Wooden: A Coach's Life (39 page)

This brought a new set of pressures on Wooden, and he knew he would have to adapt. For example, a few weeks after his team won the NCAA championship, Wooden learned that Goodrich had been drinking heavily at a fraternity party in Berkeley. Goodrich had no idea how Wooden found out, but when he returned to campus, he got a call that the coach wanted to see him in his office the next morning. Goodrich braced for the worst, but it never came. “You know that my rule is if I catch someone drinking, that player is gone,” Wooden told him. “I’d hate for anything like that to happen to you.” It didn’t occur to Goodrich until afterward that the coach never asked him point-blank if the rumors were true. “He was smart enough not to put me in that position,” Goodrich said.

Keith Erickson committed a much more serious breach when he missed the team’s flight to New York for the Olympic trials because he overslept after spending most of the previous night partying with a buddy. When Wooden returned to Los Angeles, he met with Erickson and told him that he was off the team, although Wooden added he would leave the door open for a possible return in the fall. “He was definitely serious,” Erickson said. “I walked out of there not knowing whether I was going to come back to UCLA.”

As it turned out, Erickson did play for the United States that summer at the Olympics—as a member of the volleyball team. The squad, which was comprised entirely of players from Southern California, was put together at the last minute and barely practiced before finishing ninth in a field of ten. When the Olympics were over, Erickson returned to campus pessimistic about his chances of playing basketball his senior year. When the big meeting with Wooden came, the coach began by saying, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re off the team.” Erickson’s heart sank. “However,” Wooden continued, “my wife really likes you, and my daughter and son like you, too. So I’m going to give you another chance.” Erickson walked out of Wooden’s office a little more straight, a little more narrow.

Wooden was a man of principles, but his world was changing fast. His school had a new athletic director, a new television contract, and it was about to have a new arena. It also had a new standard for its basketball program, which Wooden had set himself. His job now was to maintain that standard. It would take more than a little rule breaking for him to dismiss his two best players.

*   *   *

There would be no more sneaking up on anyone. The Bruins began the 1964–65 season ranked No. 2 in the AP poll behind Michigan. They carried their thirty-game winning streak into the new season, which put them within reach of breaking the record of sixty set by Bill Russell’s San Francisco teams. This UCLA team would not include the incandescent Hazzard—he had been selected by the Los Angeles Lakers with the first pick in the NBA draft—but in some ways the Bruins promised to be better. Goodrich would now handle the ball full-time, and he would be joined in the backcourt by Freddie Goss, who returned from his self-imposed one-year sabbatical. Forwards Kenny Washington and Doug McIntosh were ready to be promoted to the starting lineup, and Mike Lynn, a talented six-foot-six sophomore, would join the rotation. Jack Hirsch’s and Fred Slaughter’s skills would be missed, but their departures had the potential to improve chemistry. This machine wouldn’t require quite so much friction to generate heat.

The start of the season also meant the varsity debut of the much-heralded sophomore, Edgar Lacey, who had proved during his freshman year that he was worth the hype. Yet even though Lacey scored a lot of points, Wooden did not like the way he shot the basketball. Lacey’s form was slow and awkward, and he released the ball from behind his head. Ever the devotee to fundamentals, Wooden believed that Lacey would have trouble making long-range baskets against high-caliber teams, so he worked with Lacey before every practice in an effort to break down his form and rebuild it from scratch. “Edgar seemed comfortable with Wooden,” said Mike Serafin, a six-foot-three sophomore forward on that team, “but I think it was an uncomfortable process.”

With his genial manner and easy smile, Lacey was well liked by his teammates, but he was essentially a loner. Instead of living near campus, he commuted every day in a beat-up Volkswagen from his home in South Central. “It’s not that Edgar didn’t like white people. He just wasn’t comfortable around white people,” said Goss, who was the only other black player on the team. “He didn’t go out of his way to ingratiate himself to Wooden or the white community or the booster clubs. His ability to accept any kind of discipline from a white man would have been really hard.”

Lacey gave the Bruins some added offensive punch, but everything revolved around Goodrich, who had added fifteen pounds of muscle over the summer. Wooden and Norman tweaked the zone press to a 1-2-1-1 alignment, but aside from that, little else was changed.

UCLA opened its title defense in the Midwest, with a game against an unranked team, the University of Illinois. The game was a reality check. Before a feverish crowd at Assembly Hall, the Bruins got knocked on their heels and never recovered. Their press was impotent against an Illini squad that made more than 60 percent of its shots en route to a 52–38 halftime lead. Even when UCLA was able to get a few steals, they did not result in layups because Hazzard was no longer running the point. Goodrich managed to score 25 points, but the Illini ran roughshod and easily won, 110–83. “It was very deflating,” Erickson said. “We were ranked number one again, but we hadn’t done anything. So we were cocky.”

Fortunately, UCLA had a badly overmatched opponent in its next game—Indiana State, Wooden’s former employer—which it beat by 26 points. From there, the Bruins righted the ship by winning their next four, including a 16-point triumph at the Sports Arena over Oklahoma State. When the Bruins beat Utah by 30 points to win the championship of the Los Angeles Classic, and Michigan took its first loss, UCLA was back on top of the AP poll.

The season-opening loss to Illinois turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the Bruins could play their games without facing the pressure of trying to stay perfect. Now that Goodrich didn’t have to share the ball with Hazzard, he was liberated to unleash his full bag of tricks. He became the most lethal offensive weapon in America. “I guarded Gail every day in practice, and I never blocked his goddamn shot once,” said Mike Serafin. Lacey, meanwhile, cemented his status as a starter by scoring 20 points in a 9-point win over USC in December. At six-foot-seven, Lacey was the tallest player and best leaper on the team, which is why he was the leading rebounder, but his shooting woes left him as the team’s fourth-leading scorer.

UCLA’s winning ways continued through conference play. The Bruins survived a couple of close calls, including a 52–50 squeaker against USC, but they finished undefeated in league play for the second straight year. Their only other regular-season loss came at the Milwaukee Classic on January 29, when the Bruins were clipped by unranked Iowa, 87–82, costing them their No. 1 ranking. When the game was over, the Iowa players lifted their coach, Ralph Miller, onto their shoulders and carried him off the floor. Wooden had grown used to such celebrations in Berkeley and Corvallis, but now it had happened in his native Midwest, the area of the country that the
Los Angeles Times
called “the cradle of basketball” during Wooden’s first season in Westwood. Things were a lot different now, and they would stay that way.

*   *   *

West Coast basketball was still weak compared to the rest of the country, so Wooden had an advantage in the postseason because the NCAA tournament’s regions were arranged by geography, not competitive balance. The Bruins began their title defense in 1965 with a pair of easy wins at the West Regional in Provo, Utah, over BYU and San Francisco. That vaulted UCLA into the NCAA semifinals for the third time in four years. However, a few days before the team left for the championship weekend in Portland, Keith Erickson, who had scored a total of 57 points in the two wins in Provo, was hitting golf balls when he felt a painful twinge. “I was trying to hit the ball as hard as I could, and I pulled the hamstring in one of my legs,” Erickson said. “It was just a great opportunity to be an idiot.” He was the team’s second-leading scorer, but when he got to Portland, it was obvious that he was badly hurt. UCLA would have to rely more heavily on Washington and Lynn if it was going to win two more games.

The Bruins’ semifinal opponent was Wichita State. The Shockers had played slow ball to upset Henry Iba’s Oklahoma State team in the Midwest regional final, and Wooden assumed they would attempt the same tactic against UCLA. His Bruins, however, had seen every kind of trick by then, and they had more experience than Wichita State at playing on a big stage. Their dominance was so emphatic that Wooden called off the press by halftime with the Bruins owning a 65–38 lead. Erickson’s scoring was replaced by Lacey (25 points, 13 rebounds) and Goss (19 points), leading to a 108–89 victory.

That set up a final that had seemed predestined from the beginning of the season: No. 2 UCLA versus No. 1 Michigan. Very little had changed in the fifteen months since UCLA and Michigan had headlined the Los Angeles Classic. That was bad news for the Wolverines. Once again, it took some time for the pace to wear Michigan down, but when it did, Wooden’s racehorses blew by. After Michigan staked a 20–13 lead, thanks to Cazzie Russell’s ability to drive by the hobbled Erickson, Wooden replaced Erickson with Kenny Washington, who immediately sank two jumpers to ignite an 11–2 run. A few minutes later, the Bruins went on another burst, this time outscoring Michigan 14–2. The Wolverines were in full panic. “The crowd was yelling louder and louder each time we did something,” Doug McIntosh said. “One time I wasn’t able to really put any pressure on Cazzie. Then I looked, and I saw the ball just dribble off his leg. I just watched that ball dribble off his leg, and all I could think was, ‘Isn’t this sweet? We’re going to win.’”

UCLA led at halftime, 47–34. With Erickson sidelined the rest of the way, Washington turned in another storybook performance off the bench. The year before, he had torched Duke in the final for 26. This time, he scored 17. Early in the second half, Wooden ordered his team to hold the ball in order to force the Wolverines out of their zone defense. When Michigan obliged by going to an aggressive man-to-man, it opened up more driving lanes for Goodrich, who drew fouls again and again. By the time the game was over, he had set a new NCAA championship game-scoring record with 42 points. Goodrich did much of his damage from the foul line, where he converted eighteen of his twenty attempts.

UCLA won, 91–80, to become just the fourth repeat champion in the twenty-six-year history of the NCAA tournament. Yet, despite Goodrich’s historic performance, the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award went to Princeton’s All-America forward Bill Bradley, who had scored 58 points in a meaningless win over Wichita State in the third-place game. This was the second snub in twelve months for Goodrich, but he still had two championships to show for it. Not even the great Walt Hazzard could say that.

UCLA’s twin titles served as an emphatic validation for the unconventional brand of basketball that Wooden had introduced to the American West. The lessons taught by Piggy Lambert, which emphasized quickness over height, had proved enduring. And yet, for all the changes Wooden had navigated during his three decades in coaching, there was another on the horizon that would literally dwarf all the others. From three thousand miles away, an unusually tall and graceful player was getting ready to plop in his lap. For most of his coaching life, Wooden’s teams loomed large by playing small, but things were about to change in a big, big way.

21

Lewis

The kid’s first thought was: he looks like the guy in the Pepperidge Farm ad. You know, the one with the little old man who drives a buggy. Same exact hair, cropped short and parted in the middle. Long, angular face. Glasses perched on a pointed nose. Unusually plump earlobes. Then there was the voice: quiet but steady, with an unmistakable midwestern twang. With his suit coat hanging from a peg on the wall behind him, the man sat at his desk in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and tie. The kid thought the pose struck a perfect balance: formal but not stuffy; relaxed but not cavalier. The man looked like he should be working in a one-room schoolhouse.

Most recruits would be put off by such spartan conditions and understated mannerisms, but this was no ordinary recruit. This was Lew Alcindor, a seven-foot-one center from New York City who was being hailed as one of the greatest schoolboy talents in basketball history. Ever since Alcindor was a freshman in high school, he had been approached by peddlers and curiosity seekers, sportswriters and college coaches, all of whom wanted to cajole him, charm him, promise him the world. Yet, here was Mr. Pepperidge Farm, sitting in his makeshift office, promising him nothing more than the chance to get a quality education. “He had very humble circumstances around him,” Alcindor said. “He never was ostentatious in any way.”

Best of all, the man called him Lewis. Not Lew, or Big Lew, or Lewie. Lewis. Alcindor believed it was his way of saying,
We are gentlemen here. I will treat you with respect
. When Alcindor told the coach that he was impressed with UCLA’s basketball program, the man replied, “That’s all very good, but I am impressed by your grades. You could do very well here as a student, whether you were an athlete or not. That is important.”

Alcindor had never been to California before. His visit to UCLA’s campus took place over the first weekend of April 1965, a week after UCLA won its second straight NCAA championship. He was such a coveted recruit that even the speculation that he
might
visit UCLA had warranted a story in the
Los Angeles Times
back in mid-March. The visit itself was cloaked in secrecy. Alcindor arrived by plane on Friday night and was met at the airport by Jerry Norman, Edgar Lacey, and a freshman point guard from South Bend, Indiana, named Mike Warren, who, not coincidentally, was also black. The four of them drove in Lacey’s car to UCLA’s campus, where Alcindor was assigned a two-room guest suite that was usually reserved for visiting professors and other VIPs. After Norman left, the players went to a rock ’n’ roll concert in the student union, ate hamburgers at midnight in a Westwood coffee shop, and were treated to double servings of French toast the following morning at Hollis Johnson’s drugstore.