Wooden: A Coach's Life (80 page)
Many of his friends developed the same concern. “I honestly think he was suicidal. He was that despondent. She was just everything to him,” said Betty Putnam, whose husband, Bill, was one of Wooden’s first assistants at UCLA. “I tried calling, but most of the time he wouldn’t answer the phone. He just didn’t want to be with anybody, especially someone who would remind him of Nell.”
In the eyes of his former players, Wooden’s depression made him seem truly human for the first time. “He was terrible. You really couldn’t get to him that first year,” Hirsch said. “There’s a breaking point to every man. He wasn’t the man that everybody perceived him to be. I always perceived him to be a regular Joe. If he didn’t go down like that, I would have been disappointed, like what kind of cold son of a bitch are you?”
In an effort to lift the fog, a group of Wooden’s closest friends developed a rotation of days on which they were to call or visit. A member of his family stayed with him most every night. Nothing worked. After several months of this, Gary Cunningham decided it was time for some tough love. “You’re not doing the things you taught us to do,” he told Wooden. “You taught us that when you overcome adversity, you become a stronger person. You’re sitting at home and feeling sorry for yourself. I know you lost one of the most important things in your life, if not the most important, but life has to go on. What kind of example are you setting for all of us who played for you and believed in what you taught?”
As Cunningham spoke, Wooden cried on the phone. “I don’t know whether it did any good or not, but he needed somebody to say it,” Cunningham said. “You can’t call and just sympathize, sympathize, sympathize. Sometimes you have to say the truth.”
Wooden later confessed that during this period, his faith wavered. This was not surprising since Nell was always the more devout of the two. She decorated their home with Christian-themed pieces, including a plaque she hung on his office wall that read, “God never closes one door without opening another.”
It took six months for the new door to swing open. It happened in the fall of 1985 with the birth of Cori Nicholson, the daughter of Nan’s daughter Caryn. She was Wooden’s first great-grandchild. He had been speaking to a group in downtown Los Angeles the night she was born, but he still got to the hospital before the big moment came. He was so thrilled, he said he wanted to take his family out to dinner to celebrate. On his way home, however, he got into a bad car accident. John and Nan spent four hours that night while he was X-rayed at a hospital in Tarzana. He told Nan that as he saw a big truck getting ready to smack him from behind, he thought to himself, “Well, a new one came in and an old one’s going out.” He was recovering not only his will to live but also his sense of humor.
“The single biggest factor in his recovery was the birth of Cori,” Nan said. Slowly but surely, John began to climb out of the valley. “Picture this seventy-six-year-old man down on the floor with a year-old baby, crawling around and playing with her,” Caryn said. “He’s an unmerciful tease. I used to get mad at him when Cori was little. He’d tease her to the point where she’d really start to whine.” He would eventually have more than a dozen great-grandchildren, all of whom lived within a two hours’ drive. Each time another one came into the world, he was lifted a little higher.
Wooden managed to resume something close to a normal life, although the years started to catch up with him. When he reached the age of seventy-eight, he decided to stop doing his camps. “My knees don’t handle this very well anymore. I can get through an afternoon, but at night I’m in misery,” he said during his final session. Looking down at the great-grandson he was bouncing on his knee, Wooden said, “Little Johnny will replace all of this for me. I don’t need much more than him and the rest of my family.”
He was content, but he could never be truly happy again, not without Nell. During a trip to Indiana, Wooden was being visited in his hotel room by Jim Powers, his former guard from South Bend Central High and Indiana State, when he was suddenly overcome with emotion. “He was shaving in the bathroom. Tears came to his eyes,” Powers recalled. “He said, ‘I really miss her. You know, she just did everything for me. I can’t even pack my own bag.’” For a while, Jim Wooden hoped that his dad might remarry, but he soon realized there was no chance of that happening. Nor would Wooden entertain the idea of finding a new place to live. “I won’t ever leave here, because I see her everywhere,” Wooden said four years after Nell died. “I miss her as much now as I ever have. It never gets easier. There are friends who would like to see me find another woman for the companionship. I wouldn’t do it. It would never work.”
Staying in the home they shared allowed him to keep Nell alive. “I’ve had people tell me they’d go into the condo and sit on that side of the bed, and he’d get upset and say, ‘You can’t sit there. That’s Nell’s side.’ And this was fifteen, eighteen years down the road,” Marques Johnson said. “Maybe it’s psychobabble, but I just didn’t know how healthy that was for him. But at the same time, it was endearing because you understood the full extent of his devotion to her.”
Wooden also refused to go back to the Final Four and the coaches’ convention. There were too many memories, and besides, who would be there to remind him about names and faces? Who would be his buffer to the outside world, shooing away autograph seekers when he was too polite to do it himself? “I couldn’t go without her,” he said the year after she died. “I have the feeling I’ll never go again.” He did make brief trips to the Final Four cities to attend a dinner or event, but he never stayed for the games. “I’m having a lot of trouble getting some people to understand,” Wooden said in 1988. “I attended the National Association of Basketball Coaches convention, I think it was thirty-five years in succession, always with my wife. I never went to one without her. I lost her. It would be three years ago this month. And I haven’t felt like going without her. Maybe next year I’ll feel different.”
When he finished his morning walks, he was often in what he described as “a somber, almost melancholy mood.” In those moments, he turned to poetry. One day he penned an eloquent acknowledgment that he was growing older and would soon die. It began: “
The years have left their imprint on my hands and on my face / Erect no longer is my walk, and slower is my pace
…” The poem became a longtime favorite. He would recite it hundreds of times.
This is how it would be for John Wooden the rest of his life. Even when he was cheerful and funny, he carried an elegiac aura. He was an elderly man who spoke freely of his own death. It made him seem even more godly, more ethereal. “I don’t think I’m preoccupied with death, but I will say this: The loss of Nellie is responsible for the fact that I have no fear of death, where perhaps at one time I did,” he said. “That’s the only chance I’ll ever have, if my sins are forgiven, to be with her. So why should I fear?”
He assured people that he would not do anything to hurry his death along, but if it wasn’t a preoccupation, it was never far away from his consciousness. During a trip back home to Indiana in 1989, Wooden found himself walking through the halls of Martinsville High for the first time in ages. At one point, he stopped to peer at a photo of the Artesians’ 1927 state championship team. As he touched all the young faces in the photo, he repeated, “Gone … gone … gone…”
Finally, his finger came to rest on his own visage. “Almost gone,” he said.
* * *
The only way John Wooden would consent to return to the Final Four would be if UCLA were playing in it. Even then, it took much convincing.
It was not destined to happen under Walt Hazzard. The Bruins failed to reach the NCAA tournament in both of his first two seasons as coach, although they did win the NIT in 1985. Hazzard and Wooden made a good show of having close ties—in his first season, Hazzard even convinced Wooden to come to a practice for the first time since he retired—but behind the scenes there was very little interaction. Much of that was because Wooden was so preoccupied with taking care of Nell, but Jack Hirsch, who was Hazzard’s assistant, suspected there were other reasons. “I felt a little slighted by that. He should have given us more input,” Hirsch said. “You could talk to him, but he would never really talk about what you should be doing in basketball. Was he afraid of us winning, or was that just him telling us we had to do it ourselves?”
In 1987, Hazzard guided UCLA back to the NCAA tournament, but the Bruins lost to Wyoming in the second round. Six months later, the program once again found itself in hot water because of Sam Gilbert. A second NCAA investigation unearthed another batch of extra benefits, including rent payments that were made on behalf of Carl Pitts, a junior college transfer who signed for UCLA but never enrolled there. In its public report, the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions noted that Gilbert was the one who alerted UCLA to his arrangement with Pitts “as if pleased with his actions.” Once again, Gilbert was not identified by name; the NCAA described him as “a well-known and highly identifiable representative of the institution’s athletics interests … who had been involved in serious violations of NCAA rules in a 1981 infractions case involving the institution.” The report declared that Gilbert had “ignored repeated warnings from the university to disassociate himself from all recruiting activities.” The NCAA also chastised UCLA for continuing to accept money from Gilbert and his family (especially his wife, Rose) for nonathletic purposes. As a result, the infractions committee stated that it “believes it appropriate to require the institution to sever all relations (to the limit of the university’s legal authority) between the university’s athletics program and this representative.”
This time, it was left to Hirsch to deliver the bad news. “I had to betray Sam. I went to his office in Encino and I told him, ‘You have to leave the program completely,” Hirsch said. “He threatened to kill me.”
Hirsch knew that the violations uncovered by the NCAA were penny ante stuff compared to what was really going on. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I was the most honest coach in the world,” he said. “If one of my players came up and said he needed a hundred bucks to take a girl out, what am I going to do, say no?” He finally decided he’d had enough when Hazzard sent him to visit LaPhonso Ellis, a six-foot-eight power forward from East St. Louis, Illinois. According to Hirsch, when he showed up at Ellis’s house, he was carrying a bag full of several thousand dollars in cash. “I heard he wanted his mother to be taken care of,” Hirsch said. Hirsch never showed the money to Ellis, who ended up going to Notre Dame. “I called Walt and said, ‘This is so unethical and so immoral.’ But we were tired of being outrecruited.”
Based on the evidence it had, the NCAA only levied two minor penalties against UCLA: a public censure and the loss of two scholarships for the 1988–89 season. A few weeks later, Hazzard was given a contract extension. “I think our program has weathered the storm,” he said.
The NCAA’s report was not the last the world would hear of Sam Gilbert. Those long-held rumors of Mafia ties turned out to have more merit than anyone realized. On November 25, 1987, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted Gilbert and five other men on charges of racketeering and laundering some $36 million in connection with a marijuana smuggling ring dating back to 1975. Gilbert’s son, Michael, was among those charged with conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. The profits from the drug sales were allegedly laundered through the Bicycle Club, a casino in Bell Gardens, California, that had recently been built by Gilbert’s construction firm.
There was only one flaw in the government’s case: four days before the indictment was handed down, Gilbert died in his home following a long battle with cancer and heart disease. He was seventy-four. The grand jury was unaware of this when it completed its work. So were the federal officials who went to Gilbert’s Pacific Palisades home to arrest him. Whatever is said about Sam Gilbert, he must be given his due: the son of a bitch beat the system with four days to spare.
As a result of convictions handed down two and a half years after the indictment, Michael Gilbert would serve five and a half years in federal person. By that time, UCLA basketball had changed coaches yet again. Walt Hazzard was fired on March 30, 1988, after failing to reach the NCAA tournament three times in four seasons.
UCLA athletic director Pete Dalis spoke briefly with Hirsch about replacing Hazzard, but Hirsch had had enough. Once again, Dalis scoured the country for replacements. After being turned down by several prominent coaches, including North Carolina State’s Jim Valvano and Larry Brown, who had just won an NCAA title at Kansas, Dalis tapped Jim Harrick, who during his nine years at Pepperdine had compiled a 167–97 record and gone to four NCAA tournaments. Because of his many years coaching high school and college ball in Southern California, Harrick proved to be a savvy recruiter. When he signed Don MacLean, a six-foot-ten All-American from nearby Simi Valley, that summer, it jump-started the program. Though the frustrations of Bruins fans mounted while Harrick’s teams compiled sterling regular season records but kept flaming out in the NCAA tournament (sound familiar?), the Bruins finally broke through in 1995, returning to the Final Four for the first time since Brown had taken them there fifteen years before.
Harrick was one of many coaches who had long implored Wooden to come back to the Final Four. “I kept telling him, ‘Coach, the young coaches need you. They need to see you, they need to talk to you.’ But he wouldn’t go.” Thus, when Harrick returned from the 1995 West Regional final in Oakland, he drove straight to Wooden’s condominium in Encino for an unannounced visit. When Wooden opened the door, he looked at Harrick and said, “I’m not going.”
“We sat down for two hours and I just absolutely begged him to go,” Harrick said. “I called him every day that week. He was as stubborn as any guy I’ve known. You couldn’t budge him off of what his belief was.”
Finally, the old man gave in. Arthur Andersen, the prominent accounting firm, hired him to speak in Seattle and sent a private plane. Wooden didn’t arrive until Monday, the day of the final. When he walked into the Kingdome a few minutes before tip-off, the entire arena rose for a standing ovation. “I got cold chills seeing him there,” Harrick said. “It was electric.”
