The Truth about Sam Gilbert
and John Wooden
The summer between my junior
and senior years at UCLA, I had the privilege of being coached for two weeks by
Bobby Knight at the 1972 Olympic trials in Colorado Springs. I found him to be
an exceptional teacher and his knowledge of the game, I must say, was in the
same league as my college coach John Wooden. He was also fun to be around,
especially when watching him interact with the officials.
The entire group was divided
into eight teams, so each team played seven games. The very first game, Knight was
all over the refs but they barely acknowledged he was there. So the next game,
he coached in a referee shirt and it worked.
Coach Knight was good to me.
He played me a lot and I ended up leading the entire camp in scoring. The NBA
and ABA scouts were there and my stock went up considerably. I have often thanked
Coach Knight for what he did for me.
I was on the 1973 UCLA team
that played Indiana University (Knight was coach) in the semifinals of the
final four. Although they gave us a run for our money, we won and went on to
win our seventh straight NCAA championship.
Fast forward to November 8,
2017 where in an interview, “Speak for Yourself,” Knight said:
“I have a lot of respect for Wooden as a coach. He was
a good coach. I don’t respect Wooden because he allowed Sam Gilbert to do
whatever he could to recruit kids.”
“I think John was called in and told he didn’t have to
worry about recruiting. People would take care of that for him.”
Sam Gilbert was a millionaire
real estate tycoon, based in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los
Angeles. Sam was a UCLA basketball fan but went a bit too far. He illegally
helped some of the players, materially and financially. Coach Wooden got wind
of what was going on, warned us to stay away from Gilbert, and trusted us to do
the right thing. The rest of the story is, the NCAA put UCLA on probation years
after Wooden retired.
But I have no idea why Bobby
Knight claimed Gilbert was involved in player recruitment. I was a UCLA player
for three years and never heard anything of the sort.
To this day, there is much
communication between Bruins, and to my knowledge, not one has ever said,
Gilbert helped recruit him, and that includes Kareem, Walton, Johnson, Wilkes, Wicks,
and Hazzard. I have read numerous articles about Sam Gilbert’s dealings and nowhere
have I found even a hint of Gilbert being involved in UCLA recruiting. Had it
been true, it certainly would have surfaced by now, don’t you think? It’s been
over 40 years.
Knight erroneously assumed
Wooden needed help recruiting. Are you kidding? The best players in the country
were standing in line wanting to join the legendary program Coach Wooden had
developed. As for me, I wanted to play for a coach that was a role model, and
who:
Didn’t grab
players by the jersey and jerk them to their seats
Didn’t hit a
policeman before a practice
Didn’t get into a
shoving match with a reporter and stuff him into a garbage can
Didn’t curse at
the Big Ten commissioner from midcourt
Didn’t toss a
chair across the court
Didn’t bang his
fist on the scorer’s table and pull his team off the floor before the end of a
game in protest
Didn’t scream at
his son and kick at him
Didn’t go into an
outburst at a news conference
Didn’t berate a
referee and call his work on the court “the greatest travesty”
Didn’t choke a
player in practice and get suspended for three games.
But I have to confess; Coach
Wooden bribed me into signing with UCLA.
On three of my other four
visits to major universities that recruited me out of junior college, one gave his
players money to take me to a porn flick and offered me a bunch of cash when I
departed. Another promised me a starting spot. One coach set me up with a date
—the football centennial queen who followed up our date by writing a letter
which said in part, “When you get here, I want us to date.”
Coach Wooden took me to a
UCLA track meet. As we watched, he said I’d never see much playing time because
the best center in the country was coming to play at UCLA — that was Bill
Walton, 3-time NCAA player of the year.
He also promised, to the best
of his ability, he would help me make maximum improvement. Every day in
practice, he said, I would be honing my skills against the best team in the
country — the six-time NCAA champion Bruins. He thought I would have a very good
chance of being noticed by NBA scouts, even if I never started a game.
I just couldn’t resist that
bribe.
