Wooden: A Coach's Life (69 page)

Soon afterward, Harter received a letter from Wooden. It was the same type of letter Wooden sent to Digger Phelps. Wooden wrote that it did not make sense that they should become such bitter opponents. He also said in the letter that he had done a little research and discovered he and Harter had the same birthday and they were both Betas in college. Harter was appreciative but unmoved. “I am positive he wrote that letter to gain an edge,” Harter said. “I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’ve done the same thing. I really think that’s how much he competed.”

Even though UCLA followed its pair of losses in Oregon with four consecutive wins, the problems festered. The Bruins led by 15 points at Stanford, but the Cardinals came back by sagging their defense around Walton and forcing his teammates to hit from the outside. Wooden had hoped his offensive changes would spark the team, but instead they made things worse. The players were thinking too much, being less instinctive. They barely hung on to win, 62–60.

That set up yet another all-the-marbles finale at USC, which ended in yet another UCLA rout, this time by 30 points. With the regular season finally behind them, the Bruins should have entered the postseason with renewed purpose. Instead, they nearly threw it all away in their first NCAA tournament game against the University of Dayton. It took three overtimes for UCLA to put away the Flyers, 111–100.

The close shave didn’t exactly dampen the players’ moods. Later that night, they were frolicking in the pool of their hotel when Walton decided to take off his bathing suit and soak naked in the whirlpool. When Gary Cunningham walked by, he told Walton to put his swimsuit on, but Walton blew him off. A few minutes later, the hotel manager spotted Walton and called Wooden. The next thing the players knew, Wooden stormed into the pool area in his nightgown and stocking cap. He ordered them to get to bed immediately.

The next day, the Bruins blew by San Francisco, 83–60, to earn a trip to the 1974 NCAA semifinals in Greensboro. They had every reason to feel confident going into that game. Their opponent would be North Carolina State, the same squad that UCLA had made look like a jayvee squad three months before. “I want North Carolina State to remember we beat them by 18 points on a neutral court,” Wooden said after the USF win. “I want them to think about who has the psychological advantage.”

Moreover, David Thompson had suffered a frightening head injury during the Wolfpack’s win over Pittsburgh in the East Regional final. While soaring for a rebound, Thompson came down on a teammate, and his legs were flipped straight in the air. His head landed with a sickening
thwack!
that was heard throughout the arena. Thompson was taken to the hospital, but X-rays showed no fracture to his skull. Eager to let his teammates and fans know he was all right, Thompson returned to the arena and sat on the team’s bench with his head wrapped in a thick white bandage. The Wolfpack won, 100–72, but it was hard to believe Thompson would be at full strength for the rematch with UCLA.

Then again, this was not the same UCLA team that had run the Wolfpack off the court in St. Louis. Since that game, the Bruins had demonstrated they were capable of losing focus, leads, and games, even against inferior opponents.

The semifinal in Greensboro played to an all-too-familiar script. The Bruins controlled the first 29 minutes, twice building 11-point leads. The second of those came with 10:56 to play in the second half. At that point, the Wolfpack missed a shot, and Walton grabbed the rebound. In a flash, NC State’s seven-foot-two center, Tom Burleson, who had been so badly outclassed by Walton in St. Louis, ripped the ball out of his hands and laid it in to cut the Bruins’ lead to 9. It was a telling exchange. “You never saw anything like that happen with Bill Walton,” Marques Johnson said. “Burleson pointed right at Bill, and Bill shouted, ‘Fuck you, Burleson!’ That was the first sense of feeling I had that maybe we were going to lose the game.”

Wooden told his players to spread the floor and run a delay offense. The players listened, but they didn’t hear. Three times, the Bruins launched ill-advised shots. Three times they missed. That, plus a few careless turnovers, allowed the Wolfpack to rattle off 10 straight points. The game was nip and tuck the rest of the way. “They were shots we shouldn’t have taken,” Wooden said later. “If we were trying to catch up, it would have been different.”

At the end of regulation, the score was knotted at 65–all. After 5 minutes of extra play, the score was still tied. UCLA took command early in the second overtime, and with 3:27 remaining the Bruins owned a 74–67 lead.

Alas, they came apart one last time. NC State went to a full-court press, and UCLA lost its poise. As the team unraveled, Wooden thought briefly about calling time-out before deciding against it. He would often call that one of the biggest regrets of his coaching career. The Wolfpack rode the uninterrupted momentum to within 1 point with 1:16 on the clock. After Meyers missed the front end of a one-and-one, Thompson, who would finish with 28 points and 10 rebounds, put the Wolfpack in front for good. NC State made all four of its free throw attempts down the stretch to salt away the upset.

And so it all came to an end. The most awesome streak in the history of college sports, maybe of all sports, was snapped. North Carolina State 80, UCLA 77, double overtime. For the first time in eight years, there would be a new NCAA champion in men’s basketball.

While he was riding his incredible title wave, Wooden had to dodge all kinds of critics and curmudgeons. Now, in the wake of his most crushing defeat, he elicited mostly adulation. As Wooden walked into the interview room, the writers violated decorum and burst into applause. No one was surprised by his classy response. “I knew it couldn’t go on forever,” Wooden said. “I’m just happy we had the run we did. It was a great one. A lot of things broke right for us in a lot of ways, but they didn’t today.”

When he returned to the locker room, a group of writers asked Wooden if they could go inside. Wooden said he would ask the players. About ten minutes later, the school’s athletics publicist, Vic Kelley, emerged to tell the press it was okay to enter.

There were not a lot of tears in that hot, cramped room, just blank stares and resigned expressions. Dave Meyers sat on a chair in front of his locker, still wearing his uniform and sweating profusely. Walton sat in a corner with his arm around Andre McCarter. When the writers approached him, Walton waved and said, “Not now, please.”

The writers waited for Walton as he brought a chair into the shower and sat for twenty minutes as the water streamed over him. He eventually made his way back to his locker, plopped into a chair, and, without bothering to get dressed, grabbed a banana, peeled it, and chewed. The surrounding scribes tried to prod him, but he gave them only clipped answers.

How do you feel about the loss?

“I don’t feel like talking. I’m sure some of the other guys do. I just feel like getting dressed and going home.”

Do you not want to talk because it was such a bad moment?

“By saying it’s a bad time it would mean that there are good times.”

Does that mean you don’t remember what your emotions are?

“You know better than that.”

As the reporters shifted uncomfortably, Walton said, “You guys are asking me all these questions and I’m not answering any of them, and yet I know I’ll pick up the paper tomorrow and I’ll have answered all of them.” Then he started whistling.

Later that evening, Walton told Wooden that he did not want to play in the third-place consolation game. Wooden told Walton he hoped he would change his mind, but he did not insist on it. The following afternoon at a press conference for the four head coaches, Wooden revealed Walton’s stance but didn’t criticize it. “I think consolation games are for the birds,” he said. “Several of my players probably won’t play and it will be all right with me.”

Wooden also for the first time refused to commit to returning to UCLA for a twenty-seventh season. He said he wanted to wait a month, meet with his physicians, and talk it over with his wife. “Yes, this is the first time I’ve ever undergone this decision process,” he said. Though he acknowledged that his players engaged in selective listening against NC State, he still took the blame for the loss. “We haven’t been good at protecting leads all year,” he said. “That’s a coaching mistake.”

Sam Gilbert had a long conversation with Walton in hopes he could encourage Bill to play the consolation game. J. D. Morgan hosted a team meeting that night to deliver the same message. When Wooden argued that they should play, Walton, Lee, and the rest of the seniors relented.

Before sending his team onto the floor to take on No. 6 Kansas, Wooden told them they should play like champions. Though they came out flat and trailed by 9 early in the second half, the Bruins finally woke up and laid an old-fashioned blitz on the Jayhawks. With his team comfortably ahead 57–43 en route to a 78–61 win, Wooden emptied his bench. As first Lee, then Wilkes, then Walton left the game for a final time, the crowd at Greensboro Coliseum, which had booed the Bruins so lustily two days before, gave each player a standing ovation. It was an expression of warmth the Bruins had never enjoyed while they were champions.

*   *   *

The postmortems in Los Angeles were surprisingly merciful. In fact, the person who had the harshest words for Wooden was Wooden. “For the first time in my career, I became complacent this season,” he said. “I personally lost the Notre Dame game through my own complacency, and after that, Bill Walton’s injury softened me on the team as a whole. I eased my discipline in some areas such as dress and promptness, the players being on time. We didn’t have a training table this season. I think because I became more lax in some of these areas there was a carryover onto the court. If I’m back, I’ll revert to my old style.”

In retrospect, it’s clear that the Notre Dame loss was the beginning of the end. Wooden did all he could to downplay the importance of the winning streak, but his team’s response to the loss demonstrated that he failed. “The streak shouldn’t have meant that much,” Dave Meyers said. “We should have regrouped and gone undefeated the rest of the way, but we didn’t. Suddenly, it was panic time.” As Johnson suspected, Meyers did not like the lineup change—“Marques had given us a real lift off the bench. We lost that,” he said—and he agreed with Wooden that the team became too reliant on its superstars. “We got away from team play,” Meyers said. “In a tight situation, we’d say, ‘Well, Bill Walton or Keith Wilkes is there and will pull it out for us.’ After the two losses in Oregon, I think Bill felt he had to take us all the way by himself. A lot of people looked to him for other things, things he wasn’t equipped to give. That’s why he withdrew from people, from the press.”

Shortly after the win over Kansas in the third-place game, Nell was taken to the hospital complaining of chest pains. The doctors gave her an EKG but sent her home a few hours later. They said the pain resulted from “emotional and physical exhaustion.” A month later, Wooden announced that his doctors had cleared him to return to UCLA for another season. More important, he said, “Mrs. Wooden has given her approval.”

One week after Wooden made that announcement, Bill Walton signed a $3 million contract with the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, a multiyear deal negotiated by Sam Gilbert. Yet, even as Walton began life as a wealthy man, it was dawning on him that for all the burdens he carried at UCLA, life would never again feel so light and joyful. Even more galling was the realization that he had let down the team, the school, the city, and worst of all, the only coach he had ever wanted to play for. Instead of ending his career with a net around his neck, Walton’s final pose at UCLA was that of a loser, sitting in a chair and eating a banana in the nude, surrounded by a bunch of men holding notepads. “We should have run the table,” he said nearly forty years later. “Playing for UCLA was fun. It was really, really fun, really positive, really upbeat. And I blew it.”

30

Farewell

John Wooden was compulsive about his routines. When he found something he liked, he rarely deviated. This was especially true of restaurants. In a city teeming with fancy and eclectic hot spots, Wooden returned to the same one or two places and ordered the same one or two things. So when Ted Owens, the coach at Kansas, called Wooden during the summer of 1974 and said he would like to meet him for lunch, there was only one place Wooden wanted to go: Hollis Thompson’s drugstore.

Wooden ate lunch there most every day. He would slip in through the backdoor, sit with his guests on orange crates, and eat a one-dollar French dip sandwich. Usually, Wooden brought along an assistant or two or maybe a former player like Gail Goodrich. On this day, Wooden and Owens were enjoying a casual meal alone until Wooden grew serious.

“Ted, you can’t say anything,” Wooden said, “but this is going to be my last season.”

Owens was stunned—not only by the news but by Wooden’s willingness to share it with him. They were friendly but not close by any means. “I honored that,” Owens said years later. “I never said a word to anybody.”

Wooden had come closer to retiring at the end of the 1973–74 season than anyone knew. To his surprise, it was Nell who convinced him to return. She didn’t want his decision not to call a time-out against NC State to be his final memory in coaching. That wouldn’t be good for his peace of mind. When Wooden’s doctor gave him clearance to come back, he decided to coach for one more season. But only one.

Everything in Wooden’s life was planned to the finest detail. His exit from the game would be no exception. Wooden confided his plan to very few people. Owens was one. The team’s broadcaster, Fred Hessler, was another. “He told me earlier in the year that this was going to be his last year, but if I said anything on the air, he would deny it,” Hessler said. “I said, ‘Well, stick with me, John. Whenever you do, I’ll be ready for it.’” And of course, Wooden told J. D. Morgan. He figured his boss would need ample time to find his replacement.