Wooden: A Coach's Life (75 page)

When Gilbert heard where Johnson was, he blew his stack. “He said, ‘Fuck you, Marques,’” Johnson said. “I told him, ‘Hold on, I’m just calling to let you know what’s going on. I haven’t signed anything.’ I forget the exact words, but he basically said I betrayed him and hung up.”

Ten minutes later, the phone in Roth’s office rang again. It was a prominent Los Angeles sportscaster calling to ask Johnson about a “rumor” that he was meeting with an agent about signing an NBA contract, which would make him ineligible to play for UCLA. Johnson told the sportscaster that the rumor was not true.

“That’s the first time I kind of felt Sam really wielding his power,” Johnson said. “It went above and beyond UCLA and the collegiate scene. Now all of a sudden it’s into the entertainment area, where a sportscaster is calling me and saying some things. That took it to a whole different level.”

That was the end of Marques Johnson’s relationship with Sam Gilbert. “At that point, I was going into my senior year,” he said, “and Coach Bartow didn’t really care too much for him.” Even so, Gilbert clearly believed that now that Wooden was no longer the coach at UCLA, he had free rein to expand his influence. This problem was going to get bigger before it got smaller.

*   *   *

While speaking at a clinic in Cincinnati a few weeks after the 1975–76 season ended, Wooden was asked yet again about Bartow’s struggles with the media. “I guess I shouldn’t be saying this, but I thought the writers were very good to him, for the most part,” Wooden said. “I’ll say this: It would have been much harder if he hadn’t been left with a nucleus of good, extremely talented basketball players.”

By now, Bartow was starting to come to terms with reality. “My job here is to preserve a tradition—to live, I guess, with the legend,” he said. His second season opened with UCLA ranked No. 4 in the country. The Bruins won their first three games before losing at home to No. 7 Notre Dame, 66–63. Six days after that game, they drew just 9,016 fans against Rice, the smallest crowd that had ever seen a game in Pauley Pavilion. Still, the team played well. Aside from a 1-point loss at home to Oregon at the start of Pac-8 play, the Bruins did not lose another game until February.

The 1976–77 season also featured a visit from another NCAA investigator. This time, he wanted to meet with some of Bartow’s players. However, instead of asking them about Sam Gilbert, the investigator wanted to interview two players, David Greenwood and Roy Hamilton, about their experiences being recruited by UNLV. “They were trying to pin something on Tark,” Bartow said. The investigator also met with Marques Johnson, but he did not give any help. “We were instructed that whatever he asks you, just look him in the eye and say no,” Johnson said. “The guy came out and asked maybe one or two questions. It wasn’t a real thorough, intense probing.”

Wooden had a brief health scare in early December when he was hospitalized because of a flare-up in his chronic artery condition, but he was able to have it treated without bypass surgery. Aside from that, Wooden maintained his usual posture—not out in front but not completely in the background, either. He sat in his customary seat at home games, signing autographs during time-outs for the many fans who queued up. He inked an agreement with Medalist Industries to do eight to ten clinics per year. He developed a basketball shoe for Beta Inc. He joined a speaking program that sent him to thirty-five colleges a year. And he continued to be in demand as an author. Wooden was working on a book about his Pyramid of Success as well as another that would list his Ten Commandments of basketball.

After completing his walk each morning at the UCLA track, Wooden came into the basketball office four or five times each week. He made some phone calls and caught up on his correspondence, still steadfastly answering every piece of mail with a handwritten reply. “I remember thinking that he looked funny without a tie on,” Farmer said. Wooden remained available for interviews, during which he betrayed a tendency to revise history. For example, when he good-naturedly conceded to a reporter that “the officials seem much better to me as a non-coach,” he added that over his entire career he was only assessed three technical fouls. This was not true. During another interview, when Wooden was advocating yet again for the installation of a shot clock, he asserted that he had ordered his players to stall during the 1971 NCAA final against Villanova because he wanted “to show how foolish stalling is by holding the ball. Guess it didn’t do any good.” This claim was laughable. Wooden wasn’t trying to make a point that night. He was trying to win a championship.

Wooden also reluctantly agreed to lend his name to a trophy that would be awarded annually to the nation’s top college player. The idea was broached to him by the board of directors of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, who conceived it as a parallel to college football’s Heisman Trophy. At first, Wooden was opposed. He believed the Heisman was overcommercialized, and he was worried that there were already too many player of the year awards in college basketball (most prominently the Naismith and the Rupp). He said he wanted his award to go to a graduating senior, but the LAAC balked at that idea. They eventually compromised around the idea that the Wooden Award could go to a player from any class as long as he was in good academic standing. The LAAC also agreed to present a $2,000 scholarship each year to the winner’s school.

While most people at UCLA liked having Wooden around (and wished he were still coaching), the small pocket of Bartow loyalists believed that his refusal to cede the spotlight was making life difficult for his successor. That view was expressed in a December 1976 article by Skip Bayless in the
Los Angeles Times
, which reported that “some Bartow backers wonder how he can ever establish a strong personal identity as long as Wooden remains in the public eye. The Wizard of Westwood, they believe, cherishes his image and fears it will fade if he isn’t on hand to reinforce it.”

Wooden rebutted this in his soft-spoken but resolute manner. “Mr. Morgan definitely wanted me to stay around, but if I felt that in a way I was being harmful I wouldn’t stay around at all,” he said. “If I were following someone who had done well, I would welcome having the individual around to counsel me about the players I had inherited.” As for his now-infamous comment about not leaving the “cupboard bare,” Wooden said, “I always said that I did not want to leave the cupboard bare for the next man. I’m sure Coach Bartow looked over the material closely before he took the job. Of course, like the Good Book says, to those whom much is given, much is expected.”

Several years later, Wooden confessed that it was one of his “greatest mistakes” to share an office with Bartow those first few months. “I think he was uncomfortable with my presence,” Wooden said. “Bartow never had any questions to ask about situations. I think I could have helped him if he’d come to me, not in coaching his team but in other areas.”

The Bruins could never win big enough to satisfy Bartow’s critics. Aside from another home loss to Notre Dame, UCLA hummed along until late February, when it lost at home to Oregon by 20 points. The Bruins were still in first place and poised to return to the NCAA tournament, but once again, the fans and the press were all over Bartow. He stopped reading the newspapers but wanted to know what was in them. “We’d be sitting at the breakfast table, and he would say, ‘I don’t want to touch the
L.A. Times
as long as I live. Can you read that to me?’” Johnson said. “They were tough on his kid and his dog. It just really rankled him.”

UCLA rebounded from the Oregon loss to win its final three regular season games and once again capture the Pac-8 title. For all the tumult, the Bruins entered the 1977 NCAA tournament as the No. 2–ranked team in America. UCLA’s first opponent in the West Regional in Pocatello, Idaho, was No. 14 Louisville, coached by Denny Crum. “This was the only time I coached there where I felt that J. D. felt pressure in this game,” Bartow said. The Bruins overcame a 6-point deficit in the second half to win, 87–79, but their season ended five days later in a 1-point loss to Big Sky Conference champ Idaho State at the West Regional semifinal in Provo, Utah. It was not a happy flight back to Los Angeles. When someone looked over at Bartow staring out the window and wondered if the coach might not ask for a parachute, Chris Lippert, a sophomore forward, said, “He might jump without it.”

Upon arrival back home, Bartow told reporters that he expected to hear from “the kook element.” He pointed out that his 52–9 record over his first two years compared favorably to the 55–7 record Wooden had posted during his final two but added, “Yet I don’t feel good for some reason, and it’s sad. The program hasn’t exactly come apart. I mean, I don’t think I’m the worst coach in America.”

From there, Bartow suffered through a horrible few weeks. Junior center Brett Vroman announced that he was transferring to UNLV because he didn’t like Bartow’s coaching style. During a speech in front of a group of UCLA boosters, Bartow got into a shouting match with several people who challenged him. The
Los Angeles Times
reported that it had spoken with more than twenty UCLA boosters “and found considerable dissatisfaction with Bartow’s performance, both as a coach and as a recruiter.” While Bartow was being interviewed in-studio by a local radio host named Bud Furillo, he bristled constantly as fans called in to question his coaching. “Hogwash, hogwash,” he said at one point. “I have better things to do than take that kind of garbage.” During a commercial, Bartow took off his headset and walked out of the studio. “I told Bud off the air, ‘If this is just a roast Gene Bartow deal, you don’t need me sitting here,’” he said.

Other schools took note of Bartow’s misery, and a few reached out to see if he would be interested in becoming their coach. Most of the offers did not appeal to him, but there was one that did. The University of Alabama, Birmingham wanted Bartow’s advice about its plans to build an athletic department from scratch. To that point, the school only had club and intramural sports, but it had built a 17,500-seat arena and was primed to begin playing basketball for the 1978–79 season. At first, Alabama, Birmingham was only interested in hiring Bartow as a consultant, but the more the two sides talked, the more they considered the possibility of Bartow coming aboard as athletic director and basketball coach. The salary would be three times what Bartow was making at UCLA.

In June, Bartow asked for Morgan’s permission to interview for the job. While he was accompanying Marques Johnson to New York City, where Johnson was receiving a player of the year award from
Sport
magazine, two newspapers broke the news of his conversations. That sent Bartow into another paranoid tailspin. He showed up at Johnson’s hotel room late that night wearing sunglasses, a fedora pulled low, and an overcoat with the collar turned up. “He kept saying, ‘The kooks are after me,’” Johnson said. “He had lost twenty-five pounds, and his stomach was chewed to pieces. His wife was unhappy. My dad told him, ‘Hey, Coach, it’s a foregone conclusion. It’s time to get out.’”

Having suffered under the awesome task of trying to follow a living legend, Bartow was now drawn to a polar opposite circumstance—a school that literally had no athletic history. It was too good to pass up, even though J. D. Morgan made a halfhearted attempt to talk him out of it. “J. D. thought a lot of the people who were so critical were coming from the USC camp,” Bartow said. “I told him they were coming from the UCLA camp, and I was going to bail out.” On June 13, 1977, Bartow bade farewell to UCLA, leaving Morgan to search for a replacement.

Having been crucified in Los Angeles, Bartow was eventually canonized in Birmingham. He went on to spend eighteen years as UAB’s athletic director and basketball coach, at one point taking the Blazers to seven consecutive NCAA tournaments. When he retired in 1996, the school hired his son, Murry, to succeed him and renamed its facility Bartow Arena. In his golden years, Bartow became president of the company that ran the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies, and he was named team president. When he died in January 2012 at the age of eighty-one from stomach cancer, he was celebrated not just as an excellent coach but as one of the finest gentlemen the game has known. He was Clean Gene till the very end.

Still, for all that he accomplished in the last thirty-five years of his life, Bartow’s legacy was defined by those two years he spent in Westwood. He will forever be The Man Who Followed John Wooden. Those twenty-six months left many scars but no second thoughts. “I knew it would be difficult following John, but I had no idea of everything it would entail,” Bartow said one year before he died. “Some people would portray this story that I was a bitter and unhappy person at UCLA, but I really wasn’t. The truth is, I never regretted trying it, and I never regretted walking away.”

32

The Shadow

J. D. Morgan was not about to repeat his mistake. This time, his first call went to Denny Crum. Now in his seventh year at Louisville, Crum had recently remarried, so he fit more neatly into the image that Morgan wanted to project. More important, Crum had compiled a 139–37 record and had twice been to the Final Four, as the NCAA tournament’s climactic weekend was now being called.

Crum flew to Los Angeles in June 1977 to meet with Morgan. He was ready to take the job until J. D. told him the salary would be around $40,000, barely half of what Crum was making. That was a deal breaker for Crum, who lived lavishly on a 230-acre farm outside Louisville. “When you consider the cost of living, the pay out there is way below par,” he said. After Crum turned him down, Morgan spoke with North Carolina’s Dean Smith, but he also declined.

Having struck out twice, Morgan considered two current UCLA employees. The first was Larry Farmer, but Morgan judged that the thirty-year-old assistant was not ready. He had no such reservations about Gary Cunningham, who had spent the previous two years as UCLA’s director of alumni relations. When Morgan offered Cunningham the job, Cunningham made what he later described as an “emotional decision” and accepted. If anyone could carry on the Wizard’s legacy, it would be his favorite former player and assistant. “I don’t consider Coach Wooden a shadow because I was a part of what was achieved at this school,” Cunningham said. “I want him to feel he can drop by my office or attend practice at any time.”