Wooden: A Coach's Life (35 page)

19

Perfect

Gail Goodrich figured, to hell with it. Toward the end of his sophomore season, he had spent long stretches on the bench, and it didn’t look like his junior year would be much different. He didn’t care much for his classes, either. The one thing that had gone well for Goodrich was baseball. So when school ended in the spring of 1963, he contemplated leaving UCLA to pursue a career in pro baseball.

He didn’t bother sharing his thoughts with his basketball coach. “Wooden was up here,” Goodrich said, lifting his palm above his head. “I liked him and I respected him, but maybe I was intimidated. I always put him on a pedestal.” Gail’s mother was dead set against the idea of quitting school, but he was still inclined to leave. Until, that is, he started his summer job working at a lumberyard. At the crack of dawn each morning, Goodrich drove from his home in the San Fernando Valley to Glendale, where he spent long days hauling lumber. “I decided I don’t want to do this the rest of my life,” he said. He figured he would give college at least one more year.

Fred Slaughter faced the opposite circumstance. He wanted to return to UCLA for his senior year, but his coach wasn’t sure he wanted him back. Following the loss to Arizona State, Wooden had bragged to reporters about a player in the program named Vaughn Hoffman, a six-foot-seven center who had redshirted that season because of a knee injury. Wooden predicted that Hoffman would “give Fred Slaughter all he wants to handle and more.” For Slaughter, this was not a good sign.

Things came to a head a few weeks later when Wooden called Slaughter into his office. The coach wanted to talk about Edgar Lacey, a hotshot six-foot-six, 190-pound senior from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles. Lacey was a two-time all-city player who set a Los Angeles scoring record while averaging 32.2 points per game. Slaughter had met Lacey in passing a couple of months before, and the high school star had told him he expected to score in college at the same prolific rate. In reply, Slaughter warned Lacey that if his goal was to average 30 points per game, then UCLA was not the place for him.

Somehow, Wooden had gotten wind of Slaughter’s advice. During their meeting in Wooden’s office, the coach accused Slaughter of trying to “de-recruit” Lacey. This was not Slaughter’s intent at all. He was simply telling Lacey the truth about what he could expect if he played for UCLA. Wooden told Slaughter in no uncertain terms that if ever tried to do that again with Lacey or any other player, then Wooden would take away Slaughter’s scholarship. “To this day I am just shocked and disappointed that that’s how he would treat me,” Slaughter said decades later. “He hears a rumor, brings me into his office, and tears into me. Think if he had taken my scholarship and I was gone my senior year. I wasn’t a troublemaker. It hurt my feelings. It’d be different if I didn’t tell the truth. That definitely kept me from being closer to Coach.”

Then again, they had never been close to begin with. Slaughter and Wooden rarely talked about matters that did not directly relate to basketball. One of the few exceptions was a conversation Wooden initiated after Slaughter started dating a white girlfriend. Wooden warned Slaughter about the complications that could result from an interracial relationship. Slaughter didn’t think Wooden was racist, but he also didn’t appreciate the way the coach insinuated himself into his personal life. “He wasn’t telling me not to do it, but he was trying to protect me—and protect, therefore, his plan,” Slaughter said. “It surprised me. I thought, You stay out of my business. I’ll stay out of yours.”

After ripping into Slaughter about Lacey that day in his office, the coach went on to tell Slaughter that he had showed a bad attitude for much of his junior season. “He did a lousy job in ’63. He was very unhappy that he wasn’t getting any credit. I told him if he didn’t change, I didn’t want him back for the team next year,” Wooden said. “I said, ‘You were whining and complaining all year long. Nobody likes you. Go up and down the hall here, any of the coaches and secretaries. You’ve changed completely. If you don’t change, next year I just would prefer you not come out. We’ll get along without you.’”

A week later, Wooden picked up the
Daily Bruin
and read that Slaughter had been elected UCLA’s senior class president. He couldn’t help but chuckle. So much for his contention that nobody liked Fred Slaughter.

*   *   *

This is what a coach’s off-season was for: meeting with players, taking inventory, mapping out the road ahead. Every year after the last game, Wooden holed himself in his office and spent hour after hour poring over many years’ worth of his three-by-five cards, which now occupied several cabinets. In digging through past history, Wooden hoped to excavate a hint for why his teams kept coming up short in the NCAA tournament. Wooden made subtle changes every year, but this time an adjustment emerged that turned out to be hugely significant.

The Big Idea evolved out of a series of conversations between Wooden and Jerry Norman. The two of them liked to get together almost immediately after each season ended, while the details were fresh in their minds. During the 1962–63 season, the Bruins had reversed their fortunes by using a full-court pressure defense. The tactic, however, had proved to be limited. In the first place, Wooden only sicced the press on opponents when the Bruins got behind. Also, even though the purpose of the press was to speed up the tempo, it failed too often because of bad design. A single skilled dribbler could simply weave through the defense, and then his team could run a delay offense once he got past half-court. Even when UCLA got steals out of the press, it didn’t usually result in fast-break baskets. Exhibit A was the play-off win over Stanford, when the Bruins forced 20 turnovers but scored just 51 points. “We fooled ourselves into thinking we forced a bunch of turnovers and won the game, therefore we did the right thing,” Norman said. “But we didn’t do the right thing. We didn’t have any size, and every team in our conference walked the ball up the floor.” Once the Bruins went up against a team like Arizona State, which had lots of savvy ball handlers, they were exposed.

So Norman had an idea. Not only did he want Wooden to commit to using a full-court press for an entire game; he also wanted to use a different kind of press altogether. Instead of the man-to-man version they had been using, Norman suggested they go with a zone. Because teams can trap in a zone—that is, use two defenders to surround the player with the ball and prevent him from advancing—that meant the only way a team could get the ball over the half-court line was by passing, not dribbling. This, Norman surmised, would result in more steals and more fast breaks. And even if the Bruins didn’t get a lot of steals, a zone press would force the game to be played at a quicker pace. Norman had always been enamored of the way Pete Newell’s teams at Cal had controlled the tempo. Now he wanted Wooden to do the same thing—only instead of slowing the game down, he wanted Wooden to speed it up. “The idea wasn’t to steal the ball, remember. That would be an ancillary benefit,” Norman said. “It was to increase tempo.”

After four years of working together, Wooden and Norman had forged a productive relationship, although it fell short of a genuine friendship. Wooden may have come across as insecure to Norman at times, but his decision to hire Norman spoke to his self-confidence. He knew Norman was strong-willed and would always speak his mind. Wooden wanted his assistant to challenge him, to give him balance. “Jerry was not reluctant to make suggestions, but he’d be disappointed if you didn’t go along with him,” Wooden said. “He was impatient. He expected too much too soon. And maybe I did, too, in my early years.”

Wooden was familiar with the concept of a zone press. He had used it when he was coaching in high school and at Indiana State, but at UCLA he had never committed to it full bore, even when he had gifted athletes like Rafer Johnson who would have thrived in it. “Somehow I felt, maybe, that I was up another notch [at UCLA], and it wouldn’t work as well,” he said. “I’ve always second-guessed myself a little for that.”

Not only did the 1963–64 UCLA team have the suitable personnel for a zone press; Norman argued it was the only way the Bruins could beat bigger teams. He suggested a 2-2-1 formation, but instead of putting the point guard on the front line, which was customary, Norman wanted to go with Slaughter up front alongside Goodrich or Freddie Goss. Slaughter was a track star, after all, and his size would be a formidable weapon against opposing point guards. Hazzard would then go on the second line, where he would be in better position either to steal the ball or to accept a pass from the player who did. With the floor sufficiently spread, Hazzard could work his magic in the open court. Finally, Erickson would occupy the all-important back position, where his grace and instincts would enable him to cover the court from sideline to sideline, and then pounce on an errant pass as if he were spiking a volleyball on the beach.

Wooden was a tough audience, peppering Norman with questions and testing his commitment to the idea. “He could be a devil’s advocate,” Norman said. “He wanted to see how strong your convictions were.” Wooden eventually relented. Fine, he said, we’ll give it a try. Let’s see how well it works.

*   *   *

Goodrich was lucky he stuck around. Shortly before the start of practice, Goss walked into Wooden’s office and asked if he could sit out the season and resume playing the following year. It may have seemed like a generous sacrifice, but for Goss it was an easy decision. Unlike Hazzard and Goodrich, he did not come to UCLA harboring visions of a pro career. He did not want a repeat of the previous season, when there was a glut in the backcourt, and nobody was happy. Goss decided he should wait until after Hazzard graduated, and then it would be just him and Goodrich to man the two guard spots. “Wooden knew we had a problem,” Goss said. “Without me there, he wouldn’t have three guards rotating in and out. I knew the chemistry needed it.”

Chemistry would indeed be vital. Just before the first game, Wooden asked the players to rank themselves from the best to the worst. He performed this exercise almost every year—it was a useful weapon against parents who believed their son should be playing more—but when the results came back, Wooden was surprised to see that the players had ranked themselves almost exactly the same. That had to be a good sign.

As it turned out, Slaughter had no trouble beating out Vaughn Hoffman, Wooden’s hot prospect, at center. Thus, the starting five was set—Hazzard, Goodrich, Hirsch, Erickson, and Slaughter. Beyond that, two sophomores emerged as substitutes. They were both southern transplants: Doug McIntosh, a six-foot-six forward from Lily, Kentucky, and Kenny Washington, a reed-thin, six-foot-three guard from Beaufort, South Carolina.

Washington, who was black, faced a far more difficult transition than McIntosh, who was white. Washington had come to UCLA thanks to Hazzard, whom he had met on the playgrounds while visiting his sister in Philadelphia in the summer of 1961, before his senior year of high school. Hazzard thought so highly of Washington’s skills that he told Jerry Norman to offer the kid a scholarship. To make sure Norman took his advice, Hazzard told the coach that Washington was a sturdy six-foot-five, 205 pounds, and he could shoot better than Gary Cunningham. That was all Norman needed to hear. He signed up Washington sight unseen.

To get from South Carolina to Southern California, Washington spent three days crouched in the back of a Greyhound bus. When the bus reached Los Angeles, Norman waited for the player Hazzard described to step off. That player never appeared. After a while, Norman spotted the quiet, scrawny, scared-looking kid standing in a corner, and he came to the disappointing realization that this was Walt’s guy.

Washington could not have been more out of his element. To that point in his life, he had barely spoken to a white person, and he had been taught to look down when he did talk to one. Now, as a freshman at UCLA, he was living with a white roommate. Washington was also confounded by simple technologies like the milk machine in the cafeteria. When he went to a restaurant, he couldn’t tell the waiter what he wanted on his salad because he had never tasted salad dressing. As a result, Washington became a loner, so much so that Hazzard warned him people were getting worried that he would turn out to be another Ron Lawson.

If Washington expected sympathy from his head coach, he would be disappointed. In his autobiography
They Call Me Coach
, Wooden described a freshman practice in the fall of 1962, during which he found Washington standing on the side with tears in his eyes. When Wooden asked Washington what was wrong, the youngster replied that he was upset because he wouldn’t get back home to Beaufort for several months. “I said to him, ‘If you don’t shape up, you can ship out tomorrow on the first Greyhound,’” Wooden wrote.

Washington wasn’t put off by the tough love. He had experienced much the same treatment from his own father, an ex-marine. Wooden was simply preaching the same small-town values Washington had known back home. “He had structure, a philosophy based on fairness,” Washington said. “The same things his father taught him, my father taught me. I felt like a foster child.”

Hazzard may have stretched the truth about Washington’s size, but he wasn’t lying about his ability. After leading the freshman team in scoring and rebounding, Washington moved up to the varsity in 1963. During those six weeks between the start of practice and the season opener, the Bruins worked feverishly on their new defense. “I had never heard of a zone press,” Erickson said. “To my knowledge, nobody had ever done it.” Each day, they would climb those three staircases in the men’s gym and, after helping to mop up the gymnastics team’s chalk as Wooden sprinkled his water, they would run themselves ragged.

Despite being the defending AAWU champions, the Bruins would begin the season unranked in both national polls.
Sports Illustrated
declined to include UCLA in its preseason top twenty, noting that the team’s “lack of height again makes things tough.”