On Saturday, Norman took Alcindor on a tour of the offices of the
Daily Bruin
. The previous summer, Alcindor had been the sports editor at a newspaper published by a youth organization in Harlem, and he was considering a major in journalism. From there, Warren and Lacey took Alcindor to watch Arthur Ashe, who was then a UCLA sophomore, play in a tennis match against Stanford. They showed Alcindor the twenty-minute stroll he would take each day across campus to get to class. Then they tooled around town for a while, showing him the beach and the Hollywood Hills. The evening ended at a party in a residence hall, where Alcindor sat quietly in a corner on a stool, chatting up a few other athletes.
Norman knew it was important for Alcindor to meet Ashe, who was an extension of UCLA’s racial tradition. A voracious reader, Alcindor knew all about Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche, and he had introduced himself to Willie Naulls at a Knicks game. He had been pleasantly surprised to learn while watching Rafer Johnson on
The Ed Sullivan Show
that Johnson had been UCLA’s student body president. “That really impressed me, that a black man could earn that position, that he could excel beyond sports,” Alcindor said. From where he sat three thousand miles away, UCLA beckoned as a warm and welcoming place for a young black man, in contrast to his native New York City, not to mention the rest of America.
Yet, it was this white, diminutive, middle-aged midwesterner who made the biggest impression of all. It didn’t matter if John Wooden was selling cookies or basketball. Alcindor was buying. “I am a great believer in my own snap judgments, and I am quick to find a major fault in minor offenses, particularly in strangers who need me, but I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away,” Alcindor wrote in his autobiography,
Giant Steps
. “People would always tell me that they cared about me, but I felt Mr. Wooden really meant it. I came out of his office knowing I was going to UCLA.”
* * *
The connection, naturally, originated from their fathers.
Wooden thought that Alcindor had the bearing of an eagle, just like Wooden’s father, Hugh. And Alcindor thought that Wooden resembled his own dad. Not physically, of course—Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Sr., known as “Big Al,” stood a burly six foot three, two hundred pounds—but they were similar in other ways. Lew was an only child who knew that his father loved him, but Big Al did not go out of his way to express it. He was humble and well read, a man of actions, not statements. Alcindor could tell off the bat that Wooden was the same way.
Lewis was fortunate to have a strong and loving father to guide him, because it was not easy being young, black, and male in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, especially one who was ridiculously tall. Still, all things considered, Lew had a rather idyllic childhood. When he was three, his parents moved into a government-owned, middle-income housing project on Dyckman Street in the Inwood neighborhood of northern Manhattan. This was no ghetto. Lew’s early childhood memories include landscapes of expansive grass. There were scarcely any hoodlums or junkies in sight. He got excellent grades. Most of his friends were white.
Like Wooden, Big Al was an educated man, a gifted musician who had studied at the famed Juilliard School in New York City. His specialty was the trombone, and he hoped to be a conductor, but that wasn’t easy work for a black man to find. He became a police officer to support his family, but jazz remained his passion. Big Al jammed regularly at the Elks Club on 126th Street with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, and he performed with the Senior Musicians Symphony in Carnegie Hall. Lew took a few piano lessons when he was younger, but he gave it up because he didn’t like to practice. He would forever claim that everything he ever needed to know about basketball, he learned by listening to jazz. “A jazz band is not a group that just has individuals doing what they want to do,” he explained. “They have to pay attention to each other and understand teamwork and timing.”
Big Al also gave Lew his first sad, formative lesson about racism. Lew was in the third grade, and he was riding the bus with his dad to Harlem to get their hair cut. When Lew asked why they had to travel so far just to get trimmed, his father told him it was because the white barbers in their neighborhood didn’t want to cut their hair. It took a few days for the idea to sink in, but when it did, Lew felt like he had rocks in his stomach.
As a tall-and-growing grade-schooler, Lew was naturally pushed toward basketball. He came under the sway of a genial white coach named Farrell Hopkins, who taught him how to practice layups. “You only give people something to laugh about when you miss a layup,” Hopkins told him. Lew was one of only two black students at his private grade school (his parents, who were Catholic, had enrolled him at a parochial school), and his days were pockmarked by racial slurs, fights with white kids, and a strict, unspoken rule that white girls were off-limits.
It got worse after he entered high school as a six-foot-ten ninth grader at Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school on West 61st Street. As Alcindor continued to sprout, he became more of a curiosity to the outside world, and he resented being treated like a circus freak. One day while he was walking through a bus terminal with his team, an elderly white woman walked up to him and poked him with her umbrella. “I could see Lewie flush, but like always, he took it,” said his high school coach, Jack Donohue. Alcindor later referred to his junior year of high school as “the apex of my white-hating period.” It was easy for him to become a loner, because there was no one else like him. “Face it, Lew,” Donohue told him. “You’re a minority of one.”
On balance, Alcindor’s relationship with Donohue was positive, but like everything else in his life, it was complicated by race. Their relationship was irreparably breached during a game in Alcindor’s junior year. Power had played a torpid first half, and Donohue was blowing his stack in the locker room at halftime, reaming out each player one by one. When he got to Alcindor, Donohue shouted, “And you! You’re not hustling. You’re not moving. You go out there and you don’t hustle. You don’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do. You’re acting just like a nigger!”
Alcindor couldn’t believe his ears. The word hurt much more than that old lady’s umbrella. He briefly considered going home (and he was encouraged to do so by the two other black players on the team), but he finished the game, which Power won. After the game, Donohue called Alcindor into his office and said cheerfully, “See? It worked. I knew if I used that word, it would shock you into playing a good second half.” It was a long time before Alcindor could forgive what Donohue had done.
By the end of his senior season, Alcindor had set a New York City record for career points (2,067) and rebounds (2,002), and he had led Power Memorial to three Catholic League championships, two mythical national championships, and a seventy-one-game winning streak. He had also distinguished himself in the classroom. He was in the top 10 percent of his class, scored over 1200 on the SAT, and was awarded a New York State Regents’ academic scholarship.
Aside from the segregated colleges in the South, Alcindor had his choice of where he wanted to continue his education. He originally leaned toward eastern schools like St. John’s, Columbia, and Boston College, and he was also intrigued by Michigan. But there was one school out west that caught his imagination: UCLA. Lew followed college basketball by reading scores in the newspaper, and he couldn’t help but notice how frequently the Bruins won by huge margins. Moreover, Alcindor was seduced by the Hollywood-produced image of California, that glorious land of sun, beaches, pretty girls, and racial comity. As Alcindor watched the Bruins capture the 1964 NCAA championship on television, he was taken with their pell-mell style as well as their teamwork. They looked like a jazz band in sneakers.
At Alcindor’s behest, Donohue called Wooden in the spring of 1964, shortly after the Bruins had won their first title. Donohue told Wooden that his star center was interested in UCLA and that he wanted to discuss the matter in person at a coaching clinic in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where Wooden was an invited speaker. Wooden told Donohue at the clinic that he was willing to host Alcindor for a weekend, but only if he was genuinely interested in UCLA. Donohue assured Wooden that he was.
By the time that weekend rolled around, however, Wooden was becoming less interested in Alcindor. It was not because he was afraid to build his team around a big man (though he had never done it before). It was because he knew UCLA’s fans and alumni would expect multiple NCAA titles if Alcindor came. Wooden could already see that winning a championship had pushed expectations out of whack. He didn’t want to set the bar any higher.
But Wooden couldn’t get cold feet, because J. D. Morgan was too busy holding them to the fire. Morgan wanted Alcindor badly, and he made sure both Wooden and Norman knew it. “Wooden didn’t want to have anything to do with Alcindor,” Jerry Norman said. “The only reason he recruited him was because J. D. wanted him to. Believe me, he was not going to cross J. D. Morgan.”
When Alcindor took his visit to Westwood, Morgan made sure that Norman showed him where the Memorial Activities Center was being built. Morgan wanted Alcindor to see that it was not just a drawing on a piece of paper but an actual structure that was nearing completion. The only thing missing was the floor. The arena was going to open in the fall of 1965, and because the very first event would be the annual game between the freshmen and the varsity, Wooden could credibly tell Alcindor that he was going to dedicate the new facility. “We’d never have gotten him to come with the old gym,” Wooden said. “Climb up three flights. Two baskets, with gymnastics on the side, wrestling on the end. One big locker room. One shower room, no privacy in any way. You think he would have come under those conditions?”
A week after touring UCLA and meeting Wooden, Alcindor took an official visit to Michigan, but since his mind was already made up, he never really gave that school a chance. (He said later that he regretted that.) He also visited Holy Cross, but only because the school had hired Donohue as its new coach, and Donohue said Alcindor owed it to him to at least take a visit. But Alcindor’s mind was made up. He wanted to go to UCLA.
Problem was, his parents had met every other coach who was recruiting him, but they had never met Wooden. Los Angeles was awfully far from New York City. How could they send him there without meeting the man who would take care of him? Donohue called Wooden and asked if he would travel to New York so Alcindor’s parents could approve his decision. Wooden wasn’t crazy about the idea. He rarely conducted home visits in his own backyard, much less a continent away, but he recognized that this was a special case. Besides, Morgan wouldn’t let him turn it down even if he tried.
Morgan told Wooden he wanted Norman to accompany him on the trip to see the Alcindors. He said it was because Norman was Catholic, but Norman suspected the real reason was that Morgan was afraid Wooden would blow it. On the day they arrived in New York, Big Al was working the night shift, and he did not get home until after midnight. The meeting took place in the Alcindors’ living room at 1:00 a.m. Lew sat in a separate room trying to listen in as Wooden and Norman talked to his parents about UCLA. Lew’s mom and dad liked that Wooden emphasized academics, and they appreciated that he did not try to give them a hard sell. If anything, he seemed to suggest that Lew should consider changing his mind. Several times, he said to them, “If Lewis doesn’t want to come to UCLA, we will understand.” Norman felt like crawling under the couch. “He practically begged him not to come,” Norman said, “but the kid wanted to come so bad.”
Lewis’s parents were still not happy about sending their only child so far away, but they had raised him to make his own choices. And so, on May 4, 1965, Alcindor walked into the gymnasium at Power Memorial to announce his long-awaited decision. Wearing the school’s standard coat-and-tie uniform, he entered the gym at 12:33 p.m. to find more than eighty members of the media waiting for him. When he stepped to the podium and spoke, it was, wrote Phil Pepe of the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
, “the first time the press had ever heard the sound of Alcindor’s voice.”
“I have an announcement to make. This fall I’ll be attending UCLA in Los Angeles,” he said. “It had the atmosphere I wanted and the people out there were very nice to me.” He later added, “I have always been captivated by California.”
This was a truly historic basketball moment, one that caused ripples in two major cities on opposite ends of the country. “Rich Get Richer: Alcindor, 7–1 Cage Whiz, Picks UCLA,” blared the headline in the next morning’s
Los Angeles Times
. Everybody proclaimed that this was the best high school prospect since Wilt Chamberlain—including Wilt Chamberlain. “I’ve seen the kid play several times in the playgrounds around Manhattan, and I think he’s tremendous,” he said. “He’s bigger than I was in high school and thirty pounds heavier. I moved better, but he shoots much better.” Wooden, meanwhile, tried his best to knock down the assumption that Alcindor’s mere presence would guarantee three more NCAA titles. “Anybody who believes that is only displaying his ignorance,” he said. “Did Kansas win it with Wilt Chamberlain?”
Wooden further insisted that the arrival of this megatalent would not alter his basketball philosophy. “I don’t try to make a star out of anybody. He will fit into the framework of our system,” he said. In truth, Wooden didn’t really know just how he was going to utilize the incoming giant. After all, to that point, he had never seen Alcindor play.
“Is that Lew Alcindor?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s nothing but a big nigger.”
The exchange between two white students as Alcindor passed by occurred a few days after he had arrived on campus. Alcindor’s first instinct was to spin around and confront them, but he was talked out of it by the black friend with whom he had been walking. It was not the first time Alcindor had heard himself described this way, and he cursed himself for being so naive. Of course there were racists in California. It was still America, wasn’t it?