Wooden: A Coach's Life (26 page)

Wooden frequently quoted Lambert as saying, “The team that makes the most mistakes usually wins.” In 1960, Newell told
Sports Illustrated
, “Basketball is a game of mistakes, and the team making the fewer mistakes generally wins.” The two men coached the same sport, and yet they taught two completely different games.

They did share at least one fundamental policy: they never wanted to call the first time-out. Both men had started their careers in an era when coaches weren’t allowed to huddle with their players on the sidelines. In those days, when time-out was called, the players gathered in a circle by themselves on the court. Newell and Wooden wanted their guys to think for themselves. They were also both fanatical about conditioning, which was even more reason never to call time-out. When Newell said that “a player should be conditioned to play the last five minutes of a game, not just the first five,” he was uttering words that often came out of Wooden’s mouth.

Their disdain for calling time-out was more than a piece of strategy. It was a point of pride. Earl Schulz, a guard at Cal, recalled: “It was just a mental game, a way of saying, ‘We’re not a bunch of candy asses. We’re not going to roll over.’”

Such was the collision course that brought UCLA and Cal together on the final weekend of the 1956–57 season, with first place in the PCC on the line. The games had been sold out for over a week, and tickets were being scalped for ten dollars and up. “Never before has a Cal cage game so excited this city,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported. The
San Francisco Chronicle
pronounced the Bruins to be “maybe the best team Johnny Wooden [has] produced at Westwood. Certainly it is the best balanced.”

In preparing for UCLA, Newell left no stone unturned. He dispatched his assistant coach, Rene Herrerias, to scout the Bruins during their game against Oregon. Newell himself was on hand when they took on USC a few days before. This was yet another way in which Newell and Wooden were different. Whereas Wooden hardly ever mentioned the opponent to his team, Newell and Herrerias handed their players detailed reports on opponents’ tendencies. During practice, Herrerias would coach the reserves as they formed a “scout team” that ran the offense the starters were going to defend. By the time the game arrived, the Bears knew their opponents’ plays as well as they did, if not better. “I remember one time we were playing at Oregon, and I said to one of the guys, ‘Hey, you’re supposed to be over here,’” said Bill McClintock, who played at Cal from 1959 to 1961. “The guy looked at me and said, ‘You’re right.’”

UCLA drew first blood in game 1, outrebounding the Bears by 11 and overcoming a 15-point halftime deficit to win, 71–66. It was their ninth straight victory over Cal. Game 2 was a different story. This time the referees tightened up the contact under the basket, and as a result, Wooden saw his two centers, Ben Rogers and Conrad Burke, foul out early in the second half. As Cal cranked up the full-court pressure, Newell kept glancing at the opposite bench, wondering if Wooden would turn candy ass and stop play. With the score tied at 55–all with seven minutes remaining, Cal went on a quick 8–0 burst. Wooden finally relented and called time-out.

It was too late. The Bears held on to prevail, 73–68. When the buzzer sounded, the Cal players carried Newell off the court on their shoulders. The 7,200 fans broke out into a cheer of “We want Pete! We want Pete!” which forced the coach to return for a curtain call. The Bears had not technically locked up the conference title, and even if they had lost, they still would have gone to the NCAA tournament because UCLA was ineligible. But the fans in Berkeley had been humiliated so many times by their rivals to the south that they were sent into a delirious celebration by a single win that decided nothing.

Wooden was less than pleased, not just with the outcome but the disparity in fouls: twenty-seven called against UCLA, fourteen against Cal. The next day’s
San Francisco Chronicle
reported that when the game ended, Wooden “stalked away from the placating hand of referee John Kolb and stomped off the floor. Wooden was unhappy all night because Kolb and Lou Batmale called a far different game than they had on Friday night.” The Bay Area papers enjoyed needling Wooden on the rare occasions when his team lost there. One of the
Chronicle
’s stories the next day appeared under the headline, “Cal Cagers Beat UCLA (and Unhappy Coach Wooden).” The story included a photo of Wooden barking from the bench with his mouth open and head jutting forward. The caption dripped with sarcasm: “UCLA coach John Wooden no doubt is complimenting the refs on their clear vision at Cal.”

Despite that setback, UCLA set a new single-season school record when it notched its twenty-second win in the regular season finale against USC, but California finished in first place with a 14–2 record. In the NCAA tournament’s Western Regional in Corvallis—a graveyard where many a UCLA season had been buried—the Bears cakewalked to a 27-point win over BYU. The next day, Cal lost by 4 points to Newell’s former employer, San Francisco. In just his third year at Berkeley, Newell had accomplished something Wooden hadn’t done in nine years at UCLA: win a game in the NCAA tournament.

For Newell, that first triumph over Wooden would be as significant as any he would experience. From where he sat on the bench, the victory did more than catapult his team to a PCC title. It signified a defining shift in a bitter, long-standing rivalry. “I made time[outs] a big issue in that game. I felt the winning and losing was going to somehow be tied to it, and I was right,” Newell said. “They never played timeouts again with us. Psychologically, that had so much to do with our confidence every time we played them. Our guys just figured, ‘We never called timeout. They did.’”

For the first time since he came out west, Wooden was coaching against a man who cared as much about basketball as he did. If Wooden didn’t know better, he might have thought this new rival had been raised in Martinsville, not Los Angeles.

*   *   *

The hostility between California and UCLA stretched back to UCLA’s founding in the 1920s, when the Cal faculty objected to its southern counterpart’s desire to move its campus from Vermont Avenue for fear it would sap the flagship campus of prestige. The bitterness festered for decades. It did not go unnoticed in Los Angeles that the football scandal that devastated Red Sanders’s powerhouse began with a report in a Bay Area newspaper. “It is obvious, and has been for years, that Cal cannot willingly accept UCLA’s development and its athletic success,” one Los Angeles resident wrote in a letter to the
Times
. “The time for separation from Berkeley has now come.” The people in Berkeley harbored similar resentment. “You couldn’t talk about UCLA in our house. They were the antichrist,” said Tom Newell, Pete’s son.

That history helps explain why the Cal fans reacted so lustily when the Bears finally knocked off the Bruins in a basketball game with few real consequences. It also explains why they embraced their handsome, charming coach. Newell may not have been in Berkeley long, but the people could see that he represented their last, best hope at derailing the Johnny Wooden express.

If Wooden couldn’t speed Newell up, he figured he should try to slow his racehorses down. His personnel mandated it. “This could be the tallest and also the slowest Bruin team I’ve had,” he said two days before the first game of the 1957–58 season. What’s more, he realized that other coaches around the league, especially Newell, were figuring him out. “They caught up with the fast break after a while, so we altered it,” Wooden said. “I switched to a safety fast break. We didn’t abolish it completely. We just ran it more cautiously.”

Ironically, UCLA’s roster that season would include the swiftest athlete Wooden would ever coach. He was Rafer Johnson, a six-foot-three junior guard who was best known for having broken the world decathlon record his freshman year as a member of UCLA’s track team. Johnson had played four games for UCLA’s freshman basketball team, averaging better than 10 points, but he stopped playing so he could focus on track. Now he was back to playing hoops, but his speed on the track did not translate well. “Rafer could run a lot faster than he could dribble,” his teammate, Ben Rogers, said. “If he had concentrated on basketball, he would have been a pretty good player.”

The other coaches in the PCC were also catching up to Wooden in the recruiting department. This was not hard to do. Wooden could be persuasive with prospects when they were in his company, but he refused to leave Southern California to find them. “I would not do that. I made that clear when I came here,” he said. “My family comes first. I would not go away to scout. I would not be away from home. I refused to do that, and I didn’t have assistants do that.”

The school was still not providing the Bruins with their own home court, but fortunately the city of Los Angeles stepped in to fill the void. The city announced in the fall of 1957 that an architect’s designs had been completed for a multipurpose arena that would host home games for USC and UCLA, among other events. The arena’s site—commonly referred to as “the hole”—was located next to USC’s campus. That made it less than ideal for UCLA, but it was better than Venice High School.

With his program suffering from a dearth of talent, Wooden was forced to mine the junior college ranks. He brought in six such transfers that fall, including a high-scoring, hard-nosed guard named Denny Crum, a six-foot-one San Fernando Valley native who had been the region’s leading junior college scorer at Los Angeles Pierce College. Despite that pedigree, Crum did not warrant a hard sell from UCLA’s coach. During his campus visit, Crum spent several hours with Wooden and his players, waiting for the coach to deliver his pitch. Finally, during a team meal Wooden looked at him blankly and asked, “So are you coming or not?”

The fall of 1957 also saw the return of that old nonconformist, Jerry Norman. After serving a three-and-a-half-year hitch in the navy, Norman had taken a teaching and coaching position at West Covina High School, where Cat Wooden was the principal. A year later, Jerry was hired to teach in the physical education department at UCLA. Wooden asked if he would moonlight as the freshman basketball coach. Norman and Wooden may have butted heads when Norman was a player, but Wooden was not one for holding grudges, and he knew that Norman had a sharp basketball mind. He also knew Norman was a fierce competitor, just like him. “Jerry was a natural,” said Bill Eblen, another former player who joined the freshman staff the same year that Norman did. “He was very intense, very volatile, but he was technically a very good coach. He was different from Wooden, but he still used the same philosophies.”

The 1957–58 season would mark UCLA’s next-to-last campaign in the Pacific Coast Conference. In the wake of the scandals and resulting sanctions, the regents and trustees at UCLA, California, and USC formally decided to withdraw from the league effective the summer of 1959. Washington and Stanford followed suit.

The Bruins began their nonconference schedule with four straight wins to climb to No. 13 in the AP poll, but they were undone during their annual midwestern tour, where they lost three consecutive games. From there they returned to Westwood and immediately dropped their fourth game in a row to eighth-ranked Michigan State.

The Bruins fared better in league play, at one point rattling off six straight wins until Newell’s Bears beat them, 61–58, at Pan-Pacific Auditorium, a victory that put Cal in a tie with UCLA for first place. As Newell’s teams got harder and harder to beat, Wooden continued to pound the drum in favor of adding a shot clock. He even played two nonconference games that season with the clock in place as an experiment. “The rule would eliminate the occasional, farcical game where a team holds the ball or stalls,” he said in a thinly veiled reference to Newell, whose team had lost a game to San Francisco, 33–24, the year before.

Cal prevailed again when the teams met on February 28 in Berkeley. It was Newell’s third consecutive victory over Wooden. For Jerry Norman, this was his first chance to see Newell’s team up close. Norman would coach the freshman game and then stick around to watch the varsity teams square off. Since he had been away from college basketball for several years, Norman did not know the backgrounds of the players, but from where he sat, he did not see a great differential in talent. “Yet we never won,” he said.

Norman noticed two things Newell was doing that made a big difference. The first was control the tempo. “He made you play the way he wanted you to play,” Norman said. “In most games, if you’re able to do that and the talent is equal, you’re probably going to prevail.”

The other thing that struck Norman was the unusual way the Bears played defense. At that time, most players dribbled almost exclusively with their strong hand. If a player was right-handed, the opposing coach would tell his defender to force that player to go to his left. Newell, however, had taken this practice a step further and had his defenders shift their feet and position their bodies so the dribbler was physically unable to drive with his strong hand. It was subtle, but it worked.

From his perch in the bleachers, Norman had no idea that Newell and Herrerias were devoting so much time scouting opponents. But he could see the result. “You have to remember, there was no strategy in those days,” Norman said. “Coaches didn’t have clinics. There were no games on national television. It was like living in a vacuum. It was apparent to me from watching in the stands that [Newell] understood how to take away a player’s strength. Basketball is a game of mathematics. It’s percentages. Newell was forcing teams to play to their weakness. It was a very effective strategy.”

After their second loss that season to Cal, the Bruins limped home with a 10–6 record in the PCC—good for third place—and 16–10 overall. Cal, meanwhile, went on to win the league championship for the second consecutive year and advanced to the NCAA’s West Regional in Corvallis, where the Bears knocked off Iowa State before falling to Seattle, which featured Elgin Baylor, by 4 points. It was a disappointing loss, but at least the Bears were no longer measuring themselves against their rivals in the south. It was their turn to cast a shadow from on high.