When Wooden referred to permissiveness, he was invariably talking about sexual promiscuity. Sure, he could bend a little on hair length and dress code, but he could never brook the carnal free-for-all he imagined was taking place around campus. Privately, Wooden cracked that his players would probably “lead the country in V.D.”
One of Wooden’s most frequent targets on this front was Steve Patterson. He may have been an outspoken, God-fearing Christian, but when the sun set Patterson could be devilish with the ladies. The season was already wearing on Patterson’s psyche. He had spent the early part of his career getting dominated by Lew Alcindor. Now he was hearing from his coach that his subpar play happened because he was spending too much time “catting around.” Wooden levied this charge so often that Patterson’s friends teased him by calling him “The Cat Man” and “El Gato.” Midway through the season, Patterson decided he wanted to quit. Fortunately, as he was heading for his car to leave for the airport, he was spotted by his two best friends on the team, Andy Hill and John Ecker, who spent several hours talking him out of leaving. It was an especially noble effort on Ecker’s part, since he would have benefited more than any other player if Patterson had bolted.
And yet the UCLA train rolled on. The Bruins had the most talent, the best coach, and they prized winning above all else. This all came together in their rematch with USC on the final day of the regular season. The Trojans had also not lost since falling to UCLA the month before, and so they entered the final weekend trailing the Bruins by just one game in the Pac-8 standings.
The national television audience that watched in record numbers were treated to another UCLA yawner. During one stretch, the Trojans went seven and a half minutes without a point. At halftime, UCLA owned a 19-point lead, which swelled to 24 early in the second half. The Trojans never got closer than 15 until Wooden emptied his bench. The 73–62 final left Boyd dispirited. “The one thing I feared would happen did happen,” he said. “When we got behind early, we had to abandon any game plan we may have had.”
Boyd was not lying five months before when he said that this could be his best USC team. In fact, it turned out to be the best team in school history, finishing the season with a 24–2 record. Alas, the question everyone had been asking—
Could this be the year?
—yielded the same answer as the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. Boyd’s Trojans had risen to unprecedented heights, yet they ended back where they started, always and forever looking up at UCLA.
* * *
If there was one man who could relate to Boyd’s predicament, it was Jerry Tarkanian, who had also engineered a rousing revival at Cal State Long Beach. Tarkanian’s 49ers finished the regular season with a 22–4 record and claimed their third straight Pacific Coast Athletic Association title. Yet, because teams were still sent to NCAA tournament regions based on geography, not competitive balance, Tarkanian’s path to the NCAA championship was always obstructed by Wooden.
Unlike Boyd, Tarkanian developed both a professional and personal admiration for Wooden, even if some of it was begrudging. “I used to watch Wooden’s teams win national championships, and they used to come back to L.A. and land at the airport, and the media would ask him, ‘Coach, what are you going to do now?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m going to take my grandkids to get a milkshake, and then on Sunday, I’m going to go to church,’” Tarkanian said with a chuckle. “And I’ve got to recruit against him.”
Both teams breezed through their opening games—UCLA stomped BYU by 18, Long Beach cruised by Weber State University and Pacific—to earn a meeting in the postseason for the second straight year. Like Boyd, Tarkanian believed he had assembled his finest team, which featured an All-American-caliber player in six-foot-six sophomore guard Ed Ratleff. As soon as the game got under way, the Bruins knew they were in for a fight. Tarkanian, master of the zone defense, surprised Wooden by deploying a 2-3 formation instead of his usual 1-2-2 trap. That forced UCLA to beat the 49ers with outside shots, and the Bruins went cold. Three of UCLA’s starters—Booker, Bibby, and Patterson—were a combined oh-for-seventeen in the first half, yet UCLA trailed by just 4 points. Things got worse in the second half, as Long Beach built an 11-point lead with fourteen minutes to play. When Wicks went to the bench at that point with his fourth foul, it looked as if the end of UCLA’s championship run was nigh.
Wooden was furious. As UCLA huddled during the second half, he appeared to lose composure. He glared at his players and shouted, “You guys are a bunch of cock hounds!” Then he walked away from the huddle.
The players were momentarily stunned.
Did he really just say that?
They had never heard him use profanity before, and they weren’t sure how to react. After a few seconds of silence, Denny Crum dove into the huddle, delivered some final pieces of instruction, and sent them back onto the court.
Did Wooden consciously abandon his prohibition against profanity in hopes it would kick-start his team? We’ll never know, because Wooden never discussed it. But that was what happened. UCLA scored 9 straight points and eventually clawed back to a 50–50 tie with six minutes to go.
The game’s pivotal play occurred when Ratleff fouled out with four minutes left. Tarkanian saw this as more than just a bad break. According to Loel Schrader, the 49ers’ beat writer for the
Long Beach Press-Telegram
, as the Bruins were falling behind, J. D. Morgan started yelling at referee Art White. Tarkanian was convinced that Morgan’s intimidation had led White to make that call—“Only time Eddie ever fouled out in his career”—but regardless of whether that’s true, it put the 49ers in a bind. With the game tied again at 53–all two minutes later, Tarkanian, desperate, went to a delay offense.
To his surprise, Wooden did not adjust. “I was amazed that he let us stall. He never came out and tried to trap us,” Tarkanian said many years later. Long Beach could have stalled its way until the final seconds, but one of their guards, Dwight Taylor, took a pair of ill-advised jumpers that gave UCLA extra possessions. (“I swear to God if I had a gun, I would have shot him,” Tarkanian said.) That enabled the Bruins to send Wicks to the foul line, where he sank four nerve-rattling free throws to seal the 57–55 win. “Sidney certainly wasn’t one of my better free throw shooters,” Wooden said years later, “but in a clutch situation, if you had to have the free throw, I never had anyone that I’d rather have on the line than Sidney.”
Tarkanian, like Boyd two weeks ago, was disconsolate. “We did everything we wanted to win,” he said, “except we lost.”
For UCLA, it was just the latest escape in a season full of them. Tarkanian had seen many of those at close range. He did not believe a man could be so lucky unless there were greater forces at work. “I never saw a coach win so many close games,” Tarkanian marveled many years later. “So many strange things would happen. I think that Wooden was such a nice man who went to church all the time that the good Lord wanted him to win.”
Did he really believe that?
“Yes, I do. I don’t think he was lucky. I think the good Lord just said, ‘This is a good man.’”
* * *
UCLA was back in the Astrodome, not for a spectacle this time but rather for a chance to win a championship—its fifth straight. In an effort to capitalize on the growing popularity of the tournament, the NCAA staged its culminating weekend inside an indoor football stadium for the first time. Wooden tried to display his usual equanimity, but inside he was wound tight. He had a senior-laden team, and he knew the next year he would have to rebuild mostly with sophomores. If this was going to be UCLA’s last chance to continue its championship string, Wooden wanted his team to pull it off.
On the afternoon of UCLA’s semifinal against No. 4 Kansas, Cunningham and Crum waited in the hotel lobby for Wooden so they could all walk over to the Astrodome. When Wooden was uncharacteristically late, the assistants checked with Nell, who told them that Wooden had left a half hour before. Figuring Wooden had gotten the meeting time mixed up, Crum and Cunningham went to the arena. They looked for Wooden for a while, but when they couldn’t find him, they went to an upper-level box so they could scout the first semifinal. When they finally met up with Wooden toward the end of the game, they discovered that their boss was royally pissed. “He really got after both of us,” Cunningham said. “He was angry at me, but he thought Denny was the instigator. It was just a screw-up.… It shows the tension of the tournament and the pressure and wanting to win. All of those ingredients you put together, it’s like a time bomb ready to go off.”
When the game got under way, the anger between the coaches was still simmering. Normally, Crum and Cunningham spoke to the team before the game and during time-outs, but Wooden refused to let them. “He didn’t let us do what we normally do. We couldn’t talk in the locker room or anything,” Cunningham said.
Midway through the first half, Crum told Schofield to report into the game. It was not unusual for Wooden to delegate substitutions to his assistants, but on this occasion, he objected and sent Schofield back to the bench. When Crum tried to send Schofield to the scorer’s table a second time, Wooden objected again. “He told me to go sit down at the end of the bench because he didn’t want to listen to me,” Crum said. “I said, ‘I’m not going down there, Coach. This is my responsibility. I’m going to sit right here like I always do.’” The two men argued loudly and continued to go at it during a time-out. Bibby stepped in in an effort to calm the two of them down, but it didn’t do much good.
For Schofield, the exchange was awkward, to say the least. “I’m standing right there, and Wooden’s yelling, ‘I’ll make sure you never sit on this bench again!’” Schofield recalled. “It was a difficult situation because Crum told me to stay. But I wasn’t going into the game until Wooden said so.”
The arguing had no palpable effect on the players. UCLA built a huge second-half lead before winning, 68–60, to advance to the championship game. The next morning, Wooden called Crum and Cunningham to apologize. He invited them to join him at the annual Fellowship of Christian Athletes breakfast. “I had been up all night and I wanted to sleep, but I said yes,” Cunningham said. “It was an uneasy time for a few weeks after that. I mean, I had never been dealt with like that by Coach in the whole time I knew him. I don’t think Denny had, either. He let emotions take over.”
UCLA’s opponent in the final was a bit of a surprise. Villanova, which was ranked nineteenth in the AP poll, had reached the final game by upsetting undefeated third-ranked Penn in the East Regional final and then squeaking by Western Kentucky in two overtimes in the semis.
It turned out to be a much different contest than any of UCLA’s previous six NCAA finals had been. In the first place, the game was close. Villanova coach Jack Kraft came out in a zone defense, which given UCLA’s size advantage was a smart strategy. The obvious counter would be for Wooden to hold the ball, just as he had done against USC and several other teams, to force the Wildcats into a man-to-man. But would Wooden really attempt to do that here, in an NCAA championship game with 33,000-plus fans in attendance and millions more watching on television across the country? If that wasn’t “bad for the game,” what was?
Of course he would. Wooden wanted to win. After UCLA built a 45–37 halftime lead, thanks to 20 points from Patterson, the Bruins began the second half by stalling. Soon, a smattering of boos and chants of “Bruins are bush!” rained from the crowd. The Villanova players taunted the Bruins as well. “You’re the national champions! Play ball!” one yelled. Another asked sarcastically, “You guys sick?”
From a strategic standpoint, Wooden’s move backfired. When Kraft switched to a pressure man-to-man, it exposed the ball-handling weaknesses that had plagued UCLA all season. Three baskets by Villanova forward Howard Porter closed the deficit to 3 points with under two minutes to play. But Villanova would get no closer as UCLA won, 68–62. It was the first time one of Wooden’s teams had won a championship game by fewer than 11 points.
Wooden was again pleased that it was a team effort. On a night when Wicks and Rowe were ineffective (7 and 8 points, respectively), Patterson (29 points) and Bibby (17) had saved the day. The machine worked again. When Wooden substituted for Wicks in the final seconds so he could get his senior ovation, Wicks shook Wooden’s hand, leaned down, and said into his ear, “Coach, you’re somethin’.”
One can only imagine what Wooden would have said if another coach had used a stall against UCLA in an NCAA championship game, but Kraft voiced no objections. “I personally would not have done it, but I can’t criticize John Wooden for it because this is the national championship and the idea is to win,” he said. “I’m happy and I’m proud that he feared us that much.”
Wooden admitted he wasn’t crazy about the stall—“Maybe now the rules committee will think a little bit more about putting a shot clock in”—but he was even less crazy about losing the game. “If we had let them stay in their zone, I was afraid we might have hit a cold spot and start missing our shots,” he said. “I felt we could beat Villanova man-to-man.”
Given the pressure Wooden was under that weekend, it was understandable that he would do whatever it took to win. “If we had lost today, I know our fans would say we had an unsuccessful season, even though our record would have been 29–2,” Patterson said. “The pressure on us had been that bad, believe me.”
For Patterson and his fellow seniors Rowe and Wicks, it was a gratifying, triumphant moment. Now they, too, could boast that they had won three straight NCAA championships, just like Lew Alcindor and Mike Warren. When the game was over, Wooden was naturally asked whether a sixth straight title was in the offing, even though he was losing seven of his top eight players. “I’m sure you writers will put pressure on us. You’ll pick us to win everything again,” he said. “Only a lame brain would pick us for national honors with a completely new team.”