A Year Of Turmoil And Decision

It began to get pretty hot, and soon we were joined by Donny Saffer, a Jew, and by Terry Schofield, a Catholic. Coach Wooden moved closer to listen, but except for adding a few helpful bits of information, he did not take a stand. He just listened, and he seemed fascinated. When I finally told everybody that I was now an Orthodox Muslim, there was a hush, but then the whole discussion resumed and nobody seemed to care that I was a Muslim. They accepted it and we talked about it. The world did not come to an end. Coach Wooden did not look at me cross-eyed. He seemed to accept it as well as everybody else. Out of that midnight ride across Ohio and Indiana we became a different group of men, much more than just a bunch of jocks traveling around the country bouncing basketballs. After that long conversation, there were fewer dogmatists on the UCLA team.

The other thing happened toward the end of the season, and I might call it "the education of Coach John Wooden." Some people might think it presumptuous of me to suggest that a coach who won five national titles in six years might need some educating, but I maintained my position: this fine man, this superb coach, this honest and decent individual, had a terrible blind spot. He had this morality thing going; you had to be "morally" right to play. From that attitude came a serious inability on his part to get along with "problem" players. If they didn't go to church every Sunday and study for three hours a night and arrive 15 minutes early to practice and nod agreement with every inspiring word the coach said, they were not morally fit to play—and they found themselves on the second team. Or if they were so good that they had to be on the first team, they found themselves in constant hot water. There are many examples. Donny Saffer quit and didn't come back. Mike Lynn was made to sit out a year, even though his case had been fully disposed of in the courts, and Lynn presumably punished to the degree the judge felt necessary. Whenever Coach Wooden had to deal with somebody a little different from the norm, he blew the case. (I may be the only exception. The coach and I always got along, though we did not have a close relationship.)

Let me give you an instance of what I am trying to explain, probably the best example of all. It happened in my junior year and involved my roommate, Edgar Lacey, and it was kind of a personal tragedy for me. The problem came to a head the night we lost the big game to Houston in the Astrodome. Lace started the game guarding Elvin Hayes, but when Elvin scored 29 points before the first half was over, Coach Wooden took him out. Lace never got back in. We tried several people on Elvin, including me and Mike Lynn, but it took an unknown player named Jim Nielsen to finally slow him down.

On the way back to the hotel after the game, Lace sat next to me in the bus, and he said, "Man, I'm gonna quit." I could see what was eating him. Here we had played the most important game of the year and he had sat out the whole second half. Long before that Lace had had plenty to be annoyed about. Because Coach Wooden had this thing about players being "morally" ready for play, he sometimes harmed good people. The perfect kind of player for a coach like John Wooden was Lynn Shackleford. Shack was the All-American boy. He studied hard. He belonged to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He took instruction and advice and criticism beautifully. So he started almost every game. On the other hand, Lace was very much his own man. He did his own thing, and he did not alter his personality to suit whatever coach he was playing for. Sometimes he hit the books and sometimes he didn't. He would never become anybody's "boy," in the sense that Shack became Coach Wooden's "boy." So he found himself fighting for a starting position, while Shack got his automatically. And who was Lace fighting? Mike Lynn, somebody else who did not fit Coach Wooden's Midwestern idea of morality. Mike had to alternate at starting forward with Lace. And so help me, if I'm any judge of ballplayers at all, both Lace and Mike were better than Lynn Shackleford, despite the fact that Shack was one of the fine college players.

All of this was eating Lace, and then he was publicly humiliated by being taken out of the Houston game while I was allowed to stagger around for the whole 40 minutes, out of shape and with double vision. All the way back to the hotel on the bus Lace kept muttering to himself about quitting.

When we got back to Los Angeles, I figured that Coach Wooden would smooth matters out. I kept waiting for him to say something, but he didn't. All week long in practice he kept talking in the abstract. He'd say things like, "We all know that not every player can play every game, but that shouldn't upset them. There's a lot of things involved." Everybody on the team knew that he was talking about Lace, but he wouldn't come out and say so. He wouldn't even say something like, "I took Lacey out of the Houston game because I didn't think he was getting the job done, but I'm sorry I had to do it." A short statement like that would have kept Lace on the team, but Coach Wooden didn't make it. Well, Lace is tremendously sensitive, and this kept eating away at him. He never played again for UCLA. He's now with the Los Angeles Stars in the ABA, and I wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be the Los Angeles Star.

Anyway, that's the kind of thing I mean about there being certain types of players Coach Wooden couldn't understand. Now, toward the end of the Drake game in my senior year something happened that I think changed the whole situation. We had a player named Bill Sweek, and while he was certainly not a problem player, he didn't exactly fit into Coach Wooden's "morality" mold either. There was about one minute left to play, and Coach Wooden motioned to Sweek to get up and get ready to go in the game. But a few seconds later, while Sweek was standing there waiting to go on the floor, Coach Wooden told him to sit down. Sweek got mad and just left the floor. He took a walk. He was going to breeze right out of there and go home, but he felt a little tacky so he went to the showers, and that's where Coach Wooden caught him. They really went at it. The discussion kept right on going when Sweek walked out of the shower and started putting his clothes on, and Coach Wooden completely blew his cool. Assistant Coach Denny Crum grabbed Coach Wooden and led him back to their rooms. But by then Sweek had told Coach Wooden exactly where it was at. He had put it on Coach Wooden real good. He told him that it was not necessary that every player be a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, or that every player be a grind with the textbooks, or that every player's name pop up on every honor roll. He told him that some people are like that, and some are not, and the ones who are not can be just as good as the ones who are, and sometimes better. Then he named all the guys who were not in Coach Wooden's morality bag, and all the trouble they had had, and he said, "Maybe you've got to realize that the trouble isn't always with them. Maybe some of it's with you!"

Now, if you want to know how, big a man John Wooden is, I want you to consider this: he is 59 years old, not an age at which people find it easy to change, and his whole view of life goes back to rustic Indiana, 1935, and Sunday school and motherhood and Fourth of July parades. But John Wooden learned something from Bill Sweek. He called us together before practice the next day and he gave us a talk. He didn't make any self-demeaning speech or do any breast-beating; he's not that kind of man. But he made us understand that he had listened and he had found out something. He made it clear that he was going to try to understand better the Bill Sweeks of this world. As for Sweek, he stayed on the team. He shook hands with Coach Wooden and apologized for walking off the floor, and once again we were a closer bunch of human beings. When we finished the year with our third straight NCAA championship, I somehow wasn't as impressed by the victory as I was by the way a group of very different men had come together in tolerance and affection. And once again I related it to life; how all men could be brothers with a small amount of effort and a few honest words.

That was the main thing I learned from UCLA basketball. It was worth learning.

As long as I was eligible to play at UCLA, the pros couldn't talk to me, although there were a few attempts to get around the rules and regulations. One guy set himself up as a self-appointed flesh peddler, and he made contacts with just about everybody in the world who paid money to basketball players, from the NBA and ABA to the Globetrotters and the Italian League. He told them all that he represented me, and how much were they going to offer? He went to George Mikan, commissioner of the American Basketball Association, and said he represented me and asked for some money to "get the ball rolling." When I found out about it, I got the ball rolling by telling him to stay out of my sight. That was the end of that. He was just an unscrupulous guy looking for a piece of change under the table.