Wooden: A Coach's Life (15 page)

When Wooden took the Bears to Martinsville, he was embarrassed when a restaurant refused to serve them. When they played in the state tournament, he wouldn’t let the team eat at another restaurant because the manager had asked a black player, Parson Howell, to dine in the kitchen. “I remember him in his polite, beautiful English telling people that it wasn’t going to hurt to have his team eat there with one or two or three black kids eating there,” said Stan Jacobs, a former South Bend player. Jacobs recalled a separate instance when Wooden took the team to a nearby grocery store to buy lunch meat because a local restaurant had refused to serve the black players. They ate while sitting outside by a park.

“He looked after us,” Tom Taylor said. “If we traveled, he’d call ahead and make sure that if we were going to stay at a hotel, everybody was treated equally. I never remember staying at a different hotel or eating separately from the team.”

Through it all, Wooden never explained to his players what he was doing and why, even though it might have accelerated their own understanding of the importance of racial equality. As usual, Wooden was all walk and no talk. “He never talked to us about race,” Powers said. “I don’t think he wanted to get into the political thing. He just took care of number one. There was no difference between a black kid and a white kid on his basketball team.”

In this respect, as in so many others, Wooden’s wife was a kindred spirit. Having faced discrimination against Catholics while growing up, Nellie shared Wooden’s disdain for bigotry. That was especially evident when Wooden brought the family to Georgia while he was serving in the navy. “Mom always butted heads with some of the locals about the way they treated blacks,” Nan said. “Mom always said she didn’t understand. ‘They won’t sit and eat with them, yet they allow them to serve food and nurse their babies. It doesn’t make sense.’” When Nan went to school on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, her father playfully suggested she ask her teacher what she thought of his favorite president, who was still held in low regard throughout the Deep South for having freed the slaves less than a century before.

Wooden would have been content to continue making his stands through modest, unremarked-upon gestures, but his new job would not allow it. That was never more true than at the end of his second season at Indiana State, when Wooden played an unintentional, unaccustomed role in breaking down a significant barrier. Racial progress was slow in America in the 1940s. It was only fitting that the Sycamores should hurry it up.

9

Clarence

Wooden was on much firmer ground with the locals as his second season at Indiana State got under way in the fall of 1947. The Sycamores lost just one player from the team that had gone 17–8 the year before, and with nine sophomores and a junior comprising the ten returning lettermen, the future was bright. Sure enough, the team hurried its way to eleven wins in its first twelve games.

Up-tempo basketball was becoming more in vogue, especially in the Midwest, but it wasn’t being played everywhere. In late January, Indiana State traveled to Chicago to play in a doubleheader that also included Oklahoma A&M, which by then had already won two NCAA championships. (The school would later change its name to Oklahoma State University.) The Cowboys’ coach, Henry Iba, had built his powerhouse with a style that couldn’t have been more different from Wooden’s. His “swinging gate” man-to-man defense was one of the game’s foremost innovations, and he buttressed it with a brutally slow pace on offense. Iba’s presence in Chicago provided an intriguing contrast with the run-and-gunning upstarts from Terre Haute. “Oklahoma A&M, coached by Henry Iba, is one of the few college basketball teams which still believes in a planned, ball-controlled system of attack,” the
Chicago Daily Tribune
wrote on the eve of the doubleheader. “It is likely that the invading Sycamores will go to the other extreme in performance and exhibit the speed and finesse known throughout the Hoosier state as fire department basketball.”

Both teams won their games that night, giving each man some validation. That set in motion a long-running narrative pitting Wooden against Iba, both professionally and socially. At the time, Iba was by far the more popular and accomplished coach, whereas Wooden was just getting started. Over the years, Wooden often expressed respect for Iba, but his praise sometimes carried a hint of condescension. “At the beginning of each year, if you were to say that among the top five defensive teams in the country as far as points scored, Oklahoma State’s going to be among them,” Wooden said. “But it wasn’t because of their defense and it wasn’t because they didn’t play good defense. It’s because they held the ball so long on offense.”

The Sycamores continued to roll through the 1947–48 season. By the middle of February, they were 13–2, and with nine games remaining they were just 200 points from breaking the season scoring record set by the previous year’s team. Duane Klueh had already broken the individual scoring record he had set as a freshman, and on the surface the team appeared not to have a care in the world. But there was one person among them who was enduring a private struggle. That was Clarence Walker, the team’s lone black player.

Walker had been a track star in high school before coming to Indiana State, where he won a spot on the basketball team during tryouts his freshman season. He was well liked by his teammates, but he was not very well known. “He was an intelligent, smart kid, and rather quiet,” Klueh recalled. Jim Powers described Walker as “very quiet, very distinguished. Kept everything to himself.”

Unbeknown to his teammates, Walker suffered intense anxiety from having to deal with the Jim Crow segregation laws that were a normal part of life in Indiana. Walker didn’t feel as if he could express his feelings to his coach or his teammates, so he poured them into the only outlet he could find: a typewriter. At the start of the season, he began writing a journal that would chronicle his sophomore season at Indiana State. The Walker who emerges from those pages is confused yet wise, pained yet resilient, chastened yet hopeful.

Walker titled his journal “Mr. J. C.”—as in Jim Crow. “I have decided to keep an account of the numerous incidents occuring [
sic
] in the 1947–1948 basketball season at Indiana State Teachers College,” he began. “I am the only Negro on the team. I encountered some very severe setbacks in the 1946–1947 season at the same college. The most severe was my not going to New York … because I, among many, was born a Negro.”

Walker’s reverence for Wooden was palpable from the first page, despite the coach’s decision the previous year to leave Walker home for the New York trip. “My opinion of Johnny Wooden, the coach of our basketball team, is that he is a wonderful coach,” Walker wrote. “He is brilliant in knowledge of basketball. As far as I know, he is
not
bias [
sic
]. I realize the fact that he is obligated to someone else. If all people were in mind as he is in character, I
think
Mr. J. C. would be trivial.”

In the journal, Walker described a litany of slights that occurred as the Sycamores racked up wins. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Walker stayed behind in Terre Haute while the rest of the players went home, and Wooden referred him to the owner of a local restaurant for meals. On Thanksgiving morning, Walker went there to have breakfast, but the restaurant owner asked him to eat in the kitchen. He decided to take his food home instead. “I do not think I am too good to eat in anybody’s kitchen,” Walker wrote. “I know my presence is not preferred in the proper part of a café, and I figured eating at home would be just as well.” Not surprisingly, Walker expressed a low opinion of the town of Terre Haute, which he described as an unsanitary “J. C. place” populated by outdoor toilets.

Whenever Walker traveled with the team outside Terre Haute, Mr. J. C. followed. On one occasion, the players ate at a drugstore during a trip to South Bend to play Notre Dame. The waiter took everybody’s order but Walker’s, and it was only when the team manager intervened that Walker finally got served. During another trip, to play at Marshall, Walker had to stay apart from the team at a Negro hotel called the Allen. “It was pretty nice,” he wrote. “We lost by an upset.”

During a tournament that Indiana State hosted in early January, the Sycamores played Southeastern Oklahoma. As Walker battled for a rebound, he heard the opposing coach shout to his player, “Jerk that nigger’s head off!” Walker wrote of how his coach rose to his defense: “Mr. Wooden heard him and told him, ‘Why don’t you go back to Oklahoma.’ After the game, Mr. Wooden went into their dressing room and there was a big argument.”

Only once did Walker mention witnessing racism from a teammate. It happened in the locker room in mid-February, following a 70–66 win over Valparaiso. As Walker was momentarily hidden behind a dressing rack, one of the Indiana State players, Don McDonald, started singing “eeny-meeny-miny-moe.” Not realizing Walker was within earshot, McDonald said, “Catch a nigger by the toe.” There was an awkward silence when McDonald realized Walker heard him, but Walker bore him no animus. As he wrote in his journal, “Mac’s hometown is known to dislike Negroes. However, Mac is a very congenial and easy to get along with fellow. I find myself not being affected by such [things] as much as I used to.”

Walker’s teammates were surprised to learn many years later just how torn he was. “We probably should have been more sensitive and known the pain that he was feeling that turned up in his writings,” Duane Klueh said. “But we didn’t really know. We just went out and played basketball and enjoyed him.”

The slurs and slights were minor scrapes compared to the emotional injury Walker sustained after that win over Valparaiso in February. He was standing in the locker room when he noticed a piece of paper being passed around for the players to sign. He later learned it was an entry form for the NAIB tournament in Kansas City. Nobody asked Walker to sign it, and he soon learned why. Wooden and the school had decided this time to accept the invitation, but because of the ban against black players, the team was not taking Walker. “I asked Wooden what the dope is on the Kansas City tournament,” Walker wrote. “In his suave but candid way he told me, of which I expected that it was in the charter or in some written rule, that Negroes could not play.” It was the second time Wooden had let Walker down in this fashion.

The news of Indiana State’s return to the tournament after a one-year hiatus was made public eight days later. “Indiana State’s Scrappin’ Sycamores return to the thicket in the National Intercollegiate cage championship at Kansas City this year. Coach Johnny Wooden told us about it on Friday,” sports editor Bob Nesbit wrote in the
Terre Haute Sunday Tribune
on February 22. “The team drew an invitation last year, but was unable to accept due to a conflict with college final examination.” A week after Nesbit’s report, the school issued a formal announcement. “Twelve players have been certified to represent Blue and White,” the
Tribune
article read. “Ten of these boys will make the trip.” The newspaper listed the names of the ten players headed to Kansas City but offered no explanation for why Clarence Walker’s was not among them.

On an intellectual level, Walker understood why Wooden had made the decision. As he wrote at the beginning of his journal, he recognized Wooden was “obligated to someone else.” But he was deeply wounded. Wooden may have believed that the NAIB’s racial ban was wrong, but he didn’t believe it strongly enough to stand up for Walker, either in public or in private. Once again, Walker had nowhere to turn but his typewriter. “This is the second big opportunity which hurt me in a peculiar way. The first one rendered me most unstable for almost a week,” he wrote. “This one didn’t hurt as much because I had made up in my mind that one was enough. Yet when they come, believe me, it is hard to take.”

Walker would have been justified in being angry with Wooden, yet he never expressed disappointment in his coach. In his view, Wooden was just another instrument of authority who was on his side until it was inconvenient. He may have liked Wooden personally, but the turn of events left Walker despondent about his prospects as a young black man living in a racist country. “Let’s be frank,” Walker wrote, “can a boy of age or at any level in life be proud he is a Negro? The thing he aspires to do can be done, I mean the opportunity comes, but cannot be taken, not because I am not capable or my ability is not up to par, but only because I am a NEGRO. God bless this inane world.”

*   *   *

Fortunately for Walker, there were some influential people on the East Coast who were willing to fight for him in a way that Wooden was not. When Manhattan College’s athletic director learned of the NAIB’s rule prohibiting Negroes from competing in the tournament, he requested that it be changed, even though Manhattan did not have any blacks on its roster. After two days of exchanging telegrams, the NAIB informed Manhattan that it was too late to repeal the rule for that year’s tournament, so Manhattan withdrew and the athletic director publicly stated the reason. The NAIB then offered its spot to Siena College in Albany, but that school also turned the invitation down because of the racial ban. Long Island University did the same.

The battle might have ended there but for a man named Harry Henshel, who was a member of the U.S. Olympic basketball committee. One of the reasons the NAIB tournament was so prestigious was that the champion was invited to compete at the U.S. Olympic trials in New York City in late March. (The other teams invited were the two NCAA finalists, three teams from the Amateur Athletic Union, the winner of the National Invitation Tournament, and a YMCA team.) After reading about the protests made by the New York schools, Henshel sent a telegram to the Olympic committee’s chairman recommending that the NAIB champion be dropped from the Olympic trials unless the ban was rescinded. Suddenly, the members of the NAIB’s executive committee had a change of heart. They conducted a quick poll by telegraph, and on Friday, March 6, two days before the tournament was due to tip off, they announced that the prohibition had been removed.