Crum drove Wooden to the airport, where the two of them hopped on a twenty-minute flight to San Diego. They drove to a basketball game at Helix High School in the suburb of La Mesa. At first, Crum was concerned Wooden couldn’t concentrate on the game because he was besieged by people wanting his autograph. Finally, toward the end of the game, Crum asked his boss what he thought of Helix’s center. “Well he is pretty good, isn’t he,” Wooden replied. For the coach, that qualified as overwhelming enthusiasm.
Bill Walton was better than pretty good. He was the best center ever to come out of California. Walton cut quite the colorful figure back then. Bushy red hair, spindly arms, wobbly legs, tender knees, bursting with boundless, infectious, youthful energy. Walton might not have been a nationally known phenom like Lew Alcindor, but the folks out west knew all about him. “He’s the best high school player I’ve ever seen,” San Diego State coach Dick Davis said. “He’s probably a better shot blocker at this stage than Alcindor was.” After watching Walton in action, Wooden said he was “as good a prospect at this stage of development as anyone I have ever seen.”
Walton must have been something special to warrant a rare twofer from Wooden: an out-of-town scouting trip
and
a home visit. But by the time Wooden arrived at Ted and Gloria Walton’s modest home later during Walton’s senior season, the recruitment was essentially over. Walton had been enamored of Wooden ever since he saw the coach speak at a basketball camp in San Diego six years earlier. UCLA’s championship win over Michigan in 1965 was the first basketball game Walton had ever watched on television. The Bruins were scrawny and quick, just like him. He loved their teamwork, their ball movement. Walton attended Lew Alcindor’s final game in Pauley Pavilion during the 1969 NCAA West Regional, and he wore number 33 at Helix High School in Alcindor’s honor. “I was,” Walton said, “the easiest recruit UCLA ever had.”
Some two hundred colleges had contacted Walton and his family in hopes of landing him. They brandished all kinds of grand promises, many of which strayed well outside the bounds of NCAA rules. “Let your imagination run wild and you still wouldn’t come close,” Walton said. Only four coaches made it into the Waltons’ home: Notre Dame’s Johnny Dee, USC’s Bob Boyd, San Diego State’s Dick Davis, and Wooden. Fittingly, the coach who left the strongest impression was the one who promised the least. “I won’t even promise you’ll make the team,” Wooden told Walton. “First, you’ll have to prove you are a fine young man with good personal values. Then you’ll have to demonstrate you can do well in the classroom. If you can do that, we’ll give you a practice jersey and allow you to try out.”
The Waltons were simpatico with Wooden in a very fundamental way: they didn’t have much, but they didn’t want for anything. Despite living paycheck to paycheck, Ted and Gloria raised their four children in a loving, nurturing environment. Ted wasn’t much for sports—“I never shot a single basketball with my dad,” Bill said—but he loved music. Many nights after dinner, the family moved into the living room and jammed around Ted’s piano. Bill was on the baritone horn, his older brother Bruce played trombone, younger brother Andy blew the sax, and sister Candy pounded the drums. Meanwhile, Gloria, a full-time librarian, taught her children to love reading. Her kids called her “Glo.” Bill’s parents were hippies long before anyone knew what that was.
Since their father wasn’t into sports, the Walton boys had to discover athletics on their own. Bruce played lineman for Helix’s football team. Bill played football and excelled at the high jump until he started focusing on basketball in the eighth grade. Bill was so tall for his age that he played against boys who were a year or two older, but since he was the best ball handler, he usually played point guard. While playing a pickup game at Helix as a freshman, however, Bill tore cartilage in his left knee and had to undergo surgery. He was still growing, which prevented his surgically repaired knee from healing properly. And though he had an insatiable appetite, Bill had a hard time putting on weight. When he was a sophomore at Helix High School, he was so tall, skinny, and uncoordinated that he spent most of the season playing for the junior varsity. He was, in his words, “the ectomorph.”
Bill moved up to the varsity as a six-foot-seven, 180-pound junior, but he was so frail that he could play only for limited stretches. Though he was a dominant shot blocker and rebounder, he wasn’t much of a scorer. This was by his own design. Because of the tenderness in his knees, Bill’s preferred contribution to the offense was to crash the defensive boards and fire bullet passes to the streaking guards. Sometimes, he would throw those long outlet passes before his feet even touched the floor. “He averaged thirty a game, but two-thirds of the time he never got across the ten-second line,” Crum said. “If he did, he could’ve scored sixty.” Wooden said that he hadn’t seen “anyone throw the outlet pass like that since Jerry Lucas.”
This habit wasn’t just born from the pain in Bill’s knees. It also dovetailed with the communal mind-set his parents had fostered in him. He firmly believed that basketball was a team game, and he was much happier watching his teammates score than getting points of his own. “I sort of enjoyed standing back there watching our guys destroying everybody at the other end,” he said. His high school coach, Gordon Nash, had to convince him that his teammates needed him to do some destroying, too. “There were a lot of times I had to ask him to shoot more,” Nash said. “He was always conscious of his teammates.”
Bill grew another two inches by the start of his senior year, and he improved his conditioning through long bike rides. When Nash finally convinced him it was okay to shoot, the results were spectacular. Walton averaged 29 points and 24 rebounds his senior season while leading Helix to a 33–0 record and a state championship. The only downside to all that success was the attention that came with it. Much like Alcindor, Walton felt uncomfortable standing out in a crowd, and he hated it when strangers gazed up at him and asked, “Do you play basketball?” When a local newspaper ran a story that Walton had attended a concert with his girlfriend, he complained to Nash, “I can’t do anything without reading about it in the paper.”
After arriving as a freshman at UCLA in the fall of 1970, Walton did his best to blend in, pedaling around campus in sandals while his long auburn locks fluttered in the wind. But everyone knew how special he was. Wooden accorded Walton the rare privilege of practicing with the varsity twice a week as a freshman. This did not go over well with the older players. One day, during Wooden’s favorite fast break drill, the three-on-two, two-on-one conditioner, Sidney Wicks took a pass from Bibby and soared toward Walton, the lone defender. When Walton shuffled over to block a layup attempt, Wicks reached over Bill’s outstretched hand and dunked with authority. The wild child made his point at the golden child’s expense. “It was like that dunk came from Santa Monica. Just POW!” Larry Farmer said. “Coach Wooden blew the whistle.
‘Sidney! What do you think you’re doing!’
Bill is beet-red, because he just got ran. Curtis Rowe is on the other end of the floor, and he just falls on the floor laughing. It was as close as I ever saw to Coach losing control of practice. It was one of the greatest plays in UCLA history, and nobody saw it except that group of guys.”
Basketball was the easy part of Walton’s transition. Though he did well in school, he suffered from a debilitating speech impediment. If he could avoid talking to someone, especially someone he didn’t know, he would. “When you’re a stutterer, you don’t talk,” Walton said. “I was extremely shy, extremely self-conscious. Uncomfortable in the presence of people who I did not know and saddled with an unbelievable speech impediment and the inability to communicate. I just wanted to be a college student. I feel uncomfortable to this day being recognized individually in a team sport.”
Alcindor had avoided contact with strangers as well, but there was a difference. Whereas Alcindor chose to withdraw into a bookish loner’s world, Walton was by nature a joiner. He immersed himself in every aspect of campus life, especially the raging counterculture. Walton’s parents were staunchly liberal, antiwar, antiestablishment, and it didn’t take long for folks at UCLA to learn that Bill was a rabble-rouser. He was kicked out of his first freshman dorm because he and another student ran down the hall knocking off lightbulbs. “It was a prank, but also a form of rebellion,” Bruce said.
Though he preferred to socialize in small groups, Bill was fun and inclusive, the kind of guy who would buy beer and pizza for everyone if he had a few bucks in his pocket. No one ever said that about Alcindor. “He stuttered so bad that people thought he was antisocial, but he was very gregarious. A lot of fun to be around,” said Jamaal Wilkes, a six-foot-six forward from Santa Barbara who was in the same class as Walton. (When Wilkes played for UCLA, his first name was Keith. Like Alcindor, he changed his name when he converted to Islam after graduation.) Walton shared with his new teammates his passion for music, especially the Grateful Dead. Walton loved music, loved reading, loved parties. And he loved to play ball.
It was this joie de vivre that set Walton apart, not just from Alcindor but from most of the human population. He was a large man with voracious appetites. His belly was never full. “College was perfect,” he said many years later. “Are you kidding? An all-you-can-eat buffet at five thirty in the morning. Classes start at seven with the most interesting, fascinating speakers. All-you-can-eat buffet at lunch. Basketball all afternoon. All-you-can-eat buffet at dinner. Then you get to go to bed early and do it all over the next day.”
He shook his head and smiled at the memory. “I loved UCLA. It was better than perfect.”
* * *
The start of basketball practice always coincided with Wooden’s birthday, but 1970 marked a special occasion. The day before, on October 14, Wooden turned sixty. Just prior to taking the official team photo, the players sang to Wooden and presented him with a cake. The
Los Angeles Times
noted that “a couple of days ago, several of the Bruin players sported beards, moustaches and long hair, but none of those remained Wednesday.” Wooden’s friends threw him a private party that week at Bel Air Country Club (Lew Alcindor was also in attendance, showing there were no hard feelings over his
Sports Illustrated
series), but on the night of his actual birthday, Wooden preferred to go out for a quiet dinner with his family. “The older I get, the more I feel like Maurice Chevalier,” he quipped. “I remember him saying when he became eighty, ‘It’s just great, when you consider the alternatives.’”
As usual, Wooden’s team was bursting with talent. The six weeks between the start of practice and the first game was going to be another Darwinian elimination ritual. Between the veteran players, rising sophomores, former redshirts, and junior college transfers, Wooden had twenty to thirty players who genuinely hoped to make the twelve-man varsity roster. There was such a glut that Swen Nater, a prized six-foot-eleven transfer from Cypress College, decided to redshirt, and sophomore guard Tommy Curtis, a two-time prep All-American from Tallahassee, did not make the cut. “It was traumatic,” Curtis said. “I couldn’t accept the rationale behind the decision.”
That was just the race to make the traveling squad. The fight to get into Wooden’s coveted top six or seven was even more intense. With four starters returning from the national championship team, the primary question at the outset was who would replace John Vallely as the starting guard opposite Henry Bibby. Andy Hill and Terry Schofield had not so patiently waited their turn, but Wooden opted to go with Kenny Booker, who wasn’t as good a shooter as the other two but was the best perimeter defender on the team. The Bruins were loaded, and everyone knew it. After they blitzed Baylor by 31 points in their opening game, Baylor coach Bill Menefee said that UCLA was not only better than they had been the previous season; they were the best team he had ever coached against. “That includes the Bruin team with Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard,” Menefee said. “I’ve never seen big men shoot so well from the outside. It will take a combination of the New York Knicks and the Milwaukee Bucks to dethrone them.”
UCLA’s next opponent was another unranked team, Rice University. The players knew the game would be a cakewalk, which is why Wicks and Rowe strolled into the pregame meal ten minutes late without a word of explanation. The other players looked at Wooden to see if he would scold them, but he didn’t. Same old star system. “I’m thinking, okay, here’s the chink in the armor,” Farmer said. “Coach would always say, ‘Be on time when time is involved.’ I was thinking, yeah, unless it’s these two guys.”
Shortly before sending the team out on the court against Rice, Wooden stood in the locker room and listed the starting lineup. When he got to the forward spots, he wrote the names
Ecker
and
Farmer
on the board. Then he turned to Wicks and Rowe and said, “You guys were late, so you’re not starting. I don’t know when I’m going to put you in, or if I’m going to put you in.” He kept them on the bench for the first ten minutes. At halftime, the Bruins’ lead was just 52–43.
J. D. Morgan was not pleased. He scheduled these easy home games so the athletic department could make some money while assuring the fans of a win. The fans came to see the stars, and Morgan wanted Wooden to deliver them. As the team filed into the locker room, Morgan cornered Crum and ordered him to tell Wooden to start Wicks and Rowe in the second half. The team’s manager, Steve Aranoff, heard the exchange and later asked Crum what he had told Wooden. “Are you kidding?” Crum replied, chuckling. “I didn’t tell him a thing.”
As it turned out, Crum didn’t need to deliver the message, because Wicks and Rowe started the second half. They finished with 29 and 27 points, respectively, in a 124–78 romp. After the game, Crum told his boss about his conversation with Morgan. Now Wooden was the one who was not pleased.
On Monday morning, Wooden walked into Morgan’s office and objected to what Morgan had done. Wooden described the confrontation in 1982 for an oral history of Morgan compiled by UCLA. “I told him I didn’t appreciate him trying to tell me who to play or trying to take over the discipline of the team,” Wooden said. “If he wanted to do that, then he can get another coach.” According to Wooden, Morgan conceded that he was out of line, and he assured the coach it would never happen again.