UCLA is inexorably tied to John Wooden, as Wooden is to the school he helped guide to 10 national championships.
But many do not know that the University of Minnesota was the coach’s first choice.
Coach Wooden had a contract drawn up, waiting his signature at Minnesota, but bad weather prevented him from getting the phone call offering him a job. So he took the UCLA post. When he finally got in touch with Minnesota and ironed out the misunderstanding, the ultimate man of ethics felt he could not go back on his commitment.
Today, on his 100th birthday, college sports could learn from Wooden’s example, and the school he coached could use a refresher course on his “Observations and Reflections.”
In addition to Wooden’s centennial, today marks the final installment of the Bruin’s four-day series, Over and Back. The report revealed that young players from Yaoundé, Cameroon ““ the home of two recent UCLA basketball alumni ““ often struggle to reach the United States because of a complex machinery of middlemen who sell scholarships and rigid American visa policies that prevent impoverished kids from leaving the country.
While there is no reason to believe that UCLA’s two Cameroonian stars ““ Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Alfred Aboya ““ were part of the estimated 80 percent of players who pay their way into the United States, UCLA men’s basketball assistant coach Scott Garson said he will continue working with one of the scholarship sellers, Joseph Touomou.
A day after the Bruin’s report, Sports Illustrated reported that a former sports agent, Josh Luchs, paid more than 30 players from 1990 to 1996. According to Sports Illustrated, Luchs said he paid eight UCLA players, leaving UCLA with the highest number of offenders.
UCLA’s involvement in these dealings with agents and middlemen strikes this board as deeply disturbing and disheartening. Regardless of an athletic program’s knowledge of or degree of involvement in the behavior of its players and machinery behind them, such involvement shames the university and all the students, faculty, staff and administrators that work to maintain its pristine reputation.
Certainly, an athletic department, comprised of more than 600 student athletes cannot be expected to entirely eliminate transgressions on the part of its teenage athletes. Even coach Wooden is said to have turned a blind eye on controversial booster Sam Gilbert, who landed UCLA on probation in 1981.
But one thing is certain: If the legendary coach had truly smelled foul play, the disciplinarian who forced his players to tie their shoes his way, would have had none of it.
UCLA and the NCAA must hold themselves to a higher standard ““ one that not only applies discipline retroactively, but that seeks out foul play wherever it lies ““ even overseas.