On March 21, 1970 the UCLA Bruins continued their dominance in college basketball by beating 7-foot-2-inch Artis Gilmore and the Jacksonville Dolphins en route to their fourth straight NCAA title under the direction of the legendary John Wooden.
While it was a time of prosperity for UCLA basketball, it was a time of great turmoil throughout the nation. College campuses throughout the nation were alive with protest and the United States found itself entrenched in the Vietnam conflict. UCLA’s basketball team was not immune to engaging in the political debate.
Although this season’s Bruins will watch the Final Four from home, UCLA has a storied past of successful postseason runs including the 1970 team’s championship.
Riding the wave of exposure from winning the National Championship, their sixth in seven years, and in an effort to make their voices heard, all 13 members of the 1970 Bruin’s basketball team sent a letter of protest to President Richard Nixon in one of the most notable displays of student protest. According to Hill, the letter featured several demands including: “The immediate withdrawal of all the combat troops, advisors and arms from Cambodia” and “the rapid de-escalation of the war in Vietnam with the goal in mind of removing all personnel from Vietnam by January 1, 1971.”
The letter was sent care of H.R “Bob” Haldeman, then Nixon’s Chief of Staff, who was a UCLA alumnus and an avid Bruin basketball fan. Haldeman went on to become a central figure in the Watergate break-in and spent 18 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
Reserve guard Andy Hill said Wooden was frequently at odds with him. Today, Hill and Wooden have a very close relationship, but when it came to political issues, Hill, in his collegiate days, and Wooden would butt heads.
“I remember that the letter was drafted in (former Bruin center) Steve Patterson’s pool house,” Hill said. “There were a number of words in the letter that there were objections to. I remember literally taking out the dictionary and reading the definitions before people could agree that they could go in the letter.”
Not everyone, however, was entirely on board with the letter.
Senior captain John Vallely was the last to sign and wavered on the decision for some time. Vallely said he has second thoughts about the letter today.
Despite their seamless and graceful perfection on the court under the direction of the drill sergeant-esque Wooden, Vallely suggested that there may have been an off-the-court rift between himself and his teammates.
“I think that probably the majority of (the team) would have been acting like most 21-year-olds, not knowledgeable about the true situation and simply people that were against war. I would embrace that, which is why I finally signed it,” Vallely said. “I’m against war, but do I feel it’s my place to use the UCLA basketball team, where I’ve been given a scholarship to receive an education, as a political platform? Do I want to put my UCLA basketball team, which has honored me with a contract to pay for my education and use it to go and differentiate myself from anybody else on campus?
“I think that’s maybe beyond the call of my duty as a student.”
John Ecker, the sixth man of the 1970 squad, said he was not concerned with Vallely’s lack of support for the letter, adding he was pleased when stars Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe showed no hesitaion to sign on.
“The idea that the team could be united with that kind of political statement was something that we found to be very positive and if it had been a real big problem, I can’t imagine us really doing it,” Ecker said. “We’re talking about a dimension of protest that never existed before. It wasn’t tough getting the rest of the UCLA players behind it, they were all against (the war).”
Hill, meanwhile, said that he would sign the letter again in a heartbeat.
“People died and the war was a bad war,” Hill said. “I didn’t do enough. There’s no question in my mind that I didn’t do enough.”
Hill went on to say that being politically active and signing the letter enhanced his experience at UCLA.
“It made me feel like I was still a student and not just an athlete, which I think was sort of the idea of being a student-athlete at UCLA is to not go through school just as an athlete but to truly experience the entire spectrum of college life,” Hill added.
But the team’s requests were not limited to the Vietnam War. The letter also demanded a “public investigation of the killings at Kent State,” referring to the May 4, 1970 demonstration at Kent State where National Guard troops opened fire on a student protest, killing four students. UCLA students’ continued protest of the killings as well as the murders of two black panthers at Campbell Hall caused the campus to be shut down for several days in May.
Ecker said he and a number of other players approached Wooden about wearing black wristbands in protest and solidarity.
“Coach Wooden was never anyone who wanted to see us involved in political statements, so that was something that he was against. … He wasn’t too happy about us getting involved in something like that and making that kind of a political statement, but on the other hand, he didn’t punish anybody for it” Ecker said, adding that Wooden was open to political discussions within the team but did not want them to reach the public.
“I remember he wasn’t pleased, but it wasn’t the first time (Wooden) wasn’t pleased with me. … There was a very strong feeling that challenging authority was an important thing to do at that point in time so the fact that he didn’t much like it was not a surprise to me,” Hill said. “The way we looked at it was, you couldn’t really afford to sit back and say “˜I don’t want to get involved’ because too many people were getting killed.”
Ultimately, the team never got a response from Haldeman or the president.
And despite the ripple in their unity caused by the disagreements over the letter, Wooden’s Bruins went on to win three more national titles in a row.