With Alcindor’s varsity career set to get under way, the school could no longer keep him under wraps. On the first day of practice, UCLA held a press conference to introduce the team. Of course, the only person the press wanted to talk to was Alcindor, partly because they had never been able to interact with him before. The first question, naturally, was about his height. “I’m seven feet one and three-eighth inches tall. I weigh two-thirty,” he said quietly.
Needless to say, the expectations for this team were off the charts. The Bruins were tabbed as the No. 1 team in both the AP and UPI polls. Alcindor was on the cover of a plethora of national magazines, including
Sports Illustrated
’s season preview issue, where he appeared on a foldout cover under the banner, “The New Superstar.” Wooden was already fretting his team couldn’t possibly live up to all that hype, so imagine his chagrin when he lost not one but two upperclassman starters for the season. The first was Edgar Lacey, who had season-ending surgery to repair a kneecap he had fractured the previous season. (The loss was a double blow for Alcindor, since Lacey was his best friend on the team.) The Bruins would also have to play without Mike Lynn, who was suspended for the season after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of credit card theft.
With two upperclassmen waylaid, Wooden was faced with the frightening specter of a starting lineup that included four sophomores and one junior (Warren). As good as Alcindor was, he would need help from his teammates, especially Lucius Allen, who had been the second-best player on the freshman team the year before, averaging 22.4 points per game. Like Alcindor, Allen considered Wooden a very good basketball coach, but he did not swing by his office to shoot the breeze. “Jerry Norman and Willie Naulls were the guys I confided in, not Coach Wooden,” Allen said. “If you were going to talk with Coach Wooden privately in his office, that was not going to be pleasurable.”
Like Alcindor, Allen was also coming to terms with issues of race and society. “In those days, we walked around with a chip on our shoulder. We weren’t gonna take anything from Whitey,” Allen said. Once in a while, when Wooden would refer to Allen as his “boy” (as he did all his players), Allen would bridle. Wooden would only smile and say, “Of course you’re my boy, Lucius.” Yet, even in his chippiest moments, Allen never once questioned Wooden’s intentions. “I never felt anything racist from him—ever—as much as I tried to bring it into the fold.”
When Allen heard that Wooden regularly schooled his former players in shooting contests, he grabbed Mike Warren and gave it a try. “He just whipped the crap out of us,” Allen recalled. “He talked the whole time he was beating us. ‘Now, listen guys, this is how you shoot a jump shot, okay? Watch this release and—oh, that went in, didn’t it.’” Wooden also got the better of Allen on the pool table. Allen spent many hours in his dormitory shooting stick when he should have been studying. He even got good at hustling the other students, letting them win a game or two and then trouncing them when real money was on the line. Wooden happened to see Allen and Alcindor shooting pool during a road trip and cracked, “Aww, that’s niche-picking.” When Lucius dared him to pick up a cue, Wooden virtually ran the table. “When he missed, he never left me in position where I could make a shot,” Allen said. “At the end, he winked at me and said, ‘Now, Lucius, if I can beat you, you don’t have much chance to make a living at this game. I suggest you go to the library.’”
* * *
With the core of the team set, it was up to the rest of the squad to find their place within the machine. “You knew Kareem, Lucius, and Mike were going to get minutes,” Heitz said, referring to Alcindor by the name he would later adopt, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “The rest was like a street fight.” Shackelford was a shoo-in at forward. His size and long-range shooting made him an ideal complement to Alcindor’s low-post prowess, and his participation in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes didn’t hurt him in Wooden’s eyes. Heitz started at the other forward spot, but he had to fight off two other sophomores, Jim Nielsen and Bill Sweek, for minutes. Alcindor came to enjoy the comic relief those frat boys provided, especially on the road, although it took some time for him and Sweek to warm up to each other. “We had a total disconnect at first,” Sweek said. “I was a West Coaster, free-living surfer, doing crazy pranks in the dorms. He was sophisticated and serious. I remember the first time he told me I was racist or something, I said, ‘Man, you don’t even know who I am. Until you really know me, I don’t think that’s fair.’”
The 1966–67 season was shaping up to be unlike any that the school, or the sport, had experienced. As usual, J. D. Morgan was ready to pounce. Since he was assured of a sellout crowd every time UCLA played at Pauley Pavilion, he loaded up on home games. Moreover, he had secured yet another contract with KTLA-TV. The movie actor Gene Autry had purchased the station from Paramount, and he wanted KTLA to emphasize sports. Morgan negotiated a five-year, six-figure contract that would enable KTLA to broadcast a variety of UCLA sporting events. The problem was, Morgan also had an obligation to the school’s radio network to keep most of the basketball games off live TV. So he came up with an ingenious solution: on the nights when KTLA was forbidden from showing the basketball games live, it was permitted to air those games on tape delay. That meant that the local news had to refrain from announcing UCLA scores on its evening newscasts, or at least give viewers a warning that the final score was about to be revealed. To call the games, KTLA hired a thirty-year-old health education teacher and assistant baseball coach at San Fernando Valley State College who had done some sports announcing on radio while he was an undergraduate at Central Michigan University and later as a grad student at Indiana University. The young fellow’s name was Dick Enberg.
KTLA also committed to producing a weekly half-hour show with Wooden during the season. Wooden was fast becoming a star in a town full of them, especially after he published his first book that fall. He called it
Practical Modern Basketball
, an homage to the groundbreaking
Practical Basketball
text that Piggy Lambert had written back in 1932. Wooden’s book laid out all of his teachings in deep detail (and dry prose). He described his overarching philosophies—including an explanation of the tenets that made up his Pyramid of Success—as well as a step-by-step breakdown of how a coach should manage every aspect of his program. He described precisely what kind of socks players should wear, what they should eat before a game, how they should organize their dressing room, and what they should do to avoid colds. (“Instruct the players to rub down briskly after they shower and to dry their hair well.”) Yet for all the intricacies contained in his book, the view of the game that Wooden described was surprisingly simple. He did not worry that publishing this book would give an advantage to opposing coaches because, as he wrote, “there are no real secrets to the game, at least not for very long.” The book enhanced his image as a humble champion.
Alcindor was much the same way, which is why he and Wooden got along so well. Wooden told Alcindor early on that if he scored as many points as he was capable of, it would destroy the team’s chemistry. Alcindor agreed, but they made an exception for the season opener against USC. This was, after all, Alcindor’s first real game. Wooden wanted to strike fear into the hearts of the rest of the conference, not to mention the country.
It helped that Bob Boyd, USC’s new coach, had never seen Alcindor play before. Boyd tried to defend him with a straight up, man-to-man scheme, rotating six-foot-six Bill Hewitt and seven-foot Ron Taylor on Alcindor without any double coverage. He might as well have been back in high school. Time after time, Alcindor’s teammates fed him the ball down low, and he calmly dropped the ball in the basket. With a packed house of 13,800 looking on, Alcindor shot 23 of 32 from the floor and 10 for 14 from the foul line, for a total of 56 points. In his very first outing, he had shattered the school’s single-game scoring record of 42 set by Gail Goodrich in the 1965 NCAA championship game. After UCLA won, 105–90, Wooden told the press, “At times, he frightens me. When he gets it all together, he’s going to be something.”
The two-game homestand the following weekend was even bigger. The opponent for both games was seventh-ranked Duke. Wooden still had a bad taste from his experience in North Carolina the year before. Though he was never one to emphasize winning, he made sure his players knew he expected them to exact full revenge for the way they had been treated by the fans down there. Allen even heard his coach talking trash to some of the Duke players during warm-ups.
Lucius can’t wait to get his hands on you. You’re in for a long night, son.
“It looked like he was just walking around being John Wooden,” Allen said, “but he was baiting their players.”
Duke coach Vic Bubas may have overlearned the lesson from the USC game. During the first game, every time Alcindor touched the ball, he was swarmed by three Duke defenders. Rather than forcing a ton of shots, Alcindor kept dishing to his wide-open teammates. He scored just 19 points, but Warren had 26 as UCLA won, 88–54. The next night, Bubas assigned just two defenders at a time to guard Alcindor. He scored 38 points in a 107–87 drubbing. “Wooden wanted us to beat ’em bad—and we did,” Heitz said.
The games were so lacking in competitive drama that a reporter asked Wooden afterward if Alcindor might “wreck” college basketball. “There’s no such thing as any one player wrecking the game,” Wooden scoffed. He pointed out that when Bill Russell was at San Francisco, he played in a three-second lane that was just six feet wide, instead of the current twelve-foot lane. So Alcindor couldn’t possibly dominate the way Russell did. Bubas disagreed, surmising that Alcindor might score 80 points one of these days. “I suppose that if I had one game to play against them and my job depended on it, I’d have to slow the pace of the game way down, play a zone defense, hit about fifty percent and hope like the devil you can do some kind of a job on the boards,” Bubas said. “But basically I do not believe in that kind of basketball. We like to go up and down the court.”
The Bruins faced a much stiffer challenge twelve days later at home against Colorado State. The Rams were a strong, veteran, physical team, and with six minutes to play, they trailed UCLA by just 1 point. Alcindor was mesmerized by the way Wooden took control of the end-of-game strategy. The coach was always precise with his language, but Alcindor noticed that under pressure he spoke even more loudly, enunciated even more clearly. Wooden never said the word
win
, but he sure wanted his team to finish with more points than the other guys. “When it came to winning a game, he went all out. He held back nothing,” Alcindor said. “He didn’t try and break the rules, but within the rules, he was going to try and crush you.”
After UCLA escaped with an 84–74 victory, thanks to Alcindor’s 34 points and 20 rebounds, Wooden sounded relieved that his team had been exposed as less than a juggernaut. “This game proved that we’re going to be down on certain nights,” Wooden said. “Like I’ve been saying all along, we’re a young team and people expect too much.”
The Colorado State game was also the first time—but far from the last—that the referees’ treatment of Alcindor became an issue. Rams coach Jim Williams said the reason his team got into foul trouble was that “Alcindor was being overprotected.” He added, “Alcindor is great. I don’t know what more he could do with the ball once he gets it, but he doesn’t need all that protection.” When Wooden was asked whether Alcindor was overprotected, he replied, “If he was, then I must be blind.”
That question would recur throughout Alcindor’s career at UCLA, but he would not play in many more close games. There were certainly none to be found over the next few weeks as the Bruins steamrolled their next four opponents by an average of 29 points per game. That included USC, which UCLA beat by 24 points in the finals of the L.A. Classic in late December. Poor Bob Boyd. At the very moment he had returned to coach his alma mater, he was met by an imposing center the likes of which the game had never seen. And the Trojans still had two games remaining against UCLA on their schedule. Unlike the first two meetings, those would count in the league standings. Boyd realized that if he didn’t come up with something new, the Bruins would turn his team into a laughingstock, over and over again.
* * *
How badly did Bob Boyd want to win? He was once called for a technical foul for arguing with a referee who had been the best man at his wedding. Boyd knew the biggest reason his predecessor, Forrest Twogood, was let go was that he had fallen so far behind Wooden. USC’s two December losses to the Bruins made him realize just how big the gap was. Boyd was close friends with Pete Newell, the only coach who consistently got the better of Wooden, so he picked Newell’s brain about his deliberate offense. Boyd began teaching that offense to his players on the first day of practice, but he had no intention of revealing it for a game that didn’t count in the conference standings. He decided to save it for the game between USC and UCLA that was scheduled to take place at the Sports Arena on February 4.
The Bruins came into that contest still undefeated and on a roll. Their only hint of a struggle after the Colorado State game had been a 76–67 win at Washington State. At the end of January, they had taken what turned out to be a harrowing trip to the Midwest. First, the team’s flight was delayed by a major snowstorm. The Bruins reached Chicago in time only because J. D. Morgan had convinced the pilot to land the plane in St. Louis, where a caravan of taxis awaited to whisk them to a train station. Only Morgan could pull off such a feat. Despite the horrible weather, more than nineteen thousand people packed into Chicago Stadium to watch the Bruins blitz Loyola University Chicago and Illinois on back-to-back nights by a total of 53 points.
Then there was the touchy matter of Alcindor’s safety. In the days leading up to the much-ballyhooed trip, he had received death threats via two letters that bore Chicago postmarks. UCLA hired a plainclothes officer to protect Alcindor during the trip. Having seldom traveled outside the comfortable bubble of Westwood, the other Bruins finally got a real taste of the bile that Alcindor had been exposed to for most of his life. “The stuff he went through was horrible,” Heitz said. “We’d go through the airport and people would walk by and say, ‘That’s the biggest nigger I’ve ever seen.’ It happened in the arenas, in hotels. It happened all over the place.”