Wooden: A Coach's Life (38 page)

Then it happened: the blitz. Goodrich started it off with a long jumper. After a Duke miss, Erickson sank two free throws to put the Bruins up by 1. A block by Washington on the next possession led to an assist from Hazzard to Hirsch. Over the next few possessions, Hirsch had two steals, a block, and a rebound, while Goodrich added another jump shot and a pair of free throws. Twice, Bubas called time-out hoping to stop the onslaught, but it didn’t work. In a span of 2 minutes, 33 seconds, UCLA scored 16 unanswered points. The run gave them a 43–30 lead with just over four minutes left in the first half. The Bruins were still up 50–38 when the game broke for halftime.

Duke had run straight into the glue factory. “They weren’t a frantic pressing team. They were a poised pressing team. They were ready to spring,” Mullins said. “And with Walt Hazzard leading the break, they didn’t make a whole lot of mistakes in transition. So we were making the mistakes, and they were making the baskets.”

McIntosh wasn’t UCLA’s only surprise contributor off the bench. Kenny Washington, who Wooden said was “so shy that he hardly ever keeps his chin off his chest,” started hitting shots from everywhere during the second half. With his marine father watching him play college basketball for the first time, Washington attempted sixteen shots and made eleven to finish with a career-high 26 points. Remarkably, he and McIntosh, the two subs, combined for more rebounds (23) than did Buckley and Tison (10). Goodrich scored a game-high 27 points, including 17 in the first half, and even after Hazzard fouled out with just over six minutes to play, the game was never close. “We actually played pretty even with them, but that one run was just too much to overcome. They could all shoot the eyes out,” Buckley said. As the final minutes ticked off, Wooden sat back, crossed his legs, clutched his program, and watched as his students aced their final exam. When the horn sounded, Hazzard shouted joyfully from the bench, “We couldn’t beat ’em! We couldn’t beat ’em! Did you read the paper today?”

The final score was UCLA 98, Duke 83. The little Bruins had out-rebounded their taller opponents, 51–44. The zone press had forced Duke to commit a whopping 29 turnovers. The Bruins were now the third NCAA champion in history to end the season with a perfect record. And it had all happened on Wooden’s daughter’s thirtieth birthday. When Wooden stepped out of the locker room, the first person to embrace him was Nell. “Isn’t that something?” John said to her.

“We ran ’em. We just ran ’em,” Hazzard said afterward. “We knew they could run, but we also knew those big boys of theirs couldn’t possibly keep up with us.”

The India Rubber Man had finally reached his peak, completing a journey that took him from Martinsville to West Lafayette to South Bend to Terre Haute to Westwood. A champion at last, he lavished on his players the highest praise he knew. “This team,” he said, “has come as close to reaching maximum potential as any I’ve coached.”

*   *   *

The championship was only a few minutes old when Wooden delivered a stern warning in the locker room. “Don’t let this change you,” he said. “You are champions and you must act like champions. You met some people going up to the top. You will meet the same people going down.”

The players had heard this many times before, so it was unsurprising that Wooden would say it even in the moment of his greatest triumph. The man was nothing if not consistent. It was one of the things they admired most about him. “I don’t ever remember going to a practice when Wooden was not putting one hundred percent of himself on the line, every day, goodness-gracious-sakes-aliving everyone, to prepare people to be the best at what they’re capable of. Think about how hard that is,” Hirsch said. “Wooden wasn’t the best coach who ever lived. He was the best teacher who ever lived.”

During his early years at UCLA, Wooden had felt persecuted (his word) because he did not have the resources to build a winner. Now he had more than he needed. An NCAA title. A new arena on the way. A strong local recruiting pipeline. When he had taken the job, UCLA was dwarfed by USC’s shadow. Now people back home were suggesting it was time to replace Forrest Twogood because he couldn’t beat UCLA. It was true that Hazzard, Hirsch, and Slaughter were graduating, but Goodrich and Erickson were coming back as seniors, Freddie Goss would be eligible for his final year, and McIntosh and Washington had proved they could be championship-level performers. The Bruins’ freshmen team, led by Edgar Lacey, had gone 19–1. Indeed, the final buzzer against Duke had barely sounded when Goodrich told Jerry Norman that he expected the Bruins to be back in that game for his senior year.

When Wooden delivered that postgame warning to his players, he was also talking to himself. He had seen how winning a championship devoured coaches like Pete Newell at Cal, Phil Woolpert at San Francisco, and Ed Jucker at Cincinnati. All of them had been so worried about meeting expectations that it drove them to an early retirement. When the Bruins returned to Los Angeles, they were feted like champions, because Hollywood loved a happy ending. But when the credits rolled and the house lights came up, all that remained were Wooden and his three-by-five cards. He hunkered down in his little office and began to build his lesson plans for the road ahead.

At one point during their annual spring talks, Wooden looked up at Jerry Norman and said, “Winning that title was the worst thing that could have happened to us.” Norman thought he was kidding. Turns out he wasn’t.

PART THREE

Autumn

20

J. D.

A few days before the 1964 NCAA tournament began, Wooden was working in his cramped, temporary office space when he heard a knock at the door. In walked J. D. Morgan, who had taken over as athletic director the previous July after Wilbur Johns retired. Wooden was not in a chatty mood. He was busy putting together the basketball team’s budget for the upcoming year, which Johns had always required him to submit by April 1.

Noticing the pile of papers on Wooden’s desk, Morgan asked the coach what he was doing. When Wooden told him, Morgan walked over to the desk, grabbed the papers, and, without a word of warning, dumped them into the wastebasket. “I’ll take care of the budget,” he said. “You get your team ready for this tournament. If your spending gets out of line, I’ll let you know.”

The new boss may have been ten years Wooden’s junior, but there was no question who was in command. Wooden was already familiar with Morgan’s bluster and bombast, as well as his brilliance. When Wooden first came to UCLA in the fall of 1948, Morgan was the assistant tennis coach under Bill Ackerman, and he and Wooden got to know each other over the years during casual faculty lunches in the student union. “He was a very dominant, aggressive type of person. Very outspoken and very forceful,” Wooden said. “I found that J. D. had a tremendous retentive memory in regard to sporting events, scores, and various things of that sort. Of course, he was very certain that he was correct. He was very outspoken in that manner. We found that he was usually right, so there would be no point in arguing with him in regard to a date or a score.”

Morgan carried 240 pounds on his five-foot-eleven frame. His imperious manner was the opposite of Wooden’s, yet Wooden had to respect his coaching abilities. As UCLA’s tennis coach, Morgan had led his teams to seven NCAA championships, making him by far the most successful coach at the school. He had also brought a rare ferocity to an otherwise genteel sport. His team’s spring conditioning regimen was so arduous that the
Los Angeles Times
once suggested that UCLA’s football players should be glad they played for Red Sanders instead of J. D. Morgan.

Fred Hessler, who broadcast UCLA sporting events on the radio, first noticed Morgan in the early 1950s when J. D. was ejected from a UCLA basketball game for heckling officials. “I was sitting there during a time-out and I said to the guy sitting next to me, ‘Who’s he throwing out?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s J. D. Morgan, the assistant tennis coach,’” Hessler recalled. “He didn’t enjoy it too much when I used to kid him about this incident later, but he always had a very fierce feeling about UCLA and the officiating. He only saw it one way—his way.”

For many years, Morgan also served as the university’s business manager. A 1941 graduate of UCLA’s College of Business Administration, he developed an intricate understanding of the school’s financial operations, and that, even more than his acumen as a coach, made him the ideal candidate to succeed Johns as athletic director. Morgan’s hard-charging personality was a tremendous asset in his role as chief fund-raiser for the new campus pavilion. UCLA had just experienced its biggest one-year enrollment increase since World War II, and Morgan wanted the pavilion to match the grandness of the campus and the city surrounding it. The arena was designed to have room for 13,500 spectators, all of whom would have an unobstructed view of the court thanks to a state-of-the-art design that used massive steel frames to support the roof, which negated the need for columns. Wooden requested that the visitors’ locker rooms be the same size as UCLA’s, but aside from that, the pavilion project was a J. D. Morgan operation, like everything else that was now happening inside UCLA athletics.

Besides assuming control over the budget, Morgan also informed Wooden that from now on, he was going to handle the scheduling. “That was a tremendous load off my shoulders,” Wooden said. Morgan’s remark that he would let Wooden know if his spending got out of line was laughable. Wooden was a penny-pinching Depression baby who lacked any kind of business sense. There was no way he was going to go over budget. “John was never interested in money,” Hessler said. “He would do things like schedule a game at Indiana State, where he had once coached. I don’t think they had more than thirty-five hundred people there.”

If anything, Morgan wanted Wooden to spend
more
, especially when it came to recruiting. One of Morgan’s first decisions was to install Jerry Norman as a full-time varsity assistant, which allowed Norman to spend much more time scavenging for players. Morgan also dictated that any time Wooden’s team traveled by air, the players would sit in first class. Those boys were prized assets. He wanted them to stretch their legs.

Morgan and Wooden had some similarities that helped them get along. They were both raised in the Midwest (Morgan grew up in Cordell, Oklahoma, where he had lettered in four sports), and they had both served in the military (Morgan commanded a navy PT boat during World War II). A devout Presbyterian, Morgan was a moralist who shared Wooden’s devotion to faith. Both men also doted on their spouses. Morgan could be in a red-faced rage in his office, but when his wife, Cynthia, called, he would pick up the receiver and speak sweetly into the phone. “Maybe he was a little tougher on the outside to cover up a certain amount of softness he had,” Hessler said. Wooden and Morgan shared a love for all sports. Most of all, each man recognized how the other could help him. “To me, he was not arrogant but very confident,” Wooden said. “I think he backed it up. It wasn’t a false confidence.”

Yet their differences were just as stark. During Wooden’s first year at UCLA, he refused to let his starting point guard, Eddie Sheldrake, accompany the team to the Bay Area because his wife was having a baby. Morgan, on the other hand, once told Ron Livingston, who also played basketball for Wooden, that he wanted Livingston to stay with the tennis team in a hotel instead of with his new wife the day after their wedding. Whereas Wooden always sought to maintain a balance between work and family, Morgan regularly toiled in his office late into the night. When he took his family on vacation, he spent most of his time on the telephone. And unlike Wooden, Morgan enjoyed the limelight. He attended the weekly writers’ luncheons and was much more colorful in his remarks than his coach ever was.

The contrast between their life philosophies was as easy to see as the sign on Morgan’s desk. It read: “Winning Solves All Problems.” Wooden liked J. D. Morgan, but he never liked that sign. “I’m more inclined toward what Charlie Brown says in the comics,” he said. “‘Winning ain’t everything but losing is nuthin.’”

*   *   *

In the aftermath of his first NCAA championship, Wooden was a man in demand. He received hundreds of inquiries from coaches who wanted to know more about the zone press. He was peppered with invitations to speak at functions, schools, and clinics. He was named “Father of the Year” by the California Father’s Day Council. (Apparently, winning a championship makes you a better dad.) He fulfilled countless requests for autographed copies of his Pyramid of Success.

His players were in demand as well. One week after the win over Duke, the entire starting five was invited to try out for the United States Olympic team that would compete in Tokyo later that summer. At the time, the NCAA and the Amateur Athletic Union were locked in a scorched-earth dispute over who was going to control amateur basketball. Not wanting to be seen as playing favorites, the U.S. Olympic committee, led by head coach Henry Iba, chose six players from each camp to go to the Olympics. As a result, Walt Hazzard made the team, but Gail Goodrich did not. Wooden was apoplectic. “I saw all those games and the preparations,” he said, “and there was no more outstanding guard that played than Goodrich.” That experience, coupled with Willie Naulls’s omission from the Olympic team in 1956, soured Wooden on USA Basketball for good. “He told me they lied to him,” Goodrich said. “After that, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Olympics.”

At least the Bruins would no longer be treated like second-class citizens in their hometown. Their new athletic director took a strong stance in negotiations with the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission and secured a guarantee that all thirteen home games during the 1964–65 season would be staged at the Sports Arena. No more high school gyms and junior college bungalows for this bunch. Morgan also negotiated increasingly lucrative television contracts with KTLA, and he threatened to pull out of the Los Angeles Basketball Classic unless his USC counterpart, Jess Hill, agreed to alternate the event between the Sports Arena and the soon-to-be-completed Bruin Memorial Activities Center. J. D. was not trying to make friends. He was trying to make money.