That kind of confrontation, however, was unusual. For the most part, UCLA’s bombastic athletic director and its low-key basketball coach forged a productive, respectful partnership. And when they did butt heads, it was usually Morgan doing the butting. At the core of the relationship lay a mutual understanding: J. D. was the boss. On this, there was never an argument.
Not that Wooden had much choice. Morgan may have been capable, but he could also be overbearing and meddlesome, and Wooden was powerless to stop him. Morgan insisted on meeting personally with Wooden’s recruits, often asking the coach to leave Morgan’s office so he could speak with the young men alone. J. D. insisted on knowing every detail about every program at UCLA, not just basketball and football, and especially regarding academics. “J. D. was never modest about telling Coach whether he was right or wrong. He’d tell him,” said Bill Ackerman, who coached Morgan on UCLA’s tennis team before becoming the university’s director of Associated Students. “J. D. was very close to Wooden. I think he was probably maybe closer than Wooden would have liked to have him.”
The most obvious example was Morgan’s habit of sitting on Wooden’s bench during major games as well as for the NCAA tournament. This was an affront to Wooden’s authority, but the coach never objected. “Coach didn’t like J. D. sitting on the bench. He didn’t like that at all,” Gary Cunningham said. “Coach wasn’t a person that wanted to be confrontational, so J. D. sat there. He second-guessed Coach sometimes, too. We’d hear it as assistants.” Charles Young, who became UCLA’s chancellor in 1968, said that Morgan believed he was “a calming and helpful force” on that bench, which was curious given that Morgan was Wooden’s equal, if not superior, when it came to riding the refs. “J. D.used to be on the bench and he was very tough on officials. He’d write reports on them,” the broadcaster Fred Hessler said. During a game at Washington, Morgan was actually whistled for a technical foul.
Wooden accepted Morgan’s meddling because he knew that in the end, J. D. had his back. When Douglas Hobbs, a prominent political science professor, wrote Wooden a nasty letter complaining about his players’ poor sportsmanship, Morgan invited the two of them to his office and brokered a truce. Morgan also ran interference on Wooden’s behalf with Sidney Wicks. Over the summer of 1970, Wicks had shown up at an awards dinner for Wooden at the Beverly Hilton sporting a thick beard. When Wooden saw him, he turned to Hessler and said, “Fred, if I had a razor, I’d shave him right here in the lobby.” Wicks continued to test Wooden during the season, which prompted Morgan to call Wicks into his office and say, “Whatever you think of Coach Wooden’s rules, it would be good for you to play at UCLA this season. A few months from now, you’ll turn pro, get a big contract, and you can wear the beard anyway you like. So why not humor him for a few more months?” It was good advice, and Wicks took it.
Morgan and Wooden had few disputes but several disagreements. The primary one was over scheduling. Wooden believed that Morgan’s habit of loading up on easy nonconference home games hindered the Bruins’ preparation for conference play. “I would talk to him about it sometimes and he’d say, ‘Well, you’re doing all right, aren’t you?’ Since we were winning the conference and national championships almost every year, I could not argue,” Wooden said. Morgan had scheduled the 1968 “Game of the Century” in the Astrodome against Wooden’s wishes, but Morgan turned down a repeat invitation the following year. He told Wooden that the first game was great for basketball, but a second would be exploitative.
The other point of contention between the two men was recruiting. Morgan may have been the first athletic director in history to complain that one of his coaches wasn’t spending
more
money. Wooden was adamantly opposed to out-of-state recruiting unless the player made the first contact. (When Wooden declined to pursue Pete Trgovich, a six-foot-four forward from East Chicago, Indiana, Cunningham wrote a phony letter from Trgovich to Wooden to get the ball rolling.) Whenever Morgan tried to prod Wooden into changing his approach, the coach stood his ground. As Wooden put it, “I could tell him like he told me about the scheduling.… Well, we’re doing all right with the players I’m recruiting.”
Morgan’s tireless work ethic fueled his ascension to the NCAA’s powerful basketball committee, where he worked hand in glove with NCAA president Walter Byers to negotiate multimillion-dollar television contracts. Nobody could match Morgan’s contacts within the TV industry, and he was the first to say that his negotiating skills were unsurpassed. Morgan also held a similar position inside the Pac-8 Conference, where he helped the league secure a lucrative contract for the Rose Bowl. “I’m not exaggerating when I say what J. D. wanted, J. D. got,” Professor Douglas Hobbs said.
“J. D. was a remarkable guy. He was a real operator,” said Pete Newell, who served as Cal’s athletic director from 1960 to 1968. “He could break every darn rule in the book, but he was able to get more for UCLA than any athletic director in the history of any school.… Look at all the [NCAA tournament] regionals he got for UCLA. They didn’t just play there by accident. J. D. somehow convinced the powers that be to do it.”
Morgan was smart and powerful, and he wanted everyone to know it. Cunningham recalled several occasions when Morgan would summon him to his office and make him sit there for several minutes while Morgan finished up whatever he was scribbling on his desk. “It was a power deal that he wanted you to know that he’s in charge,” Cunningham said. Wooden likewise recalled hearing shouting matches in the hallways, with Morgan doing most of the shouting. “I think he was highly respected by all the others in the conference, but not personally liked by many,” Wooden said. “I think that was true at UCLA, to be honest with you.”
Among the players, the reviews on Morgan were mixed. They liked flying first class (while Morgan volunteered to sit in coach), benefited from his business acumen, respected his influence, and appreciated his interest in their academics. On the other hand, they didn’t like his intrusions, and they sure as heck didn’t think he belonged on their bench. “He was a bully and a blowhard,” Kenny Heitz said. “We wouldn’t see him all season until the Final Four, and then he’d be sitting on the bench. One game a ref told him to sit down and shut up, and we all cheered.”
The relationship between Wooden and Morgan would never have worked if the men did not share a genuine respect. “He’s the greatest fundamental coach ever in the game,” said Morgan, who won eight NCAA titles himself as UCLA’s tennis coach. That did not mean, however, that they were close friends. Their conversations revolved almost exclusively around business. For example, even though the entire country was talking about the Vietnam War, Wooden had no idea how Morgan felt about it. “I don’t think, as a coach under him, it was my responsibility in any way to be concerned about how J. D. Morgan felt about the Vietnam War,” Wooden said. Note Wooden’s use of the phrase “under him.” This was not a partnership between equals. They were a powerful two-man machine, but only one could be the engine. As Gary Cunningham put it, “It was a professional relationship. It wasn’t one you’d call a friendship.”
* * *
Could this be the year?
That titillating question was on the lips of USC basketball fans as the 1970–71 season tipped off. It had taken four years, but Bob Boyd now had enough high-caliber players to dethrone John Wooden’s mighty Bruins. Along with All-America candidate Paul Westphal, now a junior, Boyd returned eleven of twelve players from the group that had shared second place in the Pac-8 the year before. “This is the best team I’ve had since I’ve been here,” the coach said on USC’s first day of practice. “It has the best chance of winning the conference title of any team I’ve had, too.”
The Trojans began the season ranked seventh in the Associated Press preseason poll, and by mid-January they were No. 3 and still undefeated. Of course, that still left them two spots below the Bruins, who had also breezed through their early schedule unscathed. The only lingering concern UCLA had as conference play got under way was Henry Bibby, whose shooting, normally so dependable, had been thrown off by his move to point guard. In January, Bibby was averaging 11 points per game (down from 15 as a junior) while converting just 38 percent from the floor. Still, Wooden never wavered. “This guy never gave up on me,” Bibby said. “He would talk to me after practice. I remember him telling me, ‘We believe in you. You can shoot.’ If I was the coach, I probably wouldn’t have played me, but he gave me confidence.”
UCLA was a perfect 13–0 as it embarked on a two-game trip to Chicago in late January. After they dispatched a weak Loyola team by 25 points, Wooden fretted that “right now we are not as hungry as we need to be.” It was a naked motivational ploy for the challenge that lay ahead the following afternoon in South Bend, Indiana, where the Bruins would face ninth-ranked Notre Dame on national television. UCLA’s bus didn’t roll into town until 3:00 a.m. the night before, but sleep deprivation was a minor problem compared to the one posed by Notre Dame guard Austin Carr, who was leading the nation in scoring at 37.8 points per game. Once the game tipped off, Carr was otherworldly, tossing in jumpers from every angle to fuel Notre Dame’s burst to an early 13-point lead. Wooden had hoped Kenny Booker would be able to slow Carr down, but Carr was shredding him so badly that Wooden switched Terry Schofield on him. That worked until Schofield had to leave the game late in the first half because of an injured elbow. Meanwhile, UCLA’s full-court press was so impotent that Wooden abandoned it a few minutes into the game.
A couple of jumpers from Bibby helped the Bruins trim the deficit to 5 at halftime, and they managed to tie the game at 47–all with 16:40 to play. In the end, however, Notre Dame just had too much Carr. After he burned Larry Hollyfield, a little-used six-foot-five sophomore, for 15 points in the final 6 minutes, Wooden sent in Sidney Wicks for one more try even though he had four fouls. He immediately got called for his fifth. As Wicks stalked back to the UCLA bench, he barked at Wooden, “I told you, Coach! I told you not to put me on him!”
The final was Notre Dame 89, UCLA 82. The loss snapped UCLA’s nineteen-game winning streak, and it was the school’s first nonconference loss in forty-nine games. Carr finished with 46 points. “There is no one to compare with him man-to-man,” Wooden said. “They outplayed us. They were more spirited. But we are a better team.”
The loss dropped UCLA to third in the AP poll, and while it was hardly reason to panic, it did take some of the luster off the much-anticipated first meeting with USC. Instead of pitting the nation’s top two teams against each other, the matchup now featured UCLA in the unaccustomed position of being ranked below USC, which was No. 1 in the UPI poll and No. 2 in the AP. (Undefeated Marquette had replaced UCLA as the AP’s No. 1.) The excitement on USC’s campus was unprecedented. Many students camped out the night before tickets were made available, and the game took less than three hours to sell out. They were primed to see UCLA toppled at last.
For a while, it looked as if UCLA might suffer back-to-back losses for the first time in five years. It was a stark role reversal. Bibby couldn’t hit a shot against USC’s zone (he would finish three-for-twelve from the floor), the Bruins threw the ball all over the gym, and USC converted those turnovers into layup after layup. Midway through the second half, USC owned a 59–50 lead, its biggest of the game.
After a UCLA bucket cut the lead to 7, Boyd called time-out. Wooden later said he was “very pleased to see” this because it allowed his guys to regroup. Over the next 3½ minutes, the Bruins went on a 9–0 spurt, taking a 61–59 lead on a steal-and-layup by Booker with 5:30 to play. Having watched his team finally seize a lead, Wooden immediately ordered his Bruins to stall. “I knew they wanted to stay in a zone defense to try to prevent fouls, and might not come out to contest us too much,” he said. The tactic worked beautifully. The Trojans scored just one point over the final 9½ minutes, and UCLA emerged with a dramatic 64–60 victory.
Wooden’s use of the stall provided Boyd with a golden opportunity to rebuke him in the same way that Wooden had criticized Boyd four years before. But Boyd had long ago accepted that he was never going to win a public relations battle with Saint John. “I don’t like stall basketball, but it is legal and I’ll do it when I believe the status of the game dictates,” Wooden said. “I have never said it wasn’t good strategy under certain conditions.”
Having dodged a bullet in the USC game, UCLA continued to bob and weave its way to victory. Four of the Bruins’ next six wins came by 4 points or fewer. The Bruins’ proclivity for winning so many close games burnished their coach’s mystical aura—so much so that UCLA’s publicity department started applying Red Sanders’s old sobriquet “The Wizard of Westwood” to Wooden. The nickname made Wooden uneasy. He hoped it wouldn’t catch on.
Wooden knew that there was no magic behind what was happening. He simply had the best players, and he taught them well. There was no better example than Wicks, who had evolved into an efficient, disciplined, intelligent player, all without sacrificing his innate creativity. Wicks relished a challenge. Going up against Cal’s star forward, Jackie Ridgle, in Berkeley, Wicks scored a career-high 33 points to go with 17 rebounds and 5 assists. Defensively, he made life so miserable for Ridgle that Wooden chided Ridgle from the bench, “Hey Jackie, how are you going to keep your scoring average up if your teammates don’t give you the ball?” After another superlative performance by Wicks in a home win over Oregon (28 points, 13 rebounds), Ducks coach Steve Belko called him “one of the greatest college forwards I’ve ever seen. He has the quickness of an antelope, he’s strong as a big cat inside and both his shot selection and his shooting are much better. The only one I can think to compare him with is Elgin Baylor, and Wicks may be better at this stage because he’s bigger.”
Despite all this winning, Wooden continued to complain about the way college players had changed over the years. “In my opinion, they’re not as coachable now,” he said in February. “There’s a rebellion against supervision of almost any sort. To accept discipline for many of them now is almost a badge of dishonor.” At the first sign of trouble—and there weren’t many—Wooden was quick to connect those dots again between the rebellious counterculture and poor performance on the court. After UCLA nearly blew a 10-point lead at Washington before winning by 2, Wooden told his players during a time-out that they had “given in to a permissive society.”