Wooden: A Coach's Life (33 page)

*   *   *

Hazzard might not have been so suspicious of Wooden’s motives had he known the coach better. That was part of the problem. Hazzard knew Wooden, but he didn’t really
know
Wooden. Very few people did. Wooden told his players he loved them and called them his “boys,” but the contours of his personality did not come gushing forth. Instead, he chose to reveal himself little by little, drip by drip.

For example, Hazzard discovered during his junior season in 1962–63 that his ultraserious coach had a quirky side. Just as the team was about to take the court for a game, Wooden offered Hazzard a piece of gum. The Bruins won, so Wooden did the exact same thing the next game, and the next. As long as the team kept winning, the ritual remained the same. Just before tip-off Wooden would walk over to Hazzard, reach into his pocket, take out a stick of gum, remove the wrapper, hand it to Hazzard, and pat him on the butt. “The man was one of the most superstitious people I ever met,” Hazzard said.

Wooden indulged in lots of rituals like that. The pregame routine he had established with Nell at Martinsville High had evolved over the years. Now, just as each game was about to tip off, Wooden went through the same progression: pull up his socks, spit on the floor, rub the spit with his foot, rub his hands together, pat his assistant on the leg. Only then would he turn around and flash the “okay” sign to his bride. “John has been doing it for so many years now that I don’t think the referee could get up steam to blow the whistle if John failed to go through with it,” Nell said. “Of course, it’s all very silly.”

Silly? John Wooden? Well, how else would one describe his incessant habit of sticking hairpins into wood? Wooden first got the idea when he read that the old St. Louis Cardinals baseball teams did it. From that day forward, any time he spied a hairpin on the ground, Wooden picked it up and inserted it into the nearest slab of wood, usually a tree. Nell confessed that sometimes on game day she would purposely drop a hairpin in his path. Likewise, whenever Wooden found a coin on the ground, he would place it in his left shoe for the remainder of the day. “You can keep it, but you must never spend it. And that brings you luck. Oh I know it does,” he said. He kept in his pocket a smooth rock, which he called his “Indian worry stone.” And both he and Nell carried small metal crosses that were given to them by a minister right before John went into the navy. Those crosses had proved their power. He lived through the war, didn’t he?

Indeed, Wooden’s experience during World War II taught him to appreciate capricious good fortune. After all, if it weren’t for that inflamed appendix, it could have been him, not his college buddy, who died on the USS
Franklin
. Wooden survived a similar brush with death many years later. He had been scheduled to attend a coaches’ clinic in North Carolina, but he postponed his departure from a Saturday to a Sunday. The connecting flight he was supposed to take crashed between Atlanta and Raleigh. Everybody aboard was killed.

Whenever UCLA got on a winning streak, Wooden kept everything the same. He wore the same suit over and over. The menu for the pregame meal never changed. “I don’t think I ever looked at it as being superstitious,” Wooden said. “Subconsciously, certain rituals may give you a little more peace, a little more calmness, a little more serenity. If you have a feeling that doing a certain thing is going to be helpful to you, then it probably will be.”

Wooden was full of such odd revelations. The players quickly figured out just how much he loved westerns. Whenever the team was on a road trip, Wooden usually took them to see one in a movie theater. On a bus ride or team plane, he could be found flipping through a paperback from that genre. The players knew that on Tuesday nights, practice would end a little early because the coach wanted to make sure he got home in time to watch
Wyatt Earp
on television. He loved it when the good guys won.

He wasn’t funny, but he could be witty. When he cracked wise, it was often at someone else’s expense. “He made fun of you in a way that sliced you up and made everybody laugh but didn’t kill you,” said another former player, Bill Johnston. Wooden was also quick on his feet. As the team was traveling through an airport one day, Wooden was leafing through a magazine and came across a centerfold of a scantily clad woman. He turned and discovered a group of players smirking at him. “Look,” he said, pointing to the page. “Blue shoes.”

Then there were the many occasions when Wooden surprised his boys with his prowess at the pool table. The players could not believe this teetotaling goody-goody was so proficient at a game that was usually played in dingy bars. “We used to play snooker down at the bowling alley. I thought I was a decent player at it,” Denny Crum said. “When he found out, we went over to the student union. It was unbelievable how good he was. You would’ve never known he played a game like that.” Pete Blackman likewise recalled a trip to the Midwest when the players were shooting some stick and Wooden happened by. “Somebody said, ‘Here, Coach, give it a try.’ He ran the table,” Blackman said.

Wooden did not boast of his exploits at billiards any more than he bragged about his accomplishments as a basketball player. The only glimpses the players saw of the India Rubber Man came through an occasional demonstration in practice. When Wooden put on a shooting exhibition, the players laughed at his antiquated form, but darn if that ball didn’t keep going in. During a team meal one night, as the players regaled each other with tales of their toughness, Wooden let drip a piece of his past. “You know,” he told them, “one time when I was playing pro ball, the referee threw the ball for the center jump, and the two centers punched each other. Didn’t even bother going for the ball.” That ended the conversation.

Wooden could be just as eloquent in the things he didn’t say. He did his best to live by his father’s admonition never to speak poorly of someone else. One day, Wooden was talking to a local newspaper columnist about a former UCLA player who had recently fathered a child out of wedlock and been sent to jail. The columnist disparaged the young man for a few minutes and then asked the coach what he knew of him. “I understand he’s a good father,” Wooden said.

The main reason Wooden’s players didn’t know him better is that there were so few opportunities to spend time with him away from the court. “They had my home phone number, but for the most part they didn’t come to our home,” Wooden said. If a player wanted to get to know Wooden better, it helped to have a common interest. Stan Andersen barely got off the bench when he was on Wooden’s teams in 1958–59 and 1959–60, but he frequently ran into the coach while he was reading quietly by himself in a Westwood bookstore. “I was an avid reader. I probably talked to him more often in the bookstore than I did on the court,” Andersen said. “He recommended to me a book on photography, which I really enjoyed. When we played at the Sports Arena, I’d want to ride in the car with Wooden just to get into conversation. For me, his biggest strength was his intellect.”

It was for that reason that Wooden liked to proctor his players’ exams on road trips. He could have delegated that task to an assistant, but by doing it himself, he was showing his players how deeply he valued education. He was also interested in what they were studying. After proctoring an English literature exam one night, he asked the players what they had written about. They told him it was a poem that included the word
diadem
, but none of them knew what that word meant. “He told us what it was,” Johnston said. “It’s a crown, and you couldn’t elaborate on the poem unless you knew what the hell it was. So we learned vocabulary from the UCLA basketball coach.”

Wooden operated in a jock culture that was addled by cigarettes and liquor, yet he was the straightest of straight arrows. It was not easy to relax around a man who was so rigid. “There were people who didn’t like John very much because he was a little bit austere, a little bit removed,” said Bob Murphy, a longtime radio broadcaster for Stanford. “He was very polite and somewhat withdrawn, but he was always very thoughtful.”

Wooden’s program was an extension of that straight arrow. He wanted his players looking clean-cut and clean-shaven. He conducted impromptu spot checks on their lockers because he wanted “to see they’re not getting slovenly.” (Though first he had to teach them what
slovenly
meant.) He did not want gum wrappers or wads of tape lying around. If the players didn’t throw their orange juice cartons in a trash can, he would refuse to give them juice for a couple of days. Wooden loved to brag about how often he received compliments at the way his boys had left their locker room so clean.

By the early 1960s, Wooden had been teaching basketball for nearly thirty years, and he had many former players who were husbands and fathers, lawyers and doctors, businessmen and teachers and ministers. If they wanted to get to know their old college coach better, they found that he was far more emotionally available than he had been during their playing days. This was especially true of the former players who became teachers themselves. When Wooden’s first star player at UCLA, George Stanich, told him that he wanted to go into education, Wooden sat next to him on a flight to a road game and filled several sheets on a legal pad with suggestions. After Stanich graduated, Wooden spent an entire day driving him sixty miles each way to interview with the superintendent of schools in Oxnard, California. Stanich didn’t get that job, but he later became a basketball coach at a local junior college. Every few years, he would find himself in a bind that would prompt him to call on Wooden. “He never gave me the answer to my questions, but he gave me situations that he had experienced that were similar and told me how he dealt with them,” Stanich said. “On my way home, I would know what I had to do.”

Another of Wooden’s first players at UCLA, Barry Porter, joined his staff briefly as a freshman coach. “If I would ask him something, he would invariably ask me what I thought first, to get my point of view,” Porter said. “He was truly interested in me and wanted to learn.” Later, when Porter left coaching and started his own carpet cleaning business, Wooden was one of his first customers.

Wooden’s memory was incredible. He never forgot a name or a face, and he could spit out details of games that his players had long forgotten. If a former player wrote him a letter, Wooden wrote back. If someone wanted to have lunch, Wooden found the time. If a player asked him to speak somewhere, the answer was always yes. And if one of them happened to show up at a UCLA game, he was treated like royalty. “One day after I graduated, I went to the Sports Arena and walked in on the team at halftime,” said Mike Hibler, who played center at UCLA from 1951 to 1954. “I wasn’t sure if I should be there, but he welcomed me in when he was giving his speech. That’s just how he was. He
loved
his boys.”

*   *   *

“We’re going to try to get on the break and run like we did in the old days,” Wooden said in the fall of 1962. His Bruins were beginning the season with a rare dollop of respect:
Sports Illustrated
ranked UCLA No. 17 in its preseason college basketball issue. The magazine asserted that “if UCLA is going to have problems, it will be up front,” but the presence of Walt Hazzard warranted the ranking. “He has the ability to hit men who don’t even realize they’re open,” Wooden said.

Besides the promotion of Gail Goodrich and another heralded guard from Los Angeles, Freddie Goss, from the undefeated freshman team, Wooden received an unexpected gift from George Stanich. Now the coach at El Camino College, a nearby junior college, Stanich had reached out to Jerry Norman to let him know he had a player named Keith Erickson who might be able to help. The kid couldn’t shoot a lick, but he was as gifted an athlete as Stanich had ever coached. Since Erickson was also a terrific baseball player, Norman arranged for him to come to UCLA on a half-baseball, half-basketball scholarship. “That way if I didn’t make it in either sport, neither would lose a full scholarship,” Erickson said. “That’s how much confidence they had in me.”

Erickson’s real passion, however, was volleyball. He grew up by the ocean in the town of El Segundo, and he spent much of his free time at the beach. With all this energy devoted to sports, Erickson had little time—and even less interest—left over for academics. He often joked that he majored in eligibility. Erickson liked to goof around in practice, but while Wooden got mad at him a lot, he rarely stayed that way. “I’m very fond of Keith,” Wooden said. “I like spirited basketball players.”

Besides, Wooden had another new player who was giving him even bigger headaches. Jack Hirsch was a spindly, Jewish, six-foot-three forward who had spent his childhood on the hardscrabble streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. When Hirsch was fifteen, his father moved the family to California, where he became wealthy through his ownership of a chain of bowling alleys. By the time Hirsch was a senior at Van Nuys High School, he was an all-city basketball player who planned on attending Cal State University in Northridge, but he was encouraged by his father to visit UCLA. When Norman brought Hirsch into the men’s gym in the spring of 1960 to meet the head coach, Hirsch was not impressed. “He was mopping the floors,” Hirsch said. “My first thought was, God, he’s an old man.”

The old man was equally unimpressed. Wooden got one look at Hirsch’s wispy frame, took measure of his cocky attitude, and decided on the spot that he wasn’t fit for UCLA. “Come back to me when you’re ready,” Wooden said. Hirsch was livid. “I walked out of there and said, I’m going to show him. He’ll see what kind of player I am.”

After spending a year at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, where he played center and averaged 28 points per game, Hirsch was inclined to quit school and go into the family business, but his father cajoled him into going to UCLA by promising to quit smoking cigarettes. (Hirsch enrolled and his dad quit—for a week, anyway.) Once basketball season began, Hirsch wondered if he had made a mistake. “I was totally unprepared for Wooden’s work ethic, his morals, all that stuff,” he said.