Wooden: A Coach's Life (66 page)

UCLA won, 87–66. The game was Larry Farmer’s last at UCLA, ending his college career with an incredible 89–1 record, but the only thing people wanted to talk about afterward was Walton. He had made an astounding twenty-one of his twenty-two shots, giving him by far the highest field goal percentage in the history of the NCAA championship game. “He’s super, the best collegiate player I’ve ever seen,” Bartow said. “We played him wrong. We tried three or four things but I guess we didn’t try the right one.”

Now that the season was over, the national press savored the chance finally to hear directly from the best player in college basketball. Once again, they were disappointed. When several dozen sportswriters entered UCLA’s postgame locker room, Walton was already showered, dressed, and itching to leave. “I’m in a hurry to go see some friends. Would you please excuse me?” he said. When someone tried to ask him about the game, Walton snapped, “I don’t want to talk about it, man.”

Once again, Wooden was left to explain his center’s enigmatic behavior. “I’m very surprised he did that, but he was very upset over something that was written about him this week,” Wooden said. Though he was usually reluctant to compare his teams, he anointed this as the finest he had ever coached. “Yes, I’d have to say this one is. I don’t think I’ve ever had a greater one,” he said. “Except for that one game [against Indiana], this is a team that never lost its poise. What we did was a team accomplishment, built around the tremendous ability of Bill Walton.”

Walton’s latest Garbo act only intensified the questions about his future plans. “If he has been offered what he has reportedly been offered, with no gimmicks, and he does return to school, I’d take him down to our psychiatric ward,” Wooden said. As for Wooden’s future, he acknowledged that it had been “a trying season for me, first because of the pressure of the long winning streak, then some books about me have caused me some problems.” He said he planned to return, but his wife was not so sure. “I hope this will be his last season,” Nell said, “and I intend to try to do all I can to make it his last.”

*   *   *

Walton never wavered on his intent to come back to UCLA for his senior season. Still, Sam Gilbert convinced him that he at least owed the 76ers the courtesy of a meeting. So after the game, the two of them returned to Walton’s palatial penthouse at the Chase Park Plaza, where they received the pitch from team owner Irving Kosloff, general manager Don DeJardin, and coach Kevin Loughery. Walton listened politely for an hour. Then he told them no thanks.

“I don’t need any reasons for coming back,” he said later. “I’m here and that’s it. Money has never been a factor. I wish people would understand that.”

After the 76ers’ brass left, Walton called his teammates and invited them over to celebrate. They were college kids, national champs, happy hippies reveling in the last throes of the Age of Aquarius. Now they had their very own penthouse. The UCLA Bruins cut loose something awful that night. Walton would one day joke that the scene should have been labeled “Fear and Loathing in St. Louis.”

29

Intolerable

The backlash was in full swing.

To the national press, the message delivered in St. Louis was loud and clear: we’re UCLA, and you’re not. They blamed John Wooden as much as Bill Walton for the redhead’s rudeness. “Far more disturbing than Walton’s behavior is that of the UCLA athletic officials,” wrote William Gildea in the
Washington Post
. “At the major tournaments over the years, UCLA has treated the interview of an athlete—even after a game—like the security guards at the CIA plant would an approaching stranger. What does UCLA have to hide?”

Gildea also tweaked Wooden for plugging his book during the televised postgame interview following the Memphis State win. “The Wooden sales effort—and gall—reached a rare level,” Gildea wrote. Then there was this censure from a columnist at the
San Bernardino Sun
: “UCLA’s Bruins, who beat everybody, won’t talk to just anybody.… Basketball writers usually get an inquisitive crack at just one handpicked Bruin after each game. Coach John Wooden runs an off-limits locker room. Center Bill Walton is practically unapproachable.”

Frank Dolson suggested in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
that UCLA’s win streak had become “a cancer” and asked: “Isn’t there something wrong with a coach who wins his seventh consecutive national championship, his 75th straight game, and then acts as petty, as petulant, as insecure as Wooden acted Monday night?” An editorial in
Long Island Newsday
argued that Wooden was “guilty of self-serving arrogance.” Ken Denlinger added in the
Washington Post
that Wooden “often assumes the pompous air of his days as an English teacher at South Bend Central High.” The
Sunday New
s asserted that Wooden’s closed-door policy was a dereliction of his duties as a teacher: “When any college coach abdicates this responsibility, with the result that one of his star players cannot cope with the world outside, then the coach has not developed a star, he has used him.”

Those were just the complaints about Walton’s silent treatment. The broader indictment contended that UCLA’s hegemony was hurting college basketball. Of all the criticisms directed Wooden’s way over the years, this was the most misguided. The NCAA tournament had never been more popular, more watched, and more valuable. UCLA wasn’t the biggest reason for that. It was the only reason. The Bruins’ dominance had compelled NBC to convince the NCAA to move the 1973 NCAA final to Monday night. ABC had enjoyed huge success with
Monday Night Football
the previous few years, and NBC wanted the game played on the biggest viewing night of the week. The previous year’s final between UCLA and Florida State had generated a rating of 16, meaning it was watched in approximately ten million homes by thirty million people. The highest rating for an NBA game to that point was 15.5, earned by the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks in their play-off final the previous May. UCLA was the only school in America that could garner consistent national television exposure for regular season games. Everyone in the sport benefited from its popularity.

Yet Wooden had to answer this silly charge once again after winning his seventh straight championship and his ninth overall. “It’s a sad thing what has happened to college basketball,” Glenn Dickey wrote in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “UCLA makes everybody play for second place. When you take the suspense out of sport, there’s really nothing left.… The shadow of UCLA hangs over the sport like a blight.”

No wonder John Wooden had a heart attack. Even when he won, he couldn’t win.

The 1972–73 season should have been the most enjoyable of Wooden’s career, but he didn’t see it that way. In a letter he sent two weeks after the final to Duane Klueh, his former All-American guard at Indiana State, Wooden wrote that it had been “a very ‘trying’ year for me,” because of all the external pressures and the health issues that stemmed from them. “The players were fine,” Wooden wrote, “but some of the press and the fans were almost unbearable at times.”

Wooden had promised Walton and his classmates that he would coach at UCLA through their senior year, but he was conflicted about how much longer he wanted to continue beyond that. UCLA’s mandatory retirement age was sixty-five, which meant he was eligible to coach another three seasons. If he wanted to go beyond that, the school would probably make the allowance, but it seemed unlikely that Wooden would go that long. As far as his wife was concerned, he couldn’t retire soon enough. “If he even loses a game they’re going to say that he’s too old and he has lost his touch,” Nell said. “You learn to prepare yourself for the worst and then hope it doesn’t happen. They can stretch the rules and let him stay until he’s sixty-seven but I wonder if it would be worth it. What more does my husband have to prove?”

*   *   *

The week after the win over Memphis State, Walton and Wooden flew to Atlanta so Walton could accept the Naismith Trophy at the Atlanta Tipoff Club’s annual awards banquet. During the flight, Walton asked the stewardess for a glass of wine. When she brought him juice instead, he looked over and saw a familiar furrowed brow. “As long as you’re traveling with me,” Wooden said, “you’ll not drink wine.”

Aside from that, Walton enjoyed a blissful six months away from John Wooden’s exacting eyes. That meant being able to grow out his hair and beard, but when the first day of practice came around in October 1973, Walton cleaned himself up. Or so he thought. The start of the practice was open to the press and included the taking of the annual team photo. Wooden told his assistants that he wanted to go to the locker room early because he suspected Walton would try to test him. He was right. Walton came into practice with his hair matted down to look shorter than it was, but Wooden wasn’t fooled. They argued back and forth. Walton complained that he had just gotten it cut. Wooden countered that Walton’s ears and collar were still covered. Walton argued that it was his right to wear his hair as long as he wanted. Wooden agreed. He then pointed out that it was his right to determine who was permitted to practice.

That settled it. Walton hopped on his bicycle and pedaled as quickly as he could to the nearest barber shop. Thirty minutes later, he returned, freshly shorn, to join his teammates. “I may be an anarchist,” Walton said, “but I’m no dummy.”

The players teased Walton about what happened, but when the practice was over, he turned serious. After asking Wooden if he could address his teammates, Walton informed them that he had discovered the wonders of transcendental meditation, and he wanted to share it with his teammates. He asked everyone to follow him to the basketball office. “I go back to the office, and there’s eight or nine kids sitting on the floor with their legs crossed going, ‘
Mmmm … Mmmmm
,’” Frank Arnold said. “Coach wasn’t very happy about that.”

Walton also revealed that he had become a vegetarian. Not surprisingly, that idea was planted in his mind by Greg Lee. His teammates were willing to try it. “We were big time, and of course everyone with a cause wanted your attention,” Jamaal Wilkes said. “If you weren’t at least open to exploring different stuff, you were kind of like an oddball.”

All of this was quite an indoctrination for the incoming freshmen. Wooden had once again assembled a stellar recruiting class, which was more significant than ever because the NCAA had just adopted a rule making freshmen eligible for varsity competition. (Wooden had opposed the change.) The gem was Richard Washington, a six-foot-nine center from Portland, Oregon. Washington had committed to UCLA the previous spring after Wooden watched one of Washington’s high school games during the Bruins’ road trip to Oregon and Oregon State. (Washington later joked that during his campus visit to UCLA, “I took a dip in Sam Gilbert’s pool and it cooled me off, and that was the convincer.”) Wooden had also recruited Jimmy Spillane, a five-foot-ten guard from nearby Palos Verdes; Ralph Drollinger, a seven-foot sophomore from San Diego; and Marques Johnson, a six-foot-five freshman forward from Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles.

The presence of eligible freshmen created an even bigger glut than usual for Wooden to sort through. Returning at forward would be Dave Meyers, the six-foot junior who Wooden said “made more progress [last season], week by week, than anybody we’ve had here.” The most intriguing battle would come at point guard, where redshirt sophomore Andre McCarter, the six-foot-three blur from Philadelphia’s storied Overbrook High School, was poised to challenge two seniors, Tommy Curtis and Greg Lee. The numbers crunch convinced Vince Carson, a once-heralded six-foot-five forward from nearby Altadena, to transfer. “Wooden has his favorites and I’m not one of them, I guess,” he said on his way out the door.

Marques Johnson was considered an afterthought among the freshmen, but from the outset, Wooden could see that he had great potential as a rebounder. Not only was Johnson strong for his age; he was also a quick repeat jumper. Johnson was startled at how Wooden’s gentle personality transformed during those two hours between the lines. “I just remember this crazy look he had when he conducted practices,” Johnson said. “He was this fierce warrior dude, but he was able to use this whole spiritual kind of Christian philosophy. He was a real walking contradiction.”

After having not seen Walton all summer, Johnson was delighted when the redhead called out to him while riding his bike across campus one day, because it meant that Walton knew who he was. Johnson and the other freshmen were ready to follow Walton into whatever odd endeavors he suggested. Johnson did as he was asked and brought a handkerchief and two pieces of fruit to Walton’s meditation guru in Westwood. The man gave Marques the top-secret mantra he was supposed to recite over and over with his eyes closed, thus empowering him to commune with the universe. “I was caught up in it,” Johnson said, “but a certain part of me was thinking, ‘If only your homies from Crenshaw could see you now.’”

All of this was Walton’s not-so-subtle way of commandeering this team as his own. He was a senior, after all. He had heard Wooden’s speeches so many times, he could recite them himself—and he and his fellow seniors often did, to Wooden’s annoyance. They knew all of his tricks. For example, before Wooden’s annual here’s-how-you-put-on-your-shoes-and-socks lecture on the first day of practice, he always had Gary Cunningham plant a penny in a corner of the room. Then Wooden would “find” the penny, tuck it into his left shoe, and tell the boys that it would bring them luck. This time, Walton found the penny beforehand and shoved it into his pocket. When Wooden couldn’t find it after several minutes of looking, Walton let Wooden know he had been foiled. “We’re a great team,” Walton said. “We don’t need luck.” He might as well have said they didn’t need coaching.

*   *   *

So it was that Wooden faced his an annual conundrum: Where should he hold the line, and where should he bend? Walton’s and Lee’s vegetarianism posed a problem because the team’s regular training table served mostly meat. If Walton and Lee were going to get enough nourishment, they would have to eat at the student union. Wooden allowed them to do so, but because he couldn’t extend that privilege only to those two, he allowed everyone to eat at the cafeteria as well. Pretty soon, he dropped the training table altogether.