When he was just starting his coaching career, Wooden would have been a lot tougher on a wiseguy like Hirsch, maybe even kicked him off the team. But Wooden was older now, and he recognized the value of a little levity. When Hirsch would throw a crazy layup and shout, “This one’s for you, Woody!” Wooden would pretend he didn’t hear him. When Hirsch wanted to end a drill by saying, “That’s enough, JW,” Wooden might listen. And when Hirsch showed up to practice one day wearing a long-haired Beatles wig, Wooden said nothing about it until right before practice was about to begin. He ended his pre-practice talk by saying, “By the way, if certain people around here believe they can improve their appearance, that’s just fine with me.” Then he made Hirsch wear the wig for the entire practice. That thing was hot as hell.
“I made him be more human, more understanding, more caring. You can’t treat people like robots all the time,” Hirsch said. “I think I was the first person that broke him down. I taught him there’s more to life than just being a serious, stoic individual, that you can laugh at yourself and we’re not all perfect.”
So it was that in the midst of his finest season yet, the teacher became a student. Thanks to Hirsch’s juvenile antics, the players saw that beneath the ultraserious veneer, Wooden was a regular guy who wanted to have fun, just like them. His demeanor was especially important when games got tight late in the second half. Wooden’s response in those moments was simply to sit back and wait for the press to work its magic. “A couple of times when we were way down, I remember looking over at him with his legs crossed and program rolled up,” Fred Slaughter said. “I’d think hey, if he’s not worried, I’m not worried.” Goodrich added: “His words were always the same. ‘Don’t panic. Keep your poise. They’ll break.’”
It didn’t matter that the players argued on the court or spent little time together off it. They may not have functioned quite like five fingers on a hand, but they were still a team—a really, really good team. “We used to talk about how we were the All-American team, a group of guys from such diverse backgrounds, yet on the court were a perfect mesh,” Slaughter said. “Two black, two white, one Jewish, who after games would go in our separate directions. But game time, practice time, ride-the-bus time, we were pretty well matched. We liked to protect each other. We liked to do our jobs. And we just enjoyed playing for the man.”
* * *
“If you’re a hip sports fan, you’ve been swinging with college basketball this season. It’s L.A.’s newest fad.”
So proclaimed the
Los Angeles Times
on January 21, 1964. This was the ultimate front-runner’s town, and by that point the fast-breaking Bruins were captivating the Hollywood set. Two weeks before, Wooden had participated in a groundbreaking ceremony for the new athletic pavilion that would be built in the heart of the campus. That was able to happen because of a breakthrough the previous fall, when a wealthy financier and member of the University of California Board of Regents named Edwin Pauley pledged to match donations up to $1 million to supplement the $2 million already committed by the state of California. If all went according to plan, the UCLA Memorial Activities Center would be completed in time to host the 1965 spring commencement.
The players were oblivious to it all. They still played their games in small gyms at Santa Monica City College and Long Beach Arena, which didn’t even hold 5,000 people, and some of their crowds at the Sports Arena were sparse. (They drew a little over 7,000 fans for their home games against Washington and Cal.) The USC games drew near-sellouts, but the majority of those folks were Trojans fans. Slaughter remembered picking up an out-of-town newspaper in February and reading speculation the Bruins might go undefeated. It was the first he had ever thought about it. “We were too busy having fun and beating the crap out of everyone,” he said.
Still, the sports world was taking a closer look, with much of the focus falling on the man who was leading the charge. For local writers who had covered Wooden for many years, he was impressive but ultimately dull—an “unexciting intellectual whose teams play wildly exciting basketball,” in the words of
Los Angeles Times
columnist Sid Ziff. But to the unitiated out-of-towners, he was a fresh and compelling character, a soft-spoken, scholarly English teacher whose desk included non-sporting volumes like
As a Man Thinketh
,
Immortal Poems of the English Language
, and
Wise Sayings from the Orient
. The
New York Times
noted Wooden’s “Grant Wood face.”
Sports Illustrated
said he had “no equal as a pamphleteer,” though an anonymous college coach also told the magazine, “Don’t let that professorial manner fool you. He can be meaner than two snakes when he wants to be.”
It was a fascinating story, but how would it end? After making its great escape in Berkeley, UCLA reeled off four straight wins to clinch the league title, Wooden’s ninth in sixteen seasons. The Bruins won their final three games to finish the regular season 26–0. After surpassing Willie Naulls as UCLA’s all-time leading scorer, Walt Hazzard was named first team All-American by both the AP and UPI. Wooden, meanwhile, was tapped as UPI’s national coach of the year for the first time.
Finally, the Bruins could begin NCAA tournament play in Corvallis, Oregon, where they were to face Seattle in their opening game. The Chieftains were coached by a man who was plenty familiar with Wooden’s style of play: Bob Boyd, a former guard at USC from 1950 to 1952. With a television audience watching back in Los Angeles, the Bruins displayed little of the sharpness that they had shown for most of the regular season. Seattle was just as comfortable playing up-tempo, and with five minutes remaining, the Bruins found themselves clinging to an 81–80 lead.
From there, UCLA pulled away thanks to two critical baskets from Kenny Washington, the sophomore reserve. The Bruins won, 95–90, but Wooden was far from triumphant. “We didn’t have our usual zip tonight,” he said. “I don’t know what was wrong.”
He was more angry than he let on. When Wooden came into the locker room after the game, he saw the players lounging in front of their lockers, sipping Pepsi and yukking it up as though they had performed well. According to Hazzard, Wooden ripped into them something fierce. “He was screaming, ‘You bunch of fat cats! Look at you, just sitting around satisfied as you can be. No way you’re going to win tomorrow night with your attitude tonight,’” Hazzard recalled. Hazzard had scored 26 points, so he ignored the diatribe. Wooden noticed this and turned on his point guard. “You’re the main one!” he said. “If you ever play like that again, you’ll never play for UCLA again.”
Hazzard had heard all this before, but this time he believed Wooden was out of line. He stood up to Wooden and gave as good as he got. The confrontation grew so heated that Ducky Drake had to step in and separate them. “Coach was still screaming like a madman, just going nuts,” Hazzard said. “I said, ‘Hey, I’ve taken this for three years and I’m not taking it anymore.’”
About ten minutes later, Hazzard went into the bathroom and saw Wooden in there alone. Wooden looked right at Hazzard … and smiled. The whole thing had been a ruse. “I said to myself, this man is nuts,” Hazzard said. “He was just trying to keep our guard up, keep us sharp, keep us mentally alert, keep us hungry. It was trick psychology.”
The only thing now standing between the Bruins and a return to the NCAA semifinals was their old nemesis, the University of San Francisco, which had lost just four games all season and came into the meeting riding a 19-game winning streak. The Dons controlled the tempo from the start and built two separate 13-point leads in the first half, but the Bruins crawled back and won, 76–72. For the second time in three years, they had won the NCAA’s West Regional. They would now take their confidence, and their zone press, to Kansas City for the national semifinals. Even though UCLA was 28–0 and ranked No. 1 in the country, it still had plenty of doubters. The church deacon had pulled off quite a trick. Somehow, Wooden managed to be coaching David and Goliath at the same time.
* * *
The last weekend of the NCAA tournament also served as the venue for the annual coaches’ convention. For most of the hundreds of coaches who descended on Kansas City, this was their first chance to lay eyes on the four semifinalists. The Bruins would meet Kansas State on Friday night, with the winner taking on either Duke or Michigan the following night for the title. After Mal Florence canvassed the convention on Thursday, he reported in the
Los Angeles Times
that the coaches “showed strong support for Duke or Michigan to win the title, only a few votes for UCLA, and two for Kansas State.” Jerry Norman was getting much the same reaction. “The coaches had watched the other teams work out, but they hadn’t watched us,” he said. “They were calling me over and asking, how did you get here? I said we’ve already beaten two of the other teams here. Just watch us.”
UCLA’s semifinal opponent, Kansas State, had the advantage of playing a de facto home game. Back in December, when the two teams played in Manhattan, Kansas, the Wildcats were facing the zone press for the first time. Kansas State coach Tex Winter vowed that his players would be better prepared this time around. He was right. Before 10,731 fans in Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium, Kansas State ran step for step with UCLA and held a 75–70 lead with 7:20 left in the game.
The Bruins clawed back to make it 75-all a minute later. During a time-out, the UCLA song leaders, whose connecting flight had been delayed by a snowstorm in Chicago, hurried into the gymnasium and unpacked their pom-poms. Two of the girls were dating UCLA starters. It may have been a coincidence, but when play resumed, the Bruins completed an 11-point run to take an 81–75 lead that they never relinquished. Erickson had the game of his life, scoring a career-high 28 points to go along with 10 rebounds. Hazzard added 19 points and 9 assists, and UCLA emerged with a 90–84 victory. For the first time in school history, the Bruins would be playing for an NCAA championship.
Did the arrival of the cheerleaders really make the difference? Perhaps, but this team was starting to believe in the power of omens. Even Jerry Norman got into the act, wearing a lucky brown road suit for the twelfth straight time. Hirsch would never forget how that 11-point run had been preceded by a Kansas State jump shot that appeared to go in but spun out. Hirsch collected the rebound and pitched a pass ahead to Goodrich for a layup. Instead of being down by 7, the Bruins only trailed by 3. “It’s as if God said, this team is going undefeated,” Hirsch said.
The rest of the basketball world still had its doubts as the Bruins prepared to face Duke in the championship game. The Blue Devils boasted not one but two six-foot-ten forwards, Jay Buckley and Hack Tison, and also had an All-American guard in six-foot-four senior Jeff Mullins. After defeating Michigan in the first semifinal, the Duke players had watched the second half of the Bruins’ narrow win over Kansas State. They were not impressed. “It was a terrible, sloppy game,” Buckley said. “I think we got a little cocky. There was not much regard for western basketball at that time. Yeah, UCLA was undefeated, but who were they playing?”
Duke coach Vic Bubas felt the same way. “I think we can beat their press,” he told his assistant, Bucky Waters, “and I’m not so sure we can’t run with them.”
Wooden understood the scale of the challenge better than anyone. Asked by reporters how he looked at Duke, he replied, “Up.” On Saturday morning, he sat in the restaurant of his hotel and nibbled on a breakfast of orange wedges, oatmeal (always oatmeal), and a sweet roll. He said he had slept all of three hours the previous evening. “Nell fell asleep about two, and I was on my own until about four, thinking about Duke,” he said.
Dick Wade of the
Kansas City Star
summed up the conventional wisdom the morning of the game. “If you are silly enough to apply logic to basketball, there’s no way for UCLA to beat Duke,” he wrote. “The Blue Devils simply have too much—height, shooting ability, rebounding ability and defense. But UCLA isn’t a logical team. It beats the law of averages with the intangible and the unbelievable.”
As Wooden was finishing his breakfast, he spotted a familiar face in the hotel. It belonged to Jerry Tarkanian, the thirty-three-year-old head coach of Riverside City College, which was located about sixty miles east of Los Angeles. Tarkanian’s team had just won the California junior college championships, but he barely knew Wooden and assumed Wooden didn’t know him. Wooden surprised Tarkanian by coming over and congratulating him on his championship. Tarkanian, surprised, thanked Wooden and wished him luck in that night’s championship game. Tarkanian never forgot Wooden’s reply: “Even if we don’t win, I won’t be any less proud of my players than I am right now.”
Wooden communicated a different kind of message shortly before tip-off. Before sending his team out for warm-ups, he asked his players, “Can anyone tell me who finished second last year?” Nobody could. It was the closest they had ever heard him talk about winning.
The 10,864 fans who were on hand for the 1964 NCAA championship game represented the largest crowd ever gathered at Municipal Auditorium. The Bruins were not intimidated by the crowd—it was more than 4,000 shy of the capacity of the Sports Arena back home—but they were thrown off by the circumstances. UCLA was so badly out of sorts that early in the first half, Wooden broke his policy not to call the first time-out. He wanted to settle his boys down.
Their task was complicated by the fact that Fred Slaughter was suddenly unavailable. As he leaped for the opening tip, the UCLA center had felt a painful twinge in his lower back. This was a big night for Slaughter, who grew up in nearby Topeka and had a lot of friends and family there. But he knew he was hurt and asked to come out. Wooden replaced Slaughter with Doug McIntosh, who performed so well that when Wooden asked Slaughter if he wanted to go back in, Slaughter said no.
During the first thirteen minutes, the score was tied eight times. Neither team led by more than 4 points. “We had been beating their press pretty regularly,” Buckley said. “I think we relaxed a little bit.”