DocJock
Joined: 2/03/05 Posts: 15,584
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Posted Tue, Mar 08 5:50 pm
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More a volume than a post, but here goes anyway.
Athletic Director Wilbur Johns took it upon himself to hire new head coaches in the bell weather sports of basketball and football. Few people nowadays know how providence played a role in getting Wooden. JW had offers on the tabe from Minnesota and UCLA, and by his own admission preferred Minnesota. He was supposed to have the Minnesota offer finalized by phone that fateful night, but unknown to him a hallacious storm blew down telephone lines, disrupting communications in Minnesota. Not hearing from them, John Wooden opted for the UCLA position.
Red Sanders was a fixture at Vandebilt, and it was deemed a long shot to entice him to come to UCLA. But only a few knew Red wasn't really happy there, feeling he would always be in the shadow of Vandebilt coaching legend, Dan McGugin. When they were hired, the local sports scribes were livid, referring to Sanders as a forty eight year old male Caucasian, and demeaning Wooden's background by asking, "Did anybody ever hear of Indiana State Teachers College"?
Sanders elevated La Brucherie's recruitments immediately, bringing 3 players west with him. Teddy Narleski and Ernie Stockert from New Jersey, and a third whom I have forgotten. Narleski was an undersized but tough dual threat quarterback, and Stockert a 6'6" athletic end. He also replaced a laissez faire team attitude with some southern fried toughness. He turned around LaBrucherie's 3-7 record with a respectable 6-3, letting the teams he lost to feeling that they'd been in a game.
The Daily Worker, a communist front newspaper, published an article that UCLA would no longer be able to recruit the great African American players that elevated UCLA's football fortunes in recent years. Sanders' reply, as nearly as I can paraphrase him went something like this. "I am definitely prejudiced in favor of anyone who can play a good game of football and wants to come to UCLA, regardless of color."
While this is about UCLA, I'm yielding to temptation by bringing in a couple of our competitors. USC with their sense of entitlement, tried to derail the emerging UCLA juggernaut by every means, and this entailed kidnapping Hamilton High quarterback Sam Dimirjian from a UCLA frat house the night before he was due to enroll, and enticing the successor to Jackie Robinson, halfback Addison Hawthorne from Pasadena CC to forsake UCLA for USC. He was the first African American player USC recruited in thirty one years. Both only made cameo appearances for USC, but they succeeded in their intent to keep them away from UCLA. Sanders' UCLA teams still beat USC 4 of the next 5 years. We had something going with Cal and Stanford a little later on, but more on that at another time if they don't kick me off the board first.
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