3 BOY KING
If Wooden was initially hesitant to have Alcindor at UCLA, or, in Norman’s harsher assessment, flat out hoping Alcindor would not come, the head coach had accepted his fate as 1966–67 approached. It may have been that the season watching freshman Alcindor erased any doubt he would fit a team system and showed Alcindor did not have the disruptive ego Wooden feared. Or, simply, that Alcindor was there and the staff had no choice but to make it work, just as Wooden for years managed playing in the B.O. Barn. Whatever the reason, he appeared committed as Alcindor joined the varsity.
His job was further complicated when a knee injury sidelined Edgar Lacey for the season and Lynn served a school suspension after pleading guilty to unlawful use of a credit card, removing the only options to handle the high post in Wooden’s choice for a new offense. The option of attacking with Alcindor low, near the basket, and Lynn or Lacey closer to the free-throw line ended before it started. Left with no other choice, the Bruins moved forward with Alcindor a solo anchor inside and four teammates either on the opposite side of the lane or fanned out on the perimeter. Choosing the alignment that became an offensive Goliath was a fluke, an accidental concoction for the coach emotionally strained by the newness of building around a center.
“There was no doubt in my mind of Lewis’ potential,” Wooden later wrote. “If there was a doubt of any kind, it was in my ability to live up to the forecasts that were immediately made: three straight NCAAs, no defeats—things like that. I didn’t know exactly how I could use a big man to the best advantage. I had never had the chance to experiment. All I had were ideas, but with no valid way to determine whether they were sound or not. All the concepts that I believed would work when you had a big man needed one in order for me to find out.” He had a list of previous failures when the buildup of a great arriving center did not lead to a title, especially George Mikan at DePaul and Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas, ready just in case.
It didn’t help that Wooden lacked confidence as a game tactician, conceding that his success was built on attention to detail and preparation, not the chess matches of in-game decisions. “I am not a strategy coach,” he concluded years later. “I am a practice coach.” It was top assistant Norman who urged the switch to the zone press that became the catalyst of the championships with small, quick teams in 1964 and ’65, one of many reasons Pete Newell, the highly respected Cal coach turned athletic director, thought Norman had a brilliant basketball mind and the makings of a star head coach. (Norman, in turn, rated Newell the greatest coach of all time.) Norman in the same early days also handled halftime adjustments in talking to players from the chalkboard. UCLA assistants rarely scouted opponents and Wooden, preferring the entire staff spend nights at home with family, even less. His idea of scouting was to read newspaper coverage to learn the offense or defense that his next victim had been using lately. Wooden his entire career focused almost entirely on the Bruins executing their system, not how to counter the other team, and opponents were almost never mentioned in locker-room talks before tip-off. The final instructions he did give emphasized effort and focus and almost never included a mention of strategy.
To Wooden, games were won or lost in the previous days of repetitive drills and an emphasis on conditioning, until UCLA, Ben Franklin in tow, had simply outprepared the adversary before taking the court to out-talent them. Wooden, Swen Nater wrote years after playing for the Bruins in the 1970s, “trained the mind to be the boss over the body. That’s mental toughness. The body wants to do this but you say, ‘No. You’re doing that.’ All practice long, we were begging to take a break. When he saw my tongue dragging on the hardwood floor he yelled, ‘Get going! What are you waiting for?’ That’s when my mind told my body to move. His method for getting yourself in shape was, ‘Go until you can’t go anymore and then go a little more.’ ”
Staring into the unknown new world of game-planning for a hoops force of nature, then, Wooden estimated he spent hundreds of hours in the thirteen months between Alcindor’s arrival as a freshman and the start of the varsity era diagramming plays and brainstorming with coaches he respected. This time, Wooden, after never previously having a player taller than six-nine, was forced to study strategies beyond those of his own respected staff and relied most notably on Press Maravich of North Carolina State. Loud and profane, a product of the East who built his career in the South, a coach who mostly spent two years in each job, Maravich was the antithesis of Wooden and his delicate vocabulary. But he was also a friend and a trusted basketball sounding board despite the mismatch.
Losing projected returnees Lacey and Lynn, while potentially a setback in depth at forward and experience on a young roster, at least allowed UCLA to flow through center Alcindor, guard Allen, and forwards Shackelford and Heitz from the freshman team into the varsity as a single puzzle. Wooden was at least saved from any strategy decisions with the opening lineup. And the one experienced Bruin, junior Mike Warren, was intelligent, hardworking, a trusted ball handler, and dedicated to team play. Wooden considered him such a good example of the ideal Bruin and a stabilizing factor for the sophomores that he named Warren captain for the entire season, one of only four times at UCLA that Wooden went away from his usual approach of picking different captains each game. “They don’t come any smarter than Mike Warren,” Wooden said.
Alcindor had spent part of the summer before his sophomore season as an apprentice in the music department at Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems in New York, a job arranged with the help of Mike Frankovich, a movie producer who the year before set up employment for Alcindor delivering interoffice memos at Columbia. This time, working while living at home allowed Alcindor to save up to buy a 1958 Mercedes for $1,100, with the awareness to save the bill of sale in advance of the inevitable claims of a payoff from a booster or the school. Returning to Los Angeles with his own wheels meant newfound freedom. Moving out of the dorm—“I couldn’t stand any more of those kiddies’ games they played there”—and getting an apartment in Santa Monica with Lacey were early signs that life would be different as a sophomore.
For one thing, he talked to the media, after being declared off-limits as a freshman, similar to the Donohue wall at Power. The school called it Alcindor family wishes to protect their sensitive son, and a university official the year before scolded the Los Angeles Times for printing a picture of Alcindor watching a football scrimmage. Lew described the blackout as UCLA’s idea. The rarity of speaking publicly was a news event in itself either way, the same as the press conference to declare his college choice. When the 1966–67 Bruins were introduced October 14 in Pauley Pavilion, Alcindor, befitting the buildup, was saved for last.
He walked to the microphone, adjusted it skyward to the proper height, and, fully poised as with the previous media session, prepared for the first exchange with reporters since arriving as a freshman.
“I guess you have some questions.”
How tall are you? That was the first.
“I’m seven feet, one and three-eighths inches tall, and I weigh two hundred and thirty pounds.”
Are you still growing?
“I have no idea.”
Do you feel pressure with the much-anticipated move to the varsity?
“Yes, we are getting a lot of pressure because of what people expect of us. I’ll be glad when the season starts.”
“In his street clothes,” Sid Ziff concluded in the Los Angeles Times, “Alcindor looked as slim and tall as a vaulting pole. A human slat. One foot wide and seven feet tall.” Also, “If he was nervous, there was no trace of it. He seemed relaxed and under no strain. Words came to him with no hesitation. Nothing flustered him. You wondered again why all the secrecy a year ago. What did they have to hide? Obviously nothing. The guy is perfectly normal.”
Press Maravich bet his friend $5 before the season that the Bruins would go undefeated the next three seasons. Wooden took the wager. The Bruins are “potentially the most awesome [team] ever assembled at any college,” Jeff Prugh, one of two UCLA beat writers for the Los Angeles Times, trumpeted in print, with the additional assessment that other schools are “pretenders to an NCAA crown which many analysts have conceded to Alcindor & Co. for the next three years.” For the next three years. “Why, I’d say that if he continues to improve, he’ll be the greatest basketball player who ever lived,” Willie Naulls, the former NBA all-star forward, said before Alcindor had played a varsity game.
“This team,” Wooden said, “no team in the history of basketball had such pressure on it from the first day of practice.” He could almost immediately feel the shift to the Bruins playing not to lose, and he hated it. Alcindor walked by the Pauley box office to see fans camping out two days before season tickets went on sale and learned Wooden would be doing a weekly TV show to talk Bruin hoops, until the building wave felt “bigger—and more intimidating—than I ever could have imagined,” Alcindor said.
Outwardly, at least, Wooden proceeded with his usual stone face, appearing to be unfazed as interest reached new heights. There wasn’t even a public reaction noted when an opposing coach suggested a rule change to raise the height of the basket from ten to twelve feet in a desperate attempt to give the mortals a chance, a proposal scrapped once word got around that it wouldn’t do any good because Alcindor could elevate thirteen feet into the basketball orbit. (Another coach facetiously advocated the opposite approach of placing the baskets in the ground, as if golf holes. “That way it should at least take him longer to reach over and stuff the ball in.”) Meanwhile, the Bruins were assigned the maximum number of appearances in the Pac-8 television package, three games among the ten weeks of Saturday-afternoon conference contests beamed around the West Coast.
Finally taking the court for the first time on December 3, 1966, against USC, Alcindor made 23 of 32 attempts and faced mostly man-to-man coverage on his way to scoring 56 points against a quality opponent—more than he scored in any freshman game against much weaker competition, more than anyone scored in the inaugural season of Pauley Pavilion, more than any Bruin ever. Being removed with about 3 minutes remaining in an easy win triggered a standing ovation from the capacity crowd of 12,800. Alcindor termed his shooting “adequate” but said the experience “was like test-driving a Ferrari. It was just as good-looking and fast as I had hoped.” In the more telling read, Wooden was moved to instantly dump the previous approach of tempering expectations with a swooning analysis after one game: “He even frightens me.” The announcement earlier in the day that UCLA would play Houston in the futuristic Astrodome nearly fourteen months later received two paragraphs on page 8.
Back-to-back victories against Duke followed, then a fourth consecutive double-digit win, against Colorado State, that included Wooden permanently earning Alcindor’s confidence with a defensive adjustment in the second half that sparked the Bruins turning a 1-point lead into a 10-point victory. Hey, Alcindor thought during a time-out in the final moments and with the outcome all but complete, I’m with the right guy, and “He had a willing student the rest of the way.” It was impossible to miss the irony that in-game strategy, the area Wooden felt least comfortable, had moved Alcindor to commit.
“By last week,” Time magazine declared in mid-December, “everybody seemed willing to pronounce Alcindor ‘unstoppable’ and ‘the best college center in history,’ ” even if, actually, Wooden was not, while noting shortcomings on defense in particular. “He can shoot with two hands, and I still can’t,” no less an informed observer than Philadelphia 76ers center Wilt Chamberlain said. “He’s got a great body and is well coordinated for his age. Already he’s bigger than I am by an inch or so. His legs are well developed.” The season was four games old. “Can Basketball Survive Lew Alcindor?,” the Saturday Evening Post soon wondered in a headline, not limiting the projected destruction to college hoops.
Washington State coach Marv Harshman, without the benefit of a UCLA television appearance to scare his team into comprehending the approaching storm, prepared by having six-foot-six Dick Watters stand on a stool fourteen inches tall to simulate Alcindor’s defensive presence. “The idea is really not as crazy as it might appear,” Harshman said with the memory of watching Alcindor in a freshman game the season before. “Many of the kids on our team haven’t seen Alcindor and can’t imagine how much area he covers, how agile he is, and how much damage he can do.” To ensure his Cougars had as accurate a read as possible, Harshman did point out Alcindor had better mobility than the stool. Other practice moments included a player strapping a one-inch-by-four-inch slab of wood to the inside of one wrist and hand to likewise prepare teammates for the great wall about to confront them, as well as holding up a tennis racquet.
The incoming spectacle of UCLA’s first road game drove Washington State fans to wait in line outside in subfreezing temperatures days in advance for any of the thirty-three hundred seats available, after seventeen hundred had been allotted as season tickets. The practical student will arrive with books to pass the time studying for finals, the campus paper, the WSU Daily Evergreen, advised—or to build a bonfire for warmth. The host athletic director had been sounding the siren for almost a month, eliminating game-day general-admission sales and eventually requesting, probably facetiously but maybe not, that customers cut their fingernails because “we need the room.” Five thousand amped fans sounded like two or three times as many assaulting ears and nerves when the opponent had the ball. Wooden already considered Bohler Gym among the two toughest places in the conference for visiting teams, along with Stanford, thanks to the arena configuration that made it feel as though Cougar backers were on top of the action, and now it would be more intense.
“And just to make sure nobody has sneaked into the gym overnight,” the besieged Washington State ticket manager said the day before, “the police will search the place at seven thirty a.m. and then chain the doors shut until it’s time to open.”
The wheat and barley fields of southeastern Washington on January 6, 1967, were the ideal spot in many ways for the Alcindor rollout compared to the real madness that could have ensued if the first road game had been among the larger populations and conference media markets of Stanford or Cal, near San Francisco, or the University of Washington in Seattle. Oregon and Oregon State were hardly big-city, but their proximity, about fifty miles apart, meant the two schools dominated attention in a north-south swath of the state. Pullman was remote farm country, two traffic lights and 6,000 residents in addition to the 10,500 students, bumping against the Idaho border, three hundred miles from Seattle on the Pacific Ocean. The Cougars, without a top-20 finish in the Associated Press poll since 1950 or an appearance in the NCAA tournament since 1941, did not have a rivalry with UCLA or much basketball tradition at all.
That also made Pullman the perfect early gauge of the mania of Alcindor on varsity: the rarity of students lining up outside Bohler Gym in heavy overcoats, some with hoods pulled over heads with temperatures in the thirties, others leaning against the stone outside wall of the building, none seeming to have opted for a bonfire, risking illness and poor finals outcomes to watch their 5-5 Coogs almost certainly get caught under the wheels of the Bruins already appearing dominant. Any of the seventeen hundred season-ticket holders or thirty-three hundred others hoping to shoehorn in could have avoided the cold and the chained doors to watch on TV, but instead they crammed in with great anticipation. The Bohler environment would test the Bruins starters of junior Warren and four sophomores in varsity action outside Los Angeles for the first time.
The stability the routine-driven Wooden desired in a program disappeared for good once the doors were unchained at 10:00 a.m. for the 12:15 p.m. Washington State–Columbia Basin freshman game ahead of the 2:30 main event and the dash for the first-come, first-served seats began. The challenges of the first road game for a young team and a hostile crowd made the 76–67 victory a successful outcome for UCLA even with the strangeness of a final margin in single digits, and Washington State had reasons to be upbeat in the respectable defeat. The Cougars had survived despite 28 points and 12 rebounds from Alcindor that reduced Cougars center Jim McKean to being thrilled at the sight of reserve Jim Nielsen coming in to give Alcindor a rest. “You keep thinking he’s there,” McKean said. “And even when he isn’t, he’s in your mind. He’s so big. He covers so much air that you can’t help but think about it. No one else can jump that high to get near him. That’s just so frustrating.”
“Everyone wants to see the big guy play,” Santa Clara coach Dick Garibaldi said from the fortunate vantage point of not being on the schedule. “Why, people are even calling to ask if I can get them seats to the Stanford-UCLA game in March.”
“Tell them they can have my ticket,” Stanford coach Howie Dallmar said.
Each road stop of the regular season would prove challenging. In Chicago later in January, Alcindor was assigned police protection after receiving two threatening letters with postmarks from the city, resulting in a plainclothes cop being assigned as a discreet shadow from the Bruins’ arrival on Friday until departure on Monday. “Lew’s bodyguard was a fine fellow,” Morgan reported after the scare became public following the return to Los Angeles, and “Lew wasn’t upset in the least by the situation,” with the supporting evidence of Alcindor getting 35 points and 20 rebounds against Loyola, followed with 45 points and 12 rebounds versus Illinois. The horrible snowstorm, even by Chicago standards, had proved more difficult than opponents or letter writers.
Eighteen days later, Alcindor snapped, “What’s your problem?” at a newspaper photographer taking a shot of Alcindor stepping off the team bus for a practice at the University of Oregon, the same trip two coeds went to the team hotel posing as reporters in an attempt, they claimed, to win a bet with friends that they could land an interview with the Bruin center. Wooden intercepted the girls and sent them away. Two days after that, the Oregon State equipment manager said Alcindor refused to take a picture with him, and a reporter, apparently a real one, wrote of Alcindor brushing off kids wanting autographs outside the locker room, all detailed in the Corvallis Gazette-Times. The article made no mention of Alcindor signing thirty or forty autographs outside in the cold before Wooden interrupted to have Alcindor join the rest of the team waiting on the bus to leave. “He can’t get on a plane or walk through a hotel lobby without somebody snapping a bulb in his face,” Wooden said. “You say that’s the price you have to pay for fame. You have to, but you don’t have to like it.” At California, Alcindor heard, “Hey, nigger!” and “Where’s your spear?” comments black players on other teams likely received, just not as often or as openly as Alcindor.
“This bothers me sometimes, but I understand how they feel,” he said around midseason of the attention. “I guess I would do the same thing if I saw somebody who was seven feet. Many times, though, I have to say No to them. It’s really not very hard for me to say No either, because I have been doing it for so long.” He could be more social in private, usually with the limited number of teammates he let in or friends he made at jazz clubs and found him to be a cool guy. He brought records to hang out at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house, eating and talking music and ball. Otherwise, he often walked quickly with his head down and the devouring strides of a seven-footer on a mission, not wanting to give anyone an opening to stop him. The extreme shyness was real, but also not the complete explanation of his first months on varsity, which showed Alcindor could easily turn rude in even the briefest interactions with fans, media, and fellow students. Just looking at him while walking past could earn a return glare, the campus version of having a shot swatted away in a game.
The public-address announcer during the snowy Chicago weekend used the pregame introduction “At center… one of the greatest players of all time… Lew Alcindor!” with Alcindor’s varsity career fifteen games old, and the school newspaper, the Daily Bruin, suggested UCLA should now stand for the University of California at Lew Alcindor. Others proposed LewCLA. But the subject of the adulation was descending into unhappiness at a rapid rate, even with the move to an apartment in Santa Monica and decision to avoid most anything to do with UCLA other than academics and basketball. He still found it a campus of immature kids and fakes.
Almost as troubling, Wooden even before the end of the group’s first regular season together detected jealousy from teammates at the credit and attention coming to Alcindor, as if Alcindor wanted either. The initial Wooden concern two years before during recruiting, that Alcindor would become disruptive in demanding the ball and a star’s gilded treatment, had instead turned out to be others causing internal strife that strained the program. Alcindor had been exemplary in fitting in and handling the downside of fame, likely better than a college sophomore could have been expected to deal with death threats, racial taunts, and overly physical defenses. Wooden more than once encouraged other Bruins that Alcindor on the team meant more publicity for all, certainly more than most would be receiving with lesser programs that weren’t flying first-class or drawing tens of thousands of people on blizzardy Chicago weekends for games against mediocre Illinois or Loyola.
Wooden wasn’t just playing psychologist. Underlining the positives of having such a commanding player, minus a commanding personality, became a turning point for Wooden, but, really, for the direction of the entire program. The coach concerned in October as practice began and December when the schedule opened about whether Alcindor would fit had within months become his biggest backer. Alcindor’s “mere presence created problems that shouldn’t have existed, but the young man himself personified cooperation,” Wooden decided, and “he should never have been held responsible for the problems that seemed to surround him. Such tremendous ability often brings out petty jealousy and envy from both teammates and opponents.”
Alcindor neared a breaking point even with his coach’s support. Sinking emotionally and feeling the financial squeeze of being a college student in a big city, especially when the scholarship money that would have gone toward dorm payments didn’t cover the off-campus apartment, he began to seriously consider leaving in a few months, after the school year. Not only that, as he found from conversations with his friend and former roommate, Allen had the same money ache and the same solution. Alcindor would go to Michigan and Allen to Kansas, forty miles from where he grew up, in 1967–68 or both would land at Michigan State. They gave different scenarios and different answers depending on the time and the speaker.
The implosion in the making became public in the February 12 Herald Examiner with a headline an inch tall and in bold letters stripped across the top of the front page of Sports, “Alcindor May Leave UCLA.” The story included news of the Harlem Globetrotters preparing to offer what essentially amounted to a lifetime contract of $1 million for five seasons with a player option to renew the deal every fifth year and a soft denial from Alcindor that he didn’t know anything about the reports. The same paper three days later screamed, “Here’s Why Lew Dislikes UCLA,” with the same large type and the same prominent placement, and Life and Look magazines had stories centered on his loneliness and disgust with campus life. “There are a lot of phonies out here,” he said. “They pat you on the back and forget you a minute later. Back in New York, you know where you stand. If people don’t like you, they don’t even look.” Alcindor needed five months in Westwood to move out of Dykstra Hall and decide to avoid most anything to do with his college.
Wooden and the assistants, though, still had no indication despite the headlines that two starters were unhappy, and certainly not unhappy to the point of considering transferring. Either the star center turned out to be more private than already thought, which would be hard to believe, or the staff suffered from a lack of awareness, but the dynasty was in peril before barely getting started. The option of leaving college completely to join the Globetrotters, as onetime friend Wilt Chamberlain did when he dropped out of Kansas in 1958 after his junior season, never gained momentum with Alcindor. Ann Arbor was the preference if he left UCLA with Alcindor remembering the April 1965 visit for “how beautiful the campus was, with its many trees and stately traditional buildings. To me, it felt like the kind of university I saw in movies, a place where deep thinking went on. I was also impressed by the black-to-white ratio, which I knew would make me more comfortable.” The Bruin basketball program was on the brink of disaster with barely anyone aware as he thought about how New York friend Elmo Morales, a member of the track team, and basketball star Cazzie Russell “made a pretty compelling case for me to attend Michigan, which I hadn’t forgotten two years later when I was considering jumping from UCLA.” Michigan also happened to be “where some other hinted benefits might come my way.”
At the very least, Alcindor regretted not giving the Wolverines more of a chance during the initial recruiting period when he was already 99 percent set on UCLA during his Ann Arbor stop. Rarely carried by the tide of emotions, usually deliberating major decisions rather than reacting, Alcindor weighed his college choice for a second time with the same weeks, maybe even months, of consideration as the first. There were no additional campus visits and no set timeline to reach a conclusion, only the resolve to not continue down the same path of little money and a disgust with fellow students. It had, after all, been endless contemplation of nearly two seasons, one freshman and one varsity, by the time Alcindor and Allen confided in Willie Naulls, a Bruin great of the 1950s before becoming the Knick who helped Wooden recruit Alcindor as a Power senior. Naulls spent 1966–67 mentoring basketball players and as an African American, a UCLA product, a onetime New York City resident, and a former pro had credibility no one in the program could match.
The man Naulls suggested Alcindor and Allen speak with had attended UCLA in the 1930s but did not graduate because of economic reasons. He had no titled role with the program, the athletic department, or the university, nor did he want one. Millionaire contractor and building owner Sam Gilbert preferred to operate without answering to NCAA rules. He had been on the fringe of the program as a booster identified mostly as the five-foot-seven, balding white guy sporting a Bavarian hat with a feather sitting near the home bench at Pauley games. Within the locker room, though, he was known before the Alcindor years for occasionally buying tickets from players to get them money in violation of rules. He was prominent enough that Chancellor Franklin Murphy recalled hearing the name on campus as “a friend of the basketball program,” but also being assured by Athletic Director J. D. Morgan multiple times that Gilbert had not done anything that would discredit the university.
Lesser-known Bruins had been going to Gilbert’s house for dinner for years while trying to scrape by financially with scholarships that prohibited jobs during the season, but, Gilbert said, he had never met the two stars until Naulls decided late in the 1966–67 season that Gilbert could broker a solution to keep the program on a winning trajectory. Gilbert was an understandable choice as someone who had a history of helping players and the Bruins, as well as a longtime acquaintance Naulls felt he could trust with what had turned into a pressing issue. “A bundle of dynamite,” Naulls would call him in later years. “Sam is a heavyweight. He can take care of himself in any situation against any opponents. Whoever attacks him better be ready. Sam doesn’t fear anybody.” So many friends saw a connection to fictional Don Corleone that they sent copies of the novel The Godfather after its 1969 release, until Gilbert had fifteen hardcovers of the book in his office at one point. “He loves that image,” an associate said. “He’s soft-spoken, but then, godfathers don’t yell, they just point.”
On one of the most important nights in program history, and perhaps school history, Naulls drove Alcindor and Allen to the Gilbert home in Pacific Palisades with Allen considering the seismic double transfer a done deal and Gilbert believing the two had given the school the bad news. The group talked anything except basketball for several hours, Gilbert reported, until, by 2:00 a.m., “they had gotten it all out of their systems… talking to an adult who could rap with them on their own level and who understood the black-white syndrome, which most schools want to brush under the carpet.” Gilbert went with the story that he convinced the pair education was more important than basketball, and both knew they were at a quality university, while Alcindor confessed in the pros, “Once the money thing got worked out, I never gave another thought to leaving UCLA.” He and Allen had let off steam in conversation with each other and Gilbert and ultimately decided “that we would pretend UCLA was a job, and stick it out on that basis, the way a bricklayer gets up and goes to work in the morning.”
“If not for Sam Gilbert,” Allen said, “Kareem and I were going to Michigan State as a package. It was a done deal. Michigan State at that time knew how to take care of their ballplayers and I’ll just leave it at that. We didn’t think there was any chance we’d be taken care of like that at UCLA because of who our coach was.” Alcindor remembered it as he was headed to Michigan and Allen to Kansas, but under any scenario “Lucius and I said the hell with it, we were through with UCLA.” Wooden instead chose to believe the story Alcindor told him that Gilbert had no role in the decision to stay and even that Alcindor and Allen never seriously discussed leaving.
Whether the same blind loyalty bordering on naïveté caused Wooden to miss Sam Gilbert growing into one of the most crucial members of the program or Wooden simply recognized the gathering storm but chose to turn the other way never became clear. Gilbert’s profile grew the moment Naulls, Allen, and Alcindor drove away from Pacific Palisades, though, without pushback from the head coach or administrators who constantly spoke of integrity. Athletic Director J. D. Morgan refused to schedule schools he saw as beneath UCLA’s claimed moral high ground, except for the mandatory conference games, yet never told a blatant rule breaker to stay away from the team or to stop spending on players, perhaps because Morgan knew that would have provoked Gilbert to spend more. Wooden then appeared to defer to Morgan and began to pay with his reputation as a righteous man who went silent when it served his career. “Sam steered clear of John Wooden and Mr. Wooden gave him the same wide berth,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in 1983. “Both helped the school greatly. Sam helped me get rid of my tickets…”
Without anyone realizing it, Gilbert vaulted from the edge of the program to a force in one night, a status he brazenly maintained the rest of the Wooden years. Even more concerning for the university, Gilbert, rather than follow the approach of rule-breaking boosters at other schools by operating from the shadows, flaunted his involvement and laughed off NCAA regulations. The more time that passed without Morgan taking any more serious action other than occasionally reminding him of the guidelines, the wider his berth became and the more shameless Gilbert grew.
Neither player appeared distracted on the court as UCLA closed the regular season 26-0, a significant achievement amid two sophomores weighing whether to leave the team the next year. Alcindor did have the new problem of occasional migraine headaches, bad enough the day of the Washington home game that he had to lie down in the locker room about thirty minutes before tip-off, but followed with 37 points and 18 rebounds. Nothing seemed to distract the Bruins. Even the supposed test of a young roster stepping into the tournament for the first time ended with easy wins against Wyoming and Pacific on consecutive days in the regional in Corvallis, followed by dispatching Houston in the national semifinal in Louisville as Alcindor’s displeasure with UCLA grew more public. “It’s true, I’m unhappy there,” he said at the Final Four, “but that doesn’t mean I’d be less unhappy any place else…. I wanted basketball and an education. I think this is the place to do it.”
Wooden’s premonitions of Alcindor’s arrival creating problems had come true, just not the way Wooden imagined. He came to call 1966–67 “my most trying year in coaching,” even without being aware of the transfer crisis, even with the personal accomplishment of successfully reconfiguring the playbook, and even with the team so properly focused on the championship that Wooden’s final instructions before leaving the locker room were which way to face during the national anthem and to behave properly after the win in the fifth-most immoral city in the country. Players took the court for warm-ups trying to decide what four cities were in front of Louisville in whatever ranking Wooden had found or created. Only Las Vegas came to mind.
The title came with a 15-point win over Dayton, that close only because Wooden played his bench against Flyers starters down the stretch. Alcindor blocked his man’s first shot and most every subsequent contested attempt from the Dayton center seemed to come with an awkward release to avoid Alcindor’s reach. Kenny Heitz, the standout defender usually beyond the spotlight of the other four starters, shut down his matchup, and emotional leader Warren noted teammates had been unselfish all season, especially Alcindor, who could have scored at will if he wanted. His first NCAA tournament, Alcindor decided, was not much more difficult than a New York City high school postseason, underwhelming to the point that his public celebration consisted of flashing a V sign with his raised right hand while jogging to the bench upon being taken out a final time.
“Who’s going to beat them?” the Associated Press wondered. “That’s the question everyone in college basketball is asking.”
“Although it may get stale and old hat before it’s over, UCLA’s dynasty looks like a shoo-in for the next couple of years,” United Press International, the other major news service, claimed.
And this was the transition season, minus Lacey and Lynn, without a senior and with only a few juniors in the rotation.
Muhammad Ali replaced Jackie Robinson as Alcindor’s favorite athlete once Robinson retired from the Dodgers in 1956 rather than accept a trade to the New York Giants. Though only five years older than Alcindor, Ali by 1966 had an Olympic gold medal in boxing from the same 1960 Rome Games that Rafer Johnson won the decathlon and had become the world heavyweight champion with magnetism and bravado equal parts captivating and galling. To the captivated basketball sensation in Westwood, Ali was nothing less than the athlete Alcindor hoped to be, a man of supreme talent who leveraged his pedestal to speak out on social issues, however unpopular. It made no difference to Alcindor that they had contrasting personalities, an introverted college kid who disliked physical play and a motormouth boxer swinging fists for a living. He was still the thirteen-year-old Lew who watched the Olympic results come in from Italy with delight.
If finally meeting Ali after all that time wouldn’t have been jarring enough, coincidentally crossing paths on Hollywood Boulevard in the first half of Alcindor’s freshman year added to the shock. His world changed forever by walking into Ali performing sleight-of-hand magic tricks for fans while also enjoying a stroll with his small entourage under the city lights of a busy street. The champ away from the ring and the media machine he fed was theater even on a casual night out. Alcindor strolling with two school friends could not help but admire Ali’s instant connection with strangers, a quality Alcindor would never have, and the way people giggled with delight when they parted and continued down the boulevard with a memory they’d keep for the rest of their lives.
Alcindor pushed through his usual shyness to say hello.
“Ah, another big fan of magic,” Ali responded. “And I do mean big.”
The two groups and anyone who happened upon history in the making laughed, including the target of the joke, who typically cringed at being mocked for his height.
Alcindor found Ali charming and polite and left more enthralled than ever, even without additional conversation or an indication Ali was aware of the teenager’s identity. Alcindor and his two friends walked away giddy at their good fortune. Seeing each other again at a Los Angeles party filled with college and professional athletes a few months later, though, Ali flirted with the women and charmed the men and Alcindor retreated alone to the musical instruments abandoned by the band on a break. He settled in at the drum set and tapped away, quietly but enough to build into a good beat, when Ali approached, took a guitar, and began strumming. Ali’s personal photographer snapped a shot and exited, leaving the two alone.
“You sounded pretty good,” Ali said, nodding at the drumsticks. “You play?”
“Nah,” Alcindor replied, “I was just fooling around. My dad’s the musician in the family.”
“Yeah? Professional?”
“No. He’s a cop.”
“My dad painted signs,” the champ said. Then he looked into Alcindor’s eyes. “When I was little, I asked my dad, ‘Why can’t I be rich?’ So he points to my arm, you know, meaning my black skin, and says, ‘That’s why.’ ”
Unsure how to respond, Alcindor knowingly nodded back, before Ali strummed the guitar once and smiled. “But look at us now, brother,” Ali said, and the two grinned at each other as if to acknowledge their advantages compared to other young black men in the 1960s.
Only-child Alcindor felt he had a big brother from that night on—“I had plenty of coaches teaching me how to win. Muhammad Ali was the first to teach me what to do with winning.” It was instantly such a valued relationship for Alcindor that he did not care it also created a conflict with Wooden, the former navy man stateside in World War II who privately criticized Ali for refusing to be inducted in the armed forces in April 1967. Though his coach never publicly spoke out against Ali as the boxer’s stance on Vietnam became a national debate, Alcindor did note several snide comments by Wooden despite a growing awareness of their friendship. “First he’s Cassius Clay, then he’s Muhammad Ali,” Alcindor once heard in passing. “Hmph.” Other times, it was a rhetorical “Can’t he see he’s hurting the country?” as well as “It’s a privilege, not an obligation, to fight for your country.”
Alcindor and Wooden were not and never would be close during their joined UCLA years, despite all they had in common. They enjoyed a shared passion for baseball and reading, agreed on the importance of education, were understated and preferred life outside the spotlight but handled attention well when it did come, just as both transplants struggled to adjust to Los Angeles. “Socially I often did not fit in, because I was a teetotaler who didn’t smoke or swear and on many occasions was made to feel uncomfortable about it,” Wooden recalled. “On top of everything else, the traffic scared us. One day while I was driving very cautiously on the Pasadena Freeway, I looked at Nell and said, ‘What in the world are we doing out here, honey?’ She was kind enough not to remind me that it was all my doing.” Alcindor grew up loving western movies and Wooden devoured Zane Grey novels of frontier life. And, of course, the Bruins. But even without the warmth that would come decades later, the mutual respect in their cordial business relationship was substantial and real.
In this case, Alcindor disagreed with the anti-Ali sentiment yet thought enough of his coach after one varsity season together that “I felt like the child of divorced parents who had to listen to one beloved parent complain about the other beloved parent.” Basketball was a refuge in a challenging time of insane expectations, disliking L.A., nearly transferring, needing a bodyguard, being a target of racism, insensitive gawkers, and crazies. He could only wrap himself in the sport to deal with his life, which was unlike any other teenager’s. Ali’s world of federal cases and debates that stretched from the United States to Southeast Asia, meanwhile, seemed an endless series of obstacles without resolution. Alcindor was conscious of the emotional swings at play and even the potential for the Ali issue to increasingly become an irritant to the coach-player relationship, with the future of college basketball at stake. He remained unapologetically and undeniably loyal to the champ anyway, without needing so much as a conversation with Wooden to explain.
The issue of Ali as a conscientious objector that particularly gnawed at Wooden had become a national argument by the end of the 1966–67 basketball season, further stoked by the racial overtones of a black man pushing back against the system and a black man who grew up attending a Baptist church converting to Islam in 1964. The emotions of the controversial war with 490,000 American troops in South Vietnam by early 1967, clashes over civil rights, and Islam scaring millions in the United States crashed together as the perfect storm of combined conflicts in the form of a brash sports star with dark skin. It had already cost Ali his heavyweight crown—boxing officials stripped him of the title when he refused to be inducted on religious grounds, despite a secret government promise that he would never be sent to Vietnam and would instead give clinics around the United States for troop morale. What others, including Wooden, saw as being un-American was to Ali and his supporters following religious teachings.
Ali had been indicted by a federal grand jury May 8, 1967, for refusing to be drafted and by the end of the month was facing a trial in Houston, site of the induction center, when his manager, Herbert Muhammad, called Ali’s friend and business partner Jim Brown with a suggestion. Maybe, Muhammad told the retired star running back, you could gather other respected black athletes and influential voices to talk with Ali and advise him on a next step rather than end up in jail. Agreeing, Brown called his former Cleveland teammate and current top aide in the Negro Industrial and Economic Union John B. Wooten with the instruction, simply, “Get the gang together,” without specifically naming who would be invited.
That Wooten intuitively knew to include Alcindor on the list was a clear signal of how quickly Ali had come to consider the twenty-year-old finishing his sophomore year part of the inner circle. Ali had obviously spoken of his respect for Alcindor, as a friend and valued voice despite limited involvement in the civil rights movement, in such certain terms that Wooten saw that “Ali loved Lew Alcindor.” Alcindor, naturally, accepted at his own expense, as did everyone else asked to attend at the Cleveland headquarters of Brown’s business—eight current or former professional football players, one current professional basketball player, one lawyer, Ali under fire, and one shy college student. Many were military veterans.
The group that checked in at the downtown Hilton on June 3, 1967, in advance of the actual meeting the next day, was a historic convergence of athletic star power joined with influence in speaking out against racial injustice: Brown as the greatest football player ever and especially popular in his adopted hometown, Bill Russell as arguably the greatest basketball player ever, Ali on his way to becoming one of the greatest boxers, future NFL Hall of Famers Willie Davis and Bobby Mitchell, and Alcindor as the best college basketball player of the moment and arguably the top college talent of any sport. (The group also included Brown’s lawyer, who would later be elected mayor of Cleveland.) With the exception of Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens, not among the unspoken list of Ali’s inner circle, most every black civil rights icon from sports was in attendance, so many lions of the cause that the gathering became known as the Cleveland Summit.
The lone amateur among proven professionals in the meeting in the offices of the Negro Industrial and Economic Union was proud and flattered to be invited, but also confident enough in daunting surroundings to see the group’s role as “a jury in assessing Ali’s sincerity and commitment,” as if they were a screening committee who would determine the validity of Ali’s religious convictions as a conscientious objector. Even better that finally having a voice in an important matter would come in support of the friend who made him proud to be an African American. Alcindor went in feeling most came to persuade Ali to accept the draft. But after two hours behind closed doors that were “pretty heated as questions and answers were fired back and forth,” it became obvious Ali would not change his mind. He was prepared for jail. It was enough to convince participants to publicly back Ali as a conscientious objector and not a draft dodger.
Wooten’s decision to put Alcindor at the table in the front row of the press conference that followed became the greatest statement of all in elevating Alcindor as a valued voice on civil rights, a role he had desperately wanted. As if the seating assignment wasn’t enough, the journey from stepping out of the subway station and into the New York City cyclone of chaos in 1964 to sharing front-row billing with Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, and Jim Brown just three years later came at such hyperspeed that its suddenness scared Alcindor. Cub reporter at the Martin Luther King media gathering in 1964 New York City to front and center as a participant in a highly publicized conclave on race and religion in three years, a stunning timeline to match the seating assignment of Alcindor facing the audience from the left side, Brown on his right shoulder, Ali one spot over, and Russell on the right side. The eight others stood close together in a row behind them.
“I personally, and I think a lot of us, just thought he was just one of our younger brothers,” Walter Beach, a retired Boston Patriots and Cleveland Browns defensive back, said of Alcindor at the historic gathering. “Far more mature in his expressions than a lot of other young twenty-year-old guys. Lew Alcindor was just a kid and we were dealing with him like he’s a little brother. But at the same time, we recognized the fact that he had a level of maturity that exceeded the [twenty] years.” To Beach, one of several military veterans among the current or former professional athletes, “We were the elite of the elite, and he was the elite in college basketball. But he was also the elite with the level of maturity and insight. He was really not out of place.”
Cleveland brought a legitimacy Alcindor could not have reached in one varsity season. His stature on the spot went, in his own estimation, from grumbling college sophomore to national spokesperson for social issues involving African Americans. “It was what I wanted,” he later concluded, “but the pressure was even greater than it was playing basketball because the stakes were so much higher. Winning a basketball game wasn’t the same as trying to secure voting rights, educational opportunities, and jobs for the disenfranchised. Failing to score on a hook shot meant missing a couple of points. Failing to articulate a position clearly and convincingly could affect people’s lives.” He felt ready, though.
In the bigger picture, the meeting likely made no tangible difference—Ali would almost certainly have stuck to his convictions even without the show of support, he would still have been convicted sixteen days later by an all-white jury, and there is no indication the conclave altered the final outcome of the Supreme Court ruling on behalf of Ali. It likewise was not a passing of the torch to a college superstar for the next generation, not with Ali just twenty-five years old, Brown thirty-one, and Russell thirty-three with two more seasons remaining with the NBA’s marquee franchise. Brown and Russell in particular would again be important in lending star power to the civil rights movement. The Cleveland Summit did, however, force Alcindor to become publicly assertive in a way his timid personality might not otherwise have allowed.
Departing Ohio also marked the end of the most eventful eight months in UCLA basketball history: the Allen-Shackelford-Heitz-Alcindor class made an easy transition to varsity play, Warren proved every bit the steady leader Wooden anticipated and needed, stomping through 30 games started a run on championships and previewed the next two seasons as limitless, Wooden demonstrated to himself he could maximize a big man as promising San Diego ninth-grader Bill Walton took note, Sam Gilbert asserted himself, and the transfer threat and the Globetrotter option evaporated. Alcindor in particular exemplified the complicated 1966–67 that from the outside mostly appeared easy, handling unreal expectations and bully defenses, deciding whether to stay, receiving death threats, and the statement of the Cleveland invitation. When Jim Brown said to get the guys together, it was understood he meant the college kid, too, as an equal member of the club of all-time greats. Alcindor would be able to look back several decades later to see the sophomore year of college as one of the important years of his life, even if it was also just the beginning.