Alcindor quickly figured out that most people in Los Angeles came from someplace else, and their bigotry came with them. If anything, the racists here were worse than the ones back home. In New York, people would call you names to your face. They might even come right up to you and poke you with an umbrella. You had to respect that. People in Los Angeles, on the other hand, had mastered what Alcindor would later refer to as “the art of seeming to like people that you really don’t like.”
The incident with the white students fed into the intense culture shock that Alcindor experienced during his first few months at UCLA. “I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean on a raft,” he later wrote. Everything about him felt out of place. His wardrobe was Greenwich Village cool—tweed jacket, jeans, wire-rim sunglasses. Out here, it was all button-down shirts, chinos, and penny loafers. He also shared a classroom with girls for the first time since the eighth grade, but he had no idea how to talk to them. His luck with the fellas wasn’t much better. One night he tried going to a party with a bunch of UCLA football players, but when some USC players showed up, a huge fight broke out. Alcindor beat it out of there.
Life in the dorms was the same. While Alcindor tried to chill by himself in his room in Dykstra Hall, the other students entertained themselves by flooding the hallway with two inches of water and sliding through it buck naked. These kids may have been the same age as he was, but he felt much older. Unlike them, he had a social conscience. He devoured books like
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
and
Autobiography of a Yogi
, as well as the poetry of LeRoi Jones. He also studied the emerging movement of black nationalism. During the Harlem riots, Alcindor had seen firsthand how racial divisions could boil over, and he knew that Los Angeles had experienced a similar trauma the previous summer in the segregated neighborhood of Watts. That went down just twenty miles from UCLA’s campus, yet the other students didn’t seem to be affected one bit.
So Alcindor did what he always did when he felt out of place: he retreated. Aside from a couple of other black students, he befriended very few people. Even his teammates found it difficult to penetrate his seven-foot-one-inch shell. That included his roommate, Lucius Allen, a black six-foot-two guard from Kansas City, Kansas, who was arguably the best prospect ever to emerge from his home state. While Allen spent hour after hour hanging downstairs in Dykstra Hall and shooting pool, Alcindor was hunkered in his room listening to jazz and reading books. (Alcindor was a speed reader with a photographic memory. Allen couldn’t believe how fast he flipped those pages.) The player with whom Alcindor bonded the most was Edgar Lacey. Alcindor wrote in
Giant Steps
that he and Lacey shared the assumption “that whites were hard to read and harder to trust, that all blacks should be brothers, that you could expect trouble before you could expect peace.”
But Alcindor did connect with his teammates on the court, the one place where he wanted to be part of a band. During their first week on campus, Alcindor and Allen joined two other freshmen in a full-court game of pickup four-on-four against the varsity. Allen was unstoppable. After the freshmen won the first two games, Lacey said he wanted to guard him. The first time Allen had the ball, he got Lacey to leave his feet on a shot fake and easily glided past him for a layup. Whatever discomfort Alcindor felt about being a student at UCLA, he knew right away that he was going to enjoy playing with Lucius Allen for the next four years.
* * *
By the time the 1965–66 basketball season got under way, John Wooden was eager to put an end to seventeen years of delayed gratification. The Bruins’ first practice was the first official activity to take place inside the new on-campus arena, which had been named Pauley Pavilion in honor of Edwin Pauley, the regent whose $1 million donation had pushed the project past the finish line. Finally, after all these years, Wooden was coaching in a facility superior to his old high school gym in Martinsville.
In the wake of his back-to-back titles, Wooden was also presented with a most unusual offer. It came from Joe Brown, the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who happened to be seated next to Wooden at a dinner. Brown was so impressed by Wooden’s knowledge of baseball, his favorite sport, that Brown asked the UCLA coach if he would like to manage the Pirates. At first, Wooden thought he was kidding. When Brown said he wasn’t, Wooden declined, saying, “They’d run you out of town before they did me.” When asked about this by a Pittsburgh reporter many years later, Brown confirmed that he had indeed made the offer. “Yes, I would have hired him,” Brown said. “He can handle any job.”
The floor in Pauley was so spacious that both the varsity and the freshmen teams could practice there, separated by a partition. Wooden peeked in on the freshmen often, allowing him to study the seven-foot-one prodigy who had caused so much stir. “I was just astounded the first time I saw Lewis,” Wooden said. “His agility for that size was just amazing, and the coordination he had.… I never had the opportunity to work with someone of that size.”
Besides Alcindor and Allen, Wooden and Norman had recruited two other local freshmen who had garnered All-America honors: Kenny Heitz, a six-foot-three forward from Santa Maria, and Lynn Shackelford, a six-foot-five forward from Burbank. Shackelford was such a deadeye left-handed shooter that his teammates were already calling him the “Machine.” The four of them comprised by far the most talented class that Wooden had ever recruited. It affirmed his long-held suspicion that if he ever got things rolling at UCLA, the momentum would carry itself forward, success begetting ever more success.
The start of practice brought Alcindor under the auspices of two men who would be responsible for his early development. The first was the newly hired freshman coach, Gary Cunningham. After graduating from UCLA in 1962, Cunningham had played professionally overseas for a couple of years before returning to Westwood to get his master’s degree in education. Cunningham found Alcindor compliant during practices but excruciating to be around in a social setting. “During his freshman year, I used to eat breakfast every morning in the student union. I’d see him and sometimes I would sit down with him, but there was absolutely no conversation,” Cunningham said. “I tried to engage him by asking questions. How’s school? How’s this? How’s that? And you’d get one- or two-word answers. Of all the players at UCLA that I encountered, he was the most difficult player to communicate with. I don’t know why he came to UCLA, because his heart was on the East Coast.”
Wooden also brought in a second coach for the sole purpose of working with Alcindor. His name was Jay Carty, a six-foot-eight, 230-pound, self-professed “slow white guy who couldn’t jump.” Carty was well qualified to coach a big man: he had played center for Oregon State from 1960 to 1962, and during every practice his senior year, he had gone up against Mel Counts, his seven-foot sophomore teammate. Carty’s main job was to pound on Alcindor and try to make him mad, but they also spent a lot of time working on Alcindor’s post moves.
While he was at Oregon State, Carty had perfected a unique shooting method that enabled him to score over taller defenders. The shot was called a “flat hook.” It defied two conventions about the fundamentals of shooting. In the first place, Carty jumped away from his defender, not toward him. And instead of squaring his shoulders to the basket, Carty turned sideways, which allowed him to reach farther away from the defense before letting the ball fly. That enabled him to create the space he needed to keep his shot from getting blocked.
Carty didn’t invent the flat hook by any stretch. As a teenager in the 1950s, he had watched it being utilized by players like Washington’s Bob Houbregs and Doug Smart, as well as Oregon State’s Tony Vlastelica. He had first been taught the move by his high school coach in China Lake, California. Carty told Alcindor that if he learned the hook, it would make him five inches taller. The kid was a quick study. “It was a duck to water,” Carty said. “Once he got the mechanics down, that shot became his liquid gold.”
Wooden’s decision to assign Carty to work with Alcindor was a tremendous boost to Alcindor’s adjustment. Wooden’s approach to the media yielded more mixed results. Wooden rendered Alcindor completely off-limits to sportswriters for his entire freshman year. That had been the same policy that had been in place while Alcindor was at Power Memorial. Wooden claimed it was implemented at the request of Alcindor’s parents, but Alcindor later insisted that the whole thing was Wooden’s idea. Regardless of who came up with it, the decision to hold the press at bay only added to Alcindor’s feelings of isolation. When he saw adjectives like
eccentric
and
moody
being ascribed to him in print by white men he had never met, it fed into the distrust he already held.
He would have to let his playing speak for him, and he made his opening statement on November 27, 1965. That was the night that UCLA opened its sparkling, 13,000-seat, on-campus arena to the public. Pauley Pavilion was the finest campus facility anywhere on the West Coast, and perhaps in the country. The main event was the annual freshman-varsity game, which was going to be broadcast live on local television for the first time. Before the game tipped off, the school held a “Salute to John Wooden” ceremony, with some seventy-five of Wooden’s former players on hand to mark the moment. Wooden received three standing ovations during the fifteen-minute festivities, an appreciation both for what he had accomplished at UCLA and what he was promising to accomplish in the years ahead.
With all the hoopla focused on Alcindor, the varsity Bruins were an afterthought. Gail Goodrich and Keith Erickson had graduated, but five of the top seven players had returned from the 1965 champs, including Freddie Goss and Edgar Lacey. The incoming sophomore class featured Mike Warren, the highly regarded point guard from South Bend, and Bill Sweek, a six-foot-three forward from Pasadena. The Bruins began the season as the No. 1 team in both the AP and UPI national polls.
However, they were going to have to play the freshmen short-handed. Three weeks before the game, Goss had been awakened by an intense pain in his spine that left him feeling paralyzed. An ambulance rushed him to the UCLA Medical Center, where doctors prepared to perform an appendectomy before deciding that wasn’t the problem. The pain was so mysterious that Goss thought he might have been poisoned. His doctors kept asking him if he had traveled outside Los Angeles, perhaps to Mexico. (He hadn’t.) Goss was feeling better by the time practice started, but because the illness had caused him to lose so much weight, he would have to watch the freshman-varsity game in street clothes.
As the players were introduced, they walked onto the court through a gauntlet of former Bruins. Finally, at long last, the wait was over. Pauley Pavilion was open for business, and Lew Alcindor was wearing a UCLA uniform. The first time he had the ball, Alcindor rewarded the sellout crowd and the thousands watching on live television by shooting an air ball.
He didn’t miss much after that. Once he and his freshman teammates settled down, they unsettled the varsity. UCLA had mounted its two championship runs by being smaller and quicker than its opponents. Now, for the first time, the Bruins were facing a player who was much taller than they were, yet who was just as quick as any of their guards. Alcindor shut off the basket at the defensive end, and on offense, his teammates got him the ball where he could score from in close.
Meanwhile, the varsity’s vaunted full-court zone press was ineffective. Not only were the freshmen familiar with it—as was Cunningham, the freshman coach—but they had the perfect antidote. All Cunningham had to do was station Alcindor at the free throw line, have a guard toss him the ball, and allow Alcindor to pivot and decide where to throw it. Alcindor had a long way to go to fulfill his physical potential, but he was already thinking like a senior.
The game was close for a while. The varsity built a 29–28 lead but trailed at halftime, 36–31. At the start of the second half, however, the freshmen did to the varsity what the Bruins had done to so many other hapless foes. They blitzed. The freshmen scored 10 unanswered points, with 6 coming from Alcindor, and a short while later, they completed a 22–6 run to build an 18-point lead. “We didn’t have any problem with the press all night,” Cunningham said. “We were just better than the varsity. That’s the bottom line.” With five minutes to go, Cunningham mercifully pulled his starters. Alcindor finished with 31 points and 21 rebounds, but he was not the only freshman to shine. Lucius Allen had 16 points, and Lynn Shackelford added 12. Meanwhile, the highest scorer for the varsity was Mike Lynn, who scored all of 12 points.
The final score of 75–60 would have been much worse if Cunningham had not pulled his starters. Alcindor had done the impossible. He had actually exceeded his outlandish expectations. “I was completely impressed. There’s no goon in him. He moves smooth,” Wooden said. “I like the fact that he seems to be able to rise to the occasion. A boy can perform well in high school, but you don’t know how he’ll do when he comes up against older, more experienced players.” Meanwhile, Wooden had a brand-new problem on his hands. His varsity Bruins had been humiliated for all the world to see, and they now held the dubious distinction of being the No. 1 team in America yet only the second-best team on their own campus. “We’re way out of place if we don’t get Goss back,” Wooden said. “I’m not even sure we can use the press with this group. They don’t have the speed or the toughness. Quite frankly, we’re not a good ball club right now. We wouldn’t belong on the same floor with some of our teams of the past few years.”
Cunningham felt far from triumphant. He was so embarrassed at what had happened to Wooden on his big night that he hid in the locker room after the game to avoid talking to the press. “I guess that was not a mature thing to do, but I didn’t want to go out there and say anything about Coach,” he said. “I mean, he was my coach, and this was my first game on his staff. I didn’t know how to handle the win.” The embarrassment lingered through the postgame reception for the former players, where Cunningham and his wife sat quietly at a corner table. “I just didn’t feel good about mingling with people.”