.”

  The NCAA finally announced its findings on December 10, 1981. None of the violations listed in its report occurred prior to 1977. Taken individually, the violations tied to the unnamed “representative of the university’s athletic interests” were relatively minor. They included arranging for two players to live in a home at reduced rent in 1978 and 1979; signing a promissory note to allow a player to buy a car; selling a player’s tickets for more than face value; arranging for a recruit to have a used car at no cost; and most damning, giving a recruit “various amounts of cash for his own personal use.” The UCLA coaching staff was also found to have committed minor violations such as providing recruits with local car transportation, free meals, and on one occasion, a complimentary T-shirt. However, when the totality of those incidents was coupled with academic-related violations that had recently occurred in both the football and basketball programs, the NCAA concluded that UCLA had committed the cardinal sin of losing “institutional control” over its athlet
ics program.

  The NCAA brought down the hammer. UCLA’s basketball team was barred from competing in the 1982 postseason; required to vacate its performance in the 1980 NCAA tournament, which ended in the championship game; and placed on two years’ probation. The NCAA also ordered that the school “disassociate one representative of its athletic interests from participating in any recruiting activities on behalf of the university in the future.” Though Gilbert’s name did not appear anywhere in the public report, UCLA did not bother denying that he was the offender in question. “Sam is interested in the program and the kids, but the kind of relationship he had came too close to violation in spirit, if not in fact, of NCAA rules,” Chancellor Young conceded.

  On the day the NCAA’s decision was announced, Larry Farmer vigorously defended Gilbert. “It’s a terrible thing, a slap in the face to him. I don’t know how he’ll take this,” Farmer said. “For over a decade, I’ve seen him do so many good things for student-athletes. I believe to single him out is unfair.” As part of the school’s reaction to the penalties, Farmer had to drive out to the Palisades and reaffirm that Gilbert could no longer have players over to his house or socialize with recruits. “It broke his heart,” Farmer said. “I was a loyal UCLA soldier and the head coach, and I had a conversation with him that they wanted me to have. But it was awful.”

  * * *

  Since none of the violations detailed in the NCAA’s findings had occurred when Wooden was the coach, it was easy for him to brush the matter aside. “I felt that the things the NCAA came up with were all of an inconsequential nature. I’m pleased they didn’t come up with something serious,” Wooden said. “To the best of my knowledge, Sam Gilbert was never involved in the recruiting of an athlete. I can’t say for sure since I left, but he wasn’t when I was coaching.”

  The notion that Gilbert’s illicit activities commenced only after Wooden retired was becoming less and less credible. Since the NCAA saw no need to poke around the past, it would be up to the local press to ferret out the story. The Los Angeles Times sent a team of reporters to interview dozens of former players and other associates of the UCLA basketball program. The result was a multipart exposé that was published on January 31 and February 1, 1982. Headlined “Sam Gilbert and UCLA,” the stories laid out in devastating detail a wide range of violations and suspicious activity that dated back to the late 1960s. After interviewing more than forty-five people, many of whom were Wooden’s former players, the Times concluded that “the nine infractions the NCAA listed were insignificant when compared with many others dating back to the Lew Alcindor–led championship teams of the mid-1960’s.”