Hayes scored 10 quick points to stake Houston to a 9-point lead. Wooden replaced Lacey with Mike Lynn. According to Wooden, as Lacey walked to his seat, he shook his head at the coach and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” That did not bolster Wooden’s confidence in him. Meanwhile, Alcindor failed to counter. Not only was he missing shots at an alarming rate (for him, anyway), but his lack of wind slowed down UCLA’s fast break. At one point, Mike Warren told Lynn Shackelford that he wanted to ask Wooden to take out Alcindor. Shackelford told him he didn’t think that was a good idea.
Mike Lynn couldn’t guard Hayes either, so Wooden substituted Jim Nielsen. Nielsen kept Hayes in check the rest of the way, but a lot of damage was done. Hayes scored a remarkable 29 points in the first half, and Houston went into its locker room owning a 46–43 lead.
By the time the second half got under way, the television audience had grown so much that Einhorn was fielding calls from businesses looking to advertise during the second half. He did the deals over the phone and handed scribbled plugs for Enberg to read over the air. Nielsen continued to contain Hayes while the Bruins chipped at the Houston lead. With Alcindor floundering, much of the scoring fell to Lucius Allen, who made a variety of jump shots despite the odd sight lines. “I shot from spots on the floor. I didn’t look at the rim. That’s why I was able to play the game relatively normally,” he said. Meanwhile, Lacey sat anxiously on the Bruins’ bench, awaiting his return. At one point, he leaned over and asked Jerry Norman, “Am I going back in?” Norman told him to sit tight.
UCLA finally erased the deficit midway through the second half, knotting the score at 54–all. Houston briefly reclaimed the lead, but with 3 minutes to play, Alcindor tied it again, at 65. Field goals by Hayes and Houston guard Don Chaney pushed the Cougars to a 4-point advantage with 1:53 remaining. Allen made a bucket and two free throws to knot the score once again entering the final minute. By this point, the Astrodome was so loud, Chaney couldn’t hear the ball bounce as he dribbled.
With 28 seconds left, Nielsen fouled Hayes on a jump shot. Hayes was only a 60 percent free throw shooter, but he made both attempts to give the Cougars a 71–69 lead. The Bruins followed with a rare mental error. Allen drove the ball and spotted Shackelford in the corner, his favorite spot. Only when he tried to feed Shackelford the pass, Warren thought it was coming for him, and he reached for the ball. It went out of bounds, giving Houston possession. “I don’t think I would have made the shot anyway,” Shackelford said years later. “I was too tired.”
With just a few seconds remaining, the ball went to Hayes on the ensuing inbounds. Displaying his ineptitude at dribbling, Hayes slapped at the ball with just his right hand, but he managed to avoid the defense for several seconds before passing it to a teammate just as the gun went off. The final score was Houston 71, UCLA 69. As the clock expired, the Cougars jubilantly jumped into each other’s arms while hundreds of fans sprinted all the way from the stands to the court. A few minutes later, Enberg found Wooden to get his thoughts on the loss. “We’ve been winning a long time,” he said. “The only thing I think is worse than losing too much is winning too much. Maybe we’ve been winning too much.”
The game was a disaster for Alcindor, who finished with 15 points on four-for-eighteen shooting, the only time in his college career that he would shoot under 50 percent. When he was asked afterward if his eye was the reason he played so poorly, Alcindor replied, “No. I can’t say what it was. We just lost to a better team.” That was far from true, but Alcindor didn’t want to be seen as making an excuse. Wooden blamed himself for playing Alcindor in the first place. “During every time out, I asked Lewis if he felt he could keep going, and he always said yes,” Wooden said. “I kept him in, but perhaps I was wrong.”
For all the buildup, for all the hype, the game had actually exceeded its billing. The eyes of the nation were focused on college basketball as never before, and the sport delivered in dramatic fashion. “For the great majority of the audience, the big attraction of the game was, can anybody beat this John Wooden powerhouse?” Enberg said. “They tuned in looking for the upset, and they got it. That’s what made the game so memorable. Had UCLA won, it would have been just another case of the Bruins beating everybody they played.” For several weeks, Wooden received mail complimenting him for his postgame interview. For most of the massive audience watching at home, this was the first time they had heard the man’s voice, the first time they had witnessed the equipoise that had long become familiar to people in Los Angeles.
The UCLA players knew something that all those millions watching on television didn’t. Wooden wasn’t just being gracious. He was saying how he genuinely felt. He actually seemed happy that his team had been knocked from its dizzying peak. “He came into the locker room smiling,” Shackelford said. “I think he was relieved.” Now that the pressure was off, Wooden hoped his world wouldn’t spin quite so fast. His bride hoped so, too. “I’ll be seeing a pleasant face now,” Nell predicted, “instead of a face that’s about to explode.”
* * *
Wooden would need his even keel more than ever in the days that followed. Shortly after he returned from Houston, he attended a meeting of the Bruin Hoopsters, an alumni fund-raising group. His team had just ended a forty-seven-game winning streak, yet some of the boosters made Wooden feel as if he had let them down. “It brought me back to earth in a hurry,” he said later. To cheer him up, Morgan sent Wooden an article from a 1915 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post.
It was titled “The Penalty of Leadership.”
Wooden could handle external pressure. Internally, however, his machine was about to combust. The problem was Edgar Lacey, who never reentered the Houston game after Wooden had yanked him midway through the first half. In the dressing room afterward, Allen could be heard asking aloud, “Why didn’t Coach use Lacey?” Lacey felt humiliated. On the bus ride back to the hotel, he sat next to Alcindor and said over and over, “I’m gonna quit.”
Lacey stewed over the weekend, but he practiced with the team on Monday. The next morning, he picked up a newspaper and read some comments that Wooden had made the day before during the weekly meeting of the Southern California basketball writers. Asked why he never put Lacey back in the game, Wooden replied, “Edgar got his feelings hurt early. He wasn’t effective in our high post and he wasn’t effective guarding his man. He didn’t especially feel like coming back in anyway, so I didn’t feel it was right to use him.”
Needless to say, John Wooden was no expert on the feelings of most of his players, least of all a stubborn, taciturn young man like Lacey. It was a foolish remark, and Lacey was offended. “He threw the paper down on the floor,” his father, Edgar Sr., said. “He told me he was bouncing up and down on the bench and that he told the coach he wanted to play.”
Later that morning, Lacey went to Wooden’s office and asked if he really said those words. Wooden replied that he did. “You gave me the impression you didn’t want to play,” Wooden said. “That’s exactly what I told the papers, and I’ll tell you that.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” Lacey said. “I quit.”
This was not the first time a player had told Wooden he would quit. Most of the time, they cooled off after a day or two and returned to practice. When Lacey failed to show up later that day or on Wednesday, Wooden asked Mike Warren to see if he could convince Lacey to come back. It didn’t work.
At the heart of the dispute was the question of whether Lacey did, in fact, indicate to Wooden that he didn’t want to go back in the game. An anonymous player later told
Sports Illustrated
that “Lacey shook off Wooden’s motions to re-enter the game,” but that was not how Norman and Neville Saner, Lacey’s roommate on the road, remembered it. “I was sitting close to Edgar. I remember him saying to Norman, ‘Can I get back in?’ My impression was he definitely wanted to get back in the ball game,” Saner said. Lacey’s former teammates also had a hard time believing Wooden’s version. “I can’t imagine that was true,” Lynn said. “Edgar was very proud and competitive. He would do anything for the team. It certainly wasn’t Edgar’s fault that Elvin had a great game. Somehow, he ended up taking the brunt of that, and it was fairly public. He was a pretty sensitive guy, so he didn’t take that very well.”
Fourteen years before, when Willie Naulls pulled a similar stunt, Wooden called Naulls at home, apologized, and asked him to come back to the team. If he had done the same with Lacey, he might have come back as well. But Wooden never even tried. “If he kicked you out of practice, you had to ask to come back,” Allen said. “Because he was in control.”
Alcindor was especially dismayed. Not only was he losing a capable teammate; he was losing his best friend, and his coach wouldn’t do anything about it. Alcindor kept waiting for Wooden to explain himself to the team or apologize to Lacey. Instead, he referred to the matter obliquely by saying things like, “We all know that not every player can play every game, but that shouldn’t upset them. There are a lot of things involved.”
The situation deepened Alcindor’s suspicion that Wooden, whom he otherwise regarded as fair and honorable, had a blind spot. He suspected that Wooden favored players who, in Alcindor’s words, were “morally right to play.” Exhibit A was Lynn Shackelford. He was an active member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a model citizen who always showed up on time and said the right thing. Alcindor believed Lacey and Lynn were more talented than Shackelford, yet because Wooden viewed Shackelford as morally superior to the other two, he was the one who got the most playing time.
By Wednesday, the rift between Wooden and Lacey had spilled out into the public. The Bruins were headed to New York for a high-profile pair of games at Madison Square Garden against Holy Cross and Boston College. This was Alcindor’s big homecoming, another marketing ploy by J. D. Morgan that generated $60,000 for the school. When asked why Lacey wasn’t making the trip, Wooden explained that Lacey had not practiced in two days. He also conceded that he had not spoken with Lacey since Tuesday morning. “Had he joined us [on Wednesday], he would have made the trip, but he cannot go with us now,” Wooden said. “I think it would be ill-advised to dismiss him now because he is hurt enough already. He has to sit down and think it all over. I can understand how he feels. I hope he can think it over and come back.”
Lacey was finally reached by a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
on Wednesday night. “It’s his move,” he said, referring to Wooden.
Wooden sounded more contrite during a press conference in New York on Friday morning, the day of the Holy Cross game. “He’s just very quiet and sensitive, and if I had known he felt this strongly about it, I would have put him back in against Houston,” he said. Even with Alcindor still hampered by blurry vision and suboptimal conditioning, UCLA easily dispatched Holy Cross, 90–67, before beating Boston College by a more modest 13 points on Saturday night.
After the Bruins returned home, Lacey remained AWOL and wanted to stay that way. He finally unloaded his feelings about Wooden to Jeff Prugh of the
Los Angeles Times
. “I’ve never enjoyed playing for that man,” Lacey said. “That [Houston game] was the last straw. It all started my sophomore year when he tried to change the mechanics of my shooting.… And now, I have no one to blame but myself for staying this long. He has sent people by to persuade me to reconsider, but I have nothing to reconsider. I’m glad I’m getting out now while I still have some of my pride, my sanity and my self-esteem left.”
Lacey was still wounded by Wooden’s suggestion that he did not want to go back in the game. “That statement is too foul for words. With about eight minutes to go in the game, I asked Coach Norman, ‘Am I going to go back in the game?’ The answer was negative,” Lacey said. “I think a lot of it is because he wanted to play Shack. He is sacrificing my ability and Mike’s ability to promote Shack.” Lacey added that he felt “misused” in Wooden’s offense—“Ever since I’ve played for him, he has always discouraged me on my shooting”—and he left little doubt that he did not intend to rejoin the squad. “I’m sick and tired of being appeased by the coach. He’s on the brink of ruining my confidence. I think I’m better off getting out now.”
When Prugh told Wooden what Lacey said, Wooden asked, “You aren’t going to print any of this in the paper, are you?” Told that the answer was yes, Wooden indicated that he felt bad about what was happening, but he insisted he would not reach out to Lacey the way he had done for Naulls. “I’m never going to run a boy down,” he said. “He should come back because I think he’s making a mistake. I have never said anything but that he’s the best forward we have. I wish he’d think it over. Regardless of how he feels about me, I do care about him.”
And yet how was Lacey supposed to know that? At that moment, he needed Wooden to tell him that he cared, but Wooden was not capable of expressing himself that way. It was simply not how he was raised. Wooden’s father was loving, but he was a stoic man not given to gestures of affection, physical or verbal. The most revered adult male of Wooden’s youth, Earl Warriner, had once whacked his backside with a paddle in front of the entire school and later denied him the chance to play a game because he had shown a hint of obstreperousness. Piggy Lambert ran Wooden ragged and shamed him into turning down the chance at a more comfortable life. These men—always, they were men—had given John Wooden his primary education. Love was supposed to be shown, not expressed. Life was supposed to be hard, not easy. When the problem arose with Edgar Lacey, Wooden applied what he had learned thirty or forty years earlier. But times had changed, and his players had changed with them. Wooden might have seen that if he hadn’t been so stubborn.
Even to those people who had detected friction between Lacey and Wooden, the depth of Lacey’s antagonism was shocking. “It seemed out of the blue. I didn’t see anything developing,” Norman said. Even Neville Saner said he had “no inkling” Lacey was that unhappy. “I was surprised Edgar quit,” Saner said. “I thought he would hang in there.”