by Seth Davis
There was nothing ambivalent about Neville Saner’s attitude toward Wooden. He flat-out didn’t like the man. Like Andy Hill, Gary Franklin, and so many others, Saner was disappointed that he didn’t play more, but what hurt him most was the way Wooden allowed him to leave UCLA without so much as a good-bye. “All he had to do was invite me into his office after the season was over, say a few nice words and wish me well, and I would have gone off with a whole different attitude,” Saner said. “That was an enigma to me. He liked to finish practices on a positive note. Why not finish your career that way?”
Right before he graduated, Saner offered an unvarnished opinion of Wooden to Jeff Prugh of the Los Angeles Times. “He’s just a tough, cold guy, and he should just come out and admit that he is,” Saner said. After graduation, Saner asked Jerry Norman to help him find work as a teacher and coach. When Norman suggested he go to Wooden for help, Saner said he didn’t feel comfortable. “I’m sure he would have helped me, but I never asked him,” he said.
Saner applied for a position at Poway High School near San Diego. During the job interview, the principal told Saner that he had spoken to Wooden and the coach had given Saner a glowing recommendation. As Saner started coaching, he implemented many of Wooden’s philosophies and won multiple state championships his first few years. His team was on its way to winning another title during the 1985–86 season when he received a handwritten letter from his former coach. In the letter, Wooden congratulated Saner on his success, then struck a balance by reminding Saner of Cervantes’s admonition that “The road is better than the inn.”
Saner wrote Wooden back to thank him. The exchange sparked a lengthy friendship, with the same rotation of phone calls, letters, meals, and talks in Wooden’s den that numerous former players enjoyed. “No matter what happened at UCLA, you were one of his boys, and you were always welcome,” Saner said.
To be sure, many of Wooden’s former players never developed a close relationship with him in their later years. Some were busy or lived too far away. Others felt resentment that could not be overcome. The most conspicuous of those was Edgar Lacey. After quitting school in the dispute following the Game of the Century, Lacey never reentered the UCLA family, never showed up at a reunion or championship celebration, never reached out to Wooden to try to mend the fence. Once in a while, Lucius Allen would see if he could bring his friend back into the fold, but it never worked. “Edgar felt that Coach Wooden ruined his life,” Allen said. “Coach would never call Edgar. I don’t think it was in his personality. He was a loving man, but he had an ego.”
Wooden may have felt bad about what happened with Lacey, but he remained unapologetic. “Edgar was a nice person, but I wouldn’t change one thing of the way that went,” Wooden said less than a year before he died. “You don’t know in advance how things will turn out, but you do what you think is right. If that didn’t turn out to be right, it was not wrong. It was still right.”
The most unfortunate part is the way Lacey’s hurt feelings prevented him from having meaningful relationships with his former teammates. When he died in the spring of 2011, most of the other Bruins didn’t even know where he had been living. (Sacramento, it turned out.) Keith Erickson read in the newspaper that Lacey’s funeral was going to be held in Downey, California, so he went to the service, as much out of curiosity as anything else. “He was always very secretive to me. I didn’t know much about Edgar,” Erickson said. “I didn’t even know if he had a wife or children.” Mike Warren and Don Saffer were at the funeral, too, but there were not many others. As Erickson listened to the service, he grew melancholy knowing that Lacey was going to his grave without having repaired the breach with Wooden. “The whole situation was very sad,” Erickson said.
Andy Hill’s good friend and former teammate Terry Schofield read Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry! with great interest, but he had a more complicated time processing his feelings than Hill did. Schofield became a professional coach in Germany and adopted some of Wooden’s teachings, but when it came to dealing with his players, he was determined to be different. “I’d look down at the guys on the bench, and I’d see myself,” Schofield said. “I tried to make it fun, because when I was at UCLA, that word was never mentioned. There were much greater things at stake than fun.”
Schofield was pleasantly surprised that Wooden wrote some complimentary things about him in his books, but aside from a brief period as Wooden’s graduate assistant, he had very little contact with the coach over the years. Then, one day he received an envelope from Wooden out of the blue. It was a signed photograph of the 1971 championship team. Wooden wrote: “For Terry—with best wishes and thanks for helping us to excel on the court. You will always be one of ‘my boys.’ John Wooden.” The gesture led to a rapprochement of sorts. Schofield called Wooden every year on his birthday, and he tried to see Wooden when he was in the States. When he introduced Wooden to his wife at the reunion celebrating the coach’s ninetieth birthday, Wooden said, “Terry, you always had the most attractive women.”
Still, while Schofield may have made his peace with Wooden personally, he did not apply that word to his entire UCLA experience. “Peace? I don’t know. I’ve just learned to live with it. Some things still bother me,” he said. “I don’t think I’d say I’ve let it go. What happens is you learn to live with stuff.”
A happier ending awaited John Ecker, who had brought Schofield to play professionally in Germany, and like Schofield, had stayed there to coach and marry a German woman. When Andy Hill held a fiftieth birthday party for himself in 2000 with Wooden as the guest of honor, Ecker surprised Hill by flying into town. When Ecker arrived at Hill’s house for the party, he found Wooden sitting in the corner of the living room, yukking it up with the guys. Hill guided Ecker over to him. It was the first time Ecker had seen Wooden in nearly thirty years. Wooden surprised him by standing up and giving him a hug. “It really moved me,” Ecker said. It was Wooden, not Ecker, who brought up the past. “Andy tells me you think I didn’t like you. Now why would you say such a thing?” he asked.
Ecker stammered his way through an answer, but he quickly realized how wrong he had been. “He showed me how concerned he was. I really felt that he regretted some things and realized he had made some mistakes,” Ecker said. “We sat and talked all evening. He was actually very funny, just poking fun at everyone.”
As was the case with so many of Wooden’s former players, that first encounter sparked a beautiful friendship. Ecker introduced Wooden to his family. He called from Germany every few months. When he came to California, he rang up Wooden and met him for breakfast or visited him in his den. “He was always a joy to talk to. He was very lucid and very sharp. Always made jokes, those little pin pricks,” Ecker said. “I really came to not just respect him but to love him in a sense, too.”
Yet it was not until Ecker’s son, Danny, read Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry! that Ecker experienced his own moment of clarity. Danny started asking his dad about his playing days at UCLA, a subject they had barely discussed before. Danny said that he recognized many of the principles that Hill described in the book because he had heard them all from his dad. That had never occurred to Ecker, but the more he thought about it, the more Ecker realized Danny was right.
He had learned something after all.
35
Yonder
The years had left their imprint on all of them. They were men now, fathers and grandfathers themselves, yet still they wrote and called and dropped by the condo. In doing so, his former players didn’t just keep him happy; they kept him alive. At a time in life when so many people become lonely and depressed, John Wooden remained a man in full. “Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get a call or a letter from someone who was under my supervision in the past … some even going back when I taught in high school,” Wooden said. “They become almost like your children. Next to your own flesh and blood, you get very close to them. Their joys are your joys, their sorrows are your sorrows, and that goes o
n forever.”
Lucius Allen went more than ten years without speaking to his college coach. Allen had nothing against the man, but he washed his hands of the UCLA basketball program after the school fired his good friend Walt Hazzard. Then one day, Mike Warren suggested that Allen go with him to meet Wooden for breakfast. Allen agreed. Though he and Wooden never spoke about the marijuana arrests that had led to Allen’s premature departure from UCLA, Allen felt compelled to apologize for giving the coach so many gray hairs. “Oh, you were no trouble at all,” Wooden assured him. “Now Bill Walton on the other hand…”
Allen never let the relationship wither again. “I went out there once a month for breakfast. There was always somebody else showing up,” Allen said. “We took plane trips together. We were buddies again. Even then he could ask me questions that made the hair stand up on my head. He still had that effect on me.”
As Henry Bibby’s coaching career blossomed—he would eventually become the head coach at USC, of all places—he leaned on Wooden often, coming by his condo with a pad and pen so he could pepper his old coach with questions. Bibby once rang up Wooden while he was driving through central Indiana. For the next few hours, Bibby kept calling back to ask for suggestions on what he should see in Martinsville—Wooden’s high school, his childhood home, and especially his favorite candy store. “He told me where his parents were buried. I saw their names on the grave,” Bibby said. “That’s the thing about him. He had time for you. It was like this guy was so big and he was doing all these things, but he still had time for you. I never heard anybody say you had to get an appointment to go to his house. You had an open invitation. ‘Hey Coach, I’m coming over.’ You’d ring the doorbell, and he would come to the door.”
Wooden remained an expert needler. When Larry Farmer joined a group of players for breakfast with Wooden one morning, Wooden glanced down at Farmer’s bright-colored shoes and cracked, “They used to wear those in the fifties.” When Marques Johnson flew on a private jet with Wooden and some other former players to New York City for an awards banquet, they started reminiscing about the 1975 NCAA final. When Wooden told Johnson he played twenty-seven minutes in that game, Johnson said he was sure he had played a lot less. “The way you played,” Wooden said, “you weren’t the only one who didn’t realize you were out there.” The whole plane burst out laughing. “It became a lot easier to talk with him, to joke with him, just to be around him,” Johnson said. “It was kind of like, take him off the cross, we need the wood. Appreciate him for what he was—a great coach, a great person, but not a god.”
Bill Walton was Wooden’s favorite foil. When he was in his late twenties, Walton overcame his stutter so well that he went into broadcasting after he was through playing. It was the ultimate irony that he would develop a reputation for rambling interminably. Walton was the foremost Wooden devotee, calling his former coach nearly every day, including when Walton was out of the country—although Wooden liked to quip that he didn’t speak with Walton so much as listen to him. “He was just a wonderful person who was happy,” Walton said. “He was very, very much like Jerry Garcia in that he could create beauty in a sad, hard, cruel world.”
Wooden was still their teacher. He ministered Marques Johnson through his grief after his son drowned, and he counseled Sidney Wicks after Wicks was involved in a severe car accident that killed a close friend. When Walt Hazzard suffered a debilitating stroke in 1996, Wooden came to the hospital and assured Hazzard’s wife that Walter was going to be okay. (Wooden still called him Walter.) Shortly after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s mother died in 1997, he told Wooden about the anger he still felt toward his former high school coach, Jack Donohue, from the time when Donohue used that racial epithet in a clumsy effort to motivate him. “Let me ask you something,” Wooden said. “Have you ever made a mistake?” Abdul-Jabbar laughed and said, “More than I can count.” That exchange prompted Abdul-Jabbar to reconcile with Donohue before he died.
When Larry Farmer was at the 2003 Final Four in New Orleans, he ran into Nan Wooden in a hotel lobby and asked if he could bring his family to Coach Wooden’s room to say hello. When they got there, Farmer could tell that Wooden had just woken up from a nap. No matter. He sat next to Farmer’s son, plopped Farmer’s daughter on his lap, and said, “Did your dad ever tell you he was a good shooter? Ah, don’t ever buy that.” Wooden spent the next half hour teasing them, reciting poetry, asking about their lives. “He treated them like they were his kids,” Farmer said, choking up at the memory. “It was then I knew how much he really loved me. He could have told me in a hundred different ways, but what he did for my kids that day, that was it.”
In the fall of 2007, Andy Hill threw a party in honor of Wooden’s ninety-seventh birthday. Some fifty former players showed up, including Abdul-Jabbar, who looked more relaxed that night than anyone had ever seen him. Wooden was the life of the party. “It was like Coach shape-shifted that night. He was on fire,” Hill said. “I think everybody was sufficiently aware that the dude’s ninety-seven. This could be the last time.”
Mike Lynn, the power forward on those Lew Alcindor championship teams, had flown in from his home in Vermont to attend that party. Lynn had been raised in a religious household—his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister—but he lost his enthusiasm when he discovered Charles Darwin in the seventh grade. Yet when Kenny Washington asked Lynn if he wanted to join him and Wooden at church the following morning, Lynn said yes. “It just seemed like something I couldn’t pass up,” he said. “Maybe it was me trying to say to him that I was willing to meet him at least halfway.”
Going to church with Wooden was Lynn’s way of acknowledging what all the others could now see. Their coach had stood the test of time, for a long time, living out the credo that had been posted on his office wall: It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. After all these years, he was still a student of life, still improving a little bit each day. A man of actions, not statements. “I remember sitting in his den thinking that he always said the most important things in life were faith and family,” Sidney Wicks said. “So I’m looking around and I’m thinking, it’s all here. Not much to the place, pretty small. He lived simply. He was living what he always said.”
* * *
When his former players weren’t around, Wooden relied on the kindness, and company, of strangers. Doug Erickson was one of them. After graduating from San Jose State University in 1992, Erickson landed an administrative job in the UCLA basketball office. He was naturally curious about Wooden, so he wrote Wooden a letter introducing himself and asking if they could get together sometime. Two days later, Wooden called and invited Erickson over. “It just didn’t seem like he was that busy,” Erickson said. “He had more time back then.”
Wooden told Erickson he could come back anytime. He did, often. When Steve Lavin succeeded Jim Harrick as UCLA’s head coach in 1996, he kept Erickson on staff and asked him to check in on Wooden several days a week. Wooden became so comfortable around Erickson that he thought nothing of opening his door to him while wearing his Mickey Mouse pajamas. Erickson estimated that over the years, he brought some five hundred people to Wooden’s condo. “He had more energy than we did,” Erickson said. “We’d keep him up until ten at night. He got stronger as the night went on.”
In all their time together, Wooden got cross with Erickson just once. They were watching Monday Night Football when Wooden made some predictions about what was going to happen next. “Coach,” Erickson said, “if you’re right, you really will be the Wizard of Westwood.”
“Don’t ever call me that,” Wooden snapped. “That’s a moniker I’ve never liked.”
Erickson was crushed. “I went to the bathroom so I could get myself together,” he said. “I was like, man, Coach just lit me up.”
Sometimes, the strangers who spent time with Wooden were just that—strangers. Jeff Weiss was among the countless outsiders who earned an audience with Wooden through sheer persistence. A basketball coac
h at Lawrence Woodmere Academy on Long Island, Weiss read several of Wooden’s books, and in 2004, he wrote a letter to the UCLA athletics office asking if someone could forward his information to Wooden. It took several more letters and phone calls, but Weiss finally received a handwritten note from Wooden that included his phone number and an invitation to visit.
Over the next few weeks, Weiss dialed the number several times. Each time, he left a message on Wooden’s answering machine. (He kept assuring Wooden that he wasn’t some psycho stalker.) Finally, as Weiss was leaving yet another message, Wooden picked up. He asked Weiss when he wanted to visit. “As soon as you tell me I can,” Weiss replied. They made an appointment for the following week.
In advance of the visit, Weiss assembled a notebook filled with information and photographs from Wooden’s early days, including some of the high school teams he coached and played for. When he showed up at Wooden’s condominium, he was surprised to find Wooden alone. It seemed risky for a ninety-six-year-old man to invite a stranger into his apartment. “I couldn’t believe he was allowing me to do this,” Weiss said. “I thought it was insane.”
Wooden invited Weiss to sit with him in his den. After about a half hour of small talk, Weiss pulled out the notebook. “He loved it,” Weiss said. “He knew everything about every guy in the pictures. For the next three or four hours, he would point to a guy and say, ‘Oh, I remember this guy. He was a great player. He couldn’t go left, couldn’t rebound.’ His memory was off the charts.” After about five hours, Weiss suggested that he should go, but Wooden invited him to stay for dinner so they could watch a Yankees–Red Sox game together. After he got home, Weiss sent Wooden a thank-you note and a picture for him to sign, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Wooden obliged the request and dropped it in the mail.