For Bartow, there would be no easing into the job. UCLA, which entered the 1975–76 season ranked No. 2 in the AP poll, was going to open with a nationally televised game against No. 1 Indiana in St. Louis. Much of the coverage surrounding Bartow’s debut centered on his stylistic similarities with Wooden. Like Wooden, Bartow was a native midwesterner who didn’t drink, didn’t swear, went to church, and doted on his wife. They were Clean Gene and Saint John. Below the surface, however, there were real differences. For starters, Bartow made it clear he would allow reporters in his team’s locker room, so long as it was okay with the players. Bartow’s practices were also looser, more fun. They often ended with dunk contests. “He makes you want to play more than Coach Wooden did,” said Gavin Smith, who was a junior guard that season. “There’s more encouragement.”
Many of Bartow’s changes, however, did not go over so well. He told Marques Johnson from the start that he wanted him to shoot twenty to twenty-five times per game, which Johnson feared could hurt the team’s spirit. Though Bartow hired Larry Farmer as an assistant to maintain a tether to the program’s past, he also brought in Lee Hunt, who had worked as his assistant the previous five years in Memphis and Illinois. Bartow and Hunt put together detailed scouting reports of UCLA’s opponents, which represented a cultural shift as much as a tactical one. “The scouting report was worded like this kind of Beverly Hillbillies, homespun language,” Johnson said. “‘This guy’s tougher than a buzz saw, meaner than a junkyard dog,’ I remember Gavin Smith being like, ‘Buzz saw? What the fuck is that?’ Lee Hunt, he was a great guy, but he had this saying, ‘If you do that, it’s gonna be River City every time. Just think about River City.’ It was hard to embrace, put it that way.”
Hunt was right about one thing: there was a buzz saw in St. Louis, only the Bruins were the ones who walked into it as the Hoosiers pummeled them, 84–64. Bartow didn’t think the loss was so terrible, but he had no concept of the uproar he would face once he and his players returned home. The beat writers were fair, but the columnists were tough. Worst of all were the critical letters from readers that were published daily in the
Los Angeles Times
. Bartow read every one. They cut him to the bone.
“I didn’t understand it,” he said many years later. “I had been a high school coach for six years, a college coach for fourteen years, and to my knowledge I had never had a negative word written about me.”
Bartow’s thin-skinned reaction to the criticism made the loss to Indiana even worse. The players were already wondering whether he was up to snuff. Now they were starting to suspect that he was, in the words of Marques Johnson, “in over his head.”
“Gene was naive when he took the job,” said Gary Cunningham, who watched it all unfold from close range in his new job running the university’s alumni association. “When the reaction from the press came, he became very intimidated. He used to call all those people ‘kooks.’”
After the opening debacle, UCLA returned to its winning ways, but the vibes around the program never recovered. The Bruins won their next fifteen games, but there were several close shaves along the way. “It used to be that teams were intimidated when they played against us,” said Ray Townsend, a six-foot-two sophomore guard. “Now they think we’ve lost our divinity.” Bartow did not handle it well. After UCLA squeaked by Stanford, 68–67, in Pauley Pavilion on January 16, he stormed into the team’s locker room and ripped into his players. Then he left them to talk among themselves well past midnight.
It all took a terrible toll on the coach. He stopped sleeping and dropped fifteen pounds. Bartow’s obvious agitation at how he was being treated only spurred the press to agitate him more. A local radio host named Jim Healy entertained his listeners by repeatedly playing tapes of Bartow’s high-pitched squeal. At one point, Healy revealed on the air that Bartow’s phone number was listed and encouraged his listeners to look it up. After a few too many instances of Bartow’s wife, Ruth, picking up the phone to hear heavy breathing, the Bartows changed the number. One time before a game in Pauley, the coaches were told in the locker room that Bartow had been sent a death threat. “Coach Bartow was ashen,” Farmer said. “So I said, ‘Coach, do you mind if Coach Hunt and I sit next to Ducky, just in case this guy’s a bad shot?’ That kind of broke the tension.”
Throughout all of this, Wooden remained ever-present—in the office, at the games, making speeches to every company and organization in town. Wooden even called a few UCLA games as a television commentator. He was often asked about the Bruins, and he was not shy about offering his thoughts. “I’m going to answer honestly and I don’t want this to seem in any way critical. I think the program was slowed by the coaching change,” Wooden said in January. “It took the new coach time to get acquainted with his players and it took the players time to get acquainted with him.” Wooden added unhelpfully that before he decided to retire, he thought “this year’s team would be the strongest I ever had, and that next year’s would be even stronger.”
Even Bartow’s chief coaching rival, Bob Boyd at USC, believed that Bartow was being damaged by this. “I think Coach Wooden was wrong to say this was his best collection of athletes,” Boyd said. “Why would he say that? It could only cause heat for the man.”
The nadir arrived on February 21, when the Bruins were humiliated in Pauley Pavilion by Oregon, 65–45. The home fans booed as the game reached its late stages. And yet the Bruins still owned a one-game lead in the Pac-8 standings with a 9–1 record. They went on to win their final three games to clinch the title with a 13–1 record (24–3 overall). That sent them back to the NCAA tournament, where they defeated San Diego State, Pepperdine, and Arizona to advance to the 1976 national semifinals in Philadelphia.
Waiting for Bartow was Bob Knight and Indiana. The buzz saw carved up UCLA once again, this time by a 65–51 margin. The Hoosiers went on to complete a perfect season with a win in the title game over Michigan, while UCLA defeated Rutgers in the third-place game to finish 28–4. All in all, Bartow thought his first season in Westwood had been, to borrow Wooden’s favorite word, successful. Sure, there had been a few rough patches, but now that he had made it through, he hoped the fans and the media would go a little easier on him. After all, this nostalgia for Wooden couldn’t last forever, could it?
* * *
Behind the scenes, Bartow was dealing with a different and growing problem. His name was Sam Gilbert.
Bartow had never heard of Gilbert before he took the job. Shortly after his arrival, he was sitting in his office one day when he received a call from Ralph Shapiro, the local lawyer who partnered with Gilbert on his representation of UCLA players, and was calling to suggest that Bartow meet with him. Over breakfast at the Holiday Inn on Wilshire Boulevard, Gilbert was blunt about his relationships with the players. “He wasn’t hiding anything,” Bartow said. “He inferred that he was very instrumental in helping the players when they needed help. I told him that I never had an NCAA problem and I didn’t want to have an NCAA problem while I was the Bruins coach. He didn’t seem too concerned about the NCAA.”
When Bartow returned to the office, he asked Wooden about Gilbert. “John said, ‘Gene, you knew about Sam Gilbert before you got here,’” Bartow said. “I said I had never heard of him. It just shows how naive I was.”
Wooden didn’t want to talk about Gilbert, so Bartow took his concerns to J. D. Morgan. Morgan gave Bartow the same reply he had given to Wooden many times. “Don’t worry about Sam,” he said, according to Bartow. “I’ll meet with him. Sam’s not breaking rules. He’s just a great fan of Bruin basketball.” Bartow let the matter rest, but he was not assuaged. “I felt very quickly that he was a person I didn’t want to be around much,” he said.
Given the increasingly public stance Gilbert had assumed over the previous decade, it was only a matter of time before the NCAA’s enforcement office would decide to dig into it. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that it didn’t happen until after Wooden retired, but in early 1976, an NCAA investigator finally came to Westwood. His name was Brent Clark, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the University of Oklahoma law school who had been hired by the NCAA the previous summer. Clark was one of about a half-dozen investigators who had been added to a department that previously had had just one full-time employee. That batch of hires heralded a new era in college sports, but it would take some time before the NCAA committed the proper resources to cracking down on cheaters.
Clark flew to Los Angeles at the behest of David Berst, the NCAA’s director of enforcement, who had handed him a batch of newspaper clippings about Gilbert. “The NCAA had file cabinets full of articles about coaches and athletes, most of which were mailed in by competitors,” Clark said. “That’s how we got our information.”
When Clark called Gilbert, he was surprised that Gilbert readily agreed to speak with him. Clark then flew to Los Angeles and drove to the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood. When Gilbert arrived, Clark was further surprised to see that Gilbert had brought with him a tall, sturdy, young black man. It turned out to be Marques Johnson. “I thought that was kind of brazen,” Clark said. “I had never seen that happen before. Generally, people that instinctively think they’re in trouble either won’t talk to you or they want to talk to you in private. But Sam was very forthcoming. He wasn’t the least bit defensive. He was proud of what he had done to be a father figure to UCLA basketball players.”
Over the next hour, Gilbert spoke of how he had innocently (and legally) opened his home to give these players a sanctuary from the pressures of playing for UCLA. Clark recalled that Johnson did not say much, except to confirm that the players’ relationship with Gilbert was on the up-and-up. Neither revealed that Gilbert had provided the players with gifts and favors that violated NCAA rules, but Clark was justifiably suspicious. “I had enough information from Sam to know that this was an unwholesome situation,” he said. “It looked to me like there was a trail leading to extra benefits.”
When Clark returned to his hotel room, he called Berst to tell him what he had learned. That’s when he encountered still another surprise. “I told David that it had gone well, and I had a lot of information,” Clark said. “I said, ‘Do you want me to visit with the athletic director and have him arrange a meeting with Coach Wooden?’ And Berst said, ‘No, that’s not really necessary. Just go on to your next stop and come home.’ I thought that was kind of peculiar. I had gone all the way to Los Angeles for one interview. That was highly unusual.”
Clark was particularly struck by the contrast between the way Berst was approaching Sam Gilbert and the fervor with which the NCAA was prosecuting Jerry Tarkanian, who was building a powerhouse at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in just his third season there. Whereas the NCAA had deployed a single newly hired recent law graduate to interview Gilbert, it sent a former FBI agent to Las Vegas to turn up evidence against Tarkanian. In the years since the NCAA brought the hammer down on Cal State Long Beach, Tarkanian’s criticisms had become more vocal, both in public and in private. “In those days, he would call me virtually twice a week. Almost every time, he talked about UCLA,” Berst said. “He did this when he was at Long Beach State. He’d say, we can barely afford a bus ticket to go to the apartments, and they’re driving Rolls-Royces.” From Clark’s viewpoint, it was obvious the NCAA was a lot more intent on going after Tarkanian than Wooden. “They were on Tarkanian like flies on honey,” Clark said. “They were all about getting Tarkanian.”
Clark believed that if he had unearthed the favors Gilbert had been lavishing on UCLA players, it is quite possible the NCAA would have concluded that major violations had been committed at UCLA while Wooden had been the coach. The seriousness of the individual favors was less of a concern to him than the overall pattern of behavior, which had obviously gone on for years. “[Gilbert] would have had to demonstrate that his home was open to all UCLA students, that it wasn’t just basketball players or athletes. And of course, Sam wouldn’t have been able to do that,” Clark said. “The NCAA would have been looking for a pattern of behavior. Furthermore, this goes to the heart of the NCAA’s philosophy, which is institutional control.… When they find a school knew of violations over a period of time and didn’t report them, that’s when a school is in big trouble.”
Clark filed his report on Gilbert and never conducted another interview on the case. He left the NCAA at the end of 1977. Bartow, for one, was relieved that the NCAA did not pursue the matter further. “Gene was a person who I think had concerns about what Sam Gilbert was doing,” Berst said. “I don’t know that he knew what Sam was doing, but he was concerned.” Though he later insisted that he and Gilbert “never had cross words to my knowledge,” Bartow revealed his secret fears in a letter he wrote to Berst in 1991 that made reference to the decision to pull Clark off the case. “I want to say ‘thank you’ for possibly saving my life,” Bartow wrote. “I believe Sam Gilbert was Mafia-related and was capable of hurting people. I think, had the NCAA come in hard while I was at UCLA, they would have felt I had reported them, and I would have been in possible danger. Sam was a most unusual person, and he violated many rules knowingly.”
As for Marques Johnson, his relationship with Gilbert did not last much beyond that lunch at the Hamburger Hamlet. Shortly after the 1975–76 season ended, Johnson and Richard Washington decided they wanted to turn pro. Gilbert arranged for them to fly to Denver to meet with the ABA’s Denver Nuggets and their brash young coach, Larry Brown. The NBA’s Detroit Pistons were also interested in Johnson, which drove up the Nuggets’ offer. Johnson was ready to sign, but the deal fell apart when the Nuggets got cold feet out of concern that their drafting of an underclassman could jeopardize a possible merger between the ABA and the NBA. Washington kept his name in the draft, but Johnson decided to return to UCLA for his senior season.
Johnson was content with this outcome until later that summer, when a former UCLA player who was working for an agent told him that he might still be able go to the NBA through the league’s supplemental draft. Johnson was curious, so he agreed to meet with a local attorney named Jerry Roth. When he got to Roth’s office, Johnson said he wanted to get Gilbert on the phone so he could be part of the conversation.