Wooden: A Coach's Life (30 page)

As long as Wooden stayed focused on the process, the small details, then he had faith that the big picture would come into focus. He never talked about the score, rarely mentioned the word “win.” As long as his players reached their potential, well, there was no reason to get their dobbers down. “He was just a master teacher,” Archer said. “He could have taught medicine. He could have taught carpentry. He could have taught English, and he would have done it the same way.”

It wasn’t always evident in the win-loss column, but Wooden learned a great deal during that first decade and a half at UCLA. He got a little better every day, and if his players matched his persistence, they got better, too. There was, however, a price they had to pay. To become a part of his program, a young man had to surrender his individuality, and that’s not easy for a college student to do. When a player named Vince Carson decided to transfer, he told the
Los Angeles Times
that he was leaving because Wooden “handled the team like a machine. Everybody had a function, but he decided what each man would do and that was it.” Carson intended the remark as criticism. Wooden considered it the ultimate compliment.

*   *   *

As was the case for many of Wooden’s players, Willie Naulls’s estimation of his former coach grew in the years after Naulls stopped playing for UCLA. Wooden may not have been the sensitive, attentive father figure Naulls had craved as a student, but he later came to appreciate how well Wooden had taught him the game. After being selected by the St. Louis Hawks in the 1956 NBA draft, Naulls was traded to the New York Knicks, where he flourished as a professional. He would eventually become the first black man to be named captain of a major professional sports team.

One night in 1959, Naulls was with the Knicks in Philadelphia for a game against the Warriors. The preliminary game that night was a high school contest that included Overbrook High School, the legendary powerhouse that once boasted a gifted giant named Wilt Chamberlain. Naulls sat amazed as he watched Overbrook’s point guard dart and dash through the defense. It wasn’t just the young man’s talent that caught Naulls’s eye. It was his creativity, a flair that can only come through countless hours spent on an inner-city playground.

When Naulls inquired about the youngster, he grew even more impressed. The kid had terrific grades. He was student body president. His father was a minister. Naulls realized that not only would the youngster be the ideal spearhead for Wooden’s fast break; he would fit nicely into the multihued culture at UCLA.

Naulls called Wooden to tell him about this young man. His name is Walt Hazzard, Naulls said. He was so convinced the kid could help that he told Wooden that if he didn’t make the team, Naulls would pay for his tuition. Wooden told him that wouldn’t be necessary. “If you say he can play here, that’s good enough for me,” Wooden said.

Hazzard was naturally thrilled that he had made such an impression on the famous Knickerbocker. For a young black basketball player in 1959, Willie Naulls was the ultimate role model. Even when Hazzard later learned that he didn’t have enough academic credits to enroll at UCLA as a freshman, he was undeterred. He volunteered to attend junior college for a year instead of playing for a different four-year school.

Hazzard may have been a stranger from the East Coast when he alit in California in the fall of 1960, but he felt right at home—academically, socially, and especially athletically. He spent that first year at Santa Monica City College, and though he didn’t play basketball for his school, he did compete in AAU games around the city. “The first time I saw him was during a summer league game. As soon as he began to perform, I realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t basketball,” said Larry Gower, a black guard from Los Angeles who was a freshman at UCLA that year. “His adjustment to L.A. was almost seamless. Walt was charismatic, and he could be a leader without really being pushy or arrogant.”

To Hazzard, spin dribbles and behind-the-back passes were basic fundamentals. Needless to say, he was in for a rude awakening when he entered John Wooden’s classroom. Besides being stylistically unpalatable, Hazzard’s trickery gummed up the works in Wooden’s machine. Balls bounced off his teammates’ hands, their chests, even their heads. Oftentimes they flew straight out of bounds. “If you weren’t ready, the ball would hit you in the face and you’d be embarrassed, and Walt would tell you he wasn’t going to throw it to you anymore,” said Dave Waxman, a junior center on that team. Even when Hazzard completed a pass that was fancy (as opposed to clever), it would earn a scolding from his coach. “When we first started scrimmaging, Walt threw a pass behind his back,” Johnny Green said. “The guy caught it and laid it in, but Coach blew the whistle. ‘Gracious sakes, Walter, come here! I don’t approve of those behind-the-back passes!’ Coach said that if you throw the ball and the guy’s open but he drops it, I’m still going to blame you.”

Hazzard respected Wooden, but he held his ground. He believed he knew some things about basketball that Wooden didn’t. “Walt could look to his left and pass flawlessly to the right. But Coach Wooden felt that if you were going to pass to the right, you should be looking to the right,” Gower said. “In many ways, Coach Wooden had to catch up to Walt, rather than the other way around.”

Regardless of how frustrated Wooden was, there was little he could do. He simply did not have anyone else remotely as good. He made Hazzard a starter from day one. There may have been a period of adjustment, but for the most part his teammates enjoyed playing with him. “Walt really should be given a lot of credit for revitalizing the fast break, because he could bring the ball down quickly,” Gary Cunningham said. “And if you got open, you got it, man. It was there.” Johnny Green added: “I was glad Walt was there because if they made a basket and started pressing, I’d just give the ball to Walt and say, ‘See ya down at the other end.’”

It helped that Hazzard was so easy to get along with. He had a buoyant, fun-loving personality. One of his favorite stunts was to throw himself to the ground in the middle of a crowd, lie there while everyone gathered around out of concern, and then pop up with a laugh. (He enjoyed faking people off the court, too.) He became the school’s yell leader at football games. Next to playing ball, the one thing that Hazzard loved most was going to parties. “Walt came to L.A. at a time when the African American community was doing a very sedate version of the twist,” Gower said. “Walt came in doing the version which had his arms going one way and his hips going another way. Immediately, people started watching him. Parties didn’t really become parties until Walt came.”

Around his basketball teammates, Hazzard was the same way. He played on their intramural softball team. He needled them and they needled him back. Green nicknamed him “East Coast.” He was one of the guys, and he loved every minute of it.

*   *   *

With a new engine in town, every other player had to find his place in the machine. That would be especially challenging for the Bruins’ undersized center, Fred Slaughter. A six-foot-five, 230-pound black sophomore from Topeka, Kansas, Slaughter was unusually fast for a man his size. He was the state champion in the 100-yard dash, and he had come to UCLA on a scholarship that was half track, half basketball. As a freshman in 1960–61, Slaughter had developed a fallaway jump shot that enabled him to score over taller defenders. He was the leading scorer and rebounder on a freshman team that compiled a 20–2 record.

Now that he was a sophomore on the varsity, however, Slaughter had to adapt to a different role. Wooden didn’t need him to score but rather to defend and rebound, and most of all to pass the ball to Hazzard. Slaughter went along with it because he wanted to play, but he didn’t get much explanation from Wooden. “Coach Wooden was interested in the guards. He didn’t care about me,” Slaughter said. “I didn’t feel that Coach didn’t like me. I was fine, but my relationship person-to-person wasn’t as great with him as it was with Jerry Norman. Jerry used to work out with me and play defense against me. He brought the human, caring kind of things for me.”

Slaughter and Hazzard, the two sophomores, rounded out a starting lineup that also included Gary Cunningham, Johnny Green, and Pete Blackman. That meant Wooden could get back to his racehorse ways. “We’re a running club,” he said before the 1961–62 season began. “Of course, we don’t always bring the ball with us.”

Expectations for the team were low, and the Bruins soon showed why, opening the season by losing back-to-back games to unranked BYU in Provo, Utah. The team then returned home for three games at the Sports Arena, winning the first two over Kansas and DePauw before falling to Colorado State, 69–68. The fans were unimpressed—just 1,902 showed up for the home opener—but the media was plenty taken with Walt Hazzard. The
Los Angeles Times
noted that after becoming “a bit conservative in recent years,” the Bruins were “back in the running game” now that Hazzard was in charge. After the win over Kansas, the
Times
reported that Hazzard had “delighted the fans with his fancy passing and dribbling in the Bob Cousy manner.”

(Wooden, incidentally, would not have considered this a compliment. Though he spoke highly of Cousy’s gifts, Wooden often said the former Holy Cross star could never have played for him. “He was fancy. I think it’s a good thing they didn’t keep turnovers at the time he played,” he said. “He had all the ability to play for me, but some of those long, behind-the-back passes I wouldn’t have permitted at all.”)

UCLA took a 2–3 record into its annual late December road trip. That season, Wooden added a wrinkle to the schedule. UCLA would begin with a game in Omaha, Nebraska, at Creighton, but instead of keeping his team in the Midwest, Wooden entered the Bruins in a two-day tournament in Texas called the Houston Holiday Classic.

That decision had ramifications he did not anticipate. The trouble started about a week before the Bruins were to leave California, when a few of the players received phone calls from strangers, some of whom claimed to represent the NAACP, asking them not to go. The callers warned that the city was a bastion of Jim Crow racism. The University of Houston’s arena was said to be segregated. The players were warned of picket lines that would be filled with protesters who would not want black athletes in their city. “We got a lot of calls, especially Walt, from newspapers and folks saying, you know they will not allow Negroes to sit in any place in the arena. How do you feel about that?” Larry Gower said. “I lived a very insulated, privileged kind of life. My folks weren’t rich, but I didn’t really understand racism and discrimination fully.”

The situation was just as unsettling for the white guys. “I remember getting a phone call from a student activist on campus asking me not to go on the trip,” Dave Waxman said. “I was sympathetic, but I felt that whatever decision Hazzard and Slaughter made, I was going to support. They wanted to go and play the game.”

At first, the players made light of the situation. When they boarded the plane to Houston following a 2-point loss at Creighton, Hazzard noticed that Johnny Green, his softball buddy, was wearing a cowboy hat. Hazzard asked why, and Green cracked, “When we get down there, I’m on
their
side.” Hazzard thought it was hilarious.

Things were not so funny after they landed. Instead of heading for the hotel where the other teams were staying, the Bruins’ bus took them to the University of Houston. They were going to be sleeping in campus dormitories. “I remember thinking, this is weird,” Gower said. Wooden never explained why they were staying in a dorm. He didn’t have to.

When the team got to the arena on game night, the players were relieved. Contrary to what they had been told, there were no picket lines out front. Nor was the arena segregated, though the black fans mostly sat together, as did the white fans. During warm-ups the black players were not taunted with racial epithets. Everyone assumed that once the opening tap arrived, it would be just another game.

They were wrong. During the first few minutes of UCLA’s game against Houston, the officials repeatedly whistled Hazzard and Slaughter for personal fouls. The refs didn’t even bother to pretend that the calls were fair. At one point, after yet another foul on Hazzard, Gower heard one of the Houston coaches shout to an official, “You’re doing good! Now get the other one!” Pete Blackman said: “I didn’t hear the refs say anything, but it was so obvious they weren’t going to let Walt and Fred play. We were getting hosed.”

It was never a game. Hazzard and Slaughter spent most of the second half on the bench, and UCLA lost, 91–65. Everyone was in too much shock to say much afterward. “I don’t remember that Wooden said anything whatsoever,” Gower said. “There was no comment after the game about what had gone on. There really wasn’t a lot of comment on anybody’s part.”

The team went back to the dorm and slept. When the players gathered for breakfast the next morning, many of the white players felt trepidation. How would the black guys react? Would they be bitter? Crushed? Would they somehow hold their white teammates responsible? The season was already at a delicate juncture as the Bruins had now lost five of their first seven games, with the first four losses coming by a total 8 points. This trip threatened to tear the machine apart.

When Hazzard, Slaughter, and Gower came to breakfast, however, they showed none of those attitudes. Instead, they joked about what had happened. Their reaction punctured the tension. They made clear that in their minds, all of the players had suffered an injustice, not just the three of them. “They were unbelievable. I was shocked by what I had seen, but they just made a joke out of it,” Blackman said. “Everybody knew it wasn’t a joke, but they were making damn sure that their buddies on the UCLA team, who came from a different background, were included in the experience. Instead of being bitter or negative or withdrawn or any of the things they could have been, they were eighteen-year-old guys who said, Screw it. We’re gonna hang together no matter what. And wasn’t that a crazy experience?”