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March 14, 2000 By Rob Miech SportsLine.com Staff Writer |
LOS ANGELES -- As each season passes, John Wooden gets more and more uncomfortable as he watches UCLA games from his perch not more than a dozen feet behind the home team's bench inside Pauley Pavilion.
That has more to do with his 10-year-old artificial hip and knee problems that seem to worsen by the month than with the constant presence of a living legend overseeing successor after successor who can't match his peerless standard.
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Wooden can't believe it has been 25 years since he left. In San Diego on March 31, 1975, UCLA beat Kentucky in the national final to hand Wooden his 10th championship in 12 seasons. Then he walked away from the game.
The Bruins have added only one title in the ensuing 25 years. They'll get an improbable chance at another Thursday when they open the NCAA Tournament against Ball State at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.
"Well, I don't quite look at it that way," Wooden told SportsLine.com, when asked what it has been like to watch others try to resuscitate the monster he created. "My whole feeling is, all you can do is learn from others and make the best effort to do what you can do. That doesn't always reflect what's on the scoreboard."
That rarely appeases rabid alumni, who yearn for the days of yore.
"The alumni don't look at it that way," Wooden said. "But if you let the alumni, media or parents determine your actions, you're in bad shape."
Wooden never found himself in too bad a shape in his incredible years of success at UCLA, although there are those who contend that a man who often sat behind UCLA's bench at Pauley Pavilion fed the underside of the Bruins' dynasty.
The late Sam Gilbert always had a great seat, and the Bruins always had a great team. Some say he was too involved back in the day of Alcindor and Walton and superstar after superstar and national championship after national championship.
But Wooden says any involvement Gilbert had was beyond the reach of the coach.
Other coaches -- such as Jerry Tarkanian and Dale Brown -- have pointed at UCLA as a corrupt program, to the point that some suggest that Wooden's collection of titles are tainted.
"Everybody knows what went on during the Sam Gilbert era," Fresno State coach Tarkanian recently told the Los Angeles Times. "The only (team) with a higher payroll was the Lakers. During the Sam Gilbert era, UCLA was in a different class. All those guys lived in beautiful apartments and drove beautiful cars."
But it should be noted that The Shark has his ax to grind with UCLA. Tarkanian blames the Bruins (specifically athletic director J.D. Morgan) for turning NCAA investigators' attentions toward his Long Beach State program to deflect misdeeds in Westwood.
The 89-year-old Wooden doesn't care what critics have to say. He won his championships with talented players, a hard-working team, and the Pyramid of Success ... Sam Gilbert's influence or no.
"It doesn't bother me, no, because I had no relationship with him (Gilbert) and I tried to make sure my players tried to be very, very careful," Wooden said. "I know that he tried to ... there have been other alumni, on occasions ... they're everywhere. You have to be very careful, and I did all I could about it.
"It does not bother me. If I had any guilt, I suppose it would bother me. But I feel no guilt at all. I did what I could."
Gilbert did plenty, too, to befriend key players from the juggernaut program of the land in a relationship that has been described as mutually beneficial to himself and UCLA.
That started with Willie Naulls, an All-America center at UCLA in 1956 who formed a business relationship with Gilbert after leaving school. Naulls helped to keep Walt Hazzard from leaving UCLA in the early 1960s, and he's one of 16 people, or groups of people, who have donated at least $100,000 to an endowment for the program's basketball scholarships.
Among the endowments, one is in memory of Wooden's late wife, Nell. Another is from Rose Gilbert, in memory of Sam, who died in 1987.
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| Jerry Tarkanian doesn't think UCLA was running a clean ship during the 'Sam Gilbert era.'(Allsport) |
The Wizard of Westwood -- written in 1973 by Dwight Chapin and Jeff Prugh -- details Gilbert's involvement with the basketball team as a cozy one in which he often had barbecues or invited players to wash their cars on Sundays at his Malibu home.
A Lake Arrowhead retreat also served as a get-away hangout, and Gilbert listened to the players' schoolboy problems with open ears.
Mostly, he understood and sympathized with the variety of problems that black players were plagued with in the turbulent 1960s and '70s. In return, Gilbert referred to himself as "a surrogate father" to certain players, boasted of knowing the most famous college basketball players in the country.
Longtime trainer Ducky Drake once had to ask Gilbert not to knock on napping players' hotel doors on the road.
Wooden's bosses, in turn, must have been pleased that the dynasty wasn't prematurely dismantled because of player unrest with the strict and stern coach. It's that father-figure image the players found in Gilbert, not Wooden.
Morgan called Gilbert "a volunteer advisor." The license plate on Gilbert's car read "PAPA G," and a host of Bruins once gave him a watch bearing the inscription, "Thanks, Papa Sam."
Sam and Rose, a high school teacher, tutored players and helped land them in suitable, if not extravagant, housing. Gilbert is characterized in the book as doing everything for his favored players ... all the way to picking up medical tabs for girlfriends' abortions.
He also offered them his business advice with their first professional contracts (such as helping to arrange Alcindor's stunning four-year, $1.4-million deal with the Milwaukee Bucks).
That was well before agents became the omnipresent part of the college basketball landscape.
In UCLA Basketball: The Real Story, published in 1972, H. Anthony Medley wrote that "Gilbert did more to keep the UCLA team together and seemingly happy during those years than any other individual."
Still, former Bruins All-American Marques Johnson -- the first winner of the Wooden Award -- discounts the theory that Gilbert had such a vast influence on keeping key players happy.
"I've heard people say, 'If it weren't for Sam Gilbert the program wouldn't have flourished like it did.' Whatever," said Johnson, now a FOX-TV basketball analyst.
"In all truthfulness, the guys I played with or knew from the earlier days don't think Sam was an influential factor on anyone going there, like, 'Yeah, I'll go to UCLA, hook up with Sam and it'll all be good.' It wasn't like that."
In keeping certain players happy, Johnson said favors might have been granted, but not freebies. Winter jackets or car tires could be had from a Gilbert contact, but at a discount. The players always had to come up with some loot.
"He had connections, where you could get better prices," Johnson said. "But to say Sam was responsible for the good players, the quality players, that UCLA was able to attract, I think, is a total misstatement."
An NCAA investigation after his tenure found no wrongdoing under Wooden's watch, but a two-year probation was levied against UCLA from Larry Brown's regime in 1981 and the program was ordered to sever ties with Gilbert.
Wooden said he spoke with Gilbert infrequently and that Morgan was forceful in ensuring that Gilbert toed the line in his zeal.
"But I don't feel, in any way, any guilt," Wooden said. "If people think he had something to do with our success ... I never had him talk with a recruit and I never sent a recruit to him. I just knew that he's one who might do things to help kids, in some way, that could get us into trouble.
"He's not the only one. You have to be aware of that. Every college coach does. The better you do (on the court), the more people will latch onto you and try to latch onto your kids. They have to be extra careful."
Twenty-five years after Wooden retired, that is an understatement after a season in which suspensions played such a vast role in the game. Agents, their runners, summertime coaches and others can spot investment opportunities, and a 40-inch vertical, from a mile away.
"There are so many rules," Wooden said. "You have to worry about too many. Like anything else, the larger it gets the harder it is to work out easily."
The only thing more difficult, seven men have discovered, is following the footsteps of a coaching legend.