Wooden: A Coach's Life (34 page)

He was also unprepared for Wooden’s coldness, which Hirsch witnessed firsthand after he ripped up his ankle during the first month of practice. “I was lying there and Wooden said, ‘Can somebody get him off the court? I’m trying to hold a practice here.’ I mean the pain went to the top of my head,” Hirsch said. “I had the feeling at that point that he didn’t give a shit about me.”

Hirsch spent most of the 1961–62 season on crutches. He didn’t bother going to practice, and Wooden never once called to see how he was doing. After his ankle healed, Hirsch thought about transferring to Cal State, Northridge, but Norman talked him into coming back to practice for the last couple of weeks. He competed well enough that both he and Wooden realized he could make a contribution—that is, if they could learn to coexist. “He was always abrasive, but he was very smart,” Wooden said. Hirsch added: “I was probably the first person that challenged Wooden by being obnoxious and arrogant, which comes from Brooklyn. You know, like you can’t tell me what to do, you son of a bitch. I was just as tough as he was in some respects.”

One of the ways Hirsch tested Wooden was by calling him “John” or “JW.” When he was feeling especially cheeky, he might call him “Woody.” Hirsch’s teammates were stunned by his audacity. They were even more surprised that Wooden abided it. “I never asked the players to call me ‘Coach’ or ‘Mr. Wooden,’ but he’s the only one who didn’t,” Wooden said.

The coach was less forgiving of Hirsch’s tardiness. One time when Hirsch was barely a minute late to practice, Wooden literally slammed the door on him. After Hirsch complained the next day, Wooden tersely replied, “Jack, you should discipline yourself so others don’t have to.” The lesson stuck. “With him, there was always deprivation,” Hirsch said. “He was depriving me of doing what I enjoyed most, which was playing basketball with my friends.”

Such was the combustible mix that took the floor for UCLA during the 1962–63 season. The six-man rotation featured three blacks and three whites (including one Jew) who had little in common except a love for playing ball. They also lacked a true home court—still. Shortly before the season began, UCLA learned that the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had allocated most of the Sports Arena’s Saturday night slots for the winter to the Los Angeles Lakers and to the Los Angeles Blades, who played in the Western Hockey League. Aside from their three games against USC and the Los Angeles Basketball Classic, the Bruins would have to play all but one of their home games at Santa Monica City College, which barely held two thousand fans. The last game would take place at the men’s gymnasium, the old B.O. barn. It was not a happy situation.

Once the games got under way, Wooden realized that his team could be devastating when it got the running game going. During the opener against Denver, UCLA sprinted out to a 10–1 lead and won by 29 points. Two weeks later, the Bruins hung 101 points on Oklahoma, just 7 points shy of the school’s scoring record.

On the other hand, Wooden suspected that the Bruins were going to have problems against teams that had a big, scoring center and could slow the tempo and dominate the boards. Their size deficiency was especially glaring when they struggled with their shooting—as Goodrich did in those first three games, when he made just four of his thirty shot attempts. “My guards can’t hit anywhere past 15 feet,” Wooden lamented. “On the other hand, my forwards can’t hit from ten.”

Still, the team had a respectable 7–2 record heading into the Los Angeles Basketball Classic in late December. Stanford was the only team in the tournament that was ranked in the top ten of a national poll. But the Indians lost to USC in their first game, allowing UCLA to emerge as the winner by beating Colorado State in the final. “I don’t want to schedule them for three years,” said St. Louis coach John Benington, whose team lost to the Bruins by 19 points in the semifinals. “They don’t have the big man, but they have superior talent and an excellent bench. Come to think of it, I don’t think they even need the big man.”

They were still awfully young, however, so they were bound to experience growing pains. That was especially true for Goodrich. “There were nights when I’d come home from practice so tired I’d be lucky to get my clothes off,” he said. Late in the first half of UCLA’s conference opener at Washington, Goodrich dribbled the ball downcourt on a three-on-one fast break and tried to throw a behind-the-back pass, just as he had seen Hazzard do many times. Except Hazzard usually completed his passes. Goodrich’s attempt sailed out of bounds. During halftime, Wooden came at Goodrich hard and low. “He let me have it,” Goodrich said. “That was the last time I threw it behind my back in college.”

Despite Goodrich’s struggles, Wooden kept him in the starting lineup, even though Goss was playing much better. When a reporter privately asked him why, Wooden replied, “Freddie has a better attitude. Gail sulks if he doesn’t get to start.” That may have been true, but it did not solve Wooden’s numbers problem in the backcourt, where he had three players for two spots. “That whole year we struggled because Wooden didn’t know who to play,” Goss said. “If those guys didn’t get the proper amount of playing time, they would say something to him, or their parents might say something. Especially Gail’s parents. His father was at practice every day.”

UCLA lost both of its first two league games at Washington, but the team quickly rounded into form and won the next five. The main reason was Hazzard, whose playmaking was much more under control than it had been as a sophomore the year before. He emerged as the primary scorer. After he torched USC for 27 points in back-to-back games the first weekend of February, Trojans coach Forrest Twogood called Hazzard “the most complete college basketball player in America.”

Meanwhile, Wooden’s preseason concerns over rebounding were proving to be unfounded. The players were tougher than he’d realized, and their quickness allowed them to benefit from Wooden’s rebounding philosophy, which favored pursuing the basketball over boxing out. When UCLA beat Colorado State in the finals of the Los Angeles Basketball Classic, they outrebounded the Rams 58–42, even though Colorado State’s front line featured players who were six foot six, six foot eight, and six foot nine.

When it came to this area of the game, the players possessed some extra motivation. Unbeknown to Wooden, an older fan had started doling out money for each rebound. According to Jack Hirsch, every player got five dollars per rebound per game up to ten, and ten dollars per rebound thereafter. Those payments were against NCAA rules, but the players didn’t much care. “Except for Jack, we had no money,” Keith Erickson said. “So if someone gave me an extra six dollars for getting some rebounds, I was thrilled and I didn’t care where it came from.”

Goodrich, however, was less than thrilled when he learned what was going on. “I heard things about getting rebound money, so I went to Coach Norman. ‘What about assists? What about the guards? This is very unfair,’” he said. “I knew what was legal and not legal from my dad. Next thing you know, it was stopped. No one knew I did that.”

(Told five decades later that Goodrich was the one who put a stop to the rebound money, Erickson quipped, “Even if they were giving out money for assists, Gail wouldn’t have gotten any.”)

UCLA entered the middle of February in a tie with Stanford for first place in the AAWU, which was now being called the “Big Six” because of the off-season addition of Washington State. The Bruins prepared for their February road games at Stanford at a time of growing friction between Wooden and Fred Slaughter. Having proved early in the season that he was capable of scoring in big numbers, Slaughter bridled when Wooden ordered him to revert to his roles as a rebounder and defender. “I saw him run Fred Slaughter out of the gym one day,” Goodrich said. “Coach was running with him, jawing nose to nose the whole way.”

UCLA’s first game against Stanford started badly and never got better. Wooden was whistled for two technical fouls early in the first half for arguing with officials, but that did not warrant an automatic ejection back then. Unfortunately, that meant he had to stick around to watch Slaughter hoist twenty-two shots and make only six as Stanford won, 86–78. When the Bruins lost two of their next three games, their hopes of winning a league title started slipping away.

UCLA trailed Stanford by two games in the league standings with two games remaining, including one against Stanford at Santa Monica City College. The Bruins fell behind early in that game, which prompted Wooden to install his full-court press. Keith Erickson’s athleticism was an enormous asset in the back of that defense. Erickson didn’t start, but after Wooden subbed him in for Goodrich early on, Erickson played so well that Goodrich never set foot on the court again. Erickson finished with 13 points, Stanford committed twenty-four turnovers, and UCLA prevailed, 64–54. That left them one game back with one to go.

UCLA easily dispatched Cal the following night by 19 points. That put the Bruins in the rare position of having to root for USC, which was playing Stanford across town at Los Angeles State College. Most of the UCLA fans at the Santa Monica gym were listening to the USC-Stanford game on transistor radios. By the time the Bruins finished off the Bears, the other game was midway through the second half. The UCLA players repaired to their locker room and listened to the end of that game on a radio. The suspense was so great that Hazzard asked a manager to take his radio out of the locker room. Messengers kept the players informed as the Trojans seized the upper hand and sent the game into overtime. “We’re backing in,” Wooden marveled. “I never thought we’d do it.”

USC won, 67–61, setting up a one-game play-off for the right to represent the Big Six in the NCAA West Regional in Provo, Utah. Because Stanford had hosted two of the teams’ three meetings, the play-off had to be held in Los Angeles. The only question was where. The Coliseum Commission was itching to host it in the Sports Arena, but UCLA, still smarting over being treated as third-class citizens the previous fall, opted to go back to Santa Monica City College. Since UCLA’s radio agreement precluded the game from being televised anywhere but via closed circuit on campus, that meant most of its fans would be shut out. “No one likes money anymore,” Mal Florence complained in the
Los Angeles Times
. His colleague Paul Zimmerman argued that UCLA “owed it to the public to present the playoff with Stanford in the Sports Arena where all the thousands who wanted to could see.”

The tickets sold out in an hour. With fans packing the tiny, hot gym, UCLA, despite using only six players the entire game, once again unleashed its full-court press for long stretches. The Bruins led by 9 points at halftime and by 14 early in the second half. Fred Slaughter snapped out of his funk and played terrific defense on Stanford center Tom Dose. With six minutes remaining and the Bruins holding a 45–40 lead, Wooden did two things he normally didn’t like to do: he called time-out, and he ordered his team to stall. Goodrich and Hazzard dribbled around for the next few minutes as Stanford tried vainly to come back by fouling. It was to no avail as UCLA held on for a 51–45 win, giving Wooden his eighth league title, and second in a row.

It was as unexpected a championship as Wooden had ever experienced, but his elation was short-lived. When Wooden tried to bring out his favorite new toy, the full-court press, against Arizona State in the NCAA West Regional, the tactic backfired. Coach Ned Wulk’s Sun Devils also loved to get out and go—they had been ranked second in the country in scoring at 91 points per game—and they ran UCLA out of the gym. Right from the tip, ASU built an 11-point lead that swelled to 31 by halftime. Wooden emptied his bench in the second half as the Bruins sputtered to a 93–79 defeat. Given the setting, it was arguably the biggest drubbing one of Wooden’s teams had ever suffered. The following night, UCLA lost the regional third-place game by 1 point to San Francisco. The 1962–63 season had been a delirious ride, but it ended with a thud.

*   *   *

Even when Wooden’s machine sputtered that season, he could see it had potential. Sure, the guys could be headstrong and immature, but Wooden had to admit he liked their spirit. They were tough. They were competitive. And while they appeared to have little in common, once they hit the floor they shared a real love for playing.

Whenever Wooden felt the need to relieve stress, he invariably turned to his other great passion: poetry. Not just reading it but writing it as well. Wooden’s poems were nothing special compared to the classics he studied, but they were clever and crisp, and he could recite many of them by rote. “He would have never said, ‘I’m a poet.’ He was a versifier, which is different,” Pete Blackman said. “He liked writing lines, and he liked taking simple ideas and conveying them. He was drawn to the symmetry. He enjoyed the intellectual exercise.”

Blackman was every bit Wooden’s equal in this area. After graduating from UCLA the year before, Blackman enlisted in the navy and was stationed in Hawaii. During the fall of 1962, he wrote a letter to Wooden in verse, and Wooden returned the favor in January with a lengthy poem in which he laid out his analysis of his current team. He sent the letter shortly after the Bruins had lost those first two conference games at Washington. It reflected Wooden’s sour mood.

The poem was ten verses long. At times it read like something from Dr. Seuss, such as when Wooden wrote of “
boys who work and boys who don’t/Of boys who will and boys who won’t
.” Wooden complained to Blackman about his team’s selfishness, overbearing parents, the players’ insubordination, and especially their academic laziness.

In the final stanza, however, Wooden struck a hopeful chord, predicting that despite his misgivings, the team would eventually come together, and if everything fell into place, “
We could be champs in sixty-four
.”

The work to fulfill that premonition would commence with the first practice the following fall. It would take place when it always did, October 15, one day after John Wooden’s fifty-third birthday.