Still, Wooden never tried outright to forbid his players from associating with Gilbert. Even if he had, it’s doubtful they would have listened any more than they listened to his warnings about interracial dating. “You’re concerned with the ones who are friendly with your players, but I can’t tell Sam Gilbert or anyone else to stay away from my players,” Wooden said. “I can’t pick their friends for them, but I can tell my players to be careful. You can’t accept money or gifts, and if you do, you’re putting yourself and all of us in a vulnerable position.”
In Wooden’s mind, the only thing he could do was take his concerns to the one man who was even more strong-willed and powerful than he: J. D. Morgan. Wooden wasn’t telling Morgan anything he didn’t know. Morgan was, after all, a former PT boat commander who boasted that he was on top of every detail in his department. He wasn’t naive. Byron Atkinson, a former dean of students, said in an interview for Morgan’s oral history that J. D. “knew full well” that UCLA athletes were selling their game tickets, but “he turned a blind eye to that.” A much bigger problem like Sam Gilbert was not going to escape Morgan’s discerning eye.
Morgan asked Gilbert to meet him at his office several times to ask him to dial back his involvement with the players. “J. D. was constantly in trouble with Gilbert. He constantly had him in his office, constantly trying to get him to keep his hands off our kids,” Atkinson said. “He tried to twist Gilbert’s tail a dozen times because he knew what was happening over there. [But] Gilbert’s a pretty crafty character.”
Morgan again met with Gilbert in Houston during the final weekend of the 1971 NCAA tournament. The effect of that talk was the same as it ever was—which is to say, no effect at all. “I know J. D. talked to him. I talked to him. We told him to stay away from our youngsters,” Wooden said. “Well, we’re not going to be able to tell him what to do. He’s going to do what he wants to.”
Wooden and his acolytes have argued that in the final analysis, it was Morgan’s responsibility to shut Gilbert down, and therefore it was Morgan’s fault that he didn’t. “We did not want Sam Gilbert to be a part of our program. We felt he might do some things that were improper for the players,” Gary Cunningham said. “Coach went to J. D. and was concerned about Sam Gilbert’s intervention with our players, and J. D. told him that he would take care of it. What happened after that, I don’t know, but Coach was a very believing person.”
Apparently, Morgan did not want to push too hard. In the first place, Gilbert was a wealthy and influential booster, the kind of man the program depended on for fund-raising. Morgan also likely (and accurately) sensed that Gilbert had damaging information that could hurt the program if it became public.
There was, however, a deeper reason for Morgan’s reluctance to lay the hammer down: he believed Gilbert was involved in organized crime, a perception that Gilbert cultivated. When Gilbert got angry with someone, he sometimes suggested that he could push a button on his phone and two men would come through the door and throw the person out the window. When Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel
The Godfather
was published in 1969, friends sent Gilbert several copies, which he displayed prominently in his office.
Whether or not Gilbert was actually “connected” did not matter. What mattered was that Morgan was convinced that he was. “J. D. believed that he was a member of the so-called Miami Mafia, and that he either had or was capable of committing physical violence and perhaps murder,” former UCLA chancellor Charles Young said. “I remember him saying to me in that deep voice of his, ‘Chuck, you don’t know about Sam Gilbert. Do you want to end up on a block of concrete at the bottom of the ocean?’ J. D.’s view of him was that if you cross Sam, you’re likely to be killed, literally. It’s the only time I’ve seen J. D. kind of shaken.”
* * *
And so the Sam Gilbert Show continued. As word of his activities spread, Wooden’s coaching colleagues became annoyed, to say the least. It was bad enough that Wooden was kicking their asses year after year. Now they were hearing that, far from being squeaky clean, his program had the same dirty laundry that theirs did. For many years, these coaches had been told that Wooden wasn’t just a great coach but a good man. A teetotaling, church-going, nonswearing, nonsmoking paragon of rectitude.
Saint John.
Now, it turned out that he, too, kept a little devil tucked into his pocket.
Bob Boyd saw much of this happening right before his eyes. “I knew Sam to talk to, but I had no relationship with him,” Boyd said. “Sam was belligerent. He didn’t care what anybody said. He was going to do what he wanted.” Boyd also claimed that Stanford’s coach, Howie Dallmar, “couldn’t stand John because of Sam. For Howie not to like somebody was very strange.” Abe Lemons, the ever-quotable coach at Oklahoma City, liked to joke that Gilbert was the most important building block in Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. Pete Newell also quietly fumed. “I remember Dad talking about Sam Gilbert and how he was getting away with murder down there,” Newell’s son, Tom, said. “That was the one thing that really bothered Dad.”
No coach was more bothered than Jerry Tarkanian. Like Boyd, Tarkanian was forever being compared unfavorably to Wooden, on and off the court. Tarkanian’s proclivity for recruiting players off inner-city playgrounds had earned him a reputation for being a shady recruiter, which he believed was grossly unfair. Unfortunately, Tarkanian could be his own worst enemy. When the NCAA launched an investigation into Cal State Long Beach’s football and swimming programs, Tarkanian wrote a pair of columns for the
Long Beach Press-Telegram
excoriating the NCAA’s policy of selective enforcement. Noting that Western Kentucky’s basketball program was under investigation, Tarkanian wrote in the fall of 1972, “The University of Kentucky basketball program breaks more rules in a day than Western Kentucky does in a year. The NCAA just doesn’t want to take on the big boys.” He voiced the same complaint in another column the following January.
Predictably, Tarkanian’s words stirred up a hornet’s nest at the NCAA. After his second column was published, Warren Brown, the NCAA’s assistant executive director, fired off an acidic letter to Long Beach’s athletic director as well as the commissioner of the Pacific Coast Athletic Association. “Enclosed for your leisure-time reading is a copy of a newspaper article which I presume was written by Jerry Tarkanian,” Brown wrote. “It always amazes me when successful coaches become instant authorities. As in the case of this article, such instant authorities reflect an obvious unfamiliarity with facts.” Three months later, the NCAA expanded its inquiry to include Long Beach’s basketball program.
Tarkanian was incensed that the NCAA would train its resources on Cal State Long Beach, when just across town, a school that
Life
magazine had once billed as the “Athens of Athletics” was so blatantly violating rules. During the 1971 NCAA tournament, Tarkanian’s team happened to run into Wooden’s during a layover at the Las Vegas airport en route to Salt Lake City, where they would eventually meet in the West Regional. “I had this kid, George Trapp. He says, ‘Coach, Coach. Look at them gators.’ I’m going, what the hell is he talking about?” Tarkanian said. “Then he told me it was alligator shoes. Our guys were in Converse shoes, Long Beach State letterman jackets, and jeans. UCLA looks like they came from Wall Street. They were dressed like you couldn’t believe. Our guys look like they came from the Salvation Army. I told the L.A. writers, ‘Look at them and look at us and tell me who’s cheating.’”
Even if some of the NCAA’s gumshoes were inclined to poke around Westwood, Tarkanian suspected that the NCAA’s president, Walter Byers, would hold them back as a favor to his good friend J. D. Morgan. Tarkanian said that Morgan was “always wonderful to me,” but unbeknown to him, Morgan was working behind Tarkanian’s back to get him in trouble. After Tarkanian was quoted in February 1972 in the
Los Angeles Times
talking about Leonard Gray, a guard on his team who was traveling to road games despite being ineligible to play, Morgan wrote a letter to an NCAA official to bring the situation to his attention. “Per our telephone conversation of this date [February 1, 1972], I have enclosed the
Los Angeles Times
article which quotes Tarkanian on Leonard Gray. It is my understanding that Gray has accompanied the team on every trip they have made this year,” Morgan wrote. “Right or wrong, we at UCLA have always interpreted that for an institution to pay for travel, room and board and incidentals to take ineligible athletes to athletic trips was against NCAA rules and regulations.… If this is now allowed would you please let me know.”
After he retired, Wooden claimed numerous times that the NCAA had investigated his program while he was still on the job. While the NCAA may have done a little snooping—Kenny Heitz recalled that someone showed up in his hometown asking whether Kenny’s father made enough money to buy Kenny the convertible he was driving—the NCAA never formally launched an investigation the way it did with Long Beach. Nor is there any anecdotal evidence to suggest that investigators spent time on campus. “I was never interviewed by the NCAA,” Jamaal Wilkes said. Lucius Allen added: “The NCAA, if they did come around, they did not talk to me.”
Tarkanian never blamed Wooden for any of this. “It bothers me when I keep reading about how straight they were at UCLA when I know they weren’t, but I don’t think Wooden was behind any of that,” Tarkanian said. “On at least two or three occasions, he told me about Sam Gilbert and how he went to J. D. Morgan, and J. D. told him, ‘You coach the team and let me handle Sam.’ I just don’t know what more he could have done.”
As more information about Sam Gilbert came to light over the years, some people inside the UCLA athletic department were less willing to lay all the blame at Morgan’s feet. “A Sam Gilbert gets going because it’s tolerated at the player level and at the coach’s level,” said Norman Miller, a UCLA vice chancellor for student affairs. “Once it kind of gets going, it’s difficult for an athletic director to automatically eliminate it or deal with it.”
Gilbert had his defenders as well. Chief among them was Willie Naulls, who would not have become such a successful businessman without Gilbert’s lifelong friendship. Naulls was also familiar with the stresses, pressures, and inequities that came with being a UCLA basketball player. He thought Gilbert was a huge boon to the program. “These kids are lucky to have Sam because nobody else will help them,” Naulls said in 1982. “Who’s going to help them? Does the athletic department help them? They should. Does the coach help them? He should. But in my experience, they don’t.… They should be kissing [Sam’s] feet for what he’s done.”
* * *
Inasmuch as these events unfolded in the summer of 1972, it is fitting that they should suggest the question that has formed the bottom line for every so-called scandal since Watergate:
What did John Wooden know, and when did he know it?
There is no question that Wooden knew
something
. He admitted as much himself. To the players, that was only stating the obvious. “My personal opinion,” Lucius Allen said, “is that Coach Wooden was a very bright man. He was in control of everything. There’s no way that Coach Wooden wouldn’t have some type of an idea of what Sam Gilbert was doing with the UCLA players. It’s inconceivable to say that he didn’t know.”
It is, however, equally clear that Wooden did not orchestrate any of this illicit activity. Quite the contrary: he objected to it time and again. There is also no evidence to suggest that he knew the full extent to which Gilbert was violating NCAA rules with his players. For more than two decades, Wooden had stayed out of his players’ personal lives. They were his responsibility only during those hours when they were in his gym. If a player wanted to knock on his office door, he was always welcome, but Wooden was not one to insert himself. The lone instance in which he tried to breach that divide was during the fallout from Bill Seibert’s speech, and that had blown up in his face.
Moreover, Wooden’s players had every incentive to keep him from finding out the seamy details. In the eyes of some, this further removed the coach from culpability. “Coach didn’t cheat. I was offered a lot of stuff on my recruiting visits. I was offered nothing to go to UCLA,” Farmer said. “No one can control everything. When you do what [Wooden] did in a place like L.A., it would have been impossible for any one person to have managed that whole thing without anybody else interfering from the outside. Because everybody wanted a piece of our program.”
“Had he known about it, I’m sure he would have addressed it, but it was a gray area,” Wilkes said. “You’re not talking about some small college town. You’re talking about Los Angeles. You’ve got a lot going on here. Is Coach responsible to see what cars all his players are driving? I don’t believe it was his job to police the program to that extent.”
On the other hand, Wooden saw enough to take his concerns to Morgan, to warn his players to stay away from Gilbert, and to confront Wicks and Rowe about their coats. At a certain point, he had to make a choice: he could either keep digging, or he could lay down his shovel. He chose the latter. “I remember we were on a road trip in Chicago, and five guys all got on the bus together wearing matching coats with fur-lined collars,” Greg Lee said. “It was pretty conspicuous. It’s not like Coach was an ostrich about Sam, but he wouldn’t confront the problem.”
This view is shared by many of Wooden’s former players. “Coach had to look away on certain items in order for this to happen,” Saffer said. “If he was here today and you asked him if he was a saint, he’d be the first one to say no.”
“Coach never came to me. We never discussed Sam, even up until his death,” Jamaal Wilkes said. “You know, Coach wasn’t the kind of man who looked for problems. I always sensed the reason Coach never addressed it is that he didn’t know how to address it. It never got to a point that he
had
to deal with it. So he let sleeping dogs lie.”