PORTLAND, Oregon– I just finished the book “Once A Coach ‘Always a Coach– The Life Journey of Thomas Errol Wasdin” by Peter Kerasotis
Wasdin was an assistant coach at Jacksonville during the Artis Gilmore era when the Dolphins reached the NCAA championship game against mighty UCLA in 1970.
UCLA was considered the Establishment back then, a storied, old school program coached by John Wooden who would go on to win 10 straight national championships between 1964 and 1975, creating college basketball’s only real dynasty. Jacksonville was a relatively new NCAA member that was an NAIA school just five years earlier and a junior college 15 years before that. The arrival of the 7-3 Gilmore and guard Rex Morgan changed everything and the Dolphins arrived and was a surprise guest in the Final Four,.which was held at Cole Field at the University of Maryland, after knocking off top-ranked Kentucky, 106-100, in the Midwest Regionals. Then they beat St. Bonaventure’s to reach the championship game to set up a matchup with UCLA in the first year of the post-Kareem Abdul Jabbar era..
UCLA found a way to defeat Jacksonville, 60-69, in that game, but Wasdin raises some serious allegations in his book. He seriously questions the officiating in that game, the free throw differential and the lack of goal ending calls against UCLA’s best big man, 6-9 Sidney Wicks when he was defending Gilmore’s elevated hook shot.
“We were told the Establishment wasn’t going t let us win,’ Wasdin said in the book. “That was the message we got, that hey weren;t gong to let us win and our options were that we could take it like gentlemen and not complain of come across like sour grapes.
‘The message was that we weren’t’t going to win because the official weren’t going to let it.”
It is a strong accusation and. Kerasotis tried to contract both officials Lenny Wirtz and Bobby Scott, but both had passed away when he was researching the book. The only thing we have left are numbers and opinions from the members from both teams.
In the history of the NCAA championship game, which dates from 1939 through 2013, Kertasotis writes, there have never been a larger margin between the numbers of foul shots taken by team teams in 1970. UCLA shot 35. Jacksonville,the bigger team, shot just 8. And Gilmore and Morgan shot just one field goal between him .Gilmore was 1 for 1. Morgan was never fouled. And yet both Gilmore and Morgan fouled out, something that never happened to Morgan from the time he played grass roots basketball.
Gilmore took 29 shots on Wicks, who was six inches shorter and guarding him from behind, yet drew just one foul.
It led the Jacksonville coaches and players to seriously question whether there was a level paying field.
Jacksonville, which was the first team to average more than 100 points in a season, averaged 29.3 free throws a game.
“It sounds like sour grapes and I know that,” Morgan said in the book. “But when you see the stats, it doesn’t look all that straight and level.”
There was also questions about the fact that Wicks blocked several of Gilmore’s hook shots.
“It was goal tending,” Morgan said. “Artis was shooting down at the basket and there’s no way that can be a blocked shot. But they were letting it happen, and as we were getting back on defense we were looking at the official like, “Why aren’t you call that? And they wee looking back at us and then at the other official as if to say, “Its not my call.”
“The goaltending was just absolutely gross,” Jacksonville team doctor Dr. Duane Bork told Kerasotis. “It was so obvious. It’s a shame Artis couldn’t let one go and slam it home he would have broken Sidney Wicks hand. That’s just close Wicks’ hand was to the rim. There were times when the back of his wrist was in contact with the rim.”
The outcome might have been different if dunking was legal in college basketball at the time.
Former former UCLA assistant and Louisville head coach Denny Crum was adamant in his defense of Wicks, saying he never thought if even heard it even suggested that any of Wick’s block shots on Gilmore were goal tending. Wicks was not quoted in the book but he did tell Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated, who recently wrote a biography of Wooden called, “A Coach’s Life,”‘ that indeed several of the blocks should have been called goal tends.
Some 20 years after the game was entered into the history books, Gilmore and the late Vaughn Wedeking were asked to help raise money for cancer research by former UCLA starting guard John Vallely, who in 1991 lost his daughter to pediatric cancer at age 12. The two were invited to dinner at the home of Andrew Hill, another former UCLA guard, the subject casually came up.
“Right at the start of dinner.” Gilmore recalled. “John Vallely told us “We looked at the film and those were not blocked shots. We just wanted to say that right now.”
Years later, Vallely, when asked about that by Kerasotis, he admitted, “Some of these blocks were goal tending. I’m sure Artis was thrown off balance by some of the calls that weren’t made.”
This was my first Final Four. There is no known full audio tape of the game, just choppy black and white footage with spotty sound. But the way the game was called still raises some eye brows among an entire generation of Jacksonville faithful, who still feel they had the best team that year.
