Wooden: A Coach's Life (49 page)

At the next day’s writers’ luncheon, Wooden was still taken aback by what Lacey had said. “I can’t help but believe somebody might be putting words into his mouth,” he said. “With some boys, you can tell when they feel this way, but I had no indication of this from Edgar. All I can say is I’ve never had a cross word with him, and I consider him to be a fine person.” As for the comment that set Lacey off, Wooden said, “My remark was correct, and I stood behind what I said, but oftentimes, you can be correct but be better off not having said it.”

This was just the latest manifestation of the strain that Wooden had been experiencing ever since Alcindor arrived. “Last year was difficult, my most trying year in coaching, and now there have been a couple of things to happen that I didn’t anticipate,” he said. “I know a lot of coaches will say they would like to have the problems I have, but it’s not all gravy with this kind of record. The only worse thing is when you are losing all the time.”

In truth, Wooden suspected that the team would probably be better off without Lacey. As talented as Edgar was, he simply did not complement Alcindor as well as some of the other players, nor would he ever accept that fact. Maybe, with one less player to worry about keeping happy, Wooden’s machine could function a little more smoothly. “We lost a
potentially
great player,” Wooden said later. “But a potentially great player who isn’t playing that well is not a great player.”

Still, Edgar Lacey was not some robot or mechanical cog. He was a flesh-and-blood human being, a sensitive, proud young man with hopes for a future in pro basketball. Now those hopes had been dashed. After he quit UCLA, Lacey played a couple of years for an AAU team called the Kitchen Fresh Chippers, and he spent a season with the ABA’s Los Angeles Stars. But that was it. This local legend, the best scorer in the history of Los Angeles high schools, a man who had been one stroke of a pen from being a member of the great Boston Celtics, was essentially through with basketball. It wasn’t all Wooden’s fault, but Lacey certainly felt that it was. And he wasn’t alone. “Wooden ruined the boy’s life,” Walt Hazzard said. “He just destroyed Lacey.”

The messy departure left some residual damage in the locker room, especially among the black players who were closest to Lacey. “I didn’t like the way Coach Wooden handled it, probably because Edgar was a close friend of mine, so I’m probably biased in my assessment of that,” Alcindor said years later. Lucius Allen called it “one of the few times that our master psychologist went too far. Edgar had been there for four years. He was one of the guys who had to be treated gently. You should know your people better than that.”

For all their complaints about Wooden’s rigid ways—
We talked about him like a dog
—the players had come to depend on his strong, steadying hand. Wooden was their anchor in a world that was falling prey to unrest, disobedience, injustice, violence. Now, for the first time, he had let them down. It made them feel a little dizzy. “It caused us to do a lot of self-checking, because John Wooden personified goodness, piety, integrity, all those things,” Allen said. “If you can’t trust John Wooden, who can you trust?”

24

Kareem

Despite all the money his team was generating for UCLA, John Wooden’s salary remained just $17,000 in 1968. To supplement his income, he ran several youth basketball camps around Los Angeles. Wooden was hands-on and detail-oriented at the camps, just as he was at his regular job. In many ways, he enjoyed working more there than UCLA. “When I have my summer basketball school out at Palisades High School, they’re eager to know how to do things,” he said one day during an interview in his office. “You don’t find that so much in the college players. The college players are more blasé.” Getting up from behind his desk, Wooden demonstrated the proper way to fake a pass one way before throwing it another. “If you just tell your youngsters that, the college players will say, ‘Aw, why do we do this? I’ll just throw him the ball.’ They must know
why
.” Sitting down again, Wooden added, “If it hadn’t been for the war, I don’t think I’d have left high school coaching. I enjoyed it very much.”

It was understandable why Wooden would want to turn back the clock. Through no fault of his own, he had found himself cast as an avatar of ancient values in a rapidly changing world. That was not a comfortable position for a conservative, fifty-seven-year-old midwesterner who prized his consistency.

The campus culture in which Wooden now operated didn’t just encourage students to question authority. It urged them to confront and topple authority wherever it existed. With his gym shorts, zipped-up UCLA jacket, whistle, and old-fashioned strictures, Wooden was the very embodiment of the establishment. He and his players occupied the same space but lived in different worlds. “I really respected him, but I don’t know that
like
was in the equation,” Kenny Heitz said. “We had a bunch of guys who had really good relationships with our fathers. Wooden became that old guy we couldn’t please.”

That distance appeared greatest to the players who saw little action in games. “Wooden was running this basketball machine. He was aloof, as far as I was concerned,” Neville Saner said. The impression was reinforced during practices, when players like Saner watched Wooden drill his top seven or eight players while the scrubs were left to work with the assistants. “To me, he was like a businessman coach,” Gene Sutherland said. “We were like boss and employee. I never really felt close to him.”

Wooden faced a Catch-22. If he stuck to his ways, he appeared out of touch. If he bent, he was a hypocrite. Lew Alcindor posed an especially touchy problem. His size alone warranted his own set of standards. From doorways to airplanes to bus rides to hotel rooms, Alcindor needed special accommodations. Plus—and this was more to the point—he was really, really good. If Wooden was going to bend for anyone, it would be for him.

For example, UCLA had a rule that if a player was late for the team airplane, he would have to find his own way to the game. It was one of the reasons why J. D. Morgan had called UCLA athletics “the last great bastion of student discipline that exists on this campus.” However, the school’s radio announcer, Fred Hessler, recalled that on one occasion when Alcindor failed to show for a flight to the Northwest, Morgan called Vic Kelley, the school’s sports publicist, and told him to go to Alcindor’s apartment and bring him to the plane. “J. D. realized these places were sold out in the Northwest because of seeing [Alcindor],” Hessler said. “He was going to see that our star attraction got there.”

The other players noticed this slippage. Where Wooden saw necessary accommodation, they saw a double standard. “Wooden had this dress code for a team meal, and then one day Lew and Lucius showed up in jeans, and he didn’t say anything. It was like, okay,” Heitz said. Before Alcindor, the menu had always been precise: steak, potato, melba toast, celery, milk. “Somewhere along the way, out of eleven players, you’d see eight glasses of milk and three Cokes,” Don Saffer said. “They were for Lucius, Mike, and Lew. The rest of us didn’t want milk, but that’s the way it was.” Sometimes, Alcindor might not show up for a meal at all, yet nothing happened. These were small things, but Wooden was the one who had said they were big.

When the players complained—and this being the sixties, they felt free to do just that—Wooden conceded their point. Alcindor was a special player. He deserved special treatment. “Two of his teammates made some remarks to a reporter that I gave him special privileges,” Wooden said. “Breakfast, for example. He got a couple of glasses of orange juice and they’d get one. True. Then they said I let him room alone while they always had to room with someone else. But you don’t find two king-size beds in the same room.… I told one of these players, you’re lucky he’s here. I wouldn’t have you if he wasn’t here.” To Wooden, it all made perfect sense. “If we have only a few good shoes,” he said, “I guarantee you Lew’s going to have good shoes.”

When Lynn Shackelford was asked by a writer from
Sport
magazine what would happen if a player was late for curfew, he replied, “It all depends on how you’re playing. It’s been a lot looser since the big man came.” Bob Marcucci, the team’s student manager, said there was a running joke on the team: “If you’re going to break a rule, do it with an All-American.” Don Saffer followed that rule, and it still almost cost him. During a road trip to Chicago, Saffer and Mike Warren slipped out of the hotel to take some local girls to a movie. (“Everywhere we went, there were taps on the door for Mike,” Saffer said.) When Saffer returned by himself to the hotel two hours after curfew, he found Ducky Drake waiting in his room. “Do you want to go home tonight or tomorrow?” Drake asked. Saffer broke down crying, and Drake gave him a pass. Warren, however, didn’t face any consequences, even though he didn’t return until several hours later. “You have to be realistic,” Saffer said. “I knew there was a pecking order.”

Nobody was more realistic than the guys at the top of that order. “We black players knew that as a unit we had a lot of power,” Warren said. “We did a lot of things that would not have been tolerated otherwise. Before the season, Coach Wooden told Alcindor and me that our hair had grown a little too long last year and suggested that we cut it closer this year. We didn’t, and nothing happened.”

Part of this was Wooden’s nod to progress. “I realize I’m not as strict as I used to be,” he conceded, “but society isn’t as strict, either.” Still, for a man who had always espoused the virtue of standing by one’s principles, it was jarring to see him abandon them to accommodate the better players. Wooden had expectations to meet and arenas to fill. He wasn’t going to leave his star player at home just because the guy was a few minutes late for the plane. Not anymore, anyway.

The challenge would grow steeper as the culture became more permissive. That included the arrival of a new element in campus social life: drugs. Marijuana had been virtually unheard of just a few years before, but in a flash, it was everywhere. “It happened pretty quick,” Mike Lynn said. “You went from having a frat party where everybody was drinking beer, to a couple of years down the road where a lot of guys were smoking pot.”

Alcindor was no stranger to this world. In New York City, marijuana had been a staple of teenage black culture, although it was a white student at Power Memorial who first introduced it to him. He didn’t feel much effect the first couple of times he tried it, but after church on Easter Sunday 1965, he went to a friend’s house, and together they pounded the pipe so hard that Alcindor nearly coughed his lungs out. He felt high, really high, for the first time, and he liked it.

As was the case in New York, marijuana first made its presence known in Los Angeles in black neighborhoods. That’s where Edgar Lacey, a Compton native, developed his habit. When Alcindor came to UCLA, the weed bonded them as much as basketball did. “Edgar and Kareem were tight on the smoking thing,” Freddie Goss said. “They were the only two guys doing it when I was there.”

It wasn’t until he got to UCLA that Alcindor first experimented with LSD. He bought two tabs from a friend at $2.50 each, but he didn’t take enough the first time to really feel the effects. The next time, he took an entire tab, and he was flying. After a few more acid trips, however, Alcindor decided he didn’t like it and pretty much stopped. Still, LSD was all around him. One day, a pair of students who had taken LSD came upon him and thought he was an hallucination. Alcindor found it hilarious, one of the few times he didn’t mind strangers becoming fixated on his height.

Alcindor managed to keep his drug use on the down-low, but Lucius Allen was not so lucky. At the end of his sophomore season, he was pulled over for speeding, and the police found a small bag of marijuana in his pocket as well as in his glove compartment. Sam Gilbert bailed Allen out of jail and found him a criminal lawyer, who managed to get the charges dropped a month later because of insufficient evidence. Since it was the off-season, Allen was not suspended from the team, and he never spoke to Wooden about it.

If Wooden had any inkling his players were using illegal drugs, he certainly would not have approved. But as with everything else, he believed their private lives should remain private. The only time he insinuated himself was when their behavior threatened to trip up his machine.

That concern prompted him to call Mike Warren to his office one day for an uncomfortable conversation. A white man had called Wooden to complain that Warren was dating the man’s daughter. The man made it clear that if Wooden didn’t keep Warren away from the girl, then he would. “He didn’t stop me,” Warren said of Wooden, “but man, how about telling me my life is in danger? How’s that for a hint?”

Wooden had the same talk with Kenny Heitz when he learned that Heitz was dating an Asian woman, though Heitz believed Wooden only did that so Warren wouldn’t think he wasn’t being singled out. This was one more way in which Wooden was woefully disconnected from the times. “Interracial dating was just starting,” Heitz said. “Wooden was a very cautious man. He would have had no earthly idea that every black guy on his team was banging every white girl on campus. These guys were like candy to them.”

Wooden had no objection to interracial dating himself, but he worried about the reactions of those who did, reactions that could disrupt the delicate balance in his program. “I would discourage anybody from interracial dating,” Wooden said. “I imagine whites would have trouble dating in an Oriental society, too. It’s asking for trouble, but I’ve never told a player who he could or couldn’t date.”

Wooden’s attitude on this front confirmed his players’ belief that his overriding concern was for their welfare as players and nothing more. “His relationships with blacks have no meaning,” Warren said shortly after he graduated. “The coaching staff was seriously interested only in us playing, studying and keeping out of trouble. Our individual progress in terms of maturing as black men was of no concern. It’s all superficial, the same kind of dialogue every day.”