Following the loss at Butler, UCLA returned home to play in a four-team tournament at the Sports Arena that was branded the Los Angeles Basketball Classic. That event brought in good crowds, but the fans didn’t come to see USC and UCLA. They came to see Pete Newell’s Cal Bears take on West Virginia in a rematch of the 1959 NCAA championship game. As a capacity crowd of 13,024 looked on—the most ever to see a college basketball game in the city—Newell delivered yet another defensive clinic. Cal held Jerry West to just 8 points and cruised to a 65–45 victory.
Before that game tipped off, USC and UCLA met in the third-place game. The arena was half-empty as USC won by 10. Even in his own hometown, Wooden was relegated to the undercard, and an uninteresting one at that.
* * *
The loss to USC dropped the Bruins to 5–6 heading into their first slate of games in the AAWU. For the remainder of the 1959–60 season, the biggest question was whether Wooden would suffer his first losing record at UCLA. “John Wooden was not a happy camper with his ballplayers that season,” Bob Berry said. Though Wooden still professed to be less concerned with winning and losing than with maximizing potential—his own definition of success, right there beside his trusted pyramid—he found it harder to unwind as the losses piled up. “He would get Ducky Drake, and they’d go walk at two or three in the morning because he couldn’t sleep,” Cunningham said. “I learned about this much later. Coach didn’t like to lose, but he tried not to show it to us players.”
There were times, however, when he couldn’t help himself. Wooden stopped practice cold one day when he unloaded on Kent Miller for his lack of effort. Harkening back to his days in South Bend, Wooden screamed at Miller and booted him in the rear end. “That was about the angriest I’ve seen him,” Johnny Green said.
Wooden found himself in an even more contentious situation during a game at the Air Force Academy in late January. Midway through the first half, referee Ben Dreith, whom Wooden later characterized as “belligerent,” told Wooden he didn’t want to hear any more yapping from the bench. “Why don’t you call a technical foul on me and get it out of your system?” Wooden asked. Dreith complied. Things got more heated late in the second half, when a fight broke out between two players, prompting hundreds of cadets to pour out of the stands. Air Force coach Bob Spear later accused UCLA of “roughhouse tactics,” claiming the Bruins “apparently felt they couldn’t win it playing straight basketball.” After the floor was cleared, UCLA escaped with a 76–75 win.
The Bruins began their conference slate by sweeping Stanford, giving them four straight wins. That mini-streak was snapped by—who else?—California. When the teams squared off on January 8 in Berkeley, the Bears coasted to a 53–45 win. A week later, the Bears beat UCLA again, this time at the Sports Arena by 10 points.
For Jerry Norman, these losses were evidence that Wooden needed a new approach. Norman thought back to his sophomore year in 1950, when Wooden gave such a thorough scouting report before their NCAA tournament game against Bradley that the Bruins lost their composure and lost. Now, Norman believed that Wooden was overcompensating by ignoring opponents completely. “Wooden was a very good fundamental coach. He was very good at planning practices. He was very good at the relationships with the players,” Norman said. “But he didn’t have much in the way of strategy. His whole attitude was you play the way you practice.”
Always the eager learner, Wooden couldn’t deny that Newell was getting the better of him. After Cal knocked off the Bruins in the Sports Arena for the third time that season—and eighth straight win overall against UCLA—Wooden waited for Newell to emerge from his locker room. When he did, Wooden asked if he wouldn’t mind getting together in the off-season so they could talk about defense. Like Wooden, Newell was a gentleman as well as a competitor. It was the way in which he and Wooden were most alike. Newell told Wooden he thought that was a wonderful idea. He’d be happy to get together.
* * *
Once again, UCLA stumbled down the stretch of the season. After that third loss to Cal, the Bruins lost at Washington to drop to 6–4 in the conference and 13–11 overall. They began their season-ending two-game series against USC by getting blown out, 91–71. It was the most points USC had ever scored against UCLA.
With the outcome of the game no longer in doubt, Wooden summoned Bob Berry to the scorer’s table. Berry had barely stepped on the floor since January, and he was insulted at being used for mop-up duty. So he refused to go in. Wooden did not suffer that gladly. “Boy, you want to talk about somebody getting red in the face. He really gave it to me,” Berry said. “I told him there was no way I was going to play in garbage time.”
The following night’s finale was marred by a brouhaha that was extreme even by the standards of the USC-UCLA rivalry. With less than a minute to play, two players exchanged shoves as they dove to the floor to wrestle for the ball. Both benches immediately emptied, and dozens more fans joined the fray. As both coaches and the two referees tried to restore order, USC coach Forrest Twogood accidentally elbowed Wooden in the face, knocking his glasses to the floor and leaving a nasty bruise on his nose.
Once the court was cleared, UCLA finished off a 72–70 win. The Bruins’ regular season ended with a 14–12 record, allowing Wooden to claim a winning season. When the 1960 NCAA tournament began, he was once again a spectator as Cal began its national title defense by vanquishing Idaho State at the Cow Palace, 71–44. The Bears then coasted through the Western Regional in Seattle, beating Santa Clara and Oregon by a combined 41 points, to reach the national semifinals for the second straight year.
The tournament would culminate back at the Cow Palace, where once again the Bears would be matched up against Oscar Robertson and the Cincinnati Bearcats in the semifinals. For the second straight year, they sent the Big O packing. Robertson managed just 18 points on four field goals, and Cal won, 77–69. This time, however, the Bears fell short in the final against an Ohio State team that included two future Hall of Famers, John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas, and a feisty reserve guard named Bobby Knight. Ohio State pasted the defending champs, 75–55.
It should have been a joyful time in Newell’s life, but in truth he was suffering through a private hell. His diet of nothing but coffee and cigarettes had taken a nasty toll. “Pete was a skeleton by the end of the year,” said one of his former players, Ned Averbuck. “He was a walking zombie. Pete’s eyes were so sunken, guys thought he was going to die.” Winning an NCAA championship had created an expectation that Newell believed would be impossible to meet. “A coach is never really secure,” he told
Sports Illustrated
that winter. “I’m not going to coach until I’m sixty. I don’t feel that I could go through sixteen more years of the tension that goes with each season.”
Unbeknown to the public, Newell had decided back in February that he was going to retire, even though he was just forty-four years old. He made the news official shortly after the loss to Ohio State. He and Wooden never did have that tête-à-tête about defense. They were rivals who respected each other, but it would be a long while before they would become friends.
Newell earned many fans in the Bay Area during his brief stint at Cal. He also gained a huge admirer behind enemy lines. Jerry Norman was enamored of Newell’s techniques, his philosophies, his understanding of the game’s mathematics. He knew that Wooden was a great teacher, but he also sensed that Wooden needed to adapt better to the changing times. Basketball was evolving, and if UCLA was going to keep up, then Wooden would have to evolve as well. He was great at teaching fundamentals, but he needed to understand that there was more to the game than that. He needed to find a place for percentages inside all that engineering.
Most of all, Norman knew, he needed better players.
16
Walt
One day in the spring of 1959, Jerry Norman walked into Wooden’s office and noticed a letter sitting on the desk. It was written by Ron Lawson, a six-foot-four high school senior from Nashville, Tennessee. Besides being an excellent student—his father was the head of the physics department at Fisk University—Lawson was a standout guard at Pearl High School. He had already led his team to two championships at a national tournament for black high schools, and he would eventually add a third.
Like many young black athletes in America, Lawson’s hero was UCLA’s own Rafer Johnson, who had just been named
Sports Illustrated
’s Sportsman of the Year after setting a world record in the decathlon during a stirring competition in Moscow. Lawson was impressed that Johnson was student body president as well. Wooden didn’t seem eager to follow up on Lawson’s letter, so Norman asked if he could. It was not a hard pitch. Lawson enrolled as a freshman later that fall.
From the start, the young man showed extraordinary promise. He shattered several freshman records while averaging 24.5 points and leading the team in rebounding. The following year, in just his fifth varsity game, Lawson scored a team-high 19 points in a win over Notre Dame that vaulted the Bruins to thirteenth in the national rankings. By late December of Lawson’s sophomore year, the
Los Angeles Times
was predicting that he would be “one of the best basketball players UCLA has ever had.”
Things were much more unpleasant behind the scenes, however. As a child of the segregated South, Lawson had experienced a different upbringing from most of his teammates. Many of the white players found Lawson to be enigmatic and hostile. “I remember we were having lunch one day, and I made some comment about how blacks are quicker and can jump higher than us white guys,” John Green said. “Ron got up from the table and left. I said, ‘Ron, I apologize: it was nothing racial.’ But Ron had a chip on his shoulder because he dealt with that stuff a lot in Tennessee.”
The conflicts were more than skin deep. For all his talents, Lawson could be moody and selfish on the court. Wooden worked hard to instill a culture of selflessness, but Lawson did not want be a part of it. Though UCLA won twelve of its first fifteen games in the 1960–61 season to rise to No. 10 in the rankings, the team fell apart from there. “[Lawson] was a loner. He never quite fit in,” John Berberich said. Lawson did not bother to hide his discontent from the public. “[Basketball] is like a job,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. “I once loved to play. I used to sleep with a basketball when I was a kid.”
Lawson wasn’t the only player on the outs with Wooden at that time. Bob Berry, who had refused to enter the waning minutes of the USC game the year before, was now a senior, but he had been planted on the bench and left there. “I still have the splinters,” he quipped many decades later. Berry was resigned to his fate—and understood his responsibility in sealing it—but he experienced a more personal disappointment in Wooden during a trip to Lexington in December to play Kentucky.
Berry was raised in Indiana, and his parents had made the trip from home to watch the game. He was visiting with them inside the arena beforehand. Berry, the tenth of eleven children, was looking forward to introducing his parents to his coach, a fellow Hoosier. When Wooden came out of the locker room, however, he ignored Berry’s family and continued walking. “I thought it would have been nice if he had come over to say hello to my parents,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s because he was shy, but to this day it disturbs me.”
This was yet another example of Wooden’s aloofness sending a bad message. If Wooden set himself apart from his players, that distance was even greater between him and their parents, which was ironic since Wooden was such a family man himself. He viewed parents as potential distractions who could upend his program. When Wooden wanted to learn about his players’ families, he had them fill out a questionnaire. “I did not work with the parents that much,” Wooden said. “I felt I must be very careful because some parents were going to be nearby, so they could regularly attend the games, and I might find myself socializing with them, while other parents would be far away, and I wouldn’t see them that often.” Asked whether Wooden interacted with parents, his former assistant, Bill Putnam, replied, “Well, reluctantly.”
Gary Cunningham, on the other hand, remained the apple of Wooden’s eye. Some players vexed Wooden with their lack of effort. Cunningham tried so hard that Wooden had to convince him to relax and enjoy himself more on the court. The hard work paid off as Cunningham became one of the most lethal outside shooters in America. He scored 22 second-half points in a 24-point win at home over New York University in the team’s fourth game of the season.
By that point, college basketball was finally starting to catch on in Los Angeles. That was partly due to the growing popularity of the sport, but mostly it was because the city’s population continued to swell. For decades it had been common for more than 80,000 spectators to attend a USC or UCLA football game, but now the schools’ basketball teams were drawing hordes to the downtown Sports Arena as well. A record crowd of 14,589, the largest ever to see an indoor basketball game in Los Angeles, watched sixteenth-ranked UCLA lose to Iowa on December 30. More than 13,000 were on hand in early February to see USC beat UCLA by 15 points.
The Bruins, alas, would prove to be a disappointment as the 1960–61 season wound down. Lawson’s chemistry problems prevented the team from reaching its potential—which is the worst thing one could say about a John Wooden–coached team. During a game against USC on March 3, the Bruins uncharacteristically blew a 13-point lead in the last five minutes and lost, 86–85, in overtime. That enabled the Trojans to win the AAWU title while UCLA finished second with a 7–5 record (18–8 overall). It was the fifth straight year that UCLA had failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament.
From a statistical standpoint, Lawson had a very good sophomore season, but he had been a cancer in the locker room. That posed a potential problem for Wooden moving forward, but all that changed in May 1961, when Lawson admitted before a New York grand jury that he had been approached by professional gamblers. The revelation was part of a broad gambling probe that involved eighteen colleges and nearly forty players. No evidence was produced to prove that Lawson shaved points, but his failure to report the contact was enough to warrant his expulsion from UCLA.