The Road to Madness: How the 1973-1974 Season Transformed College Basketball

THE ROAD

To Madness

THE ROAD

To Madness

How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball

J. SAMUEL WALKER

RANDY ROBERTS

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Published with appreciation for Cyndy and John O’Hara and their generous support of The University of North Carolina Press.

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Rebecca Evans

Set in Miller and Serifa types by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walker, J. Samuel, author. | Roberts, Randy, 1951– author.

Title: The road to madness : how the 1973–1974 season transformed college basketball / J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004011 | ISBN 9781469630236 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469630243 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: NCAA Basketball Tournament—History. | Basketball—Tournaments—United States. | Basketball—United States—History.

Classification: LCC GV885.49.N37 W35 2016 | DDC 796.323/63097309047—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016004011

Jacket illustration: Tom Burleson collects a rebound. The other players, left to right, are Bill Walton, Tim Stoddard, Dave Meyers, Monte Towe, and Keith Wilkes. (Photograph by Hugh Morton, © 1974, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill)

Contents

Preface

Prologue  The Target

1    On the Road to 105

2    The ACC’s Challenge to You Know Who

3    Winning Shots in the Heartland

4    The Growth of the NCAA Tournament

5    Bracketology 1974

6    The Precarious Road to the Final Four

7    The Battle of Greensboro

8    Creating March Madness—Inadvertently

Essay on Sources

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. John Wooden   2

2. Bill Walton   11

3. Norm Sloan   30

4. David Thompson   34

5. Digger Phelps   50

6. Al McGuire   58

7. Ted Owens   67

8. Tom Scott   83

9. Mo Howard   102

10. Tom Burleson scoring   103

11. John Lucas and Monte Towe   104

12. David Thompson returns after injury   111

13. Tom Burleson rebounding   128

14. Maurice Lucas   135

Preface

This book began with an informal conversation the authors had at the 2012 meeting of the American Historical Association. Since we both were experienced in writing sport history—a long-standing area of interest for Randy Roberts and a recent one for Sam Walker—Roberts suggested that we do a book together. Walker immediately and enthusiastically agreed.

The more difficult task was deciding on a topic. We considered and discarded several ideas that we thought were too unwieldy or too dull. Finally, we came up with the idea of doing a book on the 1973–74 college basketball season, the last year in which only conference champions and selected independents were invited to play for the national championship in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament. Our research took on a clearer focus after Walker was asked to appear as a talking head in a series of programs that CBS and the CBS Sports Network presented in early 2013 to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the tournament. In an effort to sound authoritative, Walker prepared for his interview by reading widely on the history of the tournament. From this review, it seemed apparent that two NCAA decisions were the keys to the creation of what eventually became known as March Madness. The first, in 1972, was to expand the number of teams invited to compete for the national championship. The second, in 1974, was to allow more than one member of a conference to participate in the tournament. What was less clear was why and in what context the NCAA took those steps.

The reconstruction of the reasoning behind the NCAA’s expansion, happily, required a careful examination of the events of the 1973–74 college basketball season. What a season it was! It featured eminent coaches, celebrated players, classic games, four storied programs in the final rounds of the NCAA tournament, Cinderella teams, and the end of the UCLA dynasty that had dominated college basketball during the previous decade. The events of the season provided the essential background for the answers we found to the question of why the NCAA expanded the tournament and opened it to teams that did not win their conference championship.

Our journey of discovery has been made easier and more pleasant by the invaluable assistance we have received along the way. We benefited greatly from the expertise and professionalism of many archivists and manuscript librarians. We extend our gratitude to Anne Turkos, Jason Speck, and Amanda Hawk of the University of Maryland, College Park; Matt Turi of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jennifer Baker of North Carolina State University; Kaitlin Christian-Lamb and Sharon Byrd of Davidson College; Becky Schulte and Letha Johnson of the University of Kansas; and Ellen Summers and Betty Reagan of NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis.

We are deeply indebted to archivists who helped us locate photographs that were appropriate for our topic and affordable. At a time when the price of rights to use photographs in scholarly books seems to be skyrocketing beyond reason, the affordable part is no small consideration. Kim Andersen of the State of North Carolina Archives delivered friendly and knowledgeable guidance that eased our research through the splendid collection of negatives donated by the Raleigh News and Observer. We very much appreciated Keith Longiotti’s mastery of the superb Hugh Morton photographs in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Michelle Sweetser of Marquette University and Charles Lamb of the University of Notre Dame responded promptly to inquiries and dug out great photos for us to choose from. Julie Jenkins provided expert advice on the rich collection of Los Angeles Times photos available through Special Collections at the UCLA Library.

Brian Morrison, the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Associate Commissioner, Basketball Communications, was exceptionally hospitable in giving Walker access to the rich materials at ACC Headquarters as well as providing an enjoyable lunch. And Chuck Grench, Assistant Director and Senior Editor at UNC Press, has offered encouragement and wise counsel since the early stages of this project.

THE ROAD

To Madness

PROLOGUE

The Target

John Wooden, the basketball coach at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1948 until his retirement in 1975, was a man who lived by long-honored traditions and values. In many ways, he belonged to an older America—a nation of homespun virtues, the self-improvement maxims of Benjamin Franklin, the plucky plot lines of Horatio Alger, and the Christian themes of Harold Bell Wright. By 1973, he looked out of place sitting on the bench at courtside before tip-off. With short salt-and-pepper hair parted straight as a razor, large bookish glasses, a serenely beatific smile, and a conservative banker’s suit, he appeared more like a church deacon than a basketball coach. In a polyester age of florid shirts, bell-bottom slacks, and Nehru jackets, the Wizard of Westwood (a nickname he detested) was a wool and cotton man, so out of touch with the fashions of the times that it would not have occurred to him to notice—or care—how far behind he had fallen.

But when the referee tossed the ball in the air for the opening jump, Wooden stirred into action, encouraging his players, carping at opponents, working the officials, and noticing everything. Unlike the newer breed of coaches who sought—or demanded—the spotlight, calling attention to themselves with time-outs and technical fouls, Wooden was a presence more felt than seen. He used a decidedly hands-off coaching style that reflected his belief that if players were taught properly in practice, they would execute properly during games. When a contest ended and victory was his, Wooden walked quietly off the court, a Mona Lisa smile on his face and his suit as neat as when the game began. No one could argue with the success of his approach. By the end of the 1972–73 college basketball season, his UCLA teams had won seven consecutive national championships and nine of the previous ten.

Wooden was one of a kind in his field. Curry Kirkpatrick, who covered college basketball for Sports Illustrated with exceptional wit and insight, wrote in April 1973, He was Fred Astaire at a dance seminar; John Ford at a cinema exhibition; Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the mount, accepting hosannas, dispensing advice, suffering fools gently.¹

John Wooden instructs his team in practice, December 14, 1973. (Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)

Wooden’s reputation extended beyond UCLA’s excellence on the hardwood. Neil D. Isaacs, a keen observer of American sports and culture, pointed out that Wooden was even more than the ‘Wizard of Westwood,’ and by the 1970s had become an elder statesman, a sage, a fount of wisdom. The coach acquired the status of a cultural touchstone who stood for timeless values and represented admirable qualities that seemed threatened in American society. Wooden is a graying, sober-sided eminence who imparts what one player calls the ‘respect factor,’ reported Time in a feature profile in February 1973. Who, after all, could doubt a man who is a friend of Lawrence Welk, who admires the writings of Zane Grey and St. Francis of Assisi? … He reads the Bible daily [and his] strongest expletive is ‘Goodness gracious sakes alive.’ A deacon in the First Christian Church of Santa Monica, Wooden clearly disapproved of trends in American culture. Once, on a rare occasion when his team was trailing, he called time-out and told his players that it’s not your fault, but you’ve given in to a permissive society.²

Permissiveness was only one of the nation’s ills that troubled many Americans. Another major problem was the economy. Since the end of World War II, the country had enjoyed a sustained economic boom that provided unprecedented prosperity for its citizens. By the early 1970s, the forces that drove America’s economy and fed its proud self-confidence had begun to unravel. The economy showed early signs of what was later called stagflation, the simultaneous presence of elements of inflation and recession that Keynesian fine-tuning could not easily adjust. The robust postwar economy, the only economic framework that a generation of Americans had experienced, gave way to unwelcome uncertainties and growing anxieties.

The woes America faced in the early 1970s were not limited to economic concerns. The tumultuous events of the later 1960s fostered momentous changes in how Americans regarded their nation. The changes included a loss of faith in government and other established institutions, diminishing confidence in the country’s virtues, and increasing pessimism about the future. The trends reached new heights in 1973, largely but not exclusively because of distress over the Vietnam War, ever more disturbing news about the Watergate scandal, and an energy crisis that caused long lines at gas stations.

President Richard Nixon’s claim to have achieved peace with honor while ending America’s combat role in Vietnam in 1973 rang increasingly hollow as North Vietnam overran areas controlled by the ineffective U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. New information about the Watergate break-in suggested that the president himself was deeply involved in orchestrating a cover-up of what had happened. On October 20, 1973, Nixon incited an outburst of angry protests when he fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre. The gasoline shortage and rising prices that alarmed, and in some cases outraged, American citizens in the fall of 1973 appeared to introduce the harsh reality of scarcity. With 1973, an era died, an era of profligacy unprecedented in human experience when most Americans embarked on an orgy of consumption, editorialized the New York Times on January 1, 1974. This New Year’s Day, symbolized by dimmed lights, chilly rooms, and empty gasoline tanks, ushers in a new era of enforced—if only relative—austerity.

Those developments were deeply disturbing to a country that was not prepared to accept the loss of a war, the corruption of the White House, or an end to its orgy of consumption. The series of setbacks led the historian Andreas Killen to call 1973 the year that America suffered a nervous breakdown. One result of growing disillusionment was a tendency by more individuals to shift their attention away from public affairs and look inward for personal satisfaction and fulfillment. The practice of turning inward inspired the writer Tom Wolfe to label the 1970s the Me Decade in 1976.³

In an atmosphere of national gloom and disaffection, John Wooden’s streak of championships was a concrete symbol of cherished values and stability that appeared to be in danger on many fronts. Art Spander, a columnist for the Sporting News, addressed the decline of faith in traditional institutions by suggesting that UCLA basketball defied the trend. In these turbulent times, when other myths are being destroyed, when politicians have less veracity than circus pitchmen, when the economy is bouncing around like a free ball at midcourt, one thing remains constant, he wrote. UCLA is still winning basketball games. Although people might question mom and apple pie, he argued, they still had something left to believe in: UCLA basketball.⁴

The enormous success of the basketball institution that Wooden had established in Los Angeles made him the envy of and a target for coaches across the country. A younger breed, including flamboyant coaches such as Bob Knight at Indiana University, Richard Digger Phelps at the University of Notre Dame, Al McGuire at Marquette University, and Charles Lefty Driesell at the University of Maryland, commanded attention while projecting an undeniable star quality. Others, such as Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina, Norm Sloan at North Carolina State University, and Ted Owens at the University of Kansas, were less theatrical but burned just as fiercely on the sidelines. All shared the goal of ending Wooden’s dynasty at UCLA.

Along the way, they helped to create another cultural touchstone, the iconic national event now known as March Madness.

CHAPTER ONE

On the Road to 105

Chicago. January 23, 1973. The master of ceremonies at a banquet before the National Basketball Association (NBA) All-Star Game looked down the long line of players. They were the legends of the game—John Havlicek and Jerry West, Pete Maravich and Connie Hawkins, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Even the lesser stars, players like Dollar Bill Bradley and Chet the Jet Walker, were household names. Here sit, the emcee intoned, the best players in the world, other than U.C.L.A.¹

The joke was no laughing matter for college coaches whose teams were scheduled to meet the Bruins. In the second season of the Bill Walton era, UCLA appeared not merely unbeatable, but unapproachable. That season they had won most of their fourteen games by more than twenty points, and only one opponent had managed to finish a contest with less than a ten-point loss. The day after the NBA All-Star Game and on the same court, the Bruins drubbed Loyola of Chicago, extending their winning streak to sixty games and tying the intercollegiate record set by the University of San Francisco from 1954 to 1956.

After the game, a reporter noted, the UCLA locker room was as quiet as a museum. The way we coach these young men, we don’t want them to be too emotional, commented their mentor, John Wooden. Besides, he and his team had expected the outcome. So did virtually every other person in the basketball profession. The winning streak will go on as long as Bill Walton remains their center, said former University of California at Berkeley coach Pete Newell.²

The next day, the UCLA players boarded a bus for a short ride to South Bend, where they were expected to break San Francisco’s record against Notre Dame. Wooden looked out the window at the bleak landscape of northern Indiana, thinking about his boyhood in the state. His players were loose and happy, listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking about Whopper burgers. They hardly gave the record or the upcoming game a second thought. A reporter asked Keith Wilkes, the Bruins’ All-American forward, if he was worried about losing. I never think about losing, he answered. Why should he? He had never lost a game in a UCLA uniform.³

There was more excitement in South Bend. The Notre Dame squad anticipated the challenge, and the school’s students buzzed with activity. The last game UCLA had lost, exactly two years before, was to Notre Dame, and the Irish were ready for an encore performance. Television crews had set up to broadcast the contest, banners rippled in the winter winds, and the poor fathers [were] working overtime conducting masses. Although the Bruins had crushed the Irish in Los Angeles earlier in the season, coach Digger Phelps told reporters that his team had a fighting chance to pull off an upset. Center John Shumate brimmed with confidence: We’re going to beat them. I’m going to whip Walton. They’re in the pressure cooker.⁴

We’re cool, Bruin guard Greg Lee responded. We’ll win. After all, we always win.

And they did win—convincingly. Every player on the UCLA bench saw court time in the sixty-first straight victory, but there was no celebration after the game for setting the record. This isn’t the greatest thing that’s happened on this day, Wooden said. It is my granddaughter’s birthday. But the most important thing is that this was cease-fire day in Vietnam. That’s much more important than this. Lee agreed that the new record was no big deal. When you win all the time, it’s not all that much fun. Smiling, he added, We’ll break it with our next victory.⁵

Bill Walton mumbled that he was unimpressed with the record-breaking victory. Would he remember it? No, he said. The game I’ll remember most is the game UCLA loses. Since Walton had played his first varsity game in 1971, the Bruins had not lost, and few authorities thought they would be defeated as long as the big redhead played at UCLA. The consensus was that he would lead his team to national titles in 1973 and 1974 and increase the winning streak to 105 games. UCLA’s record over the previous decade was unique in the annals of college basketball. By 1973, dynasty was the word most often used to describe Wooden’s program. The Bruins’ eight title-winning teams between 1964 and 1972 lost a total of only seven games.⁶

The man who built the dynasty appeared to be as straight as an arrow and as sound as a dollar. He enjoyed an unpretentious life and believed in ageless maxims. The focal points of Wooden’s life were the pillars of God, country, family, and basketball. He grew up in the middle of the Midwest in the Indiana farm country south of Indianapolis. His was a childhood that knew hard times but not bad times, and what his family lacked in money it made up for in love and faith. His father was a hard-working moralist who believed that character was the currency of manhood. Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal, he told his children. Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Don’t make excuses, he added. Anyone who followed those basic rules would demonstrate integrity and be able to face adversity. His son John learned the rules young and followed them throughout his life.⁷

Like other midwestern kids raised on a farm, Wooden learned early about the necessity of grinding labor. He awoke before sunrise and milked cows and fed chickens before going to school, and during spring planting and fall harvesting he had an additional set of chores. His parents also believed that education ranked just below religion and expected that John would study his school lessons and achieve high grades. He did, and when he graduated from Martinsville High School, his father rewarded him with a three-by-five index card containing several final lessons. On one side, his father inscribed a few lines from a poem by the Reverend Henry Van Dyke:

Four things a man must learn to do

If he would make his life more true:

To think without confusion clearly,

To love his fellow man sincerely,

To act from honest motives purely.

To trust God and Heaven securely.

On the back of the card, his father added a six-point creed encouraging his son to be true to yourself; make each day your masterpiece; help others; drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible; make friendship an art; and build a shelter against a rainy day. For the rest of his life, John Wooden carried the index card in his wallet.

Of course, growing up in Indiana meant that he would also drink deeply from the instructions of James Naismith. Basketball was as much a part of the natural rhythms of the state as planting and harvesting. It was, in fact, the activity that occupied the attention of Hoosiers between those two seasonal events. In Indiana, basketball hoops seemed to sprout like corn—hoops nailed to barns and garages, hoops attached to the sides of grain elevators and schoolhouses, hoops everywhere. It was a