Given Wooden’s paltry salary at UCLA, it was only a matter of time before the pros came calling for him, too. After Lakers coach Butch van Breda Kolff resigned following the 1969 play-offs, the team’s owner, Jack Kent Cooke, offered to pay Wooden several times what he was currently making to coach the Lakers. Wooden said he wanted to discuss it with Nell and his children. “I told them I would have had to travel so much more and be away from home,” Wooden said. “I said, ‘You can have a lot more things that I just simply can’t afford now.’ But they said, ‘No, Dad, you wouldn’t be happy with that.’” According to Wooden, Cooke was furious. “I don’t think I would have enjoyed working for Jack Kent Cooke,” Wooden said years later.
Wooden’s off-season was further upended in October, when Alcindor published a lengthy diary in
Sports Illustrated
under his byline that recounted in vivid detail the unhappiness he had felt in college. The second installment was headlined “UCLA Was a Mistake.” Wooden admitted he was hurt by the series. “I’m very, very sorry to find out that he seemed to be as unhappy as he has indicated,” Wooden said. “I honestly believe that he would have been ten times more miserable at many other places he could have gone.”
The articles only deepened Wooden’s relief about beginning a new era at UCLA, post-Alcindor. “I am looking forward to this season more than I have the seasons of the last three or four years,” he said before the first practice. “We are not on the spot like we were before. The problems are fewer. I don’t have to play nursemaid to so many hurt feelings.”
The roster lacked a once-in-a-generation talent, but that fit better with Wooden’s egalitarian ethos. He was eager to reinstate his full-court pressure and up-tempo attack. He would go back to the high-post offense that he had used in all but three years as a head coach. And while the roster had plenty of talent, there was a significant drop-off between the top seven and the rest of the group. Just the way Wooden liked it.
Naturally, much of the early attention fell on Alcindor’s replacement at center, Steve Patterson. A six-foot-nine junior, Patterson had sterling credentials as a former prep All-American at Santa Maria High School. As a sophomore, however, he had mostly been Alcindor’s understudy, as well as his foil in practice. “Lew really destroyed my confidence,” Patterson said. He couldn’t match Alcindor’s size, but he was a good passer and a much better long-range shooter. That made him an ideal center for the high-post offense.
Indeed, this was shaping up to be one of Wooden’s best-shooting teams in years. Senior guard John Vallely, whose 29 points against Drake had allowed the Bruins to avert disaster in the NCAA semifinals the year before, was as good a shooter as there was in the conference. And there were plenty of possibilities to play alongside him, including Andy Hill, a six-foot-one sophomore guard who had shared the freshman team’s MVP award, six-foot-three junior Terry Schofield, and six-foot-three junior Kenny Booker. All of them, however, would quickly be outclassed by Henry Bibby, a six-foot-one sophomore dynamo from Franklinton, North Carolina. Bibby was the latest to join the conga line of out-of-state black players who came to UCLA because of its prestigious basketball program and progressive racial tradition. Bibby was so good in high school that Wooden sent Jay Carty to scout him. Carty sat next to Bibby’s parents during the game, visited their home afterward, and then got chased out of town by white vigilantes who were enforcing a local rule forbidding whites to stay in black neighborhoods late at night.
Bibby had shown great promise as a freshman, averaging 26.8 points per game. He also fit nicely into Wooden’s austere culture. “I wasn’t a Goody Two-shoes or anything, but I respected him a lot and tried not to go against what he said. I was too scared,” Bibby said. Nor was Bibby put off by Wooden’s aloofness. “I was seventeen, eighteen years old. I didn’t want to get to know him,” Bibby said. “It’s not like I was looking forward to going over to a white guy’s house. I just came out of segregation in North Carolina.”
Wooden went into practice believing that the competition for playing time in the backcourt alongside Vallely would be wide open, but it was evident right away that Bibby was ahead of the pack. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a player with more range,” Wooden said. “And Henry not only works hard; he accepts criticism readily.”
And yet everyone knew that the heart of this 1969–70 team would be the junior forwards, Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe. On the surface, they appeared similar. They were cocky, flamboyant black kids from Los Angeles, and the best of friends. Underneath, however, there were subtle differences. Rowe grew up in all-black Compton, where he broke Edgar Lacey’s city scoring record in high school, and he emerged from that environment with a few rough edges. During one game, he got so angry with his defender that he popped him in the mouth with an elbow and knocked a tooth to the floor. As the kid grabbed his face in anguish, Rowe leaned down, picked up the tooth, and handed it back to him.
Wicks, on the other hand, hailed from Santa Monica, a much more well off and diverse community by the Pacific. Wicks could put on a glare when it suited him, but most of the time he was easygoing and fun-loving. He delighted his teammates with his spot-on imitation of the Ratso Rizzo character from the movie
Midnight Cowboy
or his ability to recite lengthy passages from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. Wicks was also a flashy dresser. He loved nothing more than to arrive at Pauley while the freshman game was still going on and strut with Rowe across the court like peacocks, basking in the adoring cheers of the UCLA faithful.
Physically, Wicks had the makings of an All-American. He was a chiseled six-foot-eight, 230 pounds, with stunning quickness and leaping ability—“a real specimen,” as Jim Nielsen put it. Problem was, Wicks had gotten by for so long on ability that he never had to learn to play. He was the quintessential wild child. When Wicks was a sophomore, Wooden tried to tame Wicks by planting him on the bench. Without Alcindor on the team, that was no longer an option.
Wicks and Rowe had waited their turn. Now that it had come, they wanted everyone to know it. They showed up for the freshman-varsity game sporting thick Afros and long muttonchop sideburns. Wooden had let Alcindor and Warren get away with that, so they assumed he would do the same for them. They were wrong. Wooden told Wicks and Rowe that if they didn’t shave, they would not play. At first they weren’t sure he was serious, but Wooden wouldn’t budge. So they went to Ducky Drake’s training room and cleaned up.
After the game was over, Wicks and Rowe apologized to Wooden. Wooden told the boys to forget it and promised they would have a fine season. Everyone was on the same page, for a little while anyway.
* * *
Just as the 1969–70 season was getting under way, UCLA was becoming a center of conflict in the civil rights movement. At the urging of California governor Ronald Reagan, the state’s Board of Regents had fired Angela Davis, a visiting UCLA philosophy professor. Davis was an outspoken feminist, a Black Panther, and an avowed member of the Communist Party USA. Her firing set off a wave of student protests, as well as criticism from civil rights leaders that she had been fired on the basis of her race, not her beliefs. Davis was reinstated, but she continued to spout her incendiary rhetoric on campus and around the city throughout the school year.
The Davis contretemps was just one more disruption that Wooden had to shut out of his program. “It was almost schizophrenic going from campus life to this cloistered church of UCLA basketball,” Andy Hill said. “There were no people in the stands. All you heard was Coach’s whistle, squeaking sneakers, guys talking on defense, the net swishing, dead silence. That was a symphony orchestra compared to what was going on right outside the door.”
The players understood the need for Wooden to build a cocoon—they wanted to win just as badly as he did—but unlike him they could not shut out the world. The Vietnam War was not some faraway abstraction for them. Some of their friends from high school had gone to Vietnam and had been killed or badly wounded. This issue was much more important to them than basketball.
As it turned out, the first day of practice in the fall of 1969 coincided with a national campus moratorium that had been called to protest the war. A few days beforehand, Hill and his close friend, junior forward John Ecker, went to Wooden and asked him to cancel the first practice as an expression of solidarity. Wooden wasn’t having it. “
You
don’t have to come to practice,” he told them. “In fact, you don’t
ever
have to come to practice. But there is no way that I am going to cancel it.”
Wooden never told his players what politics they should have, nor did he ever reveal his own. (“What were his politics? I don’t think he had any,” Hill said.) Yet, he repeatedly cautioned them against getting too swept up by the tumult, not because he disagreed with the movement’s views but because he feared it would penetrate his sacred cocoon. When Wooden heard that Wicks and Rowe had joined UCLA’s Black Student Union, he pulled them aside and gave them a gentle warning. As Wicks later recalled, Wooden told them, “I’m not telling you what to believe. You have to follow your hearts, but you can’t allow any of this to interfere with your education or playing basketball.” Wicks said, “We had to refrain from being too active after that. It was hard, but we understood.”
If Wooden hoped that Alcindor’s departure would diminish expectations for the coming season, he was disappointed right away. The Bruins were ranked No. 1 in the UPI’s preseason poll and No. 4 in the AP poll. It wouldn’t take long to find out whether those rankings were reasonable. UCLA’s first opponent, Arizona, had been picked to win the Western Athletic Conference. The Bruins beat them by 25 points, with Wicks leading the way with 21 points and 15 rebounds, and all five starters scoring in double figures. “Everybody is doing something now,” Arizona coach Bruce Larson said.
Clearly, though, the team was operating with a smaller margin for error. That was evident in the Bruins’ next game, at Minnesota. Stymied by the Golden Gophers’ zone defense, the Bruins trailed by 7 points with just under five minutes to play. Vallely rescued them with four straight jumpers from the corners to propel them to a 72–71 overtime win.
Over the next three months, UCLA vacillated between easy blowouts and narrow escapes, but they always won. Meanwhile, with J. D. Morgan wielding his magic, vast television audiences followed their exploits. That included a home game against Notre Dame on January 3 that was televised nationally by Eddie Einhorn’s TVS Network. (UCLA won, 108–77.) The Bruins ran their record to 21–0, but that included several close shaves. They needed a ten-foot baseline jumper from Wicks to squeeze by Princeton, 76–75, and they barely squeaked by Oregon State (in Pauley) and Bradley (in Chicago Stadium) by 1 and 3 points, respectively. Playing at Washington State on February 9, the Bruins came out flat and found themselves down by 13 in the first half, yet they still clawed their way to win 72–70.
At least the games were interesting again. They were also more aesthetically pleasing. UCLA had returned to its racehorse ways, with blitzes and crisp passes and beautiful teamwork. Wooden showed how he had evolved into a savvy game tactician, toggling between man-to-man and zone defenses, depending on the circumstances. If teams tried to zone his club, Wooden ordered his players to stall. When UCLA held the ball for thirteen minutes without taking a shot during a home win over Washington, even the fans in Pauley Pavilion booed him. These close games should have caused Wooden more stress, but, like his players, he was galvanized by the challenge of trying to win without Alcindor. “I’m like any fan, I guess,” he said. “I feel like I have something to do. I feel more alive. It’s been a long time.”
Wooden especially enjoyed coaching a team that was balanced again. If one of the players was about to have an Alcindor-esque scoring night, Wooden would collar him. “He thought that would breed selfishness and envy,” Bibby later said. “There were nights when I was well on my way to scoring thirty-five, but he would pull me out.” The sense of urgency made for a happier locker room. “The esprit de corps was, frankly, not good last year,” Vallely said. “This year it seems like we’re playing real basketball, the way we grew up playing it. It’s a lot more fun now.”
In pulling all these great escapes, Wooden knew his team was playing with fire. With each win, he could see his players were becoming complacent, less engaged. He could also see the usual signs of friction starting to emerge. One troubling pattern was the way the team was breaking down along racial lines. The strife was nothing compared to the broader clashes that were ripping the country apart, but it festered nonetheless. The players generally got along, but outside of basketball, each man socialized with the guys who looked like him. Wooden tried to break this pattern by assigning blacks and whites to room with each other in the hotels, but midway through the season, the players asked if they could resegregate. “We were right in the middle of the civil rights movement, and it was not very cool to be white,” Terry Schofield said. “There were a lot of racial problems on the team. It wasn’t quite reverse racism; it was more subtle than that. I’ve never been black, and I’m sure that under the circumstances that was not an easy thing. But it was one of the least happy experiences I’ve had.”
Meanwhile, Wicks and Rowe continued to test Wooden’s authority. When Wooden received a report that they had skipped an early-morning music class, he told them at practice that he didn’t want it to happen again. The next morning, Rowe called Wicks to say he had been out late the night before and wanted to skip the class again. Fearing another reproach from Wooden, Wicks convinced him that they should go. When they got to class, they found Wooden waiting for them.
Wooden had returned to his old substitution patterns as well. Even during blowouts, he rarely pulled his starters until the very end, and when he did, he usually didn’t play more than one or two other guys. That made life difficult for the players who were not in the top six or seven, many of whom started to feel as if they didn’t matter. Andy Hill, for one, noticed that whenever he made a good play in practice, Wooden tended to chastise the starter for having “permitted” the play rather than praising Hill for making it. “I respected him an awful lot, but I didn’t feel he liked me very much,” John Ecker said. “He wasn’t a guy to come out and talk to us a lot personally.”