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| Glove inventor Andre McCarter (45), teacher Dave Meyers (34) and house rehab person Richard Washington (31) do in my Wildcats for the 1975 national title, but I like these guys today. |
Picture a man in Oregon who, in tandem with his wife, rehabs houses for a living, with the couple doing the work themselves of tearing the floorboards and hammering the nails.
Then there’s a person near San Diego who teaches elementary school.
Now think of another person, this one in Indiana, who worked for a steel company and coached youth sports in his city, sometimes driving kids home from practice and driving the team bus to and from games.
And yet another, a man from Philadelphia, works part time as an inventor and comes up with a certain type of glove to improve athletes' dexterity.
These folks sometimes pause from their daily lives of civic and business devotions to recall their college years, when they used to get together and play some basketball.
And the former Indiana farm kid who grew up to coach them was paid a modest salary for job tasks that for a while included waxing a gymnasium floor.
Sounds like a group who only dreamed of the big time, but missed out on lives of fame and glory.
Well, in fact you’ve just read a description of the people who in 1975 won their school, UCLA, the NCAA basketball title -- the last of coaching legend John Wooden’s 10 basketball championships at UCLA.
Their lives of rehabing homes, teaching sixth graders and so forth were what they were doing 20 and 30 years after that night in March 1975, when Richard Washington, Dave Meyers, Pete Trgovich, and Andre McCarter led the UCLA Bruins to John Wooden’s 10th title.
They allowed Wooden to cap off his dynasty in storybook fashion, beating favored Kentucky 92-85 in the title game in San Diego, ending Wooden’s 27-year tenure at UCLA.
During that stint, the Martinsville, Ind. native and former Purdue hoops star won those 10 national titles while maintaining a player graduation rate of 65 percent (comparable to the student body rate of around 75 percent). For all this, he earned a top salary of $40,000, and that includes all money from endorsements.
Late in his career Wooden also brought in about that much yearly in outside income from speaking engagements and basketball camps, but with that added in, his $80,000 figure was about one percent of what today’s highest paid coach makes.
Kentucky’s John Calipari, who is paid -- wait for it -- $8.1 million, has a player graduation rate of 28 percent (the UK student body rate is 66 percent).
Wooden emphasized to his players passing, footwork and body position, not the glamorous high scoring or fancy one-on-one moves many other coaches favored in the ‘70s to enhance their recruiting in an era of expanding TV coverage of college basketball games.
Almost all of Wooden’s greats played four seasons.
The best players leaving after their freshman year, a method called "one-and-done," is widespread in this era; UCLA itself has just a 20 percent player graduation rate today.
Whereas Washington and Meyers were the biggest contributors to the title win in ‘75, another player, Marques Johnson, did go on to great National Basketball Association stardom. But in 1975 Johnson was coming off a bout with hepatitis the previous summer and didn’t go on to become a star at UCLA until about a year after Wooden’s 1975 retirement.
He had a superb NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks, the team for which Dave Meyers also played a few years before deciding to change careers and earn a teaching certificate.
Meyers didn’t teach gym or do photo-ops in classrooms as a sports celebrity, mind you -- he genuinely taught elementary school for 30 years in Southern California. And Marques Johnson was a devoted family person; wealth and national acclaim did not distract either of these two Bruin products from the obligations and rewards of doing the essential duties of the lives all of us live.
Same for Richard Washington, whose career change came when he realized his pleasant temperament (Coach Wooden had described him as a “passive, easygoing, lovely person.”) just wasn’t ideal for the Type-A pro basketball world after Kansas City Kings teammates politely but firmly told him he needed to push himself harder.
Dave Meyers, after three decades teaching elementary school children, died from cancer in 2015 at age 62. After his death, former teammate Marques Johnson recalled Meyers as “a gentle, compassionate guy."
Sibling Ann Meyers Drysdale recalled that Dave’s decision to leave pro basketball in 1980 after six seasons, though partly because of a back injury, also was because her brother “wanted to be with his family and watch his children grow up.”
Even many of the more basketball-centered John Wooden products have lived notably full lives; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, also is a fine writer and commentator. He worked as a newspaper contributing reporter while a teenager in New York City.
Bill Walton attended law school after his basketball days and has long promoted environmentalism and his vegetarian diet. Both former UCLA centers were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War.
Still, the UCLA Bruin world wasn’t flawless; an L.A. Times investigation in the 1980s revealed that a wealthy UCLA booster named Sam Gilbert was co-signing for loans for some of Wooden’s players, in violation of NCAA rules.
Though the gifting was not used to recruit players, and a shocked Wooden ordered his team to have no contact with Gilbert when he found out, the co-signing continued and Wooden largely looked the other way, the coach acknowledged in interviews late in his life.
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| From raising title banners to raising his family, the gentle Dave Meyers, 1953-2015. |
Nonetheless, we can long for some lost priorities when contrasting the community minded lives of people like Meyers, Washington and other 1975 Bruins with most of the great NBA stars who won college championships in the years following Wooden’s retirement.
For instance Irving “Magic” Johnson of Michigan State and Michael Jordan of North Carolina have sports-centered identities wrapped in layers of massive PR machines. Neither graduated from college. The egotistical and sometimes brusque Jordan had more say over his Chicago Bulls team’s offense than his coach, and Magic Johnson actually ordered his Los Angeles Lakers team to replace its head coach over the young star’s differences with him.
And the 60-second TV ads Magic did for a fast food chain and Jordan did for Chevy cars earned them more money than Richard Washington or Dave Meyers made in a year of rehabing houses and teaching elementary students.
But for the vast majority of NBA players, having a real world job skill like those of Washington or Meyers would be more valuable than perfecting every great basketball move. Consider that Sports Illustrated reported in 2009 that 60 percent of former NBA players were broke within five years of leaving that supposedly paved-with-gold league. The magazine said the number for former National Football League players was 78 percent.
Those percentages mean John Wooden's $40,000 salary and his stressing of education and life skills more than basketball have never looked better. And "one-and-done" has never looked more dangerously exploitive.
In 1975 I scowled as I watched UCLA win Wooden’s 10th title by beating Louisville and Kentucky, two of my three favorite teams. This was just after my other favorite, unbeaten Indiana, lost its top scorer to an injury, knocking the Hoosiers out of what looked like a sure title.
My adolescent anguish didn’t last too long; Indiana, Kentucky and Louisville won three of the next five college championships.
Although those titles were redemption, I have since placed more importance on the good character of our champion teams’ stars, such as Louisville’s Darrell Griffith and Scooter McCray, who following their playing years started restaurants and alcohol-free youth recreation centers in our city.
Whereas their Louisville college uniforms and UCLA’s bore opposing school names, I now see that the people who were wearing both are teammates in the contest between good citizenship and “I’ve got mine, you get yours” selfishness. And that is a game in which this nation badly needs a come-from-behind win.
So Richard, Dave, Pete, Andre, Marques -- as much as I could not have imagined 45 years ago that I’d ever feel this way about any Bruin -- I’m now a fan of each of you.
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Brian Arbenz has been a news and sports reporter in Indiana and Kentucky, states whose college basketball success can cloud people's judgment.
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