Morgan and Wooden agreed the job should be offered first to Gary Cunningham, but they weren’t sure if he would take it. Cunningham still talked of becoming a university administrator. Before practice began, Wooden met privately with Cunningham and told him what he had decided. He told Cunningham that he was Morgan’s first choice, but he added a warning: “If you are not fired with enthusiasm, you will
be
fired with enthusiasm.” Cunningham said he would think about it. In the meantime, he told no one. “He trusted me,” Cunningham said, “and I’m a good secret keeper.”
* * *
Wooden began each morning with a brisk five-mile walk around UCLA’s tartan track. His doctor had ordered him to get more exercise, so he approached this with the same compulsion he applied to all his other routines. Wooden completed his constitutional no matter where he was or what he was doing. If he was on the road and it was raining outside, he paced around the perimeter of his hotel room until he reached the five-mile point.
One morning during the summer of 1974, Wooden allowed Dwight Chapin from the
Los Angeles Times
to join him for his walk. Wooden had supposedly stopped talking to Chapin after
The Wizard of Westwood
was published, but as usual, he didn’t hold a grudge. Chapin found the coach in a ruminative mood. “This can get monotonous. I hum and sing and recite poetry—crazy things—to pass the time,” Wooden said. “But I’ll tell ya, in the fall it’s beautiful out here. Each time I come around the track, the sun is a little different. I often wish I were an artist so I could really paint the sunrise. I’d like to know if other people see it the same way I do.”
When Chapin asked Wooden if this was going to be his final season, Wooden fibbed. “I’m reasonably certain this [season] won’t be my last,” he said. He did, however, hedge a little, saying that even if he were going to retire at the end of the season, “I’d be a little reluctant to say so because of recruiting. Each coach in competition with me for a prospect might tell him I’m not coming back.”
Wooden was still in a pleasant frame of mind when practice started the day after his sixty-fourth birthday. The craziness of the past three years, usually instigated by a certain six-foot-eleven redhead, was gone. Expectations were only slightly more reasonable: UCLA would start the season ranked No. 2 in the preseason AP poll behind NC State. When Wooden was asked before the season whether UCLA could come back, he replied, “Where have we been?”
Still, it was a welcome change. Everyone agreed that the Bruins could win the national championship. The difference was that nobody thought they
should
.
UCLA still had two of the top forwards in the country in Dave Meyers and Marques Johnson, but the rest of the lineup would be filled with players who had underperformed in the past. That included sophomore Richard Washington, junior Andre McCarter, senior Pete Trgovich, and sophomore Jimmy Spillane. Seven-foot-one center Ralph Drollinger brought a whiff of the Walton eccentricities—he was also from La Mesa, and he was an avid mountain climber who twice attempted to scale the Matterhorn—but he didn’t come close to matching Walton’s transcendent skills. McCarter was the team’s lone vegetarian, and he also had diverse passions like playing the flute and studying kung fu. These were the last vestiges from the Walton Gang, but Wooden made clear he would return to pre-Alcindor discipline. He was bringing back the training table, shorter hair requirements, and a stricter dress code. Without Walton and Lee, said Frank Arnold, “it was a lot more peaceful, let’s put it that way.”
Wooden always couched his remarks about Walton by saying how much he liked him, but he also acknowledged that, in many ways, life was easier without him. “I’m glad I didn’t have Walton another year,” Wooden said. “He is a great player, but through no fault of his own, he brought on many problems. He’s a very strange person. He was not sheltered here. He sheltered himself. Other players were jealous of him.”
The team was dealt a bad blow before practice began. While visiting his sister in Santa Barbara in the fall, Marques Johnson became violently ill with vomiting, chills, and diarrhea. He felt better after a few days, but when he could not regain his appetite or get rid of his fatigue, he checked into the UCLA medical center. A blood test found that Johnson had contracted hepatitis. For weeks, he lay in a hospital bed and watched his weight plummet. At first, he wasn’t sure he would ever play competitive basketball again, but he returned to practice in November as an older, wiser sophomore. “Basketball is still very important, but it’s not the ultimate thing now,” he said. “I just want to enjoy life because I realize as easy as someone snaps his fingers, I could get sick again or hurt and never play another minute.”
Johnson’s lengthy hospital stay also gave him the chance to spend extended quiet time with his head coach. He was never the type to stop by Wooden’s office just to chat—“I was caught up in the whole Wooden mystique. I kind of kept my distance.”—but there was no mystique in that hospital room. Just two men, one old and one young, shooting the breeze about basketball, life, family, whatever. When Johnson came back, he saw the coach in a different light. “He was still Coach Wooden with the reverence and all that stuff, but I felt at ease around him,” Johnson said.
By the time Johnson rejoined the team, Wooden had done something that he had rarely done in the past: he made Dave Meyers team captain for the entire season. Johnson could have resented that maneuver—this was supposed to be his team, after all—but he didn’t. “It was probably better,” Johnson said. “Dave became the All-American. He was an incredible leader. He played with so much passion. Now he could restore order and make it about the team again.”
* * *
For the 1974–75 season, Wooden’s salary was $32,500, a laughable sum but still the most he had ever been paid. For the last time in a season of last times, Wooden sat down at his desk and made his game-by-game predictions. He decided his Bruins would go 23–3 but fail to win the national championship. Wooden sealed the paper in an envelope and stowed it in his desk without telling anyone. He was getting good at keeping secrets.
Wooden suspected he might have been overly optimistic after the season opener against unranked Wichita State. The Bruins needed Drollinger to give them 21 points and 14 rebounds, both career highs, to win, 85–74. “Either we’re not as good as I thought we had the potential to be, or we played a fine club,” Wooden said. It turned out to be the latter. From there, UCLA reeled off five straight home wins by an average margin of 19 points.
The last of those victories came over Notre Dame in a game in which the Bruins had trailed by 19 points in the first half. Digger Phelps had caused quite a stir in the weeks leading up to that game. He had recently authorized a book called
A Coach’s World
, a diary of Notre Dame’s 1973–74 season written by Larry Keith of
Sports Illustrated
. The book included some incendiary observations about Wooden. “I have tremendous respect for what he has accomplished as a player and as a coach,” Phelps was quoted as saying. “Nevertheless, I disagree with many of the things he does. Everyone realizes Wooden has mastered the game; he acts as if he invented it as well.”
Phelps went on to call Wooden “sanctimonious” and took him to task for his bench jockeying: “While Wooden sits on the bench clutching that silver cross in his hand, he’s also riding officials and players worse than any other coach I have seen. I warned Shumate today not to walk past the UCLA bench during time outs, because I don’t want Wooden taking verbal shots at him. That’s so bush-league for a man of his stature, yet no referee has the nerve to reprimand him.”
Publicly, Wooden shrugged off those comments. “Certain people are always looking to rap someone who’s at the top,” he said. Privately, he was irate. He called Phelps and asked why he had said those things. According to Wooden, Phelps replied, “Don’t worry about that stuff, John. I just did it to sell books.”
“I hung up on him,” Wooden said.
For a long time, Wooden expressed a mixture of bemusement and pique, seasoned with a dash of condescension, at the way Phelps and the Notre Dame faithful turned a 1-point regular season victory into a cause célèbre. Phelps’s former assistant, Dick Kuchen, once bragged to Wooden that Phelps and his staff spent an entire year scouting the Bruins before their historic win. “I said, ‘Gosh, Dick, if you’d have spent that time on some of the other games, you would’ve won all those other games you lost, wouldn’t ya? How’d you work out that you were gonna score the last twelve points against us?’” Wooden said. “They made a crusade out of it, but I liked that. I used to tell my players, ‘They’re making a crusade to beat you. What does that mean? They respect you. They think it’ll be great to beat you. Let ’em celebrate if they happen to beat us, like they won the national championship. Then we’ll go ahead and win the national championship.’”
After scoring that very satisfying win over Notre Dame in Pauley, the Bruins hit the road to play in the Terrapin Classic at the University of Maryland. Lefty Driesell asked to spend some time with Wooden, so Wooden invited him to his morning exercise. “He walked so fast, the next day I could hardly walk,” Driesell said. UCLA defeated St. Bonaventure in the first game to advance to the final against Maryland, and in that contest Wooden made yet another unconventional move: he called time-out to make a strategic adjustment. Driesell had just switched to a three-guard offense, so Wooden responded by inserting Johnson, who was still working his way back into the rotation as a reserve. Johnson scored 11 of UCLA’s final 15 points, and the Bruins won, 81–75.
Despite his recovering health, it was not easy for Johnson to deal with not starting. He expressed his anger one day during practice when he dunked over Drollinger during a fast-break drill. To Johnson’s surprise, Wooden said nothing. However, when sophomore forward Gavin Smith dunked later in that same practice, Wooden blew his whistle.
Goodness gracious sakes alive, Gavin! Don’t ever do that again or you’ll never play another minute for UCLA!
When Johnson asked Wooden later why he hadn’t said anything to him when he dunked, Wooden said he was just cutting him some slack. “He knew I had been sick and that I was doing it to release my pent-up frustration,” Johnson said. “Gavin was just doing it to flaunt his jumping ability.”
Wooden was enjoying himself in a way he hadn’t for some time. Even a pair of losses in January—by 4 points at Stanford, by 6 at Notre Dame—couldn’t sour his mood. “To say I’m pleased with the play of every individual would never be true,” he said. “But I am pleased with the
effort
of every individual this season, and that hasn’t always been true.”
Wooden was less pleased when the NCAA’s basketball committee announced a pair of rule changes in early January. The first was a decision to expand the NCAA tournament from twenty-five to thirty-two teams, which meant that for the first time ever, the NCAA would award at-large bids to teams that had failed to win their conference titles. Many coaches and writers had been arguing for this change for several years, but the tipping point was the 1974 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) tournament championship game, when No. 1 NC State beat No. 4 Maryland 103–100 in overtime. It was one of the best-played, most exciting games in college basketball history. While NC State went on to win the NCAA championship, Maryland could not play in that tournament at all and had to settle for an invitation to the NIT, which it turned down. Wooden had long argued against adding at-large teams, and he wasn’t happy to be overruled. “I thought all along that we play the conference to determine who was going to get in the NCAA tournament,” he said. “Teams that don’t win the conference, I don’t think should be in.”
That was a minor annoyance compared to the other rule change. The committee had determined that from now on, every coach was required to open his locker room to the press within ten minutes of the conclusion of all NCAA tournament games. The committee’s chairman, Davidson College coach Tom Scott, made clear that the rule had been passed with one man in mind. “Wooden has been a problem, as you know,” Scott said. “If he’s there this year, we’ll have that dressing room open.”
Wooden took exception to that remark. “I don’t think the press as a whole would say that [I’ve been a problem], except on this one thing,” he said. “I just think that’s a poor place to have a great number of the press in, but if they make it a rule, why, it’ll be done.” After he left coaching, Wooden frequently claimed that Scott’s comment was part of the reason he decided to retire, which was unfair considering Wooden had already made his decision before the rule was changed.
After the loss at Notre Dame, the Bruins reeled off six straight conference wins, only one of which came by more than 12 points. Their 89–84 win over USC at Pauley Pavilion marked a historic threshold: the all-time series between the schools was now officially tied. It had taken Wooden a mere twenty-seven years to erase the forty-game advantage the Trojans owned when he came to Westwood.
Wooden remained sanguine even after he suffered the worst loss of his UCLA career, a 103–81 rout at the hands of his good friend, Washington State coach Marv Harshman. “I’m very happy for Marv, and I’m very disappointed for my own team,” Wooden said. “I can’t say we were jobbed. We weren’t out-lucked. It was a good beating.”
Wooden was finding that he had the exact opposite problem from a year ago. Now, his players were
too
agreeable. “They’re competitors in their own way, but not violent competitors,” he said. “It’s possible they don’t have the fiery spirit that might [make them] better.” Still, Wooden was not going to let himself get caught up in whether or not he was satisfying expectations. It had taken him to the age of sixty-four, but he was finally following his father’s counsel not to worry about things he couldn’t control. “It’s human nature, I suppose. Anything short of winning all our games is not enough for some people,” Wooden said. “The same is true of the people who used to say we won by such big margins it was boring. Now they’re wondering why we don’t win by more. At one time, that would have bugged me. I accept it now.”