Wooden: A Coach's Life (68 page)

The back and forth between Wooden and Phelps was an intriguing table setter for the teams’ rematch at Pauley Pavilion one week later. After the loss, Wooden suggested that while Notre Dame deserved to be awarded the No. 1 ranking (which it was), the answer as to which was the better team would be more apparent after the second game. “If they win on the west coast, by golly that will prove they are a better ballclub. If we win, that will prove we will have a better chance on a neutral court,” he said. When Phelps joked with Wooden that he’d rather not play the game, Wooden replied with a smile, “You better come.”

Wooden said he would not make any wholesale changes because of a single defeat, but he did insert Marques Johnson into the starting lineup for the rematch. That meant shifting Meyers to forward and bringing Trgovich off the bench. Johnson had responded beautifully when Wooden started him in the second half during a midweek win at home over Santa Clara, scoring a career-high 20 points. The coach waited until a few minutes before the tip-off to reveal the change to his players.

The Fighting Irish did not hold their No. 1 ranking for long, as UCLA ran them out of Pauley in a 94–75 rout. Johnson scored 16 points while holding Notre Dame’s leading scorer, Adrian Dantley, to just one first-half field goal. “Johnson’s starting was the key for them. It gave them added strength on the boards,” Phelps said. Walton chipped a season-high 32 points despite fouling out with 5:39 to play. When he came out of the game, Walton headed straight for the locker room to get an early start on icing his knees.

After the game, Phelps reminded everyone that “what we did last week can never be taken away from us. You can’t undo history.” Still, he acknowledged the obvious: “They’re number one. They beat us.” The college basketball world had been shaken up for all of seven days. Now, order was restored.

*   *   *

Marques Johnson was pleased to be starting, but he could sense that some guys didn’t like it. “It didn’t sit well with Pete that I took his place in the lineup,” he said of Trgovich. “I could feel that he and Dave Meyers weren’t completely happy about it.” This was the type of crumbling from within that Wooden had warned about. Johnson noticed that Meyers also bristled whenever Wooden drew offensive formations on a blackboard and assigned the letters
B
and
K
for Walton and Wilkes while everyone else was a simple
X.
“It was like those two guys had just gotten kind of bigger than everybody else,” Johnson said. “To this day, if you mention that to Dave, the hair on his neck will rise up.”

Wooden predicted all of this two years before, when he told the boys they would be “intolerable” by the time they were seniors. Besides fighting pressure and complacency, Walton and his classmates were becoming increasingly concerned with their pro prospects. “I just think, myself included, we had senioritis. We were starting to look ahead and got a bit distracted,” Wilkes said. “It was a combination of the expectations getting so extreme, combined with the fact that we got distracted with the vegetarians and all the different stuff we were into. We had different people pulling at us, and maybe we just lost a bit of our focus.”

Walton and Lee weren’t helping. Their New Age interests were constantly taking them in strange directions. Wooden even agreed to allow Walton to meditate in his office. One day, Marques Johnson and Richard Washington were meditating when they asked each other to divulge their top-secret mantras. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” Johnson said. When Washington said what his mantra was, Johnson said, “Hey, that’s mine, too!”

Lee’s minutes had been dwindling throughout the course of the season as Curtis and McCarter improved. He claimed that it didn’t bother him that much. “I like to think I’m a well-rounded human being,” Lee said in late February. “I still like to play basketball, but it used to constitute a larger percentage of my consciousness than it does now.”

“It was almost a team that was too intelligent for its own good,” Johnson said. “We used to be a bunch of ballers from the city that just want to go out there and kick some ass. But we’d be sitting in the hotel, and Greg Lee would hypnotize himself and make himself stiff as a board. He’d give you instructions. ‘Give me ten minutes to go into my trance here. You’ll see my eyes roll up in my head.’ We could lift him and put his head at the end of one bed and his feet at the end of another bed. He’d be just like an ironing board. I mean, that’s the kind of shit we were doing.”

It had been a long two-plus seasons, and the toughest part was yet to come. Not surprisingly, the player who felt the most worn out was the one who assumed the heaviest burdens. “I get tired carrying my 225 pounds around,” Walton said, “but I get doubly tired when I carry someone else’s 225 pounds on my back. Most of the teams we play try to rough me up. Basketball is not always fun. The publicity and the pressure spoil it for me. No one enjoys a game as a game, not the coaches, not the players, not the fans, and not the press. All that matters is whether you win or lose, and I don’t feel that way.”

That summed up the prevailing emotion on the team. More than anything, these guys were
tired
. Tired of the pressure, tired of taking everyone’s best shot, tired of the scrutiny, the nitpicking, the unreasonable expectations. Walton loved playing center, but he could never get used to being the center of attention. “I can’t go anywhere without being looked at as a freak,” he said. “Nobody knows me and they won’t for a long time.”

The desire to be better understood led Walton to give lengthy interviews to a freelance sportswriter named Bill Libby, who published a book called
The Walton Gang
toward the end of Walton’s senior season. In the book, Walton aired some of his most radical beliefs. “I don’t blame the blacks for hating the whites. If a black man gunned me down right now, I’d figure it was all right because of what whites have done to blacks,” he told Libby. “I don’t like violence, but violence scares people, and sometimes you have to scare people into doing right, into acting. If revolution comes, I’m ready.” Those words underscored why coaching the redhead could be such a challenge. “Sometimes with Bill I feel like I’m handling a piece of glass,” Wooden said. “At times he is an enigma—inconsistent, changeable, impatient—but his true nature, the one few people see, is extroverted, open and sincere. He definitely ranks up there in the unusual person category.”

Walton embarrassed himself in early February, when he was given the Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. He was just the second basketball player since 1930 to be given the award. (Bill Bradley was the other.) Wooden had informed Walton that there would be a press conference on campus at which he would be presented with the award. Wooden explained to him that this was a very big deal, but Walton showed up ten minutes late and woefully underdressed in a blue collared shirt, worn blue jeans, and sandals. His hair was mangled and sweaty from his bike ride. Jim Murray labeled Walton’s performance a “a sartorial disaster.” (“His socks and tie, in a sense, matched. He didn’t have any.”) Walton insisted it was an innocent mistake, but Wooden and Morgan were furious.

Then again, Walton and his classmates had long ago stopped listening to John Wooden. “Most of the stuff he said, unless it was related to basketball, you just didn’t really hear it,” Wilkes said. When Wooden would go into one of his timeworn spiels, the players often mocked him by singing Bob Dylan songs. Wooden finally snapped that he was “tired of all this Bob Dylan crap,” prompting the players to double over in laughter. They couldn’t believe he said the word
crap
.

Even when it came to basketball, the players were tuning Wooden out. Instead of running a delay offense when they had a big lead, they fired ill-advised jumpers in an effort to impress the pro scouts. On a few occasions, they either missed or deliberately ignored Wooden’s specific instructions to put on their full-court press. “They listen,” Wooden said, “but do not hear.”

As the season headed for the home stretch, Wooden found himself wistful for a simpler time. Six days after his team exacted its revenge over Notre Dame, Wooden was standing in a hallway in Pauley Pavilion, amiably chatting with USC assistant coach Jim Hefner before their teams took the floor. Hefner told Wooden how impressed he was with UCLA’s home arena—its size, its design, its environment. Hefner said that Wooden must feel very lucky to have such an asset. Wooden shook his head and smiled. “I liked the old place better,” he said.

*   *   *

It was only a matter of time before their play on the court also became intolerable. After struggling at home to beat USC by 11, the Bruins nearly blew a 13-point lead in Pauley against Oregon State before winning by 5. “This team is not as hungry as they were as sophomores and juniors. They seem to lack the killer’s instinct,” Wooden said afterward. “Too many of our players have been going too individual lately. I don’t want them thinking about pro contracts right now.”

Beavers coach Ralph Miller agreed. “This group of UCLA players has, more or less, old-timers. They’re not as enthusiastic,” he said. “They’ve won so many games and championships that it’s easy for them to say, ‘What the hell. What else do we have to do?’”

The machine finally came apart during one shocking forty-eight-hour span in late February. It began with a raucous, tense game at Oregon State. The Bruins were clearly the more talented team, but they could not match the intensity of their opponents or their fans. While holding a 9-point lead in the second half, Wooden was barking instructions into his team’s huddle when an apple tossed from the stands hit him square on the chest. For a moment, Marques Johnson thought he might have another heart attack. “He turned white,” Johnson recalled. “It looked like he could have keeled over right there.” As had been the case so often that season, the Bruins couldn’t hold on to their lead. The result was a 61–57 defeat. They committed 21 turnovers, 15 of which came courtesy of seniors Walton, Curtis, and Wilkes.

A team of championship mettle would have rebounded with a thrashing the following evening at Oregon. In the days leading up to that game, Wooden and Harter continued to jab at each other through the press. After noting that Harter had scouted UCLA against USC and had also been at the Notre Dame game, Wooden said, “I’m sure he knows all about us, and if there’s anything he doesn’t know about us I’ll be glad to tell him.” Harter, in turn, mocked Wooden for skipping a press luncheon in Eugene so he could sign his books at an Oregon State student bookstore. “Is he signing his own book, or the Bible?” Harter cracked. “I respect UCLA’s talent but have only distaste for its behavior. Listen to the names Walton calls the man who’s playing him. Is it proper for a coach of Wooden’s stature to verbally bait opposing players?”

The Kamikaze Kids were primed and ready. The Bruins were not. Harter surprised Wooden with a spread offense, with many of the sets resulting in wide-open shots from the corner by the six-foot-eight sophomore Bruce Coldren. Coldren was doing for Oregon what Lynn Shackelford used to do for UCLA, but Wooden never adjusted. He did, however, tell Coldren to “keep your hands off my players” when Coldren dove for a loose ball and landed on the UCLA bench.

This time, there was no lead to surrender. The Ducks used a 10–0 spurt to give them a 9-point lead with under six minutes to play. From there, Oregon spread its offense, held the ball, and finished off the 56–51 upset, handing UCLA its first back-to-back losses in eight years.

On the very few occasions when Wooden’s team was defeated in the past, he claimed to find some benefit. Not so this time. “We’re certainly not number one, not the way we’re playing,” he said. “I wasn’t concerned about it last week. I am now.” Lee was concerned, too, and openly critical of his coach. “The right people are not playing. I think we were playing better when I was in the lineup, but I don’t make those decisions,” Lee said. “We’re supposed to get the ball to Bill, but we’re also supposed to be a five-man offense. The trouble is, the other guys don’t know what to do when Bill is double-teamed.”

UCLA’s greatest asset, its aura of invincibility, had been punctured. Before the game at Oregon State, the public announcer intentionally introduced the Bruins as the “descending national champs … er, excuse me, the
defending
national champs.” The crowd ate it up. Now, the team was in genuine disarray. “There was the feeling that we were just kind of exposed for what we were,” Johnson said, “and that was a good team with a lot of internal stuff going on.”

On the plane ride back to Los Angeles, Walton and Wooden sat together and talked about what was going wrong. Walton had long made clear that he preferred having his good buddy Lee on the court over Tommy Curtis. Walton also suggested that Wooden go back to his high-post offense. Normally, Wooden was loath to make wholesale adjustments, especially at this late stage, but he had already shown uncommon flexibility that season. What was one more change?

*   *   *

Now John Wooden was the weary one. “I’ll admit it gets tiresome to answer the same questions over and over about what could be wrong,” he said. “The other night, I had to get out of bed three times to answer the phone, one from somebody in North Carolina. I’m sorry to say I lost my self-control and got upset with him.”

One might think that by now Wooden was past the point of being second-guessed, but that’s what happened. “Most coaches I know don’t think Wooden is a good X’s and O’s coach,” said Bill Mulligan, the former USC assistant who was now the coach at Riverside City College. “I think his conservative ways are showing. He wasn’t really gambling. If Norman and Crum were still assisting Wooden, they might have convinced him to do something different.”

Harter was more than happy to pile on as well. “I think it’s good for basketball to have UCLA lose. It’s bad for any team to dominate the way they’ve dominated,” he said. “[Wooden has] got to be scared now. They don’t have the hunger to win.” Harter went so far as to predict that USC, which was now tied for first place in the conference, would win the Pac-8.