Wooden’s decision was not well received by the men who were putting on the event. Foremost among them was Ned Irish, the president of the NBA’s New York Knicks and the chief promoter of college basketball at the Garden. He and several other executives met with Wooden in an effort to convince him to let his stars play. “We were on pins and needles waiting for the decision,” said Carroll Adams, a six-foot-one junior forward on that team. Wooden had always preached the importance of sticking to principles, but on this occasion his principles were trumped by business. Naulls and Taft played. “The New York guys told him, ‘You can’t do this. This is the biggest tournament of the year.’” Adams said. “I don’t know what compromises were made, but Coach relented.”
Wooden had hoped his team would build an early lead so he could implement his deliberate offense, and midway through the first half, it appeared he would get his chance. With the Bruins leading by 1, Naulls faked out Russell, drove by him, and rose to the rim for a two-handed layup. Russell, however, recovered in a flash and blocked the ball. “It stunned us—and it beat us,” Wooden said. Naulls spent most of the second half in foul trouble, Russell scored 17 points, and USF cruised to a 70–53 win. The crowd of 16,357 gave Russell a standing ovation when he left the game with over a minute to play. “Russell’s defensive play kills you,” Wooden said. “They would be a good team without Russell, but with him they’re simply great.”
* * *
Despite the setback in New York, the Bruins returned home with plenty of confidence for the league season. The year before, the Pacific Coast Conference had decided to abandon its two-division format and have each school play every other team in a single two-game series. That meant UCLA’s opponents would only have to come to Westwood every other year, prompting one Bay Area sportswriter to declare “an amen is in order.”
In the wake of the fire marshal’s decision closing down the men’s gym, Wilbur Johns could not find a locale suitable for all of UCLA’s games. The team therefore had to spend the season shuttling among three different venues: the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Loyola University, and Venice High School. Despite the lack of a permanent home, the Bruins piled up wins with ease. Naulls was clearly establishing himself as the best player in the conference and arguably the best player in the country next to Russell.
After all the tumult they had been through, Naulls and Wooden had arrived at a subtle, unspoken understanding. During a game at Stanford in February, Taft was fouled as he drove for a layup. He missed the shot, but as the referees momentarily looked away, Naulls reached up and tipped the ball in. The officials thought that Taft had made his shot and awarded him a 3-point opportunity. That brought jeers of protest from the Stanford players, coaches, and fans. After one of the Stanford players told a referee what he had seen, the official then asked Naulls if it really was he, and not Taft, who had put the ball in. Willie looked at Wooden, but the coach said nothing. So Naulls told the referee the truth. The basket was waved off, and UCLA eventually won in overtime as Naulls scored 37 points.
Many years later, Naulls reminded Wooden of that moment and asked the coach if he thought he had done the right thing that night. Wooden carefully laid out all the various considerations before concluding, “A man has to make up his own mind in a situation that affects so many others.” Naulls took that as a yes.
UCLA headed into its February series against California with a 12–0 conference record. The games were played at Venice High School. If the Bruins could sweep the Bears, they would clinch the 1956 conference crown. Wooden was none too pleased to have to play such a big game in a high school gym, where the length of the floor was ten feet shorter than regulation. Apparently, he was not alone. “I’ve heard some protests from the Bay Area regarding Venice High’s short floor, and I hope they do protest,” Wooden said during that week’s press luncheon. “If they do, we’ll move it right back to Westwood. There’s nothing I’d like better.”
UCLA got the sweep it needed. In the first game, Naulls eclipsed Eddie Sheldrake’s single-game school record by pouring in 39 points in an 85–80 win. Taft scored 26 the following night to put the Bruins over the top. When the buzzer sounded, the players carried Wooden across the court. The only suspense in an otherwise meaningless final series against USC was whether the Bruins would finish the season with a perfect conference record. They did: 16–0. The same John Wooden who had once boasted of his decision to bench Naulls now lavished a whale of a compliment on him: he actually argued that Naulls was a better all-around player than Russell. In his memoir, Naulls described this as “an out-of-character outburst,” but he was gratified that Wooden had finally extolled him in public. “Willie can do so many more things [than Russell],” Wooden said. “Granted that Russell is tremendous in some respects, and in picking a team, you’d have to choose Russell, but … I’ve never had a boy so strong in all offensive departments as Willie.” Wooden later told the local sports columnist Sam Balter that Naulls was “the greatest I have ever coached. He is the greatest I have ever seen. And you know I have seen many.”
* * *
Since there were no longer separate divisions in the PCC, UCLA’s regular season title allowed the Bruins, who were ranked No. 10 by the Associated Press, to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time in four years. That was the good news. The bad news was that their first opponent in the West Regional would be top-ranked San Francisco, who still had not lost since UCLA had clipped them in the men’s gym fifteen months before.
Since this was the postseason, the Bruins were due for another brush with bad luck. This one came when Taft fell in practice and re-aggravated his back injury. Taft was in such pain that he had a hard time getting in and out of a car. He played in the game, but he was limited, which rendered a difficult task all but impossible. UCLA lost, 81–72. One week later Russell would crown his college career with a second consecutive NCAA title.
Naulls’s own brilliant career came to an end the day after the USF loss, when UCLA defeated Seattle University by 24 points in the West Regional’s consolation game. It was technically Wooden’s first win in the NCAA tournament, but because it did not come in the main bracket, the game was not counted in the record books. Thus, at the age of forty-five and in his eighth season at UCLA, Wooden still had not won an official game in the NCAA tournament.
Naulls had high hopes of playing for the United States in the Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Since he was obviously one of the best players in the country, he should have made the team with ease. Imagine his surprise when he was cut despite scoring 42 points in three games during the Olympic trials in New York. Wooden figured that Naulls had been cut because there were too many players on the team from the West, and he was appalled that such a consideration could cause his All-American—the best player he had ever coached—to be left off the team. “I expressed my disappointment. To this day I can’t understand how they could have passed up Willie Naulls,” Wooden said nearly fifty years later. From that point on, Wooden would keep an icy distance from the American Olympic movement, which would isolate him even further from coaching peers who were deeply involved.
That disappointment aside, Naulls and Taft were the only players to be selected unanimously to the 1956 PCC first team. With their impending graduation, it would be that much harder for Wooden to claim his elusive NCAA tournament win. Bill Russell was also leaving, but while Wooden welcomed that news, he would soon face another imposing obstacle from the Bay Area. This time it arrived in the form of a coach, not a shot-blocking center, but it would be just as effective at preventing the hard-driving Wooden from reaching his goals.
15
Pete
Another off-season, another unforeseen shakeup.
This time, the tremors came from UCLA’s football program. In March 1956, the
Oakland Tribune
published an article alleging that UCLA football players were given $40 above the $75 in expenses permitted by the Pacific Coast Conference. The PCC found the charges to be true and responded in heavy-handed fashion, declaring all UCLA football players ineligible unless they could prove that they had not been given illicit cash. In response to that action, the Los Angeles district attorney, who happened to be a UCLA alumnus, called a press conference to claim that he had evidence that USC had paid more than fifty athletes a total of over $71,000. The remaining conference schools jumped in, and the scandal metastasized into a blur of charges and countercharges. When the smoke finally cleared, the PCC imposed on UCLA a three-year suspension from championship and bowl competitions in all sports, plus fines totaling around $93,000. The Los Angeles City Council struck back by passing a resolution recommending that UCLA and USC “seriously consider” withdrawing from the PCC. It was an ugly, destablizing few months for this once proud forty-one-year-old league.
Though Wooden’s basketball program had not been accused of breaking any rules, it was swept up in the scandal. The three-year postseason ban was a devastating blow for Wooden. His team had already lost its home court and four starters, including Willie Naulls and Morris Taft. Now it had lost the chance to play for a national championship and was on the brink of losing its league. This was not the way Wooden had hoped to begin the 1956–57 season.
Despite these setbacks, the Bruins were a pleasant surprise in the early going, winning seven of their first eight games, which set up a big test during their midwestern road swing in late December. They were scheduled to play at No. 5 St. Louis, which had an All-American candidate in forward Bob Ferry. Trailing by 4 points with seven minutes to play, the Bruins went on one of their patented late-game bursts, outscoring the Billikens 16–4 to pull off the upset.
The win would have been cause for celebration if Wooden had allowed it. When he heard his players whooping it up afterward in the shower, the coach marched into the locker room and ordered them to knock it off. “He was very strident about it,” said Roland Underhill, a six-foot-four sophomore forward. “He always told us to treat defeat the same way you treat victory.”
That trip, and that lecture, set the tone for a terrific season. Having vaulted to No. 8 in the AP poll because of the upset, the Bruins justified that standing by winning eleven of their first twelve PCC games. Unlike the previous season, when Taft and Naulls did most of the damage, the Bruins got scoring from several different players. That appealed to the engineer in Wooden. He liked things to be neat, tidy, structured—and most of all, balanced. “I noticed in checking our four conference games that the leading scorer has averaged 12 points, with the lowest 9 points,” he said in January. “Our balance again proved true.” A 4-point loss to USC dropped the Bruins to 11–2 in the league. That left them one game behind first-place California heading into the two-game series between those teams in Berkeley on the first weekend in March.
Cal’s program, which hadn’t made it to the NCAA tournament since its lone appearance in 1949, was in the midst of a remarkable resurgence, and it wasn’t because the team had a bunch of heralded recruits. It was because Pete Newell had taken over as coach just two years before. A Southern California native who played for Loyola University, Newell had previously coached the University of San Francisco to the NIT championship in 1949. He left the following year for Michigan State and returned to the Bay Area in 1954. Newell’s team at Cal won just one conference game in his first season. The next year, it won ten. Now, in year three, Newell had his Bears poised to challenge the titans from the south for the PCC crown.
Newell and Wooden had much in common. They both loved baseball (Newell spent a summer playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate in Pine Bluff, Arkansas), shared an affection for the English language (Newell was also a prolific letter writer), and heeded quirky superstitions (Wooden liked to stick found bobby pins in trees; Newell tucked them into his pocket). Those similarities, however, were dwarfed by their contrasts. Newell was no teetotaling hermit. He was a man’s man and a coach’s coach. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day (often lighting up before he even got out of bed in the morning) and was an inveterate night prowler. Newell loved nothing more than to hang with the fellas well past midnight, downing bourbon and talking ball. He could be tough on his players, but he was just as quick to put an arm around them once practice was over. He believed it was his job not just to tell them what to do, but why. He insisted they call him Pete.
Unlike Wooden, Newell never mastered the art of the even keel. Coaching basketball made him such a nervous wreck that he often said that fifteen minutes before each game, he wondered why he had ever gotten into the profession. “When my team went out on the court for warm-ups, I would stay in the dressing room for several minutes, thinking of all the things that might go wrong,” he said. “It was a feeling of being alone and no one understanding the dark thoughts I was having.”
Most of all, Newell taught a style of basketball that was the exact antithesis of Wooden’s. Newell liked his tempo slow and his scores low. He was a devoted defensive tactician who was one of the first coaches to use a full-court man-to-man press. On offense, he ran a system called “reverse action,” whereby players passed the ball from side to side over and over again, moving defenders back and forth, until an opportunity to score finally presented itself. “It would drive you up a wall,” Bruin center John Berberich said of playing Cal. “They would pass the ball for ten minutes and then finally take a shot that they’d passed up seven minutes ago.”
Wooden looked down his nose at this kind of basketball. Sometimes, if one of his own players passed up an open shot in practice, Wooden would chastise him by saying, “If you don’t want to shoot, go to Cal.” Newell was equally unimpressed with the racehorse attack Wooden had imported from the Midwest. “John didn’t like our slowdown style at first,” Newell said. “He came from the Piggy Lambert school, which had a lot more imagination and movement in the offense, but Lambert’s teams just outscored people. They didn’t play defense. The whole state of Indiana was one of the worst areas for defense I’d ever seen.”