Soon, Wilkes started leaning on him for stuff, too. Gilbert bought his game tickets and helped him get a discount on clothes. Wilkes also said Gilbert got him a sweet deal on a car. “I’m pretty sure it was a Toyota. I don’t remember the model,” Wilkes said. Asked if he could have afforded that car without the discount, Wilkes replied, “I don’t think so. I would have had to go to my parents and had a discussion.”
Wilkes also said that he could walk into several restaurants around town and not have to pay for his meal, though that was just as often due to an overeager restaurant owner who had nothing to do with Gilbert. To the players, this did not seem like a big deal. They were rock stars in the entertainment capital of the world. Of course there were going to be some fringe benefits. “There were places that we could go and not pay, but it had nothing to do with Sam,” Farmer added. “A lot of it simply had to do with the fact that we were basketball players at UCLA. Could Sam arrange that? Yeah, but he wasn’t the only person that did that.”
The difference was that Gilbert was a UCLA alumnus and heavy financial donor—a “booster,” in the parlance of the NCAA. His gifts were more direct, his relationships more personal. Asked if Gilbert ever helped him get clothes, Farmer said, “I wouldn’t know.” Then he smiled and admitted, “I’m being coy.”
Taken individually, these favors were hardly alarming. If Gilbert had been forking over mountains of cash or had asked the players to shave points, it would have risen to a much higher degree of severity. But it was the pattern of behavior—helping out multiple players over several years—that made Gilbert’s role so problematic. It would have been one thing if Gilbert did this for every type of student, but the vast majority of his favors went to athletes.
Even so, it was not difficult for the players to justify all of this on a moral basis. Gilbert’s gifts may have been technically against NCAA rules, but to the players, they didn’t feel all that scandalous. They talked to enough guys at other schools, including USC, to recognize that this sort of thing went on nearly everywhere. And what about all that money UCLA was making from their unpaid labor? Didn’t that entitle them to a little graft on the side?
It was all quite easy to rationalize. “Sam bought me a coat,” Larry Farmer said. “So you say, why would he have to buy you a jacket? Well, maybe my parents couldn’t afford that jacket, and I played on a team that was going to be on national TV. We were going to play Notre Dame. It was freezing, and I had no winter coat.”
It wasn’t just the stars who benefited from Gilbert’s friendship. When Bob Marcucci asked Gilbert for a summer job while he was still a student, Gilbert helped him find work on the crew that was building a house for Wilt Chamberlain. “It was supposed to be a union job, but when I showed up and asked about paying dues, the guy said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s taken care of,’” Marcucci said. According to Terry Schofield, Gilbert paid to fly his parents, as well as the parents of other seniors, to attend the 1971 NCAA championships in Houston. Gilbert also arranged for Jim Nielsen to buy a brand-new Datsun that had just come out but was in high demand. “I think he had a good heart, and I think he really was trying to do things to help people out,” Nielsen said. “A lot of those lines get really blurred, especially for people who are playing.”
John Ecker was originally introduced to Gilbert by Lew Alcindor. He became as close to Gilbert as anyone besides Farmer. He, too, got a premium discount on a car. “I enjoyed being around Sam intellectually. It wasn’t like he supported me with anything of real value,” Ecker said. “He opened up his home to us. We would have barbecue dinners there. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anything illegal about it.”
“He was a referral service,” Steve Patterson said in 1982. “I needed some tires. He’d call up and say, ‘This boy needs some new tires. Give him a good deal.’ And you’d get a good deal. It was like he knew everybody in anything. And he wouldn’t ask them, he’d tell them, and they’d do it. It was astounding.”
The locus for all of this activity was Gilbert’s lush abode. When the players were there, they mingled as if they were just a part of the family. “Swen Nater stood right on that diving board carrying my grandchild,” Rose Gilbert said years later, nodding toward the pool while sitting in her living room. “Swen was a big kid. Are you kidding? Now that I think about it, it was dangerous.” Rose was as much of a commanding presence in that house as Sam was. “She was like Wooden, only louder,” Kenny Heitz said. She helped the boys with their homework and otherwise graded papers while they made themselves at home. Wilkes said, “I always figured a guy who married someone that sweet can’t be all bad.”
Sam Gilbert loved to wash players’ cars—he was a stickler for cleanliness—and he was a handy craftsman from his days as an inventor. When Wilkes told Gilbert he was having trouble sleeping, Sam helped him build a sturdy, large-framed bed. “It’s still my favorite bed,” Wilkes said.
Gilbert tried to argue that his relationships were not limited to star basketball players, or even athletes in general. He described himself as a selfless philanthropist just trying to make the world a better place, favor by favor. “At the moment, I’m helping put a couple of Chicano and black kids through law school. Those kids have nothing to do with athletics,” he told
Time
magazine in 1974. That posture did not hold water with people who knew him best. “Sam Gilbert wasn’t doing it for chemistry majors. He was doing it for basketball players,” Greg Lee said. “I wonder if he’d be doing it if UCLA were an average team and getting five thousand people a game.”
To call all of this an open secret would not do it justice. It wasn’t even a secret. Gilbert’s relationships with UCLA basketball players made him one of the most well-known people in Los Angeles. No less an authority than legendary columnist Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote that Gilbert was “almost as important to the program as Pauley Pavilion” for convincing Allen and Alcindor to stay. When the Bruins played in the 1969 NCAA championships in Louisville, Gilbert took the entire team out to dinner. The nickname that Allen bestowed on Gilbert stuck so well that Sam eventually got a license plate for his car that read “PAPA G.” Rose’s read “MAMA G.” On game nights, Gilbert sat in his premium front-row seat in Pauley Pavilion, brandishing his trademark fedora and a broad smile. This was not a man who acted as if he had something to hide.
* * *
To be sure, not every prominent former player interviewed for this book acknowledged that Gilbert provided what the NCAA would consider to be improper benefits. “He never did anything illegal with me. We got summer jobs, but everybody got summer jobs. We didn’t get anything extra,” said Henry Bibby, who used Gilbert as his professional agent after graduation. Sidney Wicks also insisted that Gilbert never gave him financial assistance while he was at UCLA. “I took a loan out while I was going to school, which I was definitely qualified for. I worked different jobs. I didn’t need Sam for that,” he said. “Everybody tried to smear the guy. He was really cool. He treated us like we were his kids.” When Bill Walton was asked about NCAA violations allegedly committed by Gilbert, he replied, “I’m unaware of that.”
Still, Walton readily admitted that he held great affection for the man. “Sam was a great fan,” he said. “He was smart, intelligent, tough, fierce. He loved UCLA, loved basketball, loved life, loved business, loved people.” Walton found Gilbert to be a kindred spirit, while Gilbert found Walton to be a naive megatalent who could help him expand his influence. While Walton was playing for UCLA, he characterized Gilbert as “sixty-one going on twenty-one. He’s just a great dude.” When Walton told Gilbert he wanted to move off campus, Gilbert arranged for him to stay at a guest house at a wealthy friend’s property in Brentwood. Walton later claimed that he didn’t need basketball in his life, which prompted Patterson to rejoin, “He’s living in the guest house of a $150,000 home in Brentwood for $150 a month. If he wasn’t Bill Walton, basketball player, he wouldn’t be there.”
Walton became a regular visitor at Gilbert’s house. Asked if those were fond memories, Walton smiled and said, “I like to eat.” Once, after scarfing down a huge Thanksgiving dinner at Gilbert’s house, Walton ate an entire pumpkin pie with a quart of ice cream on top, just because someone dared him. Walton slept over often, though as Gilbert explained it, “We have six bedrooms and Bill Walton has yet to sleep inside. He comes up with his bedroll and disappears into the bush. We see him only when he comes in to take a shower and eat.”
Walton didn’t even wait to graduate from UCLA before he tapped Gilbert to be his “financial advisor.” From the moment Walton joined Wooden’s varsity, he faced constant entreaties from professional franchises dangling lots of money if he left school early. Before his sophomore year was over, Walton publicly identified Gilbert as his representative. “[Teams have] called my parents and my brother because I don’t have a phone and don’t want to be bothered,” he said. “I’ve told my family to refer them to Sam Gilbert.”
Walton later explained that he used Gilbert for this purpose because “I knew nothing about business. He was the only guy who I knew that did. I had no experience. That was not my parents’ world.” Walton’s parents were similarly grateful for Gilbert’s influence. “Sam’s friendship has meant a lot to my son,” Ted Walton said. “I rate Sam Gilbert an A-plus.”
Walton’s older brother, Bruce, an offensive lineman on UCLA’s football team, was also treated like family. Gilbert’s son, Michael, recalled an incident when Bruce was staying with the family at their cabin in the mountains. Michael was awakened at two in the morning by a rowdy party being held across the street, and he marched outside in hopes of quieting it down. At first, the party continued, but to Michael’s surprise the people suddenly scattered. “As I turned around, here’s Bruce standing behind me in the driveway in his skivvies with a tennis racket in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. He must have weighed about three hundred pounds,” Michael said. “I burst out laughing, because I had no clue he was there.”
When Sam later requested an autographed photo from Bruce, he signed it, “Maybe it’s corny, but I love you.”
The players who spent time with Gilbert saw just how visceral he could be when handling his business. “I was in his office and listened to him go down the list of people and let them know they owed him money,” Farmer said. “To see that other side of him, where he was very cold, was abrupt.” While Gilbert was able to connect with black players who grew up outside Los Angeles, many of the well-to-do whites who grew up locally were less impressed. When Gilbert heard that Kenny Heitz was headed for Harvard Law School, he took Heitz to lunch and offered to help him find a job. Heitz was put off by his aggressiveness. After Gail Goodrich joined the Lakers, he was told by several people that Gilbert had bragged that Goodrich once worked for him during the summer, which was not true. “Sam was a pain in the ass. He had the answer to everything,” Goodrich said. Andy Hill was especially turned off. “I’m Jewish. I grew up around guys like this. I saw right through him,” Hill said. “I thought he was a two-bit phony. He was a narcissist and a self-aggrandizer. He’d be really happy that you’re asking about him, too. This is Sam’s dream come true.”
Even players who hobnobbed with Gilbert grew weary of his blandishments. After Nielsen graduated, he ran into Gilbert while shopping at an art store in Westwood. When Gilbert offered to buy him the print he had selected, Nielsen declined. “If I could save a few hundred dollars on something I was buying, that was one thing, but I wasn’t looking for a handout,” Nielsen said. Wilkes suspected that if he needed even more help from Gilbert he could get it, but he also decided not to go there. “I wasn’t that stupid. I knew it wasn’t just altruism that motivated him,” Wilkes said. “I only wanted to go so far with it.”
* * *
John Wooden had never heard of Sam Gilbert until after UCLA won its first NCAA championship in 1964. Wooden was used to seeing wealthy alumni magically appear at the first sign of success—and vanish at the first sign of failure. He claimed that when Gilbert tried to initiate a friendship, “I just as politely, as courteously as I could, cut it off.” After that, the two of them might say hello to each other once in a while, but their interaction was virtually nonexistent.
Like the public, much of what Wooden knew about Gilbert came through what he read in the newspapers during Alcindor’s contract negotiations. Now, Gilbert’s burgeoning relationship with Walton was thrusting Sam even further into the spotlight. This was a problem for UCLA. The school’s string of national championships had brought a great deal of scrutiny. As Wooden mentioned while taking exception to Doug Krikorian’s snide remark about the weak schedule, there were a lot of people in and out of basketball who would love nothing more than to knock the program down a few pegs from its “plateau of excellence.” Now, Wooden was facing the possibility that some two-bit rogue booster might jeopardize all that he had built.
Wooden was first asked about Gilbert by a
Los Angeles Times
reporter in 1972. He was clearly uncomfortable. “I personally hardly know Sam Gilbert,” he said. “I think he’s a person who’s trying to be helpful in every way that he can. I sometimes feel that in his interest to be helpful it’s in direct contrast with what I would like to have him do to be helpful. I think he means very well and, for the most part, he has attached himself to the minority-race players. I really don’t want to get involved in saying much about that, to be honest with you.”
Wooden quietly voiced his concerns to some of his players. “During my freshman year, Coach made a comment about who we were hanging around with,” Farmer said. “He said something like, ‘I know a lot of you like to hang out with your uncle, but we just need to be careful.’ He said ‘uncle’ not ‘papa,’ but we all knew what he meant.” Wooden later claimed that he once confronted Wicks and Rowe about their sharp new clothes. “They had jackets, leather jackets,” Wooden said. “[I said] where did you get those? Who sent you there? [They said it was] Sam. You didn’t get the same price everybody else got if Sam sent you.… Of all my years here, he’s the only one I really worried about as far as recruiting. The only one.”