The Bruins surprised everyone by sprinting out of the gate. They opened with six consecutive wins, equaling the school’s longest streak in fifteen years. But even though the Bruins were winning, Wooden could see that his players were not in the kind of tip-top shape they would need to be in for conference play. So they spent the next few weeks running their tails off.
This was always Wooden’s fallback position: there wasn’t a problem in basketball that couldn’t be solved with better conditioning. It was right there in the center of his Pyramid of Success, one-third of the belief system instilled by Piggy Lambert:
Condition. Skill. Team Spirit
. Wooden may have understood at some level the importance of defense, but he didn’t emphasize it. “He didn’t teach too much defense. His theory was to get the most high-percentage shots,” said Don Seidel, a six-foot-one guard on that first team. This way of thinking frustrated his assistant, Bill Putnam, who came from the Wilbur Johns school, where teams slowed the pace and guarded their way to victory. “Bill liked defense, so he and John would bump heads once in a while,” Betty Putnam said. “Bill never said anything derogatory about John, ever. But Bill would come home and work on these defensive moves, and he’d try to get John to use them. Most of the time John wouldn’t pay much attention.” As a result, Putnam took on an administrative role with the team while Wooden and Powell, the two transplanted Hoosiers, did the bulk of the teaching.
In mid-December the Bruins got the chance to test their mettle in a pair of doubleheaders featuring visitors from the Midwest, a region that the
Los Angeles Times
described as the “cradle of basketball and spawning ground of the greatest basketball teams the game has ever seen.” In the first game, UCLA squeaked by Northwestern, 49–44, to improve to 6–0. The next night they suffered their first loss, to Wisconsin, by a score of 49–46. These games were played before 6,800 spectators at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, a venue in downtown Los Angeles that often hosted ice shows and hockey games. However, most of those fans were on hand to watch USC, which was also participating in the doubleheaders. “It was,” said Powell, “an SC town.”
Wooden’s extra conditioning work started to pay off once the conference schedule got under way in January. Over the next two months, the Bruins would play four games against each of the other three teams in the PCC’s Southern Division—California, Stanford, and USC. After losing the opener to Stanford, UCLA used an 11–2 run late in the first half to beat Cal by 9. That was followed by Wooden’s first two-game series against USC. The specter of the fresh face squaring off against the old guard represented by USC coach Sam Barry provided an irresistible story line. “Wooden brought to Westwood a fast-breaking, lung-searing style of play which demands speed and more speed from his players,” the
Los Angeles Times
wrote in advance of the weekend clashes. “Barry has had singular success with the ‘slow break’ where control of the ball pays off. ‘Race-horse’ teams here have been forced to slow down when confronted by Barry’s pass-and-wait-for-the-breaks performance. So it’ll be interesting to see which team has its own way.”
In the first game, Barry made the mistake of asking his boys to try to run with the Bruins on their home floor. By the end of the game, the Trojans were spent, which enabled UCLA to overcome a 9-point deficit over the last eight minutes and prevail in overtime, 74–68. That was the most points UCLA had ever scored against its crosstown rival. Barry slammed on the breaks the next night in the Olympic Auditorium, USC’s home court. It was an ugly, rugged affair, with forty-three fouls called on the two teams. But the strategy worked as the Trojans won, 59–52.
From there, UCLA won its next eight games, including a nonconference beatdown of Fresno State in which the Bruins scored 57 points in the first half. (Too bad just 1,500 people were in the men’s gym to witness it.) Wooden had unleashed a completely different way of playing, and opposing coaches were mystified by it. Many of them made the mistake that Barry did by trying to keep up. The problem was, their players were not physically capable of pulling it off. “We had a saying at halftime. If we stay with them the first half, we’ll beat them the second half,” Powell said. “Several times during a game it would be five-on-zero. All five of our boys would be nearer the basket than any one of the opposition.”
Many of UCLA’s wins that first season were secured late in the second half, just as Wooden had promised at the writers’ luncheon the previous spring. The Bruins outscored Cal by 11 in the second half of a 3-point win; used a 13–2 run early in the second half to beat Stanford 59–48; and broke open another game against Cal with a 20–3 burst before coasting to a 59–50 victory. “We didn’t win games because we had better talent,” Joeckel said. “We won by being in better shape.”
To the uninformed outsider, it seemed that Wooden was more sorcerer than basketball coach. “Many times this season, Wooden has seen his speed merchants leave the court at halftime on the short end of the score,” Jack Geyer wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
. “What he says [at halftime] or what he does, none but his players know, but it works like magic.”
* * *
One of Wooden’s primary advantages was that he cared about the sport more than many of his western rivals. Where he came from, basketball was religion. Here, it was a diversion. For example, when UCLA took a trip north to play a two-game series in Oregon, one of the opposing coaches asked Wooden if he wanted to set up a scrimmage the following morning for players who didn’t get into the game. This had been done for many years as a way to make the road trip worthwhile. Wooden balked. “We didn’t come up here to scrimmage,” he said. “We came up here to play games, and every boy that we have is prepared to get into the action. We don’t want to use up our talent in a scrimmage on a Saturday morning.”
Wooden also recognized the mental edge in superior conditioning. When his team got behind, the players didn’t panic. They simply waited for the pace to exact its toll. This was also why Wooden spent so little time discussing his opponents. It’s not that Wooden never scouted; he traveled to Santa Barbara that February to watch Cal play two nights before the Golden Bears were to come to Westwood. But he did not spend much time talking with his players about the other team. “He gave us a tremendous amount of self-confidence,” Joeckel said. “We basically got to the point where the other team was nothing to us. He didn’t belittle them in any way, but he had us ignore them so much that in my mind, I didn’t have any use for the other team.”
There was, however, one way in which Wooden became a different coach from the one he had been back in Kentucky and Indiana. There were hardly any outbursts of the kind that pockmarked his years in Dayton, South Bend, and Terre Haute. This was partly because of Wooden’s maturity—he was, after all, inching closer to his fortieth birthday—but it also reflected his tenuous standing. In Indiana, Wooden was a legend. In California, he was an unknown commodity. The days of busting down doors, booting players in the rear, and getting into chin-to-chin brouhahas with opposing coaches were gone—for now, anyway. “I’ve seen him upset, but I felt he was always under control,” Stanich said. “I don’t ever remember him really losing his temper.” Still, he was plenty feisty with officials and opposing players. During the Bruins’ win over Wisconsin, Wooden rode the Badgers’ best player, center Don Rehfeldt, so mercilessly that at one point Rehfeldt looked right at Wooden and gave him the finger. “Coach had been chewing on him pretty good,” Eddie Sheldrake recalled, chuckling.
Remarkably, UCLA entered its season-ending, home-and-away, two-night series against USC in late February tied with the Trojans for first place in the Southern Division with an 8–2 record. Once again the teams staged bitter, physical contests. In the first game, seen by 6,500 at the Olympic Auditorium, UCLA won 51–50. The following night, the Bruins won by 8 points at the men’s gym in Westwood despite 28 points from USC’s brilliant forward, Bill Sharman. That clinched the Bruins’ first-ever PCC Southern Division championship. For all of Wooden’s complaints about the conditions of his home court, it was proving to be even more uncomfortable for his team’s opponents. The Bruins finished undefeated at home for the first time in school history.
The locals were impressed, to say the least. The
Daily Bruin
published a lengthy story on February 25 under the headline “The Man Who Doesn’t Like to Lose.” It read: “Wooden’s first UCLA basketball team is a fast-breaking, hard-running, driving, aggressive club. One sports writer summed it up by saying that it was the first basketball team he had ever seen that had the fight and team spirit of a football team.” The article also mentioned that Wooden had never coached a losing season, repeating the falsehood that was becoming embedded in his biography.
Since the PCC could send only one team to the eight-team NCAA tournament, the conference championship was decided by a best-of-three series between the South and North Division champions. The divisions took turns hosting the championships, and in 1949 it was the North’s turn. That sent the Bruins to Corvallis to face Oregon State, which had beaten UCLA by 16 points during the inaugural PCC tournament in San Francisco back in December. (Those games did not count in the league standings.) The Beavers’ coach, Slats Gill, was one of the few coaches out west who favored a quicker tempo, but in the championship series, he and Wooden took turns slowing down the action in an effort to win.
After Oregon State won the opener by 12 points, UCLA bounced back with a 46–39 victory in game 2. Wooden liked to say he disapproved of stalling tactics, but in that second game, he ordered his Bruins to hold the ball for the final four minutes to preserve the victory. In the rubber match, the Bruins trailed by 15 points early in the second half before embarking on their trademark late-game rally. Alas, they came up short, allowing Oregon State to escape with a 41–35 victory. That gave the Beavers the PCC crown and a berth in the NCAA tournament’s Western Regionals in Kansas City.
Despite that loss, nobody, least of all Wooden, could brand the season a disappointment. In just a few short months, this unassuming, unknown, unwelcome stranger had made history. The 1948–49 Bruins set school records for longest winning streak (twelve) and overall wins (twenty-two) and became the first UCLA team to win a game against a Northern Division opponent in the PCC play-offs. In later years, when Wooden was asked to name his favorite UCLA teams, he would often include this first unit right alongside his championship teams. “I was at a new place, trying to get established. You want to do well,” he said. “No championship ever gave me greater pleasure or satisfaction than that.”
He may not have left Corvallis with a championship trophy, but John Wooden knew success when he saw it. He flew home with a peaceful mind.
11
The Nonconformist
Two senior starters graduated from Wooden’s first team at UCLA. Three more departed from his second. This, of course, was the nature of college sports: the teacher remained the same, but the students turned over each autumn. Gone were the military veterans and the boys who grew up in strict homes. In their stead came a different set of players—younger, looser, more free-spirited. Wooden had to adapt to the changes without abandoning his core principles, a challenge he would face repeatedly during the decades to come.
The ringleader of this new bunch was Eddie Sheldrake, the diminutive, wily guard from Los Angeles. On the court, Sheldrake was an alpha male who could run Wooden’s high-post offense and still score in bunches, much as Wooden himself had done in his heyday. Off the court, Sheldrake was a merry prankster who found hilarity in juvenile antics like sneaking up to the window of a classroom and interrupting a lecture by shouting, “That’s bullshit!” and then dashing away. On road trips, Sheldrake would sometimes catch pigeons and release them in the lobby of the team’s hotel. Once, he knocked on the door of a room where Wooden and Ducky Drake were playing cards. “You guys need another pigeon for bridge?” he asked. When they said yes, Sheldrake let loose one of his feathered friends right in their room.
Then there was Dick Ridgway, a graceful six-foot-four forward who joined the varsity in Wooden’s second season. He was fond of dropping water balloons from hotel balconies. When a hotel manager called Wooden to complain during a trip to the Midwest, Wooden went ballistic and benched Ridgway for two games. As he summoned Ridgway for his return against Michigan State, the player sarcastically raised his hand and said “May I?” Then he checked into the game. “That was as much a comeback as I can remember anyone having to the coach,” said Barry Porter, a six-foot-one guard. “Most of us were pretty much under his spell.”
Art Alper was another Los Angeles native with an adventurous streak. After the Bruins lost in the 1949 PCC play-offs at Oregon State, Alper decided to hit the town with some football players and ended up going to a local tavern for a few drinks. When the team returned home, Wooden called Alper to his office, told him he had heard what Alper did, and informed the player that he was indefinitely suspended. Wooden made Alper visit his office nearly a dozen times over the summer before reinstating him.
Another player, Paul Saunders, showed up at practice one day with floppy hair. Saunders knew Wooden liked his players to keep their hair short, but when the coach said nothing, Saunders figured he was in the clear. After practice, a trainer asked Saunders to come to a downstairs locker room, where he and several other trainers held Saunders down so they could shear his locks. “I never talked to Wooden about it,” Saunders said. “I wasn’t mad at him, either. I knew that he didn’t like long hair, so therefore he took some steps to see that I had short hair.”
Of all the players who tested Wooden’s authority on those early teams, none pushed the envelope further than an intense, dark-haired, streetwise guard named Jerry Norman. Norman fit right in with the team’s adolescent ethos. He respected Wooden, but he wasn’t cowed by him. During practice, Norman would think nothing of attempting a fancy shot without looking at the basket or chucking up jumpers from half-court. He could be equally audacious off the court, like the time during a trip to Kansas City when Norman got the brilliant idea to hop a fence during a visit to President Truman’s house in nearby Independence, Missouri. He was detained briefly by the Secret Service before rejoining the team with a smile.