The sky opened at 5:05 on that Thursday morning and started dumping great gobs of snow onto Chicago. Very quickly it paralyzed the city, created chaos on the roads and caused O’Hare to shut down. And, by midnight, it had done nothing less than set a record.
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In just 19 hours, the weather bureau would report, 16.4 inches of the stuff had fallen.
But as it fell on that January day in 1967, neither John Wooden nor any member of his UCLA basketball team knew what was happening, or just what rigors they would soon endure. They simply boarded Trans World Airlines’ Flight 22, departed Los Angeles as scheduled and settled in for their long journey to Chicago and their games at the Stadium against Loyola and Illinois.
They would not learn of the storm until they were well on their way, and then suddenly they found themselves headed for St. Louis. When they landed there, they climbed into cabs and headed for the train station.
“Not intentionally,” Wooden now remembers with a soft chuckle, “we got into taxis, and some went to one train depot, and others went to another one. The players I was traveling with, we arrived in Chicago later than the other group.”
“We got lost and everything,” remembers Lynn Shackelford, a starting forward on that team. “What was normally a four-hour trip took eight, and then when we got to the train station (in Chicago), we had no way of getting to the hotel. You saw a car about once every 15 minutes, so we just walked (to the Bismarck).”
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He first brought a UCLA team to the Stadium in 1961 to play Loyola three years before he won his first national championship, many years before he was certified as a legend. But John Wooden is quick to point out that was not the first time he coached in that storied playpen. He had done that when he was at Indiana State, which he had brought in to face Loyola way back in 1948.
“I even have some memories of being there before the (the Second World) war,” he then says. “When did it open?”
March of 1929, he is told.
“That’s right then. Growing up (in Martinsville, Ind.), we used to come in for hockey games.”
He would come in often during his years at UCLA, appearing nine times at the Stadium between 1961 and 1974. Loyola, Illinois, Northwestern, Bradley, Iowa-his Bruins faced each of them there, losing only to Loyola in overtime in 1966 and regularly performing in front of huge crowds. The 18,667 who watched them beat Loyola in 1969 is still the 19th largest crowd to watch any UCLA team play.
When UCLA defeated Loyola there in 1973, it tied San Francisco’s record 60-game winning streak. After they defeated Iowa there a year later, the Bruins headed for Notre Dame and the end of their own record 88-game winning streak.
“More than anything else,” explains Wooden, “I remember Arthur Morse (who then promoted basketball for the Stadium). He’d contacted me when I was at Indiana State, and I knew other people, too. (Former De Paul great) George Mikan. (Former Loyola coach) George Ireland. Then after I got to UCLA, Morse invited me to come a number of times.
“The main reason I accepted is I liked to always have a tough non-conference schedule, and I liked tough competition on the road. I also liked to come to the Midwest and to Chicago Stadium. It was like home to me. It wasn’t that there was a special feeling playing there. I would be untruthful if I said that to you. I just liked to play Midwest teams on the road.”
“But,” remembers Shackelford, “I remember coach Wooden said something before the game about how Ned Irish had done this (put on college basketball double-headers) years before at Madison Square Garden, and how he thought it was wonderful they were doing it in Chicago and how much he enjoyed being part of it.”
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UCLA was scheduled to meet Loyola on Friday and Illinois on Saturday, but the storm wiped out the first night and caused each game to be pushed back a day. There would be just one lane open to the Stadium even on Saturday as Wooden remembers it, but still 17,024 turned out to watch his Bruins face the Ramblers.
Yet this was not surprising, not to Wooden or his players, for that season marked the collegiate debut of the 7-foot-1-inch Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
He was a phenomenon then, a sophomore sensation (freshman were not then eligible), the centerpiece of a group that would finish 30-0 and as national champions.
“Every place we went, people were anxious to see him,” remembers Wooden. “It was the same thing years before when Wilt Chamberlain went to Kansas. The media, everybody was primed up for him.”
“It was more a curiosity, more like a circus,” says Shackelford. “No one had ever seen anyone as big as Kareem, or someone that big so agile. Our pregame drills were worth the price of admission. We were like the Globetrotters. It wasn’t whether we were going to win or lose. It was how much were we going to win by.”
Yet here an aura of uncertainty surrounded the Bruins as they warmed up, an aura that had been created by the death threat Alcindor had received even before he had left Los Angeles. Now a plainclothes policeman was shadowing him constantly, standing outside his room at the Bismarck, traveling with him on the bus, sitting on the UCLA bench during the games. “It wasn’t that serious,” remembers Wooden.
Still, remembers Shackelford, “the guys said later that every time the crowd stood up to cheer, the policeman stood up, too. He was all nervous and everything.”
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That threat, it turned out, would be the last bit of drama to color this weekend, which UCLA went on to dominate. On Saturday, and despite their recent travails, the Bruins defeated Loyola 82-67 behind Alcindor’s 35 points and 20 rebounds. On Sunday, before a modest crowd of 10,025, he encored with 45 points and 12 rebounds as UCLA routed Illinois 120-82.
“The games,” remembers Shackelford, “weren’t anything memorable.”
But what about the Stadium, John Wooden is finally asked. Any sadness to know it’s being ripped down?
“I think I’m a little too realistic for that. At the same time, there is a little nostalgia. You hate to see a building like that come down.
“It’s like in my hometown of Martinsville. I played there in an arena that held 5,200, even though we were a town at the time of only 4,700. Now they have a new building, and even though it’s named after me and located on a street named after me, it replaced the gym where I played.”
He chuckles here, and in a bow to the Chicago Stadium and all playpens like it, finally says this: “I prefer my gym.”