Wooden: A Coach's Life (21 page)

The Bruins prevailed over Washington in the 1952 PCC play-offs to capture their second conference title in Wooden’s four seasons. But they were visited by more bad luck. Because so many college students around the country had left school to serve in the Korean War, the NCAA had temporarily permitted freshmen to play varsity sports. And so Don Bragg, a six-foot-four forward from San Francisco, was able to join Wooden’s roster. Even though he was a freshman, Bragg was UCLA’s leading scorer during the regular season, but following the PCC clincher over Washington, he broke a toe as he exited the shower. Bragg’s mishap left him severely hampered for the Bruins’ opener against Santa Clara in the NCAA tournament’s Western Regional in Corvallis, Oregon.

The NCAA tournament field had expanded from eight to sixteen teams, but once again, the Bruins’ stay was short. With Bragg on the bench, the other Bruins suffered some early foul trouble, and Wooden was forced to insert Bragg into the game midway through the second half, but he was clearly hobbled. UCLA made just twenty of its eighty-five shot attempts and fell, 68–59. Wooden took the loss hard. “It was one of our worst games in quite a while,” he said. “I thought our kids were right, but they didn’t play like they were.” The next day, UCLA lost to Oklahoma City, 55–53, in the Western Regional’s consolation game. John Wooden may have accomplished great things during his first four seasons at UCLA, but he was now 0–4 in NCAA tournament play.

The loss to Oklahoma City also marked the end of Jerry Norman’s college playing career. It had been a wild ride, but he left school more mature than when he came in, and even he had to admit that Wooden deserved much of the credit. Now it was time for them to go their separate ways; Wooden had another team to teach, while Norman was bound for the navy. Neither would have guessed that this talented, obstinate, profane, keenly intelligent nonconformist would someday be more responsible than anyone besides Wooden for launching a basketball dynasty at UCLA.

12

L.A. Story

A $6,000 annual salary did not go far in a place like Los Angeles. During his first four years at UCLA, Wooden worked mornings as a dispatcher for a dairy company in the San Fernando Valley. “After all the trucks made their deliveries and came back, I would call the next day’s orders, sweep out the place, and head over the hill to UCLA,” he said. “Why did I do it? Because I needed the money.”

That the UCLA basketball coach needed to hold down a second job illustrated just how little the sport mattered on the West Coast. UCLA did not even provide Wooden with a full-time assistant. Ed Powell doubled as an assistant baseball coach alongside his basketball duties. Wooden’s other assistant, Bill Putnam, also served as an assistant athletic director. After Powell left in 1952 to become the head coach at Loyola University, his replacement, Doug Sale, assumed his duties with the baseball team.

Moreover, there was scant interest in basketball at the grassroots level. This was a common lament of Wooden’s during those early years. “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re from Iowa. Did you know this state does not have a high school basketball championship tournament? Can you believe that?’” said Bob Seizer, who was an undergraduate reporter for the
Daily Bruin
. During a media luncheon in 1950, Wooden pointed out that his son, Jimmy, had played organized basketball in Terre Haute beginning in the sixth grade. In Los Angeles, he said, Jimmy could only play in a loosely organized club program until he got to high school. “The better basketball players in the Midwest are no better than our basketball players in the far west,” Wooden said. “But there are many more of the better class players in the Midwest than we have out here. Back there you just about must have an indoor game. Basketball is it. Out here fans and boys can be outdoors all the year around. That splits basketball interest with other activities. Basketball suffers.”

Such comments fed the impression that the coach was not long for Westwood. As much as Sale enjoyed being Wooden’s assistant, he would quit two years later to take a high school coaching job in Northern California because he feared Wooden would soon accept one of the many offers he was getting from midwestern universities. Wooden didn’t try to talk Sale out of leaving. The best he could do was promise that if he did take one of those offers, Sale could come along with him. “I told him I don’t want to go to the Midwest because it’s too far from my family,” Sale said. “He said, ‘Well, that’s your decision.’”

The low salary, the lack of a full-time assistant, a deficient grassroots pipeline—all of these impediments would have been more bearable if Wooden’s teams had an adequate place to play. There seemed to be no end to his frustration on this front. Every year brought another futile push to give Wooden the pavilion he had been led to believe was coming. In 1952, a member of the school’s faculty committee on finances recommended that the project be financed by raising the annual student fee by four dollars, but the students rejected the idea, as they had rejected similar appeals in the past. Wooden was quoted in the
Daily Bruin
arguing that a pavilion was “feasible, advisable, and possible,” but it seemed as elusive as ever.

And yet as uncomfortable as Wooden was in the men’s gym, his opponents had it much worse. In the
Los Angeles Times
, Jack Geyer dubbed it the “B.O. barn,” and the nickname stuck. Since the Bruins were generally in better physical condition than their opponents, they were virtually unbeatable there. During Wooden’s first three years, his teams won forty of the forty-two games they played in the gym. “It was nothing but murder in there. Like walking into an oven,” said veteran PCC referee Al Lightner.

Bill Leiser, a columnist at the
San Francisco Chronicle
, called the UCLA gym “an unfair handicap.” The Bruins’ advantage was so pronounced that a conspiracy theory took hold, accusing Wooden of intentionally turning up the heat. At the very least, opponents suspected that Wooden did nothing to alleviate the sauna-like conditions. “They wouldn’t open the windows,” said Ken Flower, a forward at USC. “In fact, our alumni would try to get them to open windows, and they wouldn’t do it. It was unnaturally hot, but they liked the home-court advantage.” Ron Tomsic, who played for Stanford, said that his coach, Bob Burnett, also told his players that Wooden manufactured those conditions. “He heated that place up like you couldn’t believe,” Tomsic said. “We referred to it as the sweatbox. Our coach claimed he did this on purpose because it was more conducive for his players.”

Wooden thought the accusations were ridiculous. “There was no way, as far as I know, that the heat could be turned on in the place. I don’t think there was any heat, as a matter of fact. It was just when the crowds got in there, it was warm,” he said. Yet he did not go out of his way to dispel the conjecture. “It didn’t displease me that other teams felt that it was a sweatbox. We didn’t do anything to change their feeling,” he said. “I wanted them to dislike coming in to play. The more they felt that they couldn’t win there, the less likely they were going to win there.”

Each season the Bruins played a few home games outside the men’s gymnasium, but those venues weren’t much better. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was built for hockey games and ice shows, with the hockey boards visible around the perimeter. The games occasionally had to be halted so workers could mop up condensation. The Olympic Auditorium was the best facility in town, but that was USC’s home floor. Even when the Bruins played a different opponent there, most of the crowd rooted for them to lose.

Each day before practice in the men’s gym, Wooden swept the floor to clear the dust left by the gymnasts. One time Wooden tripped over a gymnast while pacing the sidelines during practice. Later in his career, Wooden said he believed he had developed what he called a “persecution complex” during this time. It was hard to blame him. “When I look back on my first years [at UCLA],” he said, “I don’t know how I got anything done.”

*   *   *

John and Nell might have felt lonely in the big city, but they were far from alone. Unbeknown to them, the Woodens had joined a large migration of midwesterners who flooded into Southern California during the middle of the twentieth century. They reached Los Angeles just as it was undergoing a population explosion that was transforming it from a loosely connected group of burgs into a bona fide metropolis.

It was a propitious time for him to come to UCLA. The school’s undergraduate ranks were swelling with the return of World War II veterans, who could afford to attend because of the GI Bill of Rights. In the fall of 1947, a year before Wooden got there, some 6,200 veterans enrolled. They accounted for 43 percent of the student body, which had grown from 5,000 to more than 14,000 in six short years. (The number would climb to 17,000 by 1960.) The increased enrollment and ballooning tax revenue enabled UCLA to expand its campus in rapid fashion. Fifteen new buildings were erected between 1945 and 1950, including a library wing, an engineering building, a law school, and additions to the men’s and women’s gymnasiums. This reflected the education boom across the city, where the public school system was adding a new building every week.

It took several years, but the Woodens slowly found pockets of friends, which made the place feel more like home. A few months after he and Nell arrived, Wooden walked into a restaurant that was owned by a local man named Hollis Johnson. The place was a cozy neighborhood eatery in the back of the Westwood Drugstore that would have fit right in on Main Street in Martinsville. The two men struck up an immediate friendship, and Wooden started eating there regularly. “I’m just a common person,” Johnson said. “I guess maybe he wanted to get hold of somebody who’s common.”

Wooden craved such small, comfortable routines. When he wasn’t dining at Johnson’s grill, he would meet a few friends at Pete Lilly’s restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He also met some fellow Christians through his role as a deacon at a church in Santa Monica. Little by little, year by year, he and Nell developed something resembling a social life. “There was an old guard that was part of the UCLA community before the Woodens came out here. Those people took them into their bosom,” Betty Putnam said. “I really think Los Angeles came to him rather than the other way around. And of course, nothing makes friends better than winning.”

Their children adapted as well. Nan was a pretty and popular student at University High School, where she dated a strikingly handsome blond basketball star named Denny Miller, who went on to play for Wooden at UCLA before leaving to star in the title role in one of the
Tarzan
movies. Wooden’s son, Jim, also played for University High’s basketball team, although it was a struggle for him to compete in the shadow of his famous father. Jim was a decent enough player, but he wasn’t good enough to play past high school. “He maybe felt that he had expectations from his father that he should have been an outstanding basketball player,” said Ben Rogers, who played for UCLA in the mid-1950s. “I know that caused John some anguish. He felt a little estranged from his son. That’s something I recall him sharing on one occasion.”

Sadly, Wooden’s mother and father were never an integral part of his new life. They drove from Indiana to visit him shortly after he came to UCLA, but they never visited again. “California was a little too fast for them,” Wooden said. In 1950, Hugh died of leukemia at the age of sixty-eight. The obituary published in the
Martinsville Daily Reporter
described him as a man with “a genial disposition” who had “made many friends, and had always followed with great interest the athletic and teaching careers of his sons.” Roxie passed nine years later. Wooden’s parents were buried in Centerton alongside their young daughters.

Fortunately, John did have some family nearby. His oldest brother, Cat, was the principal at West Covina High School, east of Los Angeles. Cat was much more outgoing than his younger brother, and he brought out John’s playful side. John would stride into West Covina High and demand to an unsuspecting secretary, “Who’s in charge of this school?” When told it was Mr. Wooden, John would insist he see this man immediately. Cat would come into the office to see what the fuss was about and then laugh when he saw it was only his little brother.

John and Nell’s social circle was never very wide. For them, a big night on the town meant eating dinner after a game with Bill and Betty Putnam or with Ducky Drake and his wife. “I don’t know anybody who was a real close personal friend except the guys who worked and played for him. Coach just wasn’t that way,” Sheldrake said. By most standards, Nell was pretty reserved, but she was a lively chatterbox compared to her husband. “She was a cute little peanut. She had a lot of sparkle,” Betty Putnam said. “It wouldn’t bother her to tell a joke with a little sexual innuendo. I think that appealed to John because he was very straight. He would say platitudes and quote people, but I don’t remember him ever telling a joke. He was more pleasant than funny.”

The Woodens’ aversion to alcohol prevented them from expanding their circle. Nell had grown up around too many Irish relatives who drank and was more stridently antialcohol than her husband. She had no compunctions about expressing her disapproval if someone drank in her presence. “She had definite ideas of right and wrong and good and bad, and she expected that of her children as well as her friends,” Betty Putnam said. “She would not cozy up to people if they didn’t have the same values.”

Though John was more abiding of other people’s vices, he likewise would not consume alcohol under any circumstances. One time when UCLA was on a road trip to Illinois to play Bradley, he came down with a bad case of hemorrhoids. A doctor offered some medicine, but when Wooden read the label and saw that it contained blackberry brandy, he refused to drink the stuff.

This puritanical lifestyle also kept Wooden from forming close relationships with his coaching peers. When the Pacific Coast Conference held its annual meetings, John was the only coach who always brought his wife. He rarely went out to dinner with the guys, much less hung out with them late at night drinking liquor and chasing skirts. “When he first came out west he was provincial, a little aloof,” said Pete Newell, who became the head coach at California in 1954. “The coaches he was closest to were the midwesterners, the Branch McCrackens, the Tony Hinkles. He may have considered himself an outsider and some western coaches did, too.” Marv Harshman encountered the same reactions after he took over at Washington State in 1958. “A lot of the coaches said he was stuck up,” Harshman said. “In my opinion he was never stuck up. It’s just that his family was more important to him than being around two or three old coaches who were drinking beer.”