Nearly 40 years have passed since Jerry Norman walked away from the greatest dynasty to rule college basketball.
Nearly 40 years in which Norman, chief lieutenant to John Wooden through nine seasons, including the first four of the great coach's 10 NCAA championships, has amassed a small fortune in asset management, built himself a hilltop home in Brentwood and spent more than a few idle moments, it seems, wondering why his contributions to UCLA's unparalleled success in basketball have not been more prominently noted, especially by the man who was his boss.
Yes, Jerry Norman seems to have a beef with John Wooden.
Though the former assistant, 77, insists that "I love John Wooden" and is not bitter, as others privately suggest, his words carry an edge.
"I look at maybe some of the things that happened -- what we did there -- maybe a little differently than Coach Wooden does," says Norman, who played for Wooden as a starting forward in the early 1950s and was his assistant from the fall of 1959 through the 1967-68 season, when the Bruins won their fourth title in five seasons.
"Some head coaches, they recognize people that have helped them -- and some don't. It's their prerogative, and they can decide which way they want to go."
Asked which camp he believes Wooden falls into, Norman pauses for a moment before saying, "I don't know. You'd have to look at the facts, I guess."
The facts as Norman sees them are these: UCLA didn't win big until after Norman arrived to shore up Wooden's one major flaw -- the coach hated recruiting -- and helped lure a bevy of star players; Norman convinced Wooden to utilize the full-court zone press that was instrumental in the undersized Bruins' first two title runs; and Norman suggested the defensive strategy that neutralized Elvin Hayes in UCLA's tables-turning rout of Houston in the 1968 NCAA semifinals.
"We started pretty much from scratch and built a great program," says Norman, noting that before 1962, when UCLA reached the Final Four for the first time, the Bruins had qualified for the NCAA tournament only three times in 13 seasons under Wooden and lost their opening game each time -- a showing Norman calls "pretty much commensurate with the skill level of our players at that time."
With Norman beating the bushes -- not to mention Pauley Pavilion opening in 1965 and deep-pocketed booster Sam Gilbert arriving on the scene a few years later -- UCLA in the 1960s attracted Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, Lucius Allen, Lynn Shackelford, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe, Steve Patterson, Henry Bibby, etc.
