Wooden: A Coach's Life (59 page)

Needless to say, his admonition fell on deaf ears. As far as the public was concerned, it didn’t much matter who was playing for the Bruins anymore. As long as the Wizard of Westwood was casting his spells, you’d have to be a lame brain to pick against them.

27

Sam

As the spring 1971 semester was winding down, Larry Farmer happened to run into Wooden while walking across campus. The two of them were chatting when Farmer heard Sidney Wicks calling to him from across the quad. For a moment, Farmer was unsure if he should answer Wicks or finish his conversation with the coach.

“Are you at his beck and call?” Wooden taunted. “I hope you don’t think that next season you’re going to try the same stunts he did.”

Suffice to say, Farmer didn’t go anywhere. “I don’t know what was going on between those two guys, but all of a sudden I was coldly in the middle of it,” he said. “If I was going to give in to one of them, it was definitely going to be the guy that designed the plays.”

The wild child was gone, but the old man stayed behind, unmoved and unbowed. He had coached at UCLA now for nearly a quarter century. Showerless gyms, chalky floors, and meager expectations were figments of the past. As a college coach, Wooden was accustomed to seeing departures followed by arrivals, older players moving on and younger ones moving up. Thus, when Wicks bade farewell to Westwood, it again marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. This one belonged to a player who was even more talented, more colorful, more childlike, more wild.

*   *   *

Bill Walton was some different kind of cat. His unique size and skills forced Wooden to go back to the low-post offense he had used with Lew Alcindor. Unlike Alcindor, however, Walton was also a gifted outlet passer, and Wooden wanted to take advantage of that as well as his team’s overall quickness. That meant spreading the floor and reviving the full-court zone press. Wooden relished this kind of intellectual exercise, the lonesome engineer toiling in his workshop. By the time fall arrived, he had filled nearly thirty notebooks with ideas.

Wooden spent much of the summer of 1971 jetting around the country to teach at clinics, but his doctor eventually shut him down. Walton, by contrast, kept a low profile, staying by the beach and spending most of his time reading. In the spring, he had asked Denny Crum to find him a job, but once he had just enough money to see him through the summer, he stopped showing up for work. Walton needed money to live. He didn’t live to make money.

As it turned out, Crum would not be at UCLA to coach Walton as a varsity player. In April, he accepted the head coaching position at the University of Louisville. “Coach may have been disappointed because we were doing well and I did a lot of the recruiting, which he didn’t like to do, but he would never say anything,” Crum said. “I wanted to prove I could be a successful head coach.” Wooden replaced Crum with Frank Arnold, who had spent the previous five years as an assistant at Oregon. Crum’s departure did nothing to diminish Walton’s excitement about playing for his childhood icon. He showed up at Wooden’s office every morning to grill the coach on what he was planning for that day’s practice. “I knew I had to get in there by nine thirty to get my two cents in. Why are we doing this? Why can’t we do that?” Walton said. “I was his worst nightmare.”

It was not easy for Walton to control his emotions. His intemperance got the better of him one day when Farmer scored over him in practice. Walton got so angry he fired the ball and hit Farmer, and the two of them had to be separated. On game days, the locker room could barely hold him. “He would just sit there and literally throw the ball around the locker room. He was just in another zone,” Jamaal Wilkes said many years later.

Properly channeled, Walton’s energy was a great asset. He was an avid communicator on the court, barking out instructions on defense, shouting for joy when a teammate scored, screaming when someone else made a mistake. The only thing that could silence Walton was his speech impediment, which got the better of him during huddles. “In the heat of a game, when he knew he had to hurry because he only had a little bit of time, he wouldn’t be able to get it out,” said Bob Webb, a six-foot-two guard from Pennsylvania. “It wasn’t like he stuttered just a little bit. To say one word could take him five seconds.”

His teammates tolerated Walton’s antics because they knew he was a great player. They also knew he was his own worst critic. “He’s so young, he still tends to get down on himself when things don’t go just the way he thinks they should,” Wooden said early that season. “He has to have the experience to learn to shrug off things that don’t seem to go quite right.”

It would have been nice if Walton were surrounded by upperclassmen, but he did not have that luxury. Farmer was the only returning starter, and he had played meager minutes the season before behind Wicks, Rowe, and Patterson. So Wooden had no choice but to fill out his starting lineup with two of Walton’s classmates. The first was Greg Lee, a six-foot-four guard from nearby Reseda, just over the hill from Westwood. A two-time city player of the year in Los Angeles, Lee shared many of Walton’s interests and passions. Lee was as glib as Walton was laconic, so he often served as Bill’s voice. A teammate once likened the pair to Lenny and George from
Of Mice and Men
.

The other sophomore starter was Keith Wilkes. He and Wooden were on the same wavelength from the start. Wilkes grew up the son of a Baptist minister in the picturesque seaside town of Santa Barbara. He was slightly built at six-foot-six, 167 pounds, but he was so smooth on the court that he earned the nickname “Silk.” Wilkes was by far the youngest player on the team; his nineteenth birthday wouldn’t come until May.

Wilkes got his indoctrination into Wooden’s teaching methods when the coach beckoned him after practice one day early in his sophomore season. Wilkes thought he was about to get reamed, but Wooden only wanted to watch him shoot. For the next ten minutes, the coach put Wilkes through the paces. Wilkes ran around the court, fielding Wooden’s passes and lobbing jumpers toward the rim. “What I remember most—and I’ll never forget this—was that every pass he made to me was a perfect pass. It was the pass that he taught us,” Wilkes said. “At that time, I was not real familiar with his playing background, other than he had been an All-American.”

As Wilkes attempted shot after shot, Wooden looked closely at his form. While growing up on the playgrounds, Wilkes had taught himself to wind up and release the ball from behind his head. That made it harder to block, but it was also unconventional. Wooden preferred the textbook approach, with the ball cocked from the side. As Wilkes took his shots, Wooden peppered him with questions.
Why do you hold the ball like that? What are you thinking on your release? Where are you aiming?
Wilkes’s form looked funny, but it worked.

Five years before, Wooden had put Edgar Lacey through this same exercise and decided to drastically change Lacey’s form. This time, Wooden left well enough alone. “Okay,” he finally told Wilkes, “you can go.”

Class dismissed.

*   *   *

Wooden had many options beyond his starting five heading into the 1971–72 season. There was Tommy Curtis, finally moved up to the varsity, as well as Swen Nater, the six-foot-eleven, 250-pound native of Holland. Wooden told Nater that as long as Walton was in the program, Nater probably wouldn’t get much playing time. Nater didn’t mind.

Before the season got started, Wooden sat at his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and assembled a game-by-game prediction of how the season would unfurl. He decided the Bruins would finish with a 24–2 record, with losses at Oregon State and USC. He had been completing this little ritual the last couple of years. His secretary was the only other person who knew about it.

Once again, J. D. Morgan had lined up a bunch of easy, early home games. First up was The Citadel, which UCLA slaughtered 105–49. After the game, Greg Lee quipped that The Citadel was like a “good junior college team.” When Wooden saw that quote in the newspaper, he gave Lee quite an earful. A writer from the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
named Doug Krikorian took it a step further and wrote that The Citadel couldn’t even beat Crenshaw High School’s jayvee team.

Krikorian repeated the quip when he introduced Wooden at the writers’ luncheon the following Monday. Wooden was not amused. “It’s belittling and demeaning the way you try to pull things out of our players, things they don’t mean to say,” he said to Krikorian in front of everyone. “I suppose I should apologize for J. D. Morgan, who is not here, for okaying our schedules. I guess I should apologize for our record over the past eight years. Nothing seems to please people anymore.” Wooden went on to lambaste Krikorian for failing to live up to the tradition set by legendary sportswriters like Grantland Rice, who had used his columns to anoint sporting heroes—in verse, no less. After the gathering broke up, Wooden added, “Yes, I was upset. There are a lot of fellows who are about to die because we’ve been doing so well. I think we have a tremendously entertaining product, but they’ve been demeaning and belittling us.”

It was unusual for Wooden to lose his composure under any circumstances, much less in public. Even more remarkable was the fact that he used such an open forum to criticize his boss. At practice later that afternoon, Wooden warned his players that they would read some unflattering things about him in the newspapers, and the next day he called Krikorian at work to apologize. “He was thin-skinned in a lot of ways, but we never had a problem after that,” Krikorian said. “I mean, it’s hard to write bad things about a guy who wins all the time.”

Seven easy wins later, the Bruins found themselves facing what was supposed to be their toughest test yet: a clash with No. 6 Ohio State in the final of the Bruin Classic. It ended up being another UCLA waltz, 79–53. Walton spent much of the game in foul trouble, needing just eighteen minutes to amass 14 points and 13 rebounds. He was asked afterward if Luke Witte, the Buckeyes’ heralded big man, was the best center he had ever faced. “No,” Walton replied. “Swen Nater is.”

Aside from a few postgame interviews, Walton kept himself off-limits to the press. No matter. For all his protests about wanting to be considered a part of the team, the sportswriters started calling UCLA the “Walton Gang.” As Walton continued to astound opponents with his skills, drive, and court vision, the tributes came pouring forth. “He’s better than Bill Russell at their comparative age and development,” Stanford coach Howie Dallmar said after watching Walton collect 32 points and 15 rebounds in a 39-point win. “I’m not so sure I’m glad Alcindor graduated. Walton never lets up on you,” added Washington State’s Marv Harshman, following Walton’s 31-point, 15-rebound, six-block performance against the Cougars. Pete Newell, who was working as a scout for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, declared himself a believer after just a few games. “He may be the most dominant center ever to play basketball,” Newell said.

It was incredible. UCLA once again had a bona fide once-in-a-generation player, just five years removed since another had dropped in Wooden’s lap. Even Wooden conceded that the redhead compared favorably to the once-incomparable Lew Alcindor. “Lewis had more of a psychological barrier than Bill does. Lewis was more phlegmatic,” Wooden said, in what was surely the first time a college basketball coach ever described a player as
phlegmatic
. “Bill, on the other hand, is more of an extrovert in every respect, and because he is, he will become aroused in a game more often.”

Walton made it look easy, but few people outside the program knew just how difficult it was for him to get ready to play. Every day, he arrived early for practice so he could treat his knees with thirty minutes of heat. Then he stayed afterward to ice them for another thirty minutes. Wooden gave Walton the day off for Monday’s practices so he could recover from the weekend. During games, Wooden accorded him the unprecedented privilege of calling his own time-out. Wooden trusted that Bill wouldn’t abuse that privilege, and he never did. In the past, Wooden’s players objected to this kind of star treatment, but Walton’s teammates knew he wasn’t faking it. “When he took those ice bags off his knees, they were big and red. He had those big knobby kneecaps,” Farmer said. “None of us were ever jealous that he got to skip practice.”

Because Walton tended to overcompensate for his knees, he developed other maladies. During an early February road trip to Washington, he tore tendons in his feet. He had to get cortisone injections into his toes to stop the pain. “There were times my knees hurt so bad, I honestly thought of quitting,” Walton said. “If I hadn’t been part of a team that was finishing a schedule and going for a championship, I would have quit.”

Walton looked for any remedy he could find to alleviate his pain. That included marijuana. For Walton, smoking pot wasn’t just something fun to do while listening to the Grateful Dead. It lessened his pain and helped him wind down after games. Walton even asked Wooden for his permission (or more likely, his blessing) to smoke marijuana for these purposes. “He said that a certain doctor had said that the use of marijuana could help his knees,” Wooden said. “I said, ‘Bill, I’m no doctor, but I only need to know one thing. That’s against the law.’”

Over the years, there have been a few published accounts indicating that Wooden granted Walton permission to smoke pot, provided none of his teammates knew about it. Walton laughed at the suggestion. “That’s not true,” he said. “Some people also said that Richard Nixon was a great president.”

If UCLA held a big lead in the final minutes of a game, Wooden would let Walton go to the locker room to get a start on his postgame icing routine. The situation presented itself often. After opening Pac-8 play with a 78–72 win at Oregon State, the Bruins ramrodded their opponents with margins that exceeded even those in Alcindor’s heyday: 118–79 over Stanford; 82–43 over Cal; 81–56 over USC; 109–70 over Washington; 91–72 in the rematch at Pauley with Oregon State. The team’s annual trip to Chicago produced similar scores: 92–64 over Loyola and 57–32 over Notre Dame. By the end of February, the Bruins were on pace to shatter the NCAA record for an average margin of victory of 28.1 points, which had been set by North Carolina State in 1947–48.