* * *
John Wooden had already made a long and compelling case that he was without peer when it came to teaching the game of basketball. The 1974–75 season served as a convincing closing argument.
Yes, he had two of the country’s better forwards in Meyers and Johnson, but for most of the season, Johnson was a shell of his former self. Besides, no one would claim those two belonged in the same class as Alcindor and Walton. They weren’t even Hazzard, Goodrich, Wicks, or Wilkes. Yet the Bruins stayed among the college basketball elite because they were better schooled in the fundamentals of the game. They weren’t the most talented students. They just had the best teacher.
This was becoming so obvious, even Wooden’s most bitter rivals had to acknowledge it. “He put high-profile players together effectively,” Bob Boyd said. “It wasn’t always easy, but in the end he produced his desired results.” Dick Harter added, “The most important thing in basketball is getting players to play unselfishly and play well with each other. I can’t remember any UCLA player taking a selfish or a bad shot. When you think about it, John had a lot of very nice guys like Dave Meyers and Marques Johnson, and he had some pain in the asses like Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe. Walton could be obnoxious. John got them all to play well together.”
Since most sportswriters and opposing coaches were unable to solve this riddle, it was left to a pair of psychology professors to make a clinical study. The two professors—one from the University of Hawaii, the other from UCLA—charted several dozen of Wooden’s practices during the 1974–75 season and published their findings in the January 1976 issue of
Psychology Today
magazine. The professors came up with ten different categories of communication (Instructions, Hustles, Praises, Scolds, etc.) and assigned everything Wooden said to one of those. The most frequently cited category by far was Instructions, which the psychologists defined as “verbal statements about what to do or how to do it.” That accounted for 50.3 percent of things Wooden said. The professors calculated that overall “at least 75 percent of Wooden’s teaching acts carry information.”
The researchers were also taken by the qualitative change in Wooden’s demeanor once practice began. This was the “walking contradiction” that Marques Johnson and his teammates had come to know so well. “The whistle transforms Wooden,” they wrote. “He becomes less the friendly grandfather and more the Marine sergeant … [and he] scolds twice as much as he rewards.”
What those psychologists witnessed was the result of a lifetime of small, almost unnoticeable advancements. Wooden truly lived the credo that hung on his office wall:
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts
. After all these years, he was still learning, still improving, one three-by-five index card at a time. “You look back at my practice program for the last year or the year before and there wouldn’t be much difference,” he said. “But go back ten years and you’ll find a lot of change. I make small changes regularly almost without realizing it. If you go back twenty to twenty-five years and look at one of my schedules, you’d wonder how I ever got anything done.”
One thing that Wooden had learned is that he could relax his ultraserious demeanor just a little. His friends were well aware that he had a sense of humor, but to his players this was a major revelation. “My sophomore year, he loosened up,” Johnson said. “He kind of opened up, and we opened up to him. There was a lot more of back-and-forth joking.”
For instance, one day, Raymond Townsend, a freshman guard, was messing around and taking half-court shots after practice. In previous years, Wooden might have ripped into Townsend for horsing around, but on this day he only asked for the ball. Using his patented 1930s-style two-handed set shot, Wooden drilled his first attempt. “Child’s play,” he said and walked away.
Johnson thought he was going to get an earful when Wooden spotted him shooting pool in the student union one day. Instead, Wooden asked to borrow his stick. Shifting around the toothpick clutched between his teeth, Wooden bent over and started rattling balls into the pockets. “He made five or six in a row, maybe more,” Johnson said. “The cue ball would spin and snake up to the next one.
Boom
. Spin and snake up to the next one.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
.
Boom
. Then he handed me the cue and walked out. Didn’t say a word. Didn’t say one word the whole time.”
Wooden also liked to tease Johnson about his hair. Johnson wore a thick Afro, but he matted it down extra tight for practice and games. Every so often, Wooden would walk up to him, pull at a strand, and smirk when it stood straight up. “That was his way of saying, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re not fooling me,’” Johnson said.
McCarter was a prime target for Wooden’s needle. Besides being the team’s only vegetarian (though he ate at the training table), McCarter sported the headband-and-dark-glasses look favored by his idol, Jimi Hendrix. McCarter was also a martial arts enthusiast who went through a series of kung fu moves to get ready to play. Once, before a game at Oregon State, McCarter was making his slow-motion hand and leg contortions when Wooden sneaked up behind him and started mimicking his moves. McCarter had no idea why his teammates were laughing so hard until he turned around.
During another trip to the Northwest, Wooden was riding the team bus when he asked Dick Enberg to come sit next to him. Enberg thought he was going to get a lesson on the intricacies of basketball, but instead Wooden asked, “Do you like poetry?” Startled, Enberg said yes. For the rest of the ride, he and Wooden (well, mostly Wooden) spoke about different poets and different eras, with Wooden reciting some of his favorite verses.
There was, however, one person hovering in the background who could disrupt Wooden’s serenity. Sam Gilbert remained embedded as ever in the program, despite J. D. Morgan’s efforts to pry him away. The two men continued to have heated discussions in Morgan’s office. “You could hear J. D. shouting out the door,” Frank Arnold said. “J. D. was very strongly telling Sam to stay away, don’t get involved. I know that from the inside.”
Arnold heard Gilbert’s name bandied about when he came to UCLA in the spring of 1971 but didn’t know much about him. A few weeks later, Arnold was sitting with Wooden and a few players at a UCLA track meet. When one of the players mentioned he needed some help with a problem, Arnold suggested he go see Sam Gilbert. Wooden nudged Arnold hard with his knee. After the meet, Wooden told Arnold, “Never do that again. And stay away from Sam Gilbert.” Arnold did as he was told. “I knew Sam from a distance, and that’s all I wanted to know about him,” he said. “I had a very low opinion of Sam. Any kind of high-end booster like that isn’t good for any program.”
That did not stop Gilbert from continuing to befriend Wooden’s players. Marques Johnson read about Gilbert in
The Wizard of Westwood
but did not meet him during his recruitment. After Johnson started playing for UCLA, some upperclassmen took him to one of Gilbert’s famous weekend barbecues. Johnson soon became a regular visitor. “It wasn’t anything crazy. We’d go over and play paddle tennis and just hang out all day. There might be fifteen, twenty people between players and their girlfriends,” Johnson said. “You’d have Rose, the kids, and the grandkids swimming, dogs chasing the tennis balls into the pool. It was a real wholesome picture.”
Gilbert lavished on Johnson the same less-than-wholesome favors he provided for everyone else. “There was no cash ever. He never paid rent or bought cars or anything, but he would get me discounts on things like tires,” Johnson said. “The one thing I got [for free] was buckskin heavy jackets and leather coats from a clothing guy that he knew.”
Though Gilbert boasted that he never took a fee for serving as the players’ agent, his affiliation with the team obviously enhanced his standing in the business community. There were many times when Gilbert would take Johnson and a friend, usually McCarter or Washington or both, to attend some high-class function in Los Angeles. “That would happen two or three times a month,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have to pay for the food.”
Like the other Bruins, Johnson wasn’t the least bit conflicted about what was going on. “It was a different time back then. It wasn’t like you were blatantly doing anything wrong,” Johnson said. “Being from L.A. and living in the same apartment complex with a couple of USC football players … there was a feeling like what we’re doing over here is nothing. I hate to say that because I don’t want to drag their program though anything, but it’s true. I knew guys who were playing at UNLV. L.A. guys. So it was a level playing field for everybody. There were certain things that you were going to try and get, and certain ways you were going to work the system.”
As for his coach, well, Johnson may have talked about a lot of personal things with Wooden that season, but this was not one of them. “Coach never talked about what was going on with Sam,” Johnson said. Holding his hands apart, he explained, “At that time, he was here, and Sam was here. And never the twain shall meet.”
* * *
Old habits were hard to break. As February gave way to early March, the usual tensions infiltrated John Wooden’s cone of serenity. As the postseason drew nigh, he found it increasingly difficult to sleep. His morning workout at the UCLA track was now starting at 5:00 a.m. The pressure of mounting another run to an NCAA championship was taking an even rougher toll on Nell, which only added to his worries.
Things were also bearing down hard on Gary Cunningham. He had been struggling all season with the question of whether he should be Wooden’s successor. Finally, in February Cunningham went to Wooden and told him that he did not want the job. Cunningham told Wooden that when he quit at the end of the season, Cunningham would quit, too. “It’s not where my interests were,” Cunningham said.
This sent Morgan into scramble mode. At that point, he couldn’t be positive that UCLA would even reach the NCAA tournament, much less win another title, and he wanted to have Wooden’s replacement locked down. With Cunningham no longer an option, the next obvious choice seemed to be Denny Crum, who was having another fabulous season at Louisville. Morgan, however, was not a huge fan of Crum, considering him a little too rough around the edges. Morgan wanted a coach who could win while maintaining the clean-cut UCLA image that Wooden had promulgated so well.
That also ruled out another winning coach with local ties, Jerry Tarkanian. After leaving Long Beach in a mess, Tarkanian was already attracting the scrutiny of the NCAA at UNLV. “I said to him once, what about [hiring] Tarkanian?” said Byron Atkinson, the UCLA professor and dean of students. “You should have heard the … names he called him. They were hot. [Morgan] considered him a scab and a pirate.”
Thus, Morgan had no choice but to go outside the UCLA family—and he had someone in mind. Back in the 1973 NCAA final against Memphis State, while everyone else was entranced by Bill Walton’s performance, Morgan came away impressed with Gene Bartow, the Tigers’ head coach. Not only was Bartow a good coach; Morgan also liked his “Clean Gene” profile. Problem was, Bartow had since left Memphis State and was now in his first year at Illinois. He had just signed a five-year contract.
Bartow was shocked when Morgan called him. “I said, ‘J. D., I can’t. I’m trying to win games,’” Bartow said. “It was nice of J. D. to do it, but I felt you could win big at Illinois. So at that moment, I didn’t give much thought to it.” Two weeks later, Morgan called Bartow again and asked him to reconsider. This time, Bartow was more willing to listen. He was a southerner originally, and he had twice recently skidded off the road during a bad snowstorm. Bartow was becoming more enticed by the idea of living in the California sun. More important, he was warming up to the idea of being UCLA’s next basketball coach.
On February 8, Illinois lost by 4 points at Northwestern. The next day, Bartow flew to Los Angeles, met with Morgan for two hours over lunch in Santa Monica, and then turned around and flew back home. To that point, Bartow had not told anyone about the situation except for his wife, and he managed to keep word from leaking out about his meeting with Morgan. Among those left in the dark was his athletic director at Illinois, Cecil Coleman. “It probably wasn’t real ethical,” Bartow said. “I wasn’t real proud of it.”
Wooden had no idea about Morgan’s conversations with Bartow. J. D. figured the coach had enough to worry about as the Bruins entered the final two weeks of the regular season with a one-game lead in the conference standings. Wooden was uncharacteristically emotional down the stretch of the season. After the team scored a dramatic 107–103 victory at Oregon to keep its grip on first place, Wooden had to gather himself before speaking in the locker room. “I’ve got a frog in my throat,” he said. A 12-point win at home over second-place Oregon State pushed that lead to two games. Two weeks later, the Bruins clinched the title by throttling Stanford in Pauley Pavilion by 34 points.
That rendered meaningless the regular season finale at USC, but the game meant a lot to Wooden. Before tip-off, he shared some quiet words with Bob Boyd inside the Sports Arena. Afterward, Boyd went over to his assistant, Jim Hefner, and said, “You won’t believe what’s happening. Wooden just told me this is the last time he’s playing us. He’s quitting.”
Hefner was surprised Wooden was retiring, but he was not surprised that he would confide in Boyd. “He respected Boyd,” Hefner said. “I know that for a fact because his assistants used to say what Wooden thought about him. He knew Bob could coach.”
The game was sealed in the final minute when Pete Trgovich, who had so often struggled to find playing time throughout his career, stole a pass meant for Trojans guard Gus Williams and converted a pair of free throws. When the horn sounded, Wooden jumped out of his seat, threw his fist in the air, and shook it several times. “More than anything else, I was elated for Pete,” he said. “I know he hasn’t done as well here as he probably expected to.” Wooden was so thrilled with the win, he opened up his locker room to reporters.