It was all he could do to steal a few quiet moments. Oftentimes, before practice began, Wooden would come to the floor early wearing his standard gym shorts, zipped-up jacket, and sneakers and ask Marcucci to shag for him while he shot underhanded free throws. “We would chitchat a little bit, but I could see he was thinking about a lot of stuff,” Marcucci said. “Now that I look back on it, I’m convinced it was a way for him to mentally get away from the pressure. Just be by himself in the middle of Pauley, just him and a manager, shooting free throws.”
The less fun a team is having, the worse it usually plays. That was certainly the case for UCLA on the last weekend of February, when they went to the Bay Area with a chance to clinch the Pac-8 title. They did so, but not before needing double overtime to beat California, which had come in having lost seven of its last nine games.
Before they could get to the NCAA tournament, they had to play their annual series with USC, beginning with Friday night’s opener at the Sports Arena. USC had lost ten games that season, but the Trojans put up a much bigger fight than UCLA was expecting. Once again, the Trojans executed Bob Boyd’s deliberate offense beautifully. USC did not attempt a field goal for the first six and a half minutes, and the game stayed close to the wire. The Trojans appeared to have won when guard Steve Jennings sank a layup to put USC up 47–45 with four seconds remaining, but Shackelford answered with a miraculous thirty-foot buzzer beater—his first shot attempt of the game—to send the game into overtime. It took until the second overtime for UCLA to put USC away, 61–55. Boyd called it “the toughest loss I’ve ever had.”
The Bruins had every reason to expect the Trojans to come into Pauley Pavilion the next night devastated and deflated. Instead, they were ready to finish what they had started. Once again, USC had a chance to win in the final minute. With the score tied at 44–all, Boyd had his players dribble until there were just nineteen seconds left. Then he called time-out and drew up a play for Ernie Powell, his senior guard. The play worked to perfection as Powell drilled a jumper from twenty feet away.
This time, UCLA had no miracle answer. Wicks’s last-ditch shot attempt clanged off the rim at the buzzer, and the USC players and fans were soon celebrating wildly on the court. The Trojans had won, 46–44. Alcindor’s last regular season game at Pauley turned out to be the first one he had lost there and just his second loss overall since he had come to UCLA. “Our players weren’t fired up,” Wooden said afterward. “Maybe this loss will help us, put us in good shape for the tournament. At least I hope so.”
The loss ended a fifty-one-game winning streak at Pauley, a seventeen-game streak over USC, and a forty-five-game streak in the conference. Most of all, the loss chipped away, if only a little, at the Bruins’ aura of invincibility just as they headed into the NCAA tournament.
It had been a long time since Wooden had occasion to visit an opponent’s locker room to congratulate them on beating his Bruins. When Wooden got there, he found Boyd standing on a chair and shouting jubilantly to his players, “They’re damned lucky we didn’t beat them twice!” The players serenaded Boyd with a chorus of “Who’s the coach of the year?” Wooden waited patiently for Boyd to notice him, and then he shook Boyd’s hand. It was just one more sign of how unbalanced his world had gotten. Recounting the scene a few days later, Wooden groused to a reporter, “When winning becomes that important, I’m getting out.”
* * *
The loss to USC was not Alcindor’s final game in Pauley Pavilion because J. D. Morgan had arranged for UCLA to host the 1969 NCAA tournament’s West Regional. The Bruins’ first opponent was New Mexico State, which had used a slow pace to hang close with UCLA the year before. This time wasn’t so close as UCLA won, 53–38. A 90–52 thrashing of Santa Clara sent the Bruins back to the national semifinals in Louisville, Kentucky.
With each passing year, the NCAA tournament was becoming a bigger deal, and Wooden’s Bruins were the main reason. The interest from television had become so high that for the first time, the final weekend games were moved to a Thursday–Saturday schedule because the TV folks believed that not enough people would watch on a Friday night. Wooden, however, still would not allow his players to talk to the press, a decision unpopular with the sportswriters as well as with NCAA officials. “Maybe I am overprotective, but the three years haven’t been easy,” Wooden said. “I think these boys are taut.”
By the time the Bruins got to Louisville, they didn’t want to win the title so much as get it over with. That sapped them of their competitive edge, and it nearly cost them in their semifinal against Drake. UCLA immediately ran out to an 11–2 lead, but from there the Bruins seemed to relax. Wooden was particularly annoyed with Bill Sweek, whose playing time had dwindled the last few weeks. When Sweek missed a defensive assignment midway through the first half, Wooden parked him on the bench. Sweek seethed. “I was a senior. This was my eighty-ninth game,” he said. “I didn’t think I needed a lesson at that point in time.”
The old UCLA would have put the game out of reach, but there was no blitz in sight. In fact, the script was being flipped. Now it was the Bruins who were the bigger, slower team, while Drake was the smaller, speedier, more cohesive unit. Sweek sat and watched his senior season teeter on the brink, yet Wooden would not put him back in. The only thing that kept the Bruins in front was John Vallely, the long-range marksman who tossed in a career-high 29 points. But Vallely fouled out with four minutes left, so Wooden had no choice but to send in Sweek.
When the coach summoned Sweek to the scorer’s table, Sweek removed his warm-up shirt slowly and sauntered over with a look of disgust on his face. He wanted Wooden to know just how pissed he was. As it turned out, Wooden didn’t think he needed any lessons, either. “Sit down,” he barked.
Sweek did not sit down. He wheeled around, strutted past everyone on the bench, and headed straight for the locker room. He was through with basketball, through with UCLA, and most all, through with John Wooden. “I thought for a second, ‘You know, it’s Easter vacation. All my friends are going to Mexico. I’m just going to get in the shower, get my stuff, and hitchhike there. I’m done,’” Sweek said. Wooden put Terry Schofield into the game instead. “I remember thinking, that’s weird. Is Bill hurt or something?” Heitz said.
At first, Sweek was unable to open the door to the locker room. It took him several minutes to find someone to unlock it for him. Back on the court, UCLA appeared to stay in control until Drake exploded for 6 quick points in the final twenty seconds, but in the end, the Bulldogs came up just short and lost, 85–82. The close call put the Bruins one win away from an unprecedented third straight NCAA title. Their final opponent would be Wooden’s alma mater, Purdue, which had beaten North Carolina by 27 points in the other semifinal. Wooden, however, was not in a celebratory mood. All the pressure, all the conflict, all the mutinous behavior from his senior class had finally pushed him over the edge.
Wooden strode quickly off the court. He was the first member of the team to reach the locker room. There, he found Sweek naked in the shower, and he lit into his fifth-year senior something awful. “It was madder than I had ever seen him. The veins in his head were bulging,” Sweek said. When the rest of the team got there, Cunningham and Crum had to restrain Wooden from tackling Sweek in the shower. The players stood with their eyes wide and mouths agape. If they weren’t in such shock, they might have burst into hysterics. “It was tragic and hilarious at the time. Mostly hilarious,” Heitz said. “Wooden is yelling at Bill like he wants to fight him. Sweek is going, ‘You wanna come fight, old man? You’ve been messing with my mind for five years!’ And the whole team is dying laughing.”
Sweek gave as good as he got. “You’re right, Coach, and I’m wrong,” he said sarcastically. “In fact, you’re always right. Edgar Lacey quit, but you were right, and he was wrong. Don Saffer quit, but you were right, and he was wrong. All these problems, and you’re just never wrong. Did you ever think the problem was you?”
Finally, the assistants pried Wooden away. Since Wooden did not permit reporters in his locker room, nobody in the press got wind of what had happened. Sweek rode with the team back to the hotel, but he was sure he had played his last game for UCLA. Given what he did, he had to admit that he deserved that fate.
When he woke up Friday morning, Sweek had not yet been booted from the squad. So he went to breakfast. As the meal was winding down, Wooden said he wanted to speak to the team. Instead of coming down on Sweek again, Wooden told the team that he had thought about what Sweek had said and conceded his argument had some merit. He went on to tell the players how proud he was of them and how much he enjoyed coaching them. He told them they were a great team. “I remember talking to Kenny about it later, and we were both just stunned that Wooden would be so honest about how he cared for the team,” Marcucci said. “Other than his wife and kids, he was not open to talking about his feelings that way. He didn’t want to burden other people. It made a real impression on everybody.”
At the end of his brief talk, Wooden shook hands with Sweek in front of the team. He never apologized—neither did Sweek, for that matter—but the incident had been put behind them. Sweek was still on the team for the championship game. “It surprised me, because I think most coaches would have thrown me off the team,” Sweek said. “We were under all this pressure—I know he felt the pressure—but despite all that, and despite what I had done, the fact that he would try to bring us together and mend this thing and forgive me, I thought was impressive. He forgave me and wanted me to be there and play in the final game.”
Maybe it was the catharsis of that confrontation. Maybe it was the presence of Alcindor’s father, Big Al, playing first trombone in the UCLA band. Maybe it was the fact that there was only one game left. Or maybe it was simply because they were a great team that had gotten a lousy game out of its system. Whatever the reason, UCLA took the floor with real purpose on Saturday night. Purdue never had a chance. Wooden sicced his best defender, Heitz, on Rick Mount, and he held the Boilermakers star scoreless for more than eighteen consecutive minutes during the first half. During one stretch, Heitz forced Mount to miss fourteen consecutive shots. Wooden also scuttled his full-court press for the first time in seven years; the Drake game had exposed the fact that he did not have the personnel to use it.
As the game wound down, the only suspense was whether Alcindor would go through with his plan to dunk the ball in one last gesture of protest against the basketball rules committee. Wooden removed him with just under two minutes to play, before he had the chance. The final score was UCLA 92, Purdue 72. The only disappointment for Alcindor was that Lucius Allen wasn’t there to share the glory with him. “Lucius should be here. I bet he doesn’t feel right,” he said.
It was an emphatic valedictory for the young giant. He finished with 37 points and 20 rebounds as he completed his college career with an 88–2 record, with both losses coming by a single basket. In becoming the first player to be named the NCAA tournament’s Most Oustanding Player three times, Alcindor established himself as arguably the greatest player in the history of college basketball. Wooden did the same as a coach. He was now the first coach to win five NCAA titles as well as the only one to capture three in a row.
After all they had been through, all the pranks and the fights and the parties and the complaints about double standards, the seniors were only just beginning to realize that the important things they learned from Wooden had little to do with basketball. “He came from a conservative environment, yet he was able to understand the feelings of people who were African Americans or downtrodden or weak. He was able to be flexible enough to change his thinking during the craziness of the sixties,” Sweek said. “He was such a morally upright person. He could hear and he would listen. Despite his background, he was willing to change. He really was a lifelong learner.”
For all that Alcindor had accomplished between the lines, his two most vivid memories from his senior season took place on a bus and over breakfast. He never felt particularly close to Wooden, but he understood that Wooden was a major reason why he was leaving Westwood a better man. “He was the ultimate,” Alcindor said years later, well after he became widely known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “He was a teacher above all else. He challenged us without taking away our spirit. He taught me how to instill confidence in others. He made me understand that everything is a learning game. It’s all learning about yourself and learning how to be successful.”
The teacher learned a great deal from his students as well. It had been a trying three years, but the Alcindor era was officially over. Maybe now life could return to normal. Maybe now Wooden could find a better balance. “I look forward to again coaching to try to win,” he said, “rather than trying to avoid being defeated.”
25
The Last Banquet
In October 1969, John and Nell spent a glorious weekend with their children in Martinsville, Indiana. Thousands of people welcomed their native son to the annual Morgan County Fall Foliage Festival, where the India Rubber Man served as grand marshal. A street was renamed in Wooden’s honor. Even though he had spent more than two decades living two thousand miles from where he grew up, Wooden was still a Hoosier at heart. As one national sportswriter had recently put it, “He goes better with sycamores than palm trees.”
His midwestern attitudes were making him feel especially old-fashioned as he watched the game he loved turn into a big business. In the weeks that followed the 1969 NCAA tournament, Wooden watched with disdain as Alcindor became the subject of an unprecedented bidding war between the NBA and its upstart rival, the American Basketball Association. Alcindor had tapped Sam Gilbert to represent him in the negotiations, and Papa Sam told Alcindor he would not charge for his services. The Milwaukee Bucks had won a coin flip to earn the number one pick in the NBA draft, but first they had to ward off ABA commissioner George Mikan, who told Gilbert that Alcindor could choose his team, which would presumably be the New York Nets. Alcindor eventually signed with the Bucks for $1.4 million per year. “I’m glad to see Lewis get all he can get,” Wooden said, “but the sort of money being offered to athletes these days is completely out of line.”