Cunningham reinstituted much of the Wooden culture—the discipline, the team fundamentals, even the 2-2-1 zone press. The Bruins were ranked No. 6 to start the season and played like it, winning every game except the two against their nemesis, Notre Dame, whose coach, Digger Phelps, was justifiably enjoying his newfound supremacy. Because Cunningham was considered family, however, he didn’t face any of the carping that had sliced Bartow to pieces. Mitch Chortkoff reported in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
that after speaking with several boosters during a road trip to the Bay Area, Cunningham was benefiting from a deep reservoir of goodwill. “He’s just like Wooden,” one alumnus said. “He even talks like him.”
Unlike Bartow, Cunningham spoke with Wooden often. The same was true for Cunningham’s newly hired assistant, Jim Harrick. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, Harrick had come to California in 1960 to try his hand at high school teaching and coaching, and he got to know Wooden and his staff while working as a director at some of Wooden’s camps. Harrick was an assistant coach at Utah State when Cunningham brought him back to Los Angeles, and he immediately made himself available to drive Wooden anywhere he needed to go. Harrick loved wandering down the hall to visit with Wooden in his shabby little office. On one occasion, when Harrick was venting about the lack of effort by David Greenwood, a six-foot-nine junior who was a preseason All-American in the fall of 1977, Wooden folded his arms, noted that Greenwood was averaging around 20 points and 10 rebounds, and asked, “Well, would you rather have him or not have him?”
Harrick chuckled at the memory. “That’s kind of the way he was,” he said. “He’d come up with these pearls of wisdom all the time.”
By the time the 1977–78 regular season ended, those two losses to Notre Dame were still the only blemishes on UCLA’s record, and the Bruins had completed a perfect season in the Pac-8. Yet Cunningham felt unfulfilled. “I got tired of answering the same questions over and over,” he said. “I’m a multidimensional person. I used to pray that I could sit down and talk to somebody about a book or something.” Even after the Bruins blew a 13-point lead and lost to Arkansas in the West Regional semifinal of the 1978 NCAA tournament, Cunningham was praised in a way that Bartow would not have been. As a reward, he was given a $3,000 raise.
It soon dawned on Cunningham just how much the profession had changed. When Wooden’s seasons were over, he would shut himself in his office, pore over his note cards, take a little vacation, and start preparing for fall practice. Cunningham didn’t have that luxury. A burgeoning summertime grassroots circuit had come to dominate the recruiting world, requiring coaches to be away from home for virtually the entire off-season. “I do see a difference—a great difference—in the amount of time that has to be spent on recruiting,” Cunningham said. “It’s no longer something you do for a period of time. It’s a 12-month job. It’s a
hard
12-month job, and the head coach is very involved with it.”
Cunningham’s disdain for recruiting showed as he brought in three nondescript players that fall, only one of whom, Michael Sanders, would become a contributor. Cunningham realized that his heart was not in coaching. Wooden talked him out of quitting, but Cunningham warned Morgan that he would probably have to find a new coach the following spring.
By any measure UCLA was still an elite program, but it would never be elite enough when compared to the Wooden years. When
Sports Illustrated
ranked the Bruins third in the country before the start of the 1978–79 season, the magazine noted that “its mystique is gone.” No matter what the current team achieved, it would never measure up to the past. To wit, the Bruins went 23–4 during the 1978–79 season and earned a No. 1 seed in the West Regional of the NCAA tournament. (This was the first year the NCAA seeded all of its teams.) Yet a few days before their first game,
Sports Illustrated
published a lengthy article by Frank Deford revisiting UCLA’s 1964 champs on their fifteenth anniversary. The shadow was long indeed.
The Bruins bowed out in the Regional final with a loss to DePaul. Two days after the season ended, Jim Harrick was hired to be the head coach at Pepperdine University. The following week, Cunningham surprised the public by announcing that he was abdicating Wooden’s throne to return to his former job as vice chancellor for alumni affairs. Later that summer, he would leave UCLA altogether to be the athletic director at the Oregon College of Education, a school of 3,100 in tiny Monmouth, Oregon, where Cunningham would be surrounded by professors, go fishing whenever he wanted, and be home for dinner every night. The UCLA basketball coach used to be one of the most prestigious jobs in all of sports, but now, for the third time in four years, the office was vacant. For Cunningham, leaving was a relief. “My time at UCLA was very rewarding, but the job was not always fun,” he said. “Coach Wooden’s presence was everything. With the master gone, things couldn’t be the same.”
* * *
While the folks hired to replace him were struggling with the big assignment, Wooden was tending to the small details that filled his retirement. That included tweaking the trophy that was to be given to the annual winner of the Wooden Award. The first version included five small statuettes of men in various playing positions, but Wooden didn’t like what he saw, so he asked the Los Angeles Athletic Club to come up with a new one. “They were out of balance,” Wooden said of the player models. “The shooter’s head should be in line with his feet, not in front. The passer was too tight in the arms. Loose, you have to be loose to play basketball.” Referring to the defender who was holding his arms waist high, Wooden joked, “He couldn’t stop me.”
Wooden gave one of his former players, Tommy Curtis, the green light to use his name to start a youth basketball league in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The league was supposed to go national, but it never took off. UCLA also asked Wooden’s permission to lend his name to a new recreation center on campus, and Wooden agreed on the condition that the center would be available for all students to use, not just the athletes. When Wooden accepted invitations to be a guest speaker (his standard fee for a local talk was $1,700), he went out of his way to praise former Bruins who never got much attention while they played for him. “How many of you remember Pete Blackman?” he asked one night while speaking at Orange Coast College. When very few hands went up, Wooden continued, “Isn’t that ironic. He’s with one of the finest law firms in Los Angeles, but if you didn’t play pro ball, you don’t get much recognition.”
Most of all, Wooden hovered as an interested (if detached) observer of the travails facing UCLA basketball. He continued to balk at assertions that his record would never be duplicated. “Before we did it, people said it couldn’t be accomplished,” Wooden said. “In some ways it might be easier to accomplish now because coaches have players for four years [because freshmen are eligible] and, if they’re successful, they can attract others.”
It may have sounded logical to Wooden, but it was hardly realistic. Nobody knew that better than J. D. Morgan. Gary Cunningham’s resignation came at a bad time for him. Though he was only sixty years old, his frenetic work schedule had taken a toll on his body. Three months before Cunningham quit, Morgan had open heart surgery, and his recovery was not going well. He had been hospitalized for pneumonia in early March and was recuperating at home. Still, he made it clear that he would be in charge of finding the next basketball coach. And he knew the man he wanted.
His name was Larry Brown, the charming, tempestuous, brilliant, hard-charging, thirty-eight-year-old coach of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets. (The Nuggets had moved to the NBA in 1976 when the two professional leagues merged.) Brown had been a standout guard at North Carolina from 1960 to 1963 and was a three-time ABA coach of the year. When Morgan offered Brown the UCLA job, he leapt at the chance, even though he had just signed a five-year, $980,000 contract with the Nuggets.
The chance to work for Morgan was a major reason why Brown said yes. He believed he was working for the best athletic director in history—and Morgan agreed. “It’s not an accident that we’ve won thirty-nine championships since I’ve been athletic director,” Morgan told Brown, referring to all of UCLA’s varsity sports. Morgan convinced Brown to retain Larry Farmer as an assistant, and he told Brown that despite the low pay, he would have every chance to win. He also warned Brown about Sam Gilbert. “He told me, ‘This is going to be an obstacle. I want you to be aware of it and you’re going to have to deal with it,’” Brown said. “I told him I would do my best.”
Brown’s first exposure to Gilbert came at a function with the Bruin Hoopsters, the organization of alumni boosters who raised money in support of UCLA basketball. When Brown saw his players drinking alcohol with Gilbert and other boosters, he was appalled. “I would have never, ever thought about drinking in front of my coach,” he said. Instead of confronting Gilbert, Brown tried to establish a personal connection with his players so they would not need to look outside the program for support. Brown also moved them into on-campus dormitories. Brown said he never told his players not to spend time with Gilbert, but it was clear that he did not approve. Gilbert was none too pleased. He later remarked to a reporter that he could “cut [Brown’s] nuts off and he wouldn’t know it until he pulled his pants down.”
“It got back to me that he was not happy with what was going on,” Brown said many years later. “Sam was not a nice man.”
Brown faced the same problem that previous UCLA coaches, including Wooden, had faced. He had to weigh the costs of taking on Gilbert against the risk of letting him continue. So he tried to find a middle ground. “I feared this guy would tear down the program if I fought him, so I tried to tolerate him,” Brown said. “I was honestly afraid [of] what he would do, and I didn’t want to exclude any booster. But it got very ugly and so uncomfortable.… He didn’t want anyone questioning what he did.”
Gilbert’s interferences were part of a broader culture of entitlement among UCLA’s supporters that Brown found off-putting. “The first thing they say is it will help
you
if you speak at our dinner,” he said a few weeks before his first game. “That isn’t the way I would ask for a favor.” Nor did he realize just how astronomical the cost of living was in Los Angeles. Since he could not afford to buy a home on his meager salary, Brown had to live in a 2,200-square-foot house in Brentwood that had been purchased by a group of UCLA alumni and leased to him. His wife, Barbara, took a job at a travel agency to help make ends meet.
Worst of all, before the season began, Morgan had to retire because of his failing heart. Technically, he would stay on as athletic director until the following June, but his assistant, Bob Fischer, was now calling the shots. When Morgan left, a piece of Brown’s enthusiasm for the job went with him.
Brown’s first season did not get off to a promising start. The Bruins dropped two straight games in mid-December, a 77–74 decision at Notre Dame and a 99–94 loss to DePaul in Pauley Pavilion. That prompted the publication of a damning
Sports Illustrated
article (“The Bruins Are in Ruins”) and further embedded the narrative that nobody would ever accomplish what John Wooden had. Brown asked Wooden for advice from time to time, but they did not socialize. “I don’t know if I would call him a friend,” Brown said. “He was larger than life to me.”
Still, Brown couldn’t get enough of hearing about Wooden from Farmer and Ducky Drake. He about fell off his chair when they told him how Wooden really behaved on the bench. “As an outsider, that was the biggest shock of my life to think he would get on referees,” Brown said.
UCLA hit its roughest patch in January, losing four out of five games. The main problem was that Brown was still relying on his seniors, even though the freshmen and sophomores were more talented. “I was trying to play all the seniors because I was their third coach,” Brown said. “Larry Farmer said that Wooden would never do that.” Not only did Brown take Farmer’s advice about his rotation; he also went to Wooden to ask for help installing the high-post offense. “His main advice to me was to be myself,” Brown said. “He didn’t tell me to be like him. He said just value the things that I would trust and I would be all right.”
From there, the season turned around in dramatic fashion. The Bruins won seven of their final nine games to finish fourth in the conference, which was now called the Pac-10 because of the additions of Arizona and Arizona State. In Wooden’s era, that would have ended the season, but since the NCAA tournament had been expanded to include forty-eight teams (over Wooden’s objections), the Bruins were extended an at-large bid. Having been granted the reprieve, they went on a surprising dash through the bracket. They made it all the way to the 1980 national championship game, where they lost to Louisville and Denny Crum, 59–54. Afterward, Sam Gilbert sarcastically congratulated Brown on being the first coach in UCLA history to lose an NCAA final. “I told him I was also the first coach to win five NCAA tournament games at UCLA,” Brown said.
In his second season, Brown had to rebuild with a young team that featured a six-foot-five center. When the Bruins beat No. 10 Notre Dame in Pauley Pavilion in their second game, Wooden made another tone-deaf remark saying that the 1980–81 team was better than his 1964 champs. “I don’t think he meant anything by it, but I remember thinking, Holy God, how can you duplicate that?” Brown said. That coincided with J. D. Morgan’s death on December 16, 1980, a devastating loss for Brown personally and professionally. “J. D. was so strong that he kept people away,” Brown said. “When he passed away, I sensed a lot of people were trying to get involved.”
After UCLA finished third in the conference, the Bruins were again invited to the 1981 NCAA tournament. This time, however, there was no miracle run. The season ended with a 23-point drubbing at the hands of BYU in the first round. Brown was feeling the two-year itch. The financial pressures, the expectations, and Morgan’s death made the job a lot less appealing. When the NBA’s New Jersey Nets offered a four-year, $800,000 contract, Brown jumped at the chance to leave.