Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  “UCLA wouldn’t have won any championships without athletes,” Lucius Allen told the Times. “And without Sam Gilbert, they wouldn’t have had the athletes.” Keith Erickson said that Gilbert “knows what the rules are and he thinks they’re rubbish. So he does what he believes is right, with full knowledge that something was going to come down the pike like this.” Allen revealed that Gilbert had paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, and Marques Johnson said that Gilbert had paid his airfare to negotiate with the Denver Nuggets following the end of his junior season, a clear and major NCAA violation. When Greg Lee made the remark that “Sam Gilbert wasn’t doing this for chemistry majors,” he fortified the heart of the NCAA’s case—namely, that Gilbert’s “favors” were only available to these young men because they were athletes. That’s what made them rise to the definition of extra benefits. “The gild is off the lily out there now,” Brent Clark crowed to the Times. “They are vulnerable to past sins.”

  In the face of all this evidence, Wooden continued to insist that whatever violations had occurred on his watch were minor. “There’s as much crookedness as you want to find,” Wooden said. “There was something Abraham Lincoln said—he’d rather trust too much than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.”

  Wooden later told the New York Times that he was not shaken by what had been reported by his hometown paper. “I might be a little disillusioned, but I’m certainly not embarrassed because I know I didn’t do anything that I was ashamed of,” he said. Wooden also rebutted the suggestion that the NCAA gave the program a pass while he was the coach. “That’s ridiculous. We were probably checked more because when the good players came here, other people wanted to know why.” Asked how he knew his program was being “checked,” Wooden replied, “You know when they’re checking you. They don’t do it without your knowing it. They don’t do it unless they were checking what somebody wanted them to look into.”

  Wooden’s defense centered on his claim that if there were any illicit activities going on with Gilbert while he was coaching, he never orchestrated or sanctioned any of them, and therefore his hands were clean. This ignores his guilt by omission. The fact is that Wooden did nothing to stop what was happening, aside from making a few remarks to his players and then passing the matter up the food chain to J. D. Morgan. Perhaps Wooden would not have succeeded if he had confronted Gilbert directly, but he didn’t try very hard. Even his greatest admirers acknowledged as much. “I think he knew that things were going on, and he just didn’t want to know,” Erickson said to the Los Angeles Times. Greg Lee added: “On the one hand, he was glad about [Gilbert’s] presence. But whatever was happening was going to be out of sight, out of mind.”

  As the years passed, and as Wooden became a popular author and speaker, Sam Gilbert faded in the mind of the public. Yet Gilbert’s memory persisted in basketball circles through private whispers and offhand remarks. Many years later, the NCAA considered naming the championship trophy after Wooden, just as the NFL had renamed its Super Bowl trophy after Vince Lombardi. The idea was quietly shelved, not because people at the NCAA didn’t feel Wooden was worthy but because they were concerned that the move would dredge up too many stories about Gilbert. Better to leave that carcass buried.

  Pete Newell was among the more prominent coaches who used Gilbert to denigrate Wooden’s record. Though he and Wooden developed a friendship in their later years and appeared on many panels together, Newell made no secret of his belief that Wooden’s ten NCAA titles were besmirched in a way that his one championship at California was not. “None of those [UCLA] championship teams meet as teams. Because they operated differently than we did,” Newell said in 1994 for an oral history project at Cal. “I think that they may say respect, but there isn’t respect, because they know they did it illegally. As great as they were, and as great as those teams were, they still didn’t do it within the rules.”

  Digger Phelps also liked to get in his jabs about Gilbert from time to time. This really ticked off the UCLA faithful, especially since Phelps was never one of their favorite people to begin with. “Digger Phelps couldn’t talk about Wooden without mentioning Sam Gilbert. He’s obviously an insecure and jealous guy,” Kenny Heitz said. “He didn’t lose to Wooden because he lacked for good players. He just couldn’t fucking coach.”

  The ties between Gilbert and UCLA were also a major reason why Wooden had a tetchy relationship with Newell’s most prestigious acolyte, Bob Knight. Whatever can be said about Knight’s own egregious, bullying behavior, there was never any hint of impropriety around him with respect to NCAA rules—and that was certainly not the case with many of the men he coached against. Wooden and Knight were inextricably linked. Knight won three NCAA titles, establishing himself as the most dominant coach in his era, and he did it in Wooden’s native state. As a result, Wooden was often asked about him, and he was generally complimentary—up to a point. “Knight was a great fundamentalist,” Wooden said in 2003. “Do I agree with his methods? No. But that doesn’t make them wrong.” Wooden hedged like this so often that Knight’s wife privately referred to him as “Mr. However.”

  Knight and Newell extracted a modicum of revenge through their roles in the 1994 film Blue Chips. Newell was a consultant on the movie, and Knight played himself in it. Nick Nolte starred in the lead role as a coach whose integrity was being compromised by a rogue booster. The film was an obvious send-up of UCLA. The fictional school was called “Western University,” and its colors were the same shades of blue and gold. Unlike the real-life Wooden, Nolte’s character confronts the booster in a press conference, a bold stand for integrity that costs him his job. The coach’s first name was Pete. Marques Johnson also worked on the movie, and he saw the obvious parallels. “Pete and Bobby Knight were there. I would overhear them talking at dinner, saying some stuff,” Johnson said. “It was a definite UCLA slant showing the booster paying off kids.”

  Knight tried to refrain from speaking about Wooden in public. He was not one to dole out compliments if he didn’t really mean them, and he was smart enough to know that he would never win a public relations war with the Wizard of Westwood. But the undercurrent was apparent in subtle ways. When Knight was asked once about a critical remark that Bill Walton had made about him, he replied, “That would have bothered me more if it came from Pete Newell.” Despite Wooden’s lifelong disdain for profanity, he delighted visitors by playing an audio recording of Knight’s profanity-laced tirade in the Indiana locker room that was widely circulated even before the days of file sharing on the Internet. When Wooden played the R-rated tape, he laughed all the way through.

  Once, while being interviewed for a video oral history for the Basketball Hall of Fame, Wooden was asked what he thought of Knight. His one-word answer: “dictator.” On another occasion, during an interview with ESPN, Wooden called Knight a “great teacher” but added, “I’m afraid Bobby’s going to self-destruct one of these days.” (Wooden was right about that. Knight’s boorishness finally got him fired from Indiana in 2000.) Then there was the time during a visit to Martinsville when Wooden was asked whether he had ever lost his temper. “I never lost control,” Wooden answered, not altogether truthfully. “I never threw anything. I never threw a chair.” That was an obvious reference to the infamous 1985 incident where Knight threw a chair during a game in Bloomington to protest a technical foul.

  When one of Knight’s players at Indiana, Calbert Cheaney, won the Wooden Award in 1993, Cheaney sent in a videotaped acceptance speech instead of attending. Knight also refused to come. The stated reason was that Indiana had classes, but that did not pass the smell test. “It is not an unknown fact that Bobby’s not a big fan of John Wooden,” said Earl Schulz, the former Cal guard who was a close fishing buddy of Knight’s. “A big part of it is because Bobby liked Pete so much.”

  To be sure, Knight’s and Newell’s views of Wooden’s culpability in the Sam Gilbert saga were not shared by many of Wooden’s peers. “We’re appl
ying today’s norms and standards to something back in the seventies, and I don’t think that’s fair,” George Raveling said. “We didn’t sit in judgment back then as quickly as we do today. We’ve evolved into a society filled with judges. In those days, I think people were more compassionate.” Not surprisingly, many of Wooden’s former players felt the same way. “I guarantee you there were some alumni at Indiana or Notre Dame who gave something to somebody that they don’t know about, or that they did know and looked the other way,” Gary Franklin said. “To me, this is just sour grapes and trying to take down a good man.”

  Even so, there is no denying that the specter of Sam Gilbert still hovers in the rafters of Pauley Pavilion, alongside all those championship banners. The bottom line on this aspect of Wooden’s life was best summarized by Mike Littwin and Alan Greenberg, the two Los Angeles Times reporters who produced the groundbreaking series on Gilbert. In an editorial written under the headline “Wooden Heard No Evil, Saw No Evil,” Littwin and Gilbert delivered their final verdict: “Wooden knew about Gilbert. He knew the players were close to Gilbert. He knew they looked to Gilbert for advice. Maybe he knew more. He should have known much more. If he didn’t, it was only because he apparently chose not to look.”

  * * *

  As if operating under the great man’s shadow wasn’t hard enough, Larry Farmer now had to coach a team with no postseason to play for, thanks to the NCAA’s penalties. To his credit, the 1981–82 Bruins managed to produce a 21–6 record and finish second in the Pac-10.

  During the team’s final road trip, the team’s best player, Darren Daye, sneaked out of the hotel past curfew. When he returned to his room, Daye found Ducky Drake sleeping in his bed. Farmer decided to make a statement and sit Daye for the entire game, which UCLA won. A few weeks later, Farmer joined Wooden on his morning walk. When he brought up that situation, Wooden agreed he wouldn’t have started Daye, either. “But I would have played him,” he added. The old man was less strict—and more practical—than Farmer realized.

  In Farmer’s second year as coach, the Bruins won the Pac-10 regular season title and secured a bid to the 1983 NCAA tournament, only to lose their opening game to unranked Utah, 67–61. The loss was redolent of Wooden’s first decade and a half in Westwood, when strong regular seasons were followed by first-round postseason exits. But this was a different coach and a different time. No school was going to wait fourteen years for its coach to win a postseason game anymore. The world had Wooden to thank for that.

  After a disastrous 1983–84 campaign, which ended with the Bruins missing out on the NCAA tournament (for competitive reasons) for the first time since 1966, a cloud of uncertainty lingered around Farmer, who was in the final year of his contract. UCLA had hired a new athletic director, Pete Dalis, who refused to extend Farmer’s contract before the season was up. Kenny Fields, an all-conference forward, stated the obvious: “The problem we’re having is John Wooden. He won too much. Now our fans can’t accept anything less.” Wooden, however, continued to disagree. “Maybe that was the case at first, but it shouldn’t be now. I’ve been gone for nine years,” he said. “You know, as the years go by, I can’t believe how so many people have come to believe how I had it easy at UCLA. Believe me, the first seventeen years there were no cakewalk. In retrospect, those were the fun days. The pressure started after we began winning the titles.”

  Farmer had guided UCLA to its worst record (17–11) in twenty-four years, but Dalis believed Farmer had performed well enough to warrant a contract extension. Farmer, however, was reluctant to sign it. Dalis wanted him to jettison his assistants and replace them with two starters from the glorified 1964 championship team, Walt Hazzard and Jack Hirsch. After a long NBA career, Hazzard was now the head coach at Chapman College, and Hirsch was his unpaid assistant. Sam Gilbert called the three of them into his office in hopes of convincing Farmer to agree to Dalis’s condition. He told Farmer it was the only way he could save his job.

  Farmer thought he would have a day or two to mull over the decision, but when word leaked out that he had been offered an extension, Dalis hastily called for a press conference and forced his hand. Farmer told the reporters that he was happy with his new contract and committed to UCLA for the long term. He mouthed the right lyrics, but his music was off-key. Two of his friends called to say he did not look happy. “I had to tell them I really wasn’t,” Farmer said. “That’s when I realized that it wasn’t fair for me to stay at UCLA. If I really didn’t want to do it, I couldn’t possibly give a hundred percent.”

  Three days after the press conference announcing he was staying, Farmer met with Dalis and Sam Gilbert at a local restaurant. Gilbert may have been technically disassociated from UCLA athletics, but he was still Farmer’s close friend and adviser. Farmer confessed to the two men that he was having second thoughts. The following morning, he delivered his resignation letter to Dalis. Within hours, Dalis tapped Walt Hazzard to be the next head basketball coach at UCLA.

  The new coach was one of the all-time UCLA greats, a direct link to a storied past that was feeling more distant by the day. The prospect of restoration was reignited—again. “UCLA Hopes It Has Another Wizard,” blared the headline in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. Hazzard said all the right things. He was excited to be the coach. He loved his alma mater. He was prepared to succeed. Most of all, he loved John Wooden and promised to implement all of Wooden’s tenets, both on and off the court. He wasn’t running from the shadow. He was running toward it. “I want John Wooden up in the seats,” Hazzard said. “I’m not afraid of him looking over my shoulder. I think he can be a reminder, a standard, something to live up to,”

  Even as he said those words, Hazzard seemed to recognize how ridiculous they sounded. “I’m not saying there’s no pressure,” he added with a smile. “Hey, it’s tough here.”

  33

  The Hardest Loss

  While UCLA basketball spiraled, Wooden floated above the fray, enjoying a contented life. He no longer went into the office, but he stayed plenty busy—traveling, speaking, writing, receiving visitors. He expressed surprise that people still cared so much about what he had to say. “Perhaps one of the reasons people still want to hear me is that I was always known as a teacher as much as a coach,” he said. “Of course, winning championships didn’t hurt.”

  Immediately after his retirement, Wooden found work as a television commentator, primarily for NBC. He stopped after a few years. “This is not my cup of tea,” he said. “I don’t think I provided what the networks or stations wanted because I refused to be extremely critical of coaches or players.” Another reason Wooden stepped away is that he could see the destructive influence television was having on the game. “I see coaches who have stopped coaching so they can become actors and get the TV cameras turned on them,” he said. “Most of them have forgotten what the game and their responsibilities are all about.”

  Indeed, Wooden’s opinions on the state of the game were widely sought. He became the sport’s resident scold. After watching North Carolina win the 1982 ACC tournament championship over Virginia, Wooden chastised Dean Smith for having his team hold the ball for thirteen minutes. “I deplore a game of non-action. I can’t see talented teams not playing each other,” he said. Wooden believed play was too rough. (“If I want to see something like that, I’ll go to a wrestling match.”) The refs were too lenient. (“They let them travel, palm the ball, the amount of moving screens are ridiculous.”) He opposed expanding the NCAA tournament, but if it was going to be expanded, he wanted every team in the country to be invited—just as Indiana did with its high school tournament. Wooden was pleased when a shot clock was finally added in 1986, but he remained a lone, futile crusader against the offensive rebound basket. Dating back to his days coaching UCLA, Wooden argued that if an offensive player got a rebound, he should have to pass before another shot is taken. He thought it would elevate teamwork. Wooden did acknowledge that bringing back the dunk was good for basketball, but he
deplored the way it encouraged showmanship.

  Such opinions should have made Wooden seem outdated, but if anything, his voice was resonating even more than when he was coaching. As his grandson, Greg Wooden, put it, “He became much more famous after he retired.” In an era of ever-faster changes, Wooden provided a link to a simpler time. “Today’s kids are crying out for discipline, and most of the time they’re not getting it,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “Until we give them the proper standards to live by, we will continue to be a nation whose young people will be in and out of trouble.”

  Stepping away from coaching also enabled Wooden to devote more time to his basketball camps. He loved the chance to engage in pure teaching, without alumni and scoreboards determining whether he had “succeeded.” He adored children—his schoolmarm’s mien softened whenever one of them asked for an autograph or to take a picture—and he enjoyed sitting around for hours talking ball with the staff. “I used to tell the coaches, get your questions ready. That’s all he likes to do is hold court,” Jim Harrick said. “It was like getting your doctorate degree in basketball.”