12 THE CROSS IN THE POCKET
Fan in Chief H. R. Haldeman handed his alma mater the chance to be part of history by providing White House backing to the idea of his Bruins touring China in the summer of 1973 for games against local clubs. Haldeman’s role in inserting UCLA as the latest and largest move of using sports to build a diplomatic bridge between the distrusting political adversaries would give the school a role in global affairs, to the understandable delight of university officials and the athletic department headed by publicity maven J. D. Morgan. The Game of the Century in the Astrodome that excited his marketing side in 1968 boosted the program’s profile within college basketball; this was high-visibility participation in the most delicate of East-West relations.
Even Wooden, grasping the historical significance as well as the promotional benefits of Morgan potentially hyperventilating about the Bruins into ambassadors’ ears, was on board at the personal cost of losing a large part of his offseason. The level of certainty over whether international envoy Bill Walton would mute himself was less clear—if he cussed at innocent Chancellor Charles Young while being arrested, what verbal hell would Walton rain down to embarrass Nixon with the world watching? It was also irrelevant. Morgan was barely into the team meeting in his office to lay out the details when Walton raised a hand in mid-explanation to say he would not go. Summers were for beaches and hiking and long red hair flowing in the wind on extended bike rides, he reasoned, not being a political prop under scrutiny in the Ping-Pong diplomacy that would boost Nixon’s standing.
Wooden decided either the Bruins go as a team or they don’t go at all. Walton immediately felt anger and disappointment aimed in his direction by the voters who wanted the unique experience and would in later years come to regret the veto that cost him a trip unavailable to most Americans. In an instant, he went from claiming a passionate interest in world issues to passing on the opportunity to live the pressing topic of U.S.-China relations sixteen months after Nixon’s historic visit to Peking. Far into adulthood, he wished Wooden or Morgan or Ernie Vandeweghe, anyone, would have tried to change his mind, a lobbying that never happened. In the moment, “I was a twenty-year-old college student fleeing from everyone who was trying to make me into anything other than a twenty-year-old college student.”
The all-star team cobbled together to replace the Bruins included Walton pen pal Rich Kelley, George Karl of North Carolina, Indiana’s Quinn Buckner, Alvan Adams from Oklahoma, and coach Gene Bartow, coming off the title-game thrashing, without a hint of potential international incident among them. In Canton, already steaming in humidity in mid-June, locals waved enthusiastically at passing buses ferrying the delegation through town. In Peking, several thousand spectators came to the beautiful arena for practice alone, watching mostly in silence, as if studying, except for hushed aaaahhhhhs anytime an American went vertical and finished a dunk. The eighteen-thousand-seat gym had been sold out far in advance for the first game in the capital city—the equivalent of ten cents for the best seats, five for the others—a level of obvious excitement that prompted one member of the party to jokingly ask whether tickets would be scalped outside. “Of course not,” a Chinese official responded briskly, finding no humor in the question. “It is against the law.”
As a reminder they were in a land of great suspicion toward outsiders, especially American outsiders, one player tossed his sneakers out the hotel window in a moment of youthful indiscretion, then found the shoes waiting atop the front desk the next day upon arriving in the new city, to the spooky amazement of all who realized how much their movements were being tracked. (Sneakers became a thing. Kelley threw his worn pair of size 16s in the trash can in his room when packing for the trip home, only to have a maid run from the hotel to the bus out front about to depart for the airport, apparently concerned the owner had forgotten them.) The U.S. team chosen with high character in mind easily won in each of eight stops against eight different opponents, layered among visits to numerous tourist spots, VIP treatment, and banquets flowing with food, drink, and toasts, and the olive branch of apple pie à la mode for dessert one day. Ultimately, when three members of the Politburo and the very influential wife of Chairman Mao Tse-tung attended one of the games, the White House had the desired signal that China was pleased at the direction of the relationship. UCLA officials could only grit their teeth at the missed global opportunity.
The mood for 1973–74 had been set in the process: increasing disinterest even when given the chance for a unique opportunity—Wilkes and Lee were also against going—and a team dulled by success. The Bruins were suffering from Bruin fatigue. “This group of UCLA players has, more or less, old-timers,” Oregon State coach Ralph Miller said. “They’re not as enthusiastic, perhaps, as they were as sophomores and juniors. 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?’ ” Wooden diagnosed the problem as senioritis, but also a team needing to be challenged once it became apparent the lure of a third championship wouldn’t be motivation enough. Before long, he was wondering out loud about the stars being more focused on their professional futures than the current season, a surprising development after three years of Walton, Wilkes, and Lee who had been the definition of selfless.
Back under basketball’s magical spell after an offseason of long rural bike rides and classes at Sonoma State in Northern California’s wine country, but not any Chinese banquets, a recharged Walton returned for his senior season with the excitement of a newcomer. Not only pronouncing himself in top physical shape—maybe for the last time in his life—Walton considered 1973–74 “by far” the most talented Bruin team in any of his four years, with good reason. Lee and Wilkes were back as two of his all-time favorite teammates, in college or the pros, along with Meyers, Curtis, and Trgovich, along with varsity newcomers Marques Johnson, Richard Washington, Ralph Drollinger, and Andre McCarter. (“Sadly,” Walton wrote later, “we still had Tommy Curtis on the roster.”) It would turn out as arguably the most talented and deepest frontcourt in NCAA history, even with the graduation loss of forward Farmer and center Nater: Walton and Wilkes became Hall of Famers, Meyers played four seasons in the NBA while missing another with a back injury, Washington six plus one lost to a knee injury, Johnson eleven while missing two because of a neck injury, and Drollinger one.
Others, in turn, noted an encouraging new level of maturity in Walton, which was perhaps a response to costing the entire team an experience in China or a further sign of his excitement for the season ahead. “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. Even though we differ, I like him. I like him a lot.” To Cunningham, “He’s a complex person who has to feel he’s being treated as more than a basketball player before he’ll open up. He’s very shy in groups and is uncomfortable around people he doesn’t know. For whatever reason, he thinks people are out to exploit him. There’s a basic lack of trust. But I can see that slowly changing as he’s grown up. Remember, he’s not grown up yet.” When he won the 1973 Sullivan Award in February as the outstanding U.S. amateur in any sport, Walton in his first solo press conference of the season came across as gracious, honest, and introspective.
“I would say that I’m a much better human being than when I came to school here,” Walton concluded later in the season. “I’m much more well-rounded. I’m just a stronger person…. I’m much happier now, much more relaxed and much more self-confident…. I don’t try to prove myself to anybody and I don’t try to please anybody. I just try to do what is right…. If it comes out all right, fine.” He was to the point of being open to working relationships with the media, dining out with Doug Krikorian and Bud Furillo of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and then with Dwight Chapin of the Los Angeles Times, and even giving an extended interview to Ted Green of the Times that included driving Green and Lee to dinner in his gray Toyota with the front seat removed and Walton driving from the back seat for extra legroom.
The head coach understood Walton and felt upbeat about their relationship. He allowed Walton to use his office to meditate, usually after practice as a stop en route to the training table in the Student Union. “We had to bring two pieces of fruit and a handkerchief,” Marques Johnson said of one of the team sessions. “Why, I have no idea.” An assistant coach from NSULA spending a week around the Bruins in the early days of practice, one of many times through the years that Wooden opened his program to young coaches hoping to learn from a behind-the-scenes look at the machine, left practice with Wooden, walked a minute to the office, and opened the door to find Walton and several nonplayers relaxing on the floor.
It was still a senior season in which the unwanted spotlight prompted the projected No. 1 draft pick to daydream about quitting basketball to become a teacher or a lawyer or to fight forest fires. His love for the game, and for Wooden and UCLA hoops in particular, remained impenetrable as the NBA and ABA learned the previous March in the St. Louis hotel. Walton upbeat about life as a Bruin as 1973–74 started, if not the attention that went with it, came with the medical bulletin that he was in the best shape of his life. While it would have been a noteworthy update no matter what, the topic took on particular relevance with Walton aware opponents in the coming months would play him more physical than ever, as with Alcindor once every other attempt at a countermove had failed. Walton could not have been more primed for a crescendo finish to college as part of the attempt at an eighth consecutive title.
Sports Illustrated, the ultimate national media voice on sports, had grown so desperate for new ways to preview the inevitable next Westwood celebration that its preseason Top 20 spotlighted the student managers. The rest of the country, the chase pack, got the typical of roster breakdowns, injury issues, and schedule analysis, but for No. 1 UCLA, it was “Bob Marcucci, who did the honors during the tenure of Lewis Kareem [sic], was fast with a towel, but could not handle warmup jackets. He always took them one at a time. George Morgan, now a Marine based at nearby Camp Pendleton, accomplished chores for the Wicks-Rowe teams and never missed a play or a pun. Les Friedman, who toiled during Bill Walton’s first two years and is now in law school, was quick to the chairs but had no left hand. Now Friedman’s brother Len, a junior and the new head manager, shows the most potential of the bunch. All he has to do is eat his greens and keep his proper silence.” The uncredited writer did provide the scouting report that Lee had sold some teammates on the benefits of being a vegetarian and that Wooden and Walton disagreed over hair length. “When you’re under a dictatorship, you do what the boss wants,” Walton said. “I even had to cut it twice. I may be an anarchist, but I’m no dummy.”
The Bruin universe was upbeat: Walton playfully jabbing his coach, Wooden bending to accommodate players and national publicity for managers, and the early benefit of the rule change in Walton’s second season that allowed freshmen to join the varsity. Even that broke right for UCLA—Johnson arrived capable of immediately making a significant contribution and Washington had similar star potential and in the moment the ability to play in most games despite the frontcourt riches. In talent, experience, and atmosphere, it was impossible to be set up better for success.
“UCLA may be the greatest team in basketball,” Maryland coach Lefty Driesell said as the Terrapins’ visit to Pauley Pavilion approached. “Not just college basketball, all basketball. If we could break their streak, the consequences would be greater than if we won the national championship. It would be remembered longer, because sometimes I don’t think they’re human.”
The good vibes of the buildup to 1973–74 got the Bruins only through the early days of practice, but ultimately only until the moments it took Walton to notice Wooden striding with determination, as if angry, toward Lee warming up. Walton could not hear the conversation, but from the other side of the court read the tone as contentious, then could see Wooden headed in his direction.
“Bill,” Wooden said, “it has come to my attention that you have been smoking marijuana.”
Walton, caught off guard, struggled to keep a straight face at Wooden coming to him with this now, after smoking each of the previous three seasons on campus, barely containing his laughter at Wooden either just learning the breaking news or for whatever reason finally being moved to confront Walton.
“Coach,” Walton replied after quickly composing himself and locating a sincere tone, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Wooden took a deep breath. “Good,” he said. Whether he naïvely believed Walton or not, Wooden got the answer he wanted, quickly turned, and started practice before Walton had a chance to change his mind and opt for the truth that would have presented Wooden with a major dilemma.
Lee chose honesty—and was replaced in the opening lineup. Walton losing his closest teammate, his dependable distributing point guard who knew exactly where and when to deliver the pass, the player Walton credited for the historic night against Memphis State, would have been bad enough. Curtis as the replacement made it worse. He went to Wooden’s office several times in the coming weeks, “begging, pleading, trying to explain why Tommy Curtis was not right for our team, our style, our psyche, our game, our life, our fun.”
What Wooden would have done if Walton admitted smoking pot would never be known. Wooden almost certainly realized he had to be consistent in disciplining two players with similar personal histories at the school, and if anything, Walton would have to face a harsher penalty. Lee, after all, had not been arrested or put on school probation. The likely outcome in that scenario was Lee keeping his job and facing a lesser discipline, unless Wooden was prepared to demote arguably the greatest player in NCAA history to a reserve role for being a typical college student in 1973. Walton protecting himself also unintentionally saved Wooden.
A New York Times Magazine deep dive on the Bruins hit the stands with either the best or worst possible timing, fifty-four hundred words dated December 3 that included the eighteen of “John Wooden comes as close to an embodiment of Jesus Christ as anyone on the current sporting scene.” As easy as it would have been to imagine Wooden gasping at the analogy, if not outright hating the compliment, he had always been open about his strong Christian faith. (Even if the many opposing coaches who found him a sanctimonious hypocrite for preaching values while Sam Gilbert ran wild were not so open when mocking him as St. John.) Indeed, when freshman Drollinger said he wanted to start a team Bible study class, Wooden got excited and told players they were expected to attend. Two or three showed, none named Walton or Lee. Wooden appeared on an hour-long TV special hosted by televangelist Oral Roberts, one of the country’s most recognizable preachers, five weeks after the 1970 title, going against Ironside, a Jim Nabors variety show, and Bewitched on the networks in the 8:30 p.m. slot in Los Angeles. Another time, Cora Alcindor observed after Wooden’s 1965 overnight home visit to meet Lewis’s parents, “He’s more like a minister than a coach,” and a rival coach said after losing a different recruit to UCLA, “We thought we had one kid sewed up, but then Jesus Christ walked in. The kid’s parents about fell over. How can you recruit against Jesus Christ?” To Cora’s son, Wooden’s occasionally watching practices from the top rows of Pauley was where “he would look down on us like a benevolent God.”
Wooden, actually all mortal, was a deacon at the First Christian Church of Santa Monica, kept the Good Book close at home and on his travels and for decades kept the same silver steel cross either tucked out of sight into his left palm, wedged between his index and middle fingers, or in a left-side pocket during games as a source of serenity without most anyone aware it was there. Eventually worn smooth from constant rubbing, though with the alpha and omega from the Greek alphabet still visible, signifying beginning and end, the gift from his minister in 1942 just before entering the navy remained a constant companion during speeches well into retirement. When other coaches socialized at local drinking holes after hours at the summer hoops camp Temple’s Harry Litwack held in the Poconos, Wooden chose to stay behind to do the dishes in the shared cabin. Never before, though, had his morality so crashed into his career as when benching Greg Lee helped set a course to Bruin self-destruction.
For all Alcindor’s 1968 claims that Wooden preferred Lynn Shackelford over Edgar Lacey, the 1974 evidence of virtue factoring into the fate of the Bruins was far more damning. Lacey refused to enter a game, one of the biggest transgressions an athlete can make. Lee’s previous outing was 14 assists with a national championship on the line. Nothing new had happened on the court, no laws or university rules were known to have been broken, no recent injuries played into the decision.
Walton’s instincts that the change at point guard had turned the Bruins inconsistent did not come through in the box scores. Beating Driesell and Maryland only 65–64 in the second game may have caused concern inside Pauley Pavilion, but could be explained away as a good showing by the visitors, the No. 4 team in the country with talent and experience in John Lucas, Tom McMillen, and Len Elmore. Unlike Wooden, who could look at the matchup as one of many nonconference tests through the years, Driesell had put so much focus on the game that he had his team practice at 10:30 p.m. in College Park so players could get their bodies adjusted and not feel they were pulling an all-nighter when tip-off came in California.
Drollinger aggressive in sharing his Christian faith at nineteen years old—suggesting the team Bible study, often appearing at Wooden’s office announced to discuss religion, giving Wooden books on spirituality—contrasted his basketball personality. Being at UCLA said as much, that he went there rather than accept another among some two hundred other scholarship offers in large part because Walton’s presence guaranteed Drollinger would be the backup center. His career had gone this far because everyone told him tall guys should play hoops, not because he loved it, never more obvious than when Walton arrived before a game talking about how he spent the morning imagining a turnaround bank shot to use that night, rehearsing the move in his mind over and over. Drollinger knew he could never come close to matching such passion for the game.
One of his talents, and he did have basketball skill despite his minimal role, was realizing early that he could parlay the sport into the chance to build a future that did not involve playing. Drollinger didn’t deceive himself. He wanted the UCLA education, appreciated the chance to be part of the No. 1 program in the country, and liked being just 150 miles from home. But expectations and pressure in basketball made him nervous, even after he grew to seven-two and dominated high school contests around San Diego. The unease was so obvious that in the midcourt circle just before sophomore Drollinger and Grossmont tipped off against senior Walton and Helix, Walton told his alleged opponent to take any shot without fear of it being blocked, to do anything he wanted to score. Make the game about building your confidence, Walton told him. Drollinger instantly wondered about the psychological ploy underway, yet Walton kept his word, laying off to allow Drollinger a big offensive night while making sure Helix still won easily, an extraordinary gesture that stayed with Drollinger for decades.
Now the second week of December 1973 had become particularly trying with a showdown against No. 2 North Carolina State in St. Louis days away and his mother in UCLA Medical Center for an operation to ease a nerve issue causing hot, stabbing pains in her face. Drollinger could at least take comfort in knowing Walton was in good health heading into the individual battle with Tom Burleson, at seven-two able to dwarf the best player in the country by three inches, and a skilled seven-two despite the image of an awkward thin man on stilts who contributed little beyond height. One layer of solace came the day Carolyn Drollinger had surgery a mile from Pauley Pavilion. Wooden received word during practice the procedure had been a success, stopped the session, walked to Ralph on the court, and delivered the good news through tears of joy.
The encouraging prognosis allowed a relieved Drollinger to fade back into his familiar and preferred role of invisible seven-footer as the Bruins left for the neutral-site game against North Carolina State. Though it would not match the buildup for the Game of the Century in the Astrodome, or the eventual perspective of UCLA-Houston as the night that changed college basketball forever, facing the Wolfpack did have the J. D. Morgan seal of marketing approval. Wooden even surprised Morgan by immediately accepting the invitation, because this was a game in a traditional setting, not the same extravaganza as Houston in 1968, which was built on the novelty of the site, the island court, and the record attendance.
The hype centered entirely on the teams this time, with UCLA as the defending champion returning to the scene of Walton and Lee overwhelming Memphis State, and with North Carolina State as the program certain it would have been in the 1973 title game if not for the recruiting violations that led to an NCAA ban after a 27-0 season. Walton and Wilkes from the West and electric forward David Thompson, Burleson, and point guard Monte Towe from the Southeast were all back. The current Bruins had won 78 in a row, the Wolfpack 29. Wooden only asked that the game not be played in Raleigh, just as the Wolfpack said they would not go to Pauley.
Middle America as the compromise still provided the cash register Morgan wanted with an arena of 18,431 seats and plenty of experience hosting large hoops events. ABC would handle the national broadcast for the matchup, originally proposed by the man handling television packages for the Atlantic Coast Conference and backed by the UCLA athletic director with an expertise in TV deals. Digger Phelps did color commentary on the broadcast, giving him the chance to scout the Bruins while having his expenses paid. Tickets that went for $5, $4, and $3 in the Astrodome were priced at $10 and $8 six years later in St. Louis Arena and immediately sold out. The eventual $100,000 take for each side from the gate and broadcast was more than either would have received from meeting in the title game still under debate in the Carolinas. “Win or lose, it’s no mistake,” Morgan, his face hardening, his tone turning full bully, thundered before tip-off at the suggestion that facing such a skilled opponent early in the season would be an error.
The Bruins stepped off the bus and into the Chase Park Plaza hotel for check-in the snowy Missouri night of December 13 aiming, as always, for later conference play and the postseason tournament, not victory streaks or peaking in December. “Imagine,” Lee told reserve guard Gavin Smith at practice the next day, scanning the arena’s empty seats. “Tomorrow there will be eighteen thousand people up there who will have paid ten bucks a ticket and who have nine-to-five jobs and nothing better to do than getting it on by watching ten guys run up and down a court chasing a ball.” Lee shook his head in retelling the story the same night. “If we win, great. If we lose, life goes on. We’ve got too many other things to look forward to in life. Next week. Next month. Next summer, at the beach.” They were equally nonchalant that only one Bruin, Curtis, had actually seen the Wolfpack, on TV the year before while home sick as UCLA teammates played.
Early afternoon of game day with a 4:15 p.m. start arrived with the North Carolina State band playing in the lobby, Thompson and Burleson signing autographs, and jubilant middle-aged men in red blazers singing the school fight song. Eight floors up, the Bruins gathered near the elevators for their departure unfazed in chanting, “Wolf… Wolf… Wolfpack!” At 78 wins in a row, they were somewhere between daring an opponent to pose a threat and privately laughing at anyone believing they actually had a chance. Not so privately, the original message of PACK POWER scrawled in soap on a hallway mirror by a State backer had been altered with a simple adjustment to PAC 8 POWER.
When the game started, though, and Walton picked up 4 fouls in the first 9 minutes, one personal away from disqualification, the Wolfpack, down 15–10, had an unexpected opening. Morgan, sitting across from the benches, yelled at referees until he almost lost his voice.
“Watch ’em pushing away,” Wooden chimed in as part of his steady stream of jockeying the officials, often from behind the rolled-up program and most directed at the ACC ref working with the Pac-8 representative.
“That’s an offensive foul. You called that offensive foul on us.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Bad call. Bad call.”
“Feeling good?” he scolded after Thompson was awarded a two-shot foul. “You should be.”
“John Wooden—despite what those who worship him like to believe—is not so terribly different from dozens of other college basketball coaches,” Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote after sitting a few yards away, within hearing distance. “He has great material, and he makes the most of it, which is surely the mark of an outstanding coach. But he is not a saint. He is not impervious to the pressures of winning basketball games. And he is certainly not above intimidating officials.” Wooden always saw it as sticking up for his Bruins and looking for any edge within the rules to win, just as he would clandestinely ride opposing players.
Drollinger went from rarely playing in a meaningful situation to seeing Wooden point to him on the bench to replace Walton 9 minutes into the biggest regular-season college game in six years. Encouraging his teammate and friend as if they were still at midcourt for tip-off before Helix at Grossmont, Walton told Drollinger to look into Wooden’s eyes from the court whenever he felt nervous and see how much the coach believed in him. Sophomore Drollinger heard senior Wilkes exhorting “You can do this!” and “You’re ready for this!” their first few trips up and down the court in another attempt to boost Drollinger, swimming in his usual basketball anxiety, calling him “Young Ralph” as always in a term of endearment.
Drollinger amid the self-inflicted stress and the startling role change couldn’t help but also embrace the rare opportunity to contribute to the dynasty. He took Walton’s advice to look to Wooden for unspoken encouragement, got additional boosts from Wilkes’s in-game pep rallies, and fell back on his own faith to know everything would work out with Jesus Christ, until Young Ralph had played well through the end of the first half and halfway into the second. The 5-point UCLA lead when he came in was only down to 2 when Walton returned with 9:52 remaining, a better barometer of Drollinger’s impact than the 8 points and 5 rebounds in 19 minutes. Walton sparked the dominating final stretch that led to an 18-point victory without adding a fifth foul, then returned to the hotel to circulate a petition among friends and strangers in the lobby urging the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
Their attempt to relitigate the 1973 championship foiled, the gift of Walton spending 21 of the 40 minutes on the bench wasted, messages in soap on hallway mirrors invalidated, devastated Wolfpack players took the rare step of closing the locker room to reporters, in contrast to openness after victories. “I’d like to be in the finals against them,” Towe said upon emerging, “but after the jolt we’ve had we’re going to have to take a look at ourselves, talk it out, pull back a little, and pick up the pieces.” They had within hours gone from 29-0 and No. 2 in the country to being jarred to introspection, even before Towe spent the flight back to Raleigh lying across two seats with his face turned into the cushions and refusing to speak to anyone. A rematch three months later in the 1974 tournament appeared to be the only hope for redemption.
“We’ll have one,” NC State forward Tim Stoddard insisted.
The NCAA leveled Long Beach State on January 6 with an indefinite ban on postseason play and most television appearances in basketball and football, for at least three years, as part of what the national governing body called among the most serious infractions it had ever seen. Someone in the 49er athletic department cut out a picture of Walter Byers, the NCAA’s executive director, and placed it over a dartboard in an office, quickly to be riddled with holes. “Wanna take a shot?” an assistant sports information director asked a visitor in between his own throws that created a thumping loud enough to be heard in the hallway. “Everybody else around here has.”
That Tarkanian went to Nevada Las Vegas the previous summer, that Tark successor Lute Olson had no link to the previous staff, that the athletic director and school president were seen as part of a new administration determined to correct past misdeeds, and that the football coach resigned the month before slightly eased the penalties. Tarkanian pronounced himself “absolutely shocked,” denied wrongdoing, and expressed sympathy his former program would suffer under such an injustice, but never noted how a high-profile school thirty-five miles away had yet to be so much as investigated despite obvious evidence of misconduct. “Hey, Tark,” Pan American University coach Abe Lemons, smart-aleck Oklahoma good ol’ boy, shouted at him a few months later, “I understand the NCAA’s gonna reopen Devil’s Island for ya. They’re gonna give ya thirty days in the ’lectric chair. Don’t fret, Tark. I’ll send ya magazines and cigarettes in the pen.
“Reminds me,” Lemons continued, “of the guy drivin’ down the road doin’ sixty and everybody else is passin’ him goin’ eighty. And the cop stops the guy and he says, ‘Why me?’ And the cop says, ‘’Cause you’re easier to catch.’ ” No one needed to ask Lemons to explain.
Washington State coach George Raveling, with his own Bruin problems to consider, slumped in a chair in his hillside home in Pullman overlooking campus hours after the NCAA announced the Long Beach penalties, sipped a beer, and chatted with friends while Sunday night faded into early Monday. He appeared exhausted after going over film of UCLA-Maryland at Pauley Pavilion, taping his weekly TV show, writing his column loaded with quotes and anecdotes of sports personalities for six Washington newspapers, and fielding calls. Driesell among them phoned his former Maryland assistant to wish Raveling luck the next day against the Bruins in the Performing Arts Coliseum, the replacement for Bohler Gym, of the famed Alcindor visit. Win and your picture should be on the cover of Time, Driesell told him. Raveling’s eyes glistened at the thought.
Raveling at thirty-six and in his second season as a head coach admired his next counterpart enough to keep a large file on anything written about Wooden, even if wouldn’t rank with the greatest document Raveling owned, the pages Martin Luther King Jr. used at the podium of the “I Have a Dream” speech. But he also planned to dramatically slow the pace by holding the ball for minutes at a time, a tactic Wooden hated when it had been used since the Alcindor days in desperate attempts to knock the Bruins out of rhythm, and because nothing else worked. This time, it allowed the 5-8 Cougars to stay within 30–27 at halftime, before Wilkes and Curtis scored 9 points early in the second half and Wooden countered with his own stall the final 12 minutes in a message to the rules committee that a shot clock should be added to outlaw boringball. He also vowed after the 55–45 victory to respond in kind if future opponents tried the same crawling strategy, just not at Pauley—he did not want to deprive his own of the fast break life they paid to see. “Who am I to question God?” Raveling said with a shrug when told of Wooden’s reasoning.
Walton crash-landing under the basket in the second half, after coming down on the shoulders of Washington State defender Rich Steele, was the real UCLA concern anyway, what Walton saw as a “despicable act of intentional violence and dirty play.” The crowd that booed during pregame introductions went silent as he lay sprawled on the court in obvious pain, then delivered a standing ovation when he got up, and another when the brief attempt to continue playing proved unbearable and he asked to be removed with 10:23 remaining. Walton, though, had merely bruised a muscle above the right hip, the school announced a day later after the return to Los Angeles, not something more serious, an upbeat prognosis considering the original fear of a serious back injury. He would undergo therapy, including whirlpool baths, and should be ready to face Cal later in the week, the Bruins announced.
Although no one at the time could have realized the frightful implications or even what it meant in the short term, the night of January 7, 1974, in Pullman and what was later found to be two broken bones in his spine would become one of the worst moments of Walton’s life. Well into retirement, the misdiagnosed injury became the root of such constant agony that Walton, seeing no way to end the pain, considered suicide. In the middle of the senior season, he was expected to play on.
He did not suit up against Cal, though, and also missed the Stanford game the next day. Ten days after the injury, Walton went through a solo workout at a downtown Chicago health club in hopes of facing Iowa that night in a neutral-site contest and still felt considerable pain anytime he quickly went left. Drollinger, his confidence growing, started a third time in a row instead, again hearing a river of encouragement from Wilkes, as Digger Phelps scouted the Bruins in the Midwest for the second time in a month. No one could say if Walton would miss the next game as well, only that the season had turned more tenuous than a 13-0 record would indicate, that the record win streak had grown to 88 in a row, and that Notre Dame was waiting in South Bend.