I’ve long envied the blessed legions that played for John Wooden and bonded with him for so long.
I’ve always been jealous of Bill Walton and Gail Goodrich and Jamaal Wilkes and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and so many others who could get together with him, it seemed, any time they pleased, or reach him by phone whenever they liked.
Walton always promised to set up a meeting, but I never made it happen. The closest I ever got to Wooden, who died Friday night from natural causes just shy of the century mark, was in Las Vegas in 1994. We were being honored with Victor Awards.
Before the ceremony began, I made sure not to blow this opportunity. Apprehensively, I approached Wooden at his table and introduced myself, not to one living legend but to two, no, actually, three — the Wizard of Westwood, Jim Murray, whose columns I had read religiously from the age of reason, and Shari Belafonte.
Wooden, accompanied by a granddaughter, invited me to sit down and, for the next 10 or 15 minutes, put up with my nervous chatter, which might’ve centered on basketball.
I remember telling Wooden, had I been good enough, UCLA wouldn’t have had to recruit me; I would’ve paid to play for the Bruins, whose true blue and gold colors I proudly wore anyway throughout the 1960s, off the court as well as on.
In those days, I pretended I was Goodrich, who teamed in the backcourt with Walt Hazzard in 1964 for Wooden’s first of 10 NCAA titles. When Goodrich and I partnered for NBA-TV a few years ago, I’d often tell him how lucky he was I hadn’t attended UCLA, “because you would’ve had to come off the bench.”
Rich Levin’s carcass was imprinted on that crown-moulded bench. It took about, oh, one or two freshman scrimmages for Wooden to suggest he take a seat. Levin, major league baseball’s senior VP of public relations for the last 25 years, had topped the Los Angeles area’s high school scoring charts, with one point more than Goodrich, albeit against “slightly” inferior competition.
Before Levin became chief spokesman for four commissioners, he was a sportswriter for 11 years, primarily covering the Lakers for the L.A. Herald Examiner. His enduring relationship with Wooden is precisely what I envy; Levin was on scholarship with his coach until the day he died.
Wooden made a great impact on Levin’s life, as he did on just about all his players. A few weeks ago, in fact, Levin was able to have breakfast with him and, as always, returned to New York with a full report.
“Amazing that a person can pass away at 99, yet you feel such complete shock and emptiness,” e-mailed Bill Feinberg, a long-time ally of mine, of Levin and of Stan Love (father of former UCLA player Kevin Love). “I didn’t know Coach Wooden well, but the few times we spent time together, I felt as if we were close. Perhaps it’s because many of my friends were so linked to him.”
When Kevin Love was on his official visit to UCLA, he met Wooden for the first time, but always felt he’d known him forever. Since he was 8, he had a poster of Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” on his bedroom wall.
At any rate, there was Love at the UCLA offices, visiting with coach Ben Howland and assistants Kerry Keating and Donnie Daniels, when through the door walked another assistant, Doug Erickson, and Wooden. Kevin was dumbfounded. He spoke with Wooden for about 20 minutes. If there had been any second thoughts about Love going to UCLA, they were gone.
“A few weeks earlier, Kevin told me his greatest fear was not getting to meet Coach Wooden,” Feinberg related.
At a second meeting at Wooden’s condo in July 2007, when Love was getting settled in L.A., Feinberg mentioned to Wooden that Levin’s wife had just passed away. He immediately said: “Yes, I know that Susan just died and I need to call Rich.”
Feinberg was blown away: “Here was a bench guy on his first two championship teams, and he knows through the vine that Susan died, and even knew her name. It amazed me. He asked if I would call Rich and offer his condolences.”
Tom Lubin was the guy who set up the second meeting. His uncle was Frank Lubin, UCLA’s first All-American. A chemist by profession, Tom is a well known big-man coach to those in the know, on par perhaps with the late, great Pete Newell and Swen Nater.
Tom had been the assistant coach at Cypress College in Orange County, Calif., under Don Johnson, Wooden’s first All-American. That’s where he found Nater walking around campus, a 6-foot-11 math major.
Asked if he wanted to play ball, Nater replied: “My high school coach cut me and told me that I should never play again.”
Tom laughed and basically adopted Nater. He learned well enough during two years at Cypress to get a full ride to UCLA, where he hardly played due to the presence of Walton.
Years later, Nater, who became a first-round pick of the NBA Bucks and ABA Virginia Squires was asked by Feinberg if he ever regretted choosing UCLA over a school where he would have dominated.
“Not for one second,” Nater said. “I would have never gotten to meet John Wooden.”