Wooden also let Walton stay at home the night before a home game instead of at the team’s hotel, because Walton said he got a better night’s sleep there. Remarkably, Wooden disposed of his regular curfew, instead letting the players decide a reasonable time that they should be in bed. “I’ve changed,” Wooden acknowledged. “The times have changed. You can’t be rigid and unyielding.”
The 1973–74 season marked the arrival of a new broadcaster to fill absences left by Dick Enberg, whose career had taken off to include more national television responsibilities. Enberg’s replacement on KTLA’s broadcasts was a young California native named Al Michaels, who had left his job calling Cincinnati Reds baseball games to return to his West Coast roots. Having grown up watching Wooden’s teams play at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Michaels was somewhat in awe of the man, but when he met the coach for the first time, Wooden put Michaels at ease by showing a deep curiosity about the inner workings of the Reds. “The Reds had just gotten Joe Morgan, and John was very interested about how Sparky Anderson was folding Morgan into the team,” Michaels recalled. “He struck me as a man who enjoyed listening more than talking. He was an absorber of information.”
Wooden would have to be especially shrewd about how he managed his own assortment of egos, because for the 1973–74 season J. D. Morgan had put together the toughest schedule the Bruins had ever faced. That included an early-season home game against fourth-ranked Maryland. The Terrapins had a stellar frontcourt duo in Tom McMillen and Len Elmore, as well as a heralded sophomore point guard, John Lucas, who was also a nationally ranked tennis player. The Terrapins’ fifth-year coach, Charles “Lefty” Driesell, had been widely mocked when he declared his intention to make Maryland “the UCLA of the east,” but now he appeared well on his way. Like most coaches around the country, Driesell did not know Wooden well, but he held a deep reverence for him. While they spoke on the phone the week before the game, Driesell picked Wooden’s brain about the best way to manage McMillen’s and Elmore’s transitions to the pros. Wooden recommended that Driesell meet with Sam Gilbert while he was in town. Driesell called Gilbert, who picked up the Maryland coach at the airport and took him to lunch, though he did not end up representing Driesell’s players.
The nationally televised game did not lack for drama. UCLA built a 12-point lead shortly after intermission and still led 65–57 late in the second half, but when Driesell switched to a zone, the Bruins’ offense went dry. Maryland climbed back to within a point and threatened to take the lead in the closing minute, until Dave Meyers stole the ball from Lucas in the closing seconds to seal the 65–64 win. Curtis was fouled just as time expired, but Driesell argued with the officials that the game was over. He wanted to make sure his margin of defeat remained a single point. Walton finished with 17 points and 27 rebounds, and while Elmore was duly impressed—“Big Red is the baddest dude anywhere,” he said—Walton’s mother, Gloria, was less elated. “I just think winning all the time is immoral,” she said.
Having watched his team barely win its seventy-seventh straight game, Wooden was concerned that it lacked balance. “It’s like when we had Kareem Jabbar. We tend to leave things too much to Bill,” he said. “Maybe now some of our fans will stop believing we have all the good players.”
The best player not in a UCLA uniform also resided in the Atlantic Coast Conference. David Thompson was a six-foot-four prodigious leaper at North Carolina State who was the most exciting player to come into college basketball in a long time. The Wolfpack had finished the previous season 27–0 and ranked No. 2 in the AP poll, but they were ineligible to play in the postseason due to NCAA sanctions for recruiting violations. Thus, they never got the matchup with UCLA that everyone wanted to see. In the spring of 1973, however, the two schools’ athletic directors engaged in a protracted negotiation in hopes of getting them together. Since neither man wanted his team to travel to the other’s arena, or even a quasi-neutral site in the other’s home state, they agreed to meet halfway, in St. Louis, on December 15. ABC gladly forked over $125,000 to each school in order to make it happen, rendering this the most profitable college basketball game ever. Some blight, these Bruins.
Wooden tried to downplay the matchup, emphasizing that it was far less important than the conference games. “I don’t even know what kind of defenses North Carolina [State] plays, and I don’t care,” he said. Still, the game garnered a buildup not seen for a regular-season tilt since the Game of the Century six years earlier. Unlike that game, however, this one was no contest. The Wolfpack hung close for three quarters, partly because Walton got in foul trouble, but once he reentered the contest with nine minutes to play, he led UCLA on a devastating 19–2 run. The final score was 73–56. The star for UCLA was not Walton but Wilkes, who scored a career-high 27 points while on defense limiting Thompson to 17 points on 7-for-20 shooting.
And yet, even after this latest triumph Wooden could not escape sniping from his critics. Frank Dolson of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, the same columnist who had published Wooden’s letter to Digger Phelps and called UCLA a “cancer” on the sport, pronounced himself shocked—shocked!—at Wooden’s sideline comportment. Dolson sat close enough to hear most every word Wooden said to the officials. In a column that was carried to newspapers around the country via the Knight News Service, Dolson offered an extensive, near-verbatim accounting of Wooden’s caustic remarks.
“I wonder how many college basketball coaches could have verbally abused an official the way Wooden did without receiving a single warning, a single rebuke, a single technical,” Dolson wrote. “From a seat in front of your TV set, or a seat in the stands, you’d never suspect what John Wooden is really like while a game is going on. From a seat a few yards away, it’s a revelation. ‘Watch ’em pushing away.… Lookit the elbow.… That’s an offensive foul. You called that an offensive foul on us.… Oh, for crying out loud! Bad call. Bad call.” Dolson also reported that he heard Wooden shout at David Thompson after a questionable call awarded him two free throws. “Feeling good? You should be.”
When asked about Dolson’s column, Wooden conceded, “I have my Achilles’ heels like other coaches do. Certainly I am critical of officials, just as I yell at my players, because I expect a great deal from them.” The Los Angeles writers were more amused than anything else. If Dolson thought Wooden was bad now, he should have seen Wooden before the old man mellowed.
* * *
The streak was now at seventy-nine games and counting. Wooden kept insisting it was only a matter of time before his team lost, but it was hard for people to imagine that happening. At least, not while Bill Walton was there.
Walton was surrounded by more quality players than at any other time of his college career. Dave Meyers was a crafty scorer and dogged defender in the Jack Hirsch mold. He earned the nickname “Spider” because of his long arms. Pete Trgovich was earning more minutes in the backcourt, as was Andre McCarter, whose speed was a terrific asset on the fast break. Marques Johnson was pushing his way onto the court as well. When Walton got frustrated from being double- and triple-teamed, he would yell at Wooden, “Get Marques in here! We need rebounds!” Johnson said, “When I’d hear Bill say that, I’d start unbuttoning my sweatpants. I knew I was coming in.”
Wooden was also substituting more liberally than at any point in his career. In the season opener, he played sixteen guys. Against North Carolina State, he played eleven. That made playing for him more fun, but it was not easy for ex-benchwarmers like Andy Hill to see. “I wish he could have changed his mind earlier. It’s tough to get in there and look like a player when you’re in for only two minutes,” said Hill, who had taken a job as an assistant coach at Santa Monica College. While emphasizing that he felt “privileged to have played for him,” Hill admitted that “not playing was a painful experience. I had a lot of desire in the past to be resentful, but not now because Wooden is not affecting my everyday life.”
The Bruins looked as if they would sail through yet another undefeated season. That is, until January 7, when Walton took a nasty fall during a 10-point win at Washington State. As he jumped for a rebound, Walton was undercut—or submarined, to use the common description—by Cougars center Rich Steele. “It was a despicable act of intentional violence and a dirty play,” Walton said many years later. At first, Walton hopped up thinking he was okay, but as soon as play resumed, he called time-out because the pain in his back was so severe. An X-ray the next day revealed that Walton had suffered two small fractures in his lower vertebrae. The diagnosis was kept secret.
This was a big deal because UCLA was just two weeks from its next great test, on January 19, at Notre Dame, the school that had last beaten the Bruins, as well as the team against which UCLA had set the consecutive wins record. This time, the Irish were undefeated and ranked No. 2 in the AP poll. The speculation over whether Walton would be available to play against the Irish mirrored the guessing game that had surrounded Lew Alcindor’s eye before the game against Houston at the Astrodome. After Walton sat out home wins over Cal and Stanford, Wooden said he didn’t think it was likely Walton would even make the trip to the Midwest. When Walton did travel with the team but sat out a 24-point win over Iowa, Wooden said he would leave it up to Bill to decide whether he would play against Notre Dame. Walton had been practicing while wearing a corset to get himself ready. To no one’s surprise, he chose to play against the Irish.
By this time, UCLA had won eighty-eight games in a row, and even the great English teacher was at a loss for words. “If I say what I think about this accomplishment, I know I’ll sound immodest, but to me it’s unbelievable, absolutely amazing,” he said. “I really can’t visualize any team doing it, especially in this modern day of basketball with so many outstanding players on other teams everywhere you look.”
In advance of the game, Digger Phelps pulled out every motivational trick he could find. He had the players practice cutting down the nets. He attended a pregame pep rally for the students. He claimed to know the Bruins so well that “I could coach them myself.” Always eager to promote his program (and especially himself), Phelps invited a small group of writers into his locker room
before
the game so they could watch him deliver his twenty-point plan. As he revved up his players, he warned them to “stay away from [the UCLA] bench during time out in case Coach Wooden decides to talk to you.” He also got a pregame hug from his former boss and current Oregon coach, Dick Harter, who had made the trip to support his friend and scout the Bruins.
Once again, UCLA took control of the game from the outset. With 6 minutes remaining in the first half, the Bruins led by 17, and they owned a comfortable 43–34 advantage at halftime. The two teams held each other in check for much of the second half, the Irish never quite coming back, the Bruins never quite pulling away. With 3:32 to play, UCLA led, 70–59. The game looked to be over.
Phelps, however, had one last gambit. He called time-out and ordered his team to come out in a full-court, trapping, man-to-man press. He also inserted freshman point guard Ray Martin to give his team more quickness. It worked beautifully. Notre Dame started scoring, and UCLA stopped answering. A hook shot by John Shumate over Walton cut the deficit to 9. Shumate stole the ensuing inbounds pass off the press and scored again. Irish forward Adrian Dantley then stole the ball from Wilkes, drove the length of the court, and converted a layup. After Curtis was called for traveling, Notre Dame guard Gary Brokaw hit a shot from the corner. A Meyers miss was followed by another Brokaw jumper. Remarkably, UCLA’s lead was down to a single point, and there was still 1:11 on the clock.
When a team gets bum-rushed like that, the textbook response is for the coach to call time-out, settle his guys down, and make a strategic adjustment. Wooden chose not to do that. Asked about this nondecision after the game, he smiled and said, “Oh, I’m not a time-out caller.” Why should he change now? He had seen his teams blow big leads before, and they always found a way to win. Besides, he figured, these guys are seniors. They should know what to do.
Except they didn’t. UCLA committed yet another turnover against the press, this time on a charge by Wilkes. On the Irish’s next possession, they worked the ball around the perimeter until Brokaw fed junior guard Dwight Clay with a pass to the corner. Clay launched a high-arcing shot with 29 seconds left. Swish. Wooden finally called time-out with his Bruins trailing, 71–70.
On their final possession, the Bruins got not one, not two, but five chances to score, courtesy of multiple offensive rebounds. The last was an attempted tip-in by Meyers. The ball bounced off the rim and into the hands of Clay, who flung it toward the ceiling as the buzzer sounded. The game and the streak were over, and in the most stunning way imaginable. Notre Dame had scored the game’s final 12 points to win.
Phelps was breathless when he arrived for the postgame press conference. “Did we win?” he said. Wooden was more even-keeled. He did not try to blame the loss on Walton’s back injury, which would have been pointless considering Walton still managed to get 24 points and 9 rebounds, but he did not sound devastated. “Do you want me to say what I really think or what you want to hear?” he said. “I said it once, I have said it a hundred times, that once we broke the record last year, the streak became meaningless. I am fairly certain my players felt this way. I am not mad or glad about the streak, and my players are acting like they should act—like men.” Wooden did not open his locker room to reporters, nor did he invite any players to the interview room. “Winners talk. Losers keep quiet,” he said.
Wooden also disagreed with Phelps’s assertion that the end of the streak was good for college basketball. “If so, then you’d have to say that having such a streak was bad for college basketball,” Wooden said. “I think this streak was the most tremendous thing there ever was for college basketball. Look at all the interest it generated, and all the enthusiasm there was at Notre Dame before the game.”