It was clear from the start that Norman and Wooden were not simpatico. “Wooden was a little cornballish and had some straitlaced ideas, and Jerry was a little more sophisticated,” Ed Powell said. “Jerry continued to do things his own way, and sometimes he found that trying his way was not the best way. But I will say this. Wooden always knew his potential, and he was willing to put up with it.”
The two men shared many qualities: talent, pride, intelligence, most of all hardheadedness. Yet they also had some fundamental differences. In the first place, Norman had a desultory attitude toward schoolwork. He would wait until the end of the semester to get serious about studying, but he was so smart that he could keep himself eligible. Like Wooden, Norman derived his outlook from his father, a son of German immigrants who had dropped out of high school after the ninth grade and worked most of his life for the Southern California Gas Company. “My father reached the highest position in the company for someone who didn’t go to college,” Norman said. “His parents believed in work, not education.” Jerry was the middle of three children, and his father gave them a lot of leeway. “You could go anywhere you wanted as long as you didn’t get into trouble,” Norman said. For many players, Wooden was an extension of their father, but that was not the case for Norman.
Worst of all, in Wooden’s view, Norman did not bring a lot of energy to practice. He preferred to save it for game night. “I probably wasn’t the greatest practice player,” Norman conceded. “Some guys are practice players and some are game players. It’s a whole different atmosphere when you play a game. I’m sure I didn’t play hard every day.”
Wooden tried to get Norman to exert more effort, but that did little to change Norman’s modus operandi. “Jerry had an attitude. He didn’t pay attention the way Wooden wanted,” Art Alper said. Norman could get a little mouthy with Wooden, but it was what came out of his mouth that rankled the coach the most. “He was very profane,” Wooden said. “I just can’t stand that and I probably kicked him off the floor more times for profanity than all the rest of the players that I’ve ever had put together.”
Norman called that claim “a total fabrication,” adding, “I don’t know why he ever came up with that.” Regardless, there is no doubt that Norman bridled against Wooden’s discipline. The stricter the coach tried to be, the more Norman resisted.
“Jerry was the guy who didn’t fit. He was a nonconformist,” Ralph Joeckel said. “I don’t remember Norman being profane, but there were times during practice when Wooden just told Norman to get off the court because he was fooling around. Wooden didn’t like horseplay. The guys that never smiled and worked the hardest got the most attention from Wooden.”
Still, Norman loved basketball, and he possessed a mind for the game that surpassed even his considerable physical talents. In December 1949, in Norman’s sophomore season, UCLA traveled to New York City to play in Madison Square Garden against City College of New York, a powerhouse program that would end that season as the only team in history to win both the NCAA and NIT championships. (CCNY would have to forfeit those titles the following year after an epic point-shaving scandal that rocked the sport.) Norman had spent the previous summer playing with several CCNY players while working for a hotel in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. In those days, the Catskills were a basketball hotbed during the summertime, when prominent college and even some professional players would work as busboys and waiters during the day and then entertain the guests by playing games at night. While sitting in the locker room before the matchup at the Garden, Norman briefed his UCLA teammates on the respective strengths and weaknesses of their opponents. “It was pretty amazing,” Alper recalled. “Wooden’s whole thing was don’t worry about the other guys, but Jerry is saying, ‘This guy can’t go to his right,’ and ‘This guy will give you a head fake, but he can’t shoot outside.’ By the time he was done, we knew those guys cold.” Norman’s insights helped UCLA emerge with a 60–53 victory.
The big win on the big stage infused the Bruins with great confidence. After they returned home, they steamrolled their way through the Southern Division and won a spot in the two-out-of-three PCC play-off against Washington State. The Northern Division champs were a typical West Coast slow-ball outfit featuring center Gene Conley, who would go on to play for the NBA’s Boston Celtics and to pitch for eleven years in the major leagues. At six foot eight, Conley was referred to by newspaper writers as a “giant.” Said Wooden, “Our hope is to run Conley so much we cut him down to our size.”
The first game ended with the most dramatic moment thus far in UCLA basketball history, when Joeckel banked in a shot from just beyond half-court in the closing seconds to give the Bruins a 60–58 victory. The delirious fans rushed onto the floor of the men’s gym and carried Joeckel off. The following night, the Bruins clinched the crown with a 52–49 win as their opponents were visibly gassed down the stretch. “I like to play basketball but not that way,” Conley said.
The triumph propelled Wooden to his first-ever NCAA tournament. The field consisted of four teams that would play in an Eastern Regional in New York, and another four that assembled for the Western Regional in Kansas City. The championship game would be played three days later in New York. UCLA’s opening game took place before more than ten thousand fans in Municipal Auditorium, the same arena where two years earlier Wooden’s Hurryin’ Sycamores had broken a racial barrier and nearly won a national championship.
UCLA’s first opponent was Bradley, which was ranked No. 1 in the country by the Associated Press. The game was so big that Wooden cast aside his policy of never talking to his players about their opponent. Bradley was a Midwest powerhouse that competed in his former league, the Missouri Valley Conference, so he asked a friend to deliver a detailed presentation on the Braves to Wooden’s players. It backfired, badly. “We were in there about an hour. By the time we got out, we thought we were playing the Minneapolis Lakers,” Jerry Norman said. “Bradley probably would have finished third or fourth in our conference, but instead of just playing our game, we spent the whole game waiting for them to do something. Because of that, they stayed in it until the end.”
Not only did the Bruins lose, they did so in distinctly un-UCLA-like fashion. They led by 7 points with five minutes to play but were outscored by an astonishing 23–2 margin the rest of the way. Jack Geyer noted in the
Los Angeles Times
that the Bruins had “turned deliberate.” The team played a consolation game the next day against Brigham Young University, which had lost to Baylor in the other regional semifinal, but Wooden had a low opinion of consolation games. He played his reserves for extended minutes, and UCLA lost by 21. It was a disappointing experience, but it taught Wooden an invaluable lesson. “He never believed in scouting again,” Norman said.
* * *
Even as Wooden was turning around UCLA’s basketball fortunes, he and Nell pined for the chance to return to their home state. A perfect opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1950, when Purdue sent three top administrators to Los Angeles to convince Wooden to come back to his alma mater. This was a classier, more straightforward way of doing business than two years before, when the school tried to use back channels to lure Wooden away from Indiana State. The fruits they bore were plenty tempting. Besides offering a five-year contract that would renew annually and more than double his $6,000 salary, Purdue also dangled perks like membership at a country club, a new car every year, a house at reduced rent, and a fully paid life insurance policy.
Wooden was impressed by the material persuasions, but the clinchers were two basketball assets that UCLA could not match: a full-time assistant coach and a brand-new arena. The Purdue officials showed Wooden designs for the new facility just as Wilbur Johns had done when Wooden interviewed for the UCLA job. Johns hadn’t technically promised Wooden he would have a new pavilion by the end of his three-year contract, but he’d led Wooden to believe that would be the case. Two years later, Wooden could see that was far from happening. The lack of enthusiasm for basketball in Los Angeles made it difficult for the school to raise enough money, and every time someone in the athletic department tried to raise undergraduate fees to finance the project, he was voted down by the student association.
The decision was easy. Wooden wanted the job. He told the Purdue officials that he would accept their offer as long as UCLA released him from the final year of his contract.
He asked to meet with Wilbur Johns and Bill Ackerman, the graduate manager of UCLA’s student association. Ackerman, whom the students affectionately called “Mr. A,” was a revered figure on campus. He was also the varsity tennis coach whose squad would capture UCLA’s first-ever NCAA championship later that spring. Wooden considered the meeting a formality, but Johns and Ackerman asked that he bring Nell with him. “They knew what I wanted to talk about,” Wooden said.
When Wooden made his request, his bosses didn’t quite say no. They did, however, remind Wooden that
he
was the one who had insisted on a three-year contract as a condition for his coming to UCLA. We thought you were an honorable man, they told him. You promised to be here for the full three years. We’ll let you out if you want, but it won’t be the right thing to do.
We thought you were an honorable man.
The words gnawed at Wooden, just as Johns and Ackerman knew they would. “I guess they had learned enough about me in the first two years that they probably had me there,” he said. Nell still wanted him to leave—in her mind the failure to build the pavilion justified the breach—but Wooden knew his bosses were right. Besides, Purdue had now come calling twice in a three-year span. Surely they would call again.
Amid much public speculation, UCLA made a formal announcement that the coach was staying put. “For a number of weeks it has been more or less common knowledge that there was some question of Coach Wooden’s remaining at UCLA because of other offers,” Johns said in a statement. “It pleases me to announce that Coach Wooden has decided to remain at UCLA. We all hope his tenure will be happy and permanent.” The
Los Angeles Mirror
reported that UCLA kept Wooden by giving him a ten-year contract and assuring him of “provisions of a new pavilion.” That first part was incorrect—the contract was actually a permanent three-year deal that automatically renewed at the end of each season—but the promise of the pavilion was an essential part of Wooden’s decision. “I like it here,” Wooden said. “My family likes it here and so I chose to stay.”
In truth, the Woodens were bitter that UCLA had placed such shackles on them. The episode reinforced their strong desire to move home as soon as possible. “I was irritated to say the least. Though I understood their position at the time, I thought it was unfair,” Wooden said. “But I fulfilled my contract. In the back of my mind, I said, ‘Yes, I’ll fulfill it. Then I’ll probably fly the coop.’” The near loss of Wooden prompted the student varsity club to circulate a petition a few weeks later calling for the immediate construction of a new basketball pavilion on campus. “If there is no hope of a new pavilion,” the petition read, “there is no hope of keeping Wooden.”
* * *
The tension between John Wooden and Jerry Norman continued to percolate during the 1950–51 season. It finally boiled over in January as the Bruins were trying to unshackle themselves from a stretch in which they had lost five times in eight games. As Wooden was addressing the team before the start of practice, he spotted Norman lying on the floor with his head on a ball and talking to a teammate, not paying attention. This time, Wooden didn’t just boot Norman out of practice. He booted him right off the team.
In reporting Norman’s suspension, the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
wrote that Wooden had dropped Norman from the team “temporarily” because of the player’s “attitude.” Though the paper indicated Norman probably would be back in a few days, he ended up being gone for two weeks—and it would have been longer if it hadn’t been for Eddie Sheldrake, who by that point had grown friendlier with Wooden than any other player. Sheldrake had also become close with Norman’s parents, who treated him as one of their own after Sheldrake’s father died. Norman needed to be convinced to come back to the team, and Wooden needed to be convinced to take him back. Sheldrake brokered the rapprochement.
From then on, Norman toed the line and emerged as a dependable backcourt starter. Sheldrake, meanwhile, remained the ace of the squad, lighting up Stanford for a school-record 38 points in February. But UCLA’s defense was even more porous than before. The Bruins were giving up more than 64 points per game, up from 53.5 the previous season, and they surrendered 90 points during an especially bad loss to Long Island University in December. Yet, despite their suspect defense, the Bruins finished the regular season in a tie with USC for first place in the Southern Division. That set up a one-game play-off between the rivals, which UCLA won by 8 points.
Alas, the season ended in Seattle, where UCLA lost two straight games to Washington in the PCC play-offs. It didn’t help that Wooden had to bench the incorrigible Ridgway in the second game for all but the final thirteen minutes. “Ridgway was being disciplined,” Wooden explained without revealing specifics. “I played him in the late stages of the game because he saw the light in a talk we had at halftime.”
Unfortunately, over the summer of 1951, Ridgway suffered a debilitating head injury while working under a car that fell off its jack. He was unavailable for the 1952–53 season. (Ridgway would return a year later and complete his final two seasons, but he never regained the all-conference form he showed as a sophomore.) That meant the team would need more production from Norman, who was now a senior and the undisputed team leader with Sheldrake having graduated. Norman responded like the gamer he was, spurring UCLA toward yet another division title. After Norman lit up Stanford for 34 points in mid-February, the Indians’ coach, Bob Burnett, said, “Stop Norman and you can stop the Bruins.” Wooden also recognized that this heretofore frisky colt had finally matured into a thoroughbred. “Norman has been our spark,” he said. “We didn’t see eye to eye on some things last year, but I believe that Jerry has now whipped himself.” Asked by a reporter about his “two-week vacation from the basketball team” the year before, Norman replied, “Mr. Wooden and I just had a few differences, so we had a heart-to-heart talk. I wasn’t working too hard in practice, for one thing, and Mr. Wooden didn’t like it. So he told me what he thought and I told him what I thought and we reached a compromise. We decided to do things his way.”