Wooden had done well to keep his impending retirement a secret, but now the news was starting to break, and from a most unlikely source. Washington coach George Raveling first reported the big scoop in his Sunday column for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, which was published on March 8. “The public announcement won’t come until mid-April, but John Wooden won’t return as head coach at UCLA next year,” Raveling wrote. “Several sources up and down the coast have told me of Wooden’s pending retirement.”
Raveling wasn’t totally straight with his readers. He actually had only one source, and it was not from the West Coast, but it was a good one. A few weeks before, Gene Bartow, with whom Raveling had become very good friends over the years, called Raveling to tell him about his meeting with Morgan. “I told him, damn, you know it’s going to be tough as hell following a legend. The only expectation they know is a national championship,” Raveling said. Once the regular season ended, Raveling called Bartow and asked if he could report the news. Bartow said it was fine with him as long as Raveling didn’t reveal his source.
When the column was published, said Raveling, “all hell broke loose.” Morgan rang him up and demanded that Raveling tell him his source. “He was livid. He kept saying, ‘You can’t just say these things. You’ve got to prove it,’” Raveling said. “He was trying to smoke me out, but I wouldn’t tell him where I got it from. I just said, ‘Well, let it play its course and we’ll see who’s right and who’s wrong.’” Morgan also got the Pac-8 commissioner to publicly reprimand Raveling.
Raveling’s article was just one more piece of conjecture for Wooden to bat down. “I’ve said it before and I can say it again. I’ve made no decision about retiring next season yet,” he said. “You may put to rest rumors that I have decided not to return.”
Wooden, however, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with having to lie. He knew the questions would only become more frequent during the NCAA tournament. It was going to be hard enough to win the title. Because of the addition of seven at-large slots, a team would have to win five games instead of four to claim the championship. The conference champions were assigned regions by geography, but the at-large teams were drawn out of a hat and placed into the bracket. That’s why UCLA’s first opponent in the West Regional in Pullman, Washington, was Michigan, which had been the runner-up in the Big Ten to Indiana.
The Bruins’ season came very close to ending against the Wolverines, but they pulled out a thrilling 103–91 win in overtime. That sent them to the West Regional semifinals in Portland, where they were nearly upended yet again, this time by a Montana team coached by a hard-nosed Marv Harshman disciple named Jud Heathcote. The Bruins’ win in the West Regional final came much easier by way of an 89–75 triumph over Arizona State. After all they had lost, after everything they had been through, the Bruins were headed for the final weekend in San Diego. John Wooden would have the opportunity he wanted, to leave basketball a champion.
* * *
Gene Bartow was headed to San Diego, too, but unlike Wooden he was not bringing his team. The Illini had gone 8–18 and failed to make the NCAA tournament. Bartow still was not sure what he was going to tell Morgan, but he felt himself inching closer to taking the job. After he got back from his cloak-and-dagger trip to Los Angeles, Bartow told his boss, Cecil Coleman, what was going on. Coleman was understandably angry, but when Bartow asked him what he would do if he was asked to be UCLA’s athletic director, Coleman conceded he had a point.
UCLA arrived for the tournament’s final weekend back in its customary perch atop the rankings, courtesy of No. 1 Indiana’s loss to Kentucky in the Mideast Regional final. The Bruins’ opponent in the NCAA semifinals was No. 4 Louisville. This put Wooden in a tough spot. Not only would he again have to go up against his former player and assistant, Denny Crum, but he still had not told Crum about his plans. That was one more reason why Wooden did not want the news to break, but he was losing the battle. At a party on Friday night, Wooden was cornered by four Los Angeles sportswriters who claimed to have heard from reliable sources that he planned to announce his retirement on Saturday night if UCLA lost or on Monday night if the Bruins reached the final. Wooden was through with the charade. “It might be,” he said. “I won’t want to lie. I would announce it to my players first and I haven’t yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if a decision came this weekend. It’s been a troubled time. It’s not what I’d really want. If I did it, it would be for the best.”
In an unbylined story the following morning, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that “a prominent UCLA alumnus said Friday that John Wooden will resign as the Bruins’ basketball coach at the NCAA tournament.” The
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
published the same claim. When Wooden read those articles during the Kentucky-Syracuse semifinal that preceded his own, he knew the jig was up. The spiraling situation set the stage for one of the most dramatic and wrenching nights of his life.
* * *
If anyone could get his team prepared to play UCLA, it was Denny Crum. His Louisville Cardinals built two separate 7-point leads during the first half. Each time, the Bruins managed to hang tight. “It was like playing against ourselves,” Marques Johnson said. The game stayed close for the entire second half. Louisville led, 65–61, with 1:06 to go.
After Richard Washington dropped in a pair of free throws to cut Louisville’s lead to 2, Wooden went to his zone press for the first time all day. The move baffled the Cardinals, who turned the ball over and allowed Johnson to score on the ensuing possession to tie it at 65–all. When neither team could score during the final minute, the game headed for overtime.
By that time, Drollinger and Trgovich had fouled out, and the Bruins again fell behind by 3 points with 2:20 to go. A Johnson tip-in and two free throws by Meyers sandwiched a Louisville basket, leaving the score at 74–73 in favor of the Cardinals. Crum called time-out and ordered his team into a four-corner stall. For most of the possession, the ball stayed in the hands of Cardinals guard Terry Howard. There was a good reason for this: Howard had not missed a free throw all season. He was a perfect 28 for 28.
With the game slipping away, Washington had no choice but to foul. It was a one-and-one situation. If Howard made both free throws, it would be a two-possession game, and UCLA would probably be headed for defeat. Howard stepped to the foul line … and missed.
If ever there was evidence to support Tarkanian’s theory that Wooden was the good Lord’s favorite coach, this was it. Howard’s miss gave the Bruins new life. Wooden called time-out to set up the final possession. When play resumed, McCarter tried to score on a drive down the lane and missed, but Meyers grabbed the rebound to keep the possession going. The Bruins worked the ball around to Washington, who slipped loose on the baseline and lofted a baseline jumper as the final seconds ticked away.
Swish. Ball game. UCLA 75, Louisville 74.
Wooden and Crum shook hands amid the bedlam. As Wooden walked off the court toward the locker room, he was totally, utterly spent. His players were elated in the locker room. Nobody was trying to avoid peaks and valleys, least of all Wooden. When he came inside, he waited for the whooping and hollering to subside. Once it did, Wooden praised his Bruins for how they played. He said he was proud of them. He said he loved coaching them. He told them he believed they had an excellent chance to beat Kentucky in the final.
Then Wooden dropped the news. Win or lose, Monday was going to be his final game as the UCLA basketball coach. “I’m bowing out,” he said. Struggling to push down the frog in his throat, he could only add, “I don’t want to. I have to.”
At that point, the only player who had known of Wooden’s plans was his senior captain, Dave Meyers. The rest were in shock. “There was never a hint that he was going to retire,” Johnson said. “I remember feeling a little disappointment, a little sadness that he wasn’t going to be there to finish out my career.”
Wooden had not told anyone—not Morgan, not Cunningham, not Nell—that he was going to break the news to the players that night. He wasn’t even positive himself until he started walking off the court. He dreaded the idea of going into that interview room and facing another round of questions about that morning’s reports. He was tired of carrying around his secret, tired of lying to his friends. It was important to him that his players heard the news from him first. Having told them at last, he was ready to reveal his plans to the world.
Wooden was still wrung out when he took his seat in the interview room. “I’ve always said that my first year in coaching [at UCLA] was my most satisfying. My last year has been equally satisfying, regardless of what happens Monday night,” he said. “I’ve asked J. D. Morgan to release me from my coaching duties at UCLA. I have done that for a number of reasons I’d rather not go into. I just told the players.”
The room fell silent. Someone asked Wooden what the players’ response was. “Quietness,” he said.
Wooden explained, less than truthfully, that he had been considering retirement “for some time” but did not come to a final conclusion until the last week. He said he was making the announcement now instead of after the final “because there has been a lot of conjecture about it recently, most of it reasonably accurate. I certainly don’t think I panic when I make decisions.” He talked of his recent sleeping troubles—“That had never happened before and I thought, well, maybe it’s a sign”—and said he did not make the decision out of his own health concerns but rather “the health of others,” presumably Nell, who later confirmed to reporters that her husband had made his decision to retire at the start of the season. Wooden also promised he would not coach anywhere else. “I’ll be sixty-five October 14. Practice starts October 15. I made the decision many years ago I’d never coach any place but UCLA.
“But let’s don’t talk about that,” he pleaded. “Let’s talk about the game.”
Fat chance. Wooden’s announcement set off a mad scramble. Frank Arnold was doing an interview with Hessler on the court when Wooden delivered the news to the players. “I had a hunch it might happen, but I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me,” Arnold said. Cunningham was also caught off-guard. He immediately informed the press that he planned to resign as well. “I’m thirty-five years old and things have happened to me that shouldn’t be happening to a man my age,” he said. “They’re directly related to coaching, the hours and pressure.”
Now it was Wooden’s turn to be caught off-guard. “Did he say for sure he was resigning?” he said to a reporter who relayed what Cunningham had said. Asked if he was surprised, Wooden said, “Yes and no.”
Crum may have been the most surprised of anyone. Not only was he unaware that Wooden was going to retire; he had no idea that Morgan had already offered the job to someone else. Crum could barely hold back tears as he talked about his former coach. “There’s not much you can say about a man who has done what he has done in his profession,” he said as his hands shook. “Basketball will miss him. You’ll all miss him. He might miss basketball even more.”
When the writers entered the UCLA locker room—Wooden didn’t like the rule, but he didn’t protest it—the players were still spinning from the night’s events. “I felt like I was sitting in on a little bit of sports history,” Johnson said of the moment Wooden broke the news. Meyers added, “There was a lot of emotion in the room. Most of our guys are young and maybe don’t realize what Wooden has meant to UCLA and the game.”
The chance to play in an NCAA championship game was plenty big on its own. Now, Monday night’s final wasn’t just going to be big. It was going to be historic. The players may have been young, but they weren’t naive. As soon as Wooden left the locker room, McCarter brought everyone together and delivered a stern message. “There’s no way,” he said, “that we are going to let this man lose.”
* * *
At the traditional Sunday press conference for the semifinal coaches, Wooden sounded like a man unburdened. “When I got wind of the Saturday morning papers in Los Angeles, I made the decision,” he said. “I feel much better now that the announcement has been made. I was sort of pent up inside. I wasn’t being able to be completely honest with my friends.” Wooden answered a few more questions about his retirement before cutting them off. “Isn’t it about time that we talk about the important thing—the basketball tournament?”
His opponent in the final, Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall, was happy to oblige. “There’s no way we can come up with anything like what’s involved in John Wooden’s resignation,” he said. “Still, it won’t dampen our spirits.” Hall also joked that he should get the UCLA job because he had already been foolish enough to follow Adolph Rupp. “There’s no sense destroying two people,” he said.
Kentucky had a major advantage over UCLA in size, experience, and depth. Playing alongside four seniors were three bruising, six-foot-ten freshman centers: Rick Roby, Mike Phillips, and Dan Hall. The Wildcats also featured a rising star in six-foot-five freshman guard Jack Givens. Kentucky posed such a formidable challenge that on Sunday Wooden conducted a walk-through of Kentucky’s trapping defense and four-corners offense. “Never before had we done this, but we had to,” he said.
When the game began, Wooden was unusually tight. As he feared, his Bruins had all kinds of problems with Kentucky’s size. Usually, Marques Johnson could overcome a height disadvantage with strength and quickness, but this was one occasion where he was overmatched. When Kentucky built an early 6-point lead, Wooden replaced him with Drollinger.
From there, UCLA made its move. With Drollinger playing the game of his life, UCLA erased its deficit and fought toe-to-toe with the Wildcats. There were fifteen lead changes and five ties in the first half alone. Rather than stew on the bench, Johnson found himself cheering Drollinger’s every move. “It wasn’t like I wanted Ralph to cool off and not play as well so I could get back in there. I was genuinely happy for Ralph,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t about me and my minutes and this and that. It was like, we need to win this game by any means necessary. Ralph’s doing the job. I’m glad not to have to battle those big dudes. Go, Ralph, go.”