UCLA's basketball dynasty began its demise 30 years ago in Oregon

On the day of the biggest basketball game of his life, Doug Oxsen rose very early. What else could he do? It was Feb. 15, 1974, and the nation was in the middle of a gasoline shortage. If you wanted to keep driving, you needed to have your car in line at the filling station before dawn, because the day's allotment would be gone in a couple of hours.

Oxsen's girlfriend needed gas, and he dutifully volunteered. He was up at 4:30 a.m. for the mile drive from the Campus Villa apartments in Corvallis, Ore., down to Fourth Avenue and a tedious start to his day. His coach at Oregon State, Ralph Miller, never knew.

But then, we never knew, either. We didn't know what a drop-dead shocker of a weekend it would be, one described in grandiloquent fashion 30 years later by Bill Walton: "When the infidels from the frontier stole our posterity and our place in history. We have never recovered."

It was a time of skepticism, when the hard-edged '60s had given way to a mistrust of monoliths. The divisive war effort in Vietnam had long since been exposed as a fraud. In six months, President Nixon would resign in disgrace over the Watergate burglary.

If anything seemed inviolate, it was the greatest dynasty in sports history. Under coach John Wooden, the UCLA men's basketball program had begun winning national championships in 1964, and, save for an injury-decimated 1965-66 season, hadn't stopped. The Bruins had won titles with Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton playing center, but they also won them with faceless Steve Patterson in the middle and with no starter taller than 6 feet 5.

Thirty years ago this weekend, they came to the state of Oregon with a 50-game conference winning streak that included sweeping the 14-game league schedule three straight seasons. By way of comparison, since the Pac-8 Conference was expanded to 10 teams 25 years ago, nobody has negotiated one 18-game conference season unbeaten.

In the previous 127 weeks of The Associated Press poll, the Bruins had been top-ranked 110 times. You had to retreat eight seasons to find them losing back-to-back games.

The indomitable Walton was a senior who had lost one college game. That was four weeks earlier, when second-ranked Notre Dame closed with a rush to end UCLA's NCAA-record 88-game winning streak, 71-70. With ruthless precision seven days later, the Bruins dismantled the Irish by 19 points in Los Angeles and returned to their No. 1 perch.

Then they came to the Willamette Valley.

A few hours after Oxsen filled his girlfriend's tank with gas, there was a luncheon at the Holiday Inn in Eugene, 40 miles away, featuring the coaches from UCLA, USC, Oregon and Oregon State. Afterward, Chuck Niemi, the sports publicist at Oregon, needed a ride back to his office.

"I've just got this feeling," Niemi said. "UCLA's going to lose two this weekend."

Yeah, right.

The magic of mystique

To fully comprehend what faced UCLA opponents, you have to understand the mystique. It preceded UCLA into the gym, it enshrouded every pass and shot, it seemed to ensure that any act putting the Bruins at risk was doomed to go begging. Before you could begin to think about beating UCLA, you had to deal with the mystique.

"It kind of made you wonder," says Paul Miller, an Oregon State forward. "Did you even belong on the same court with them?"

Conversely, the long history of success made for supreme confidence among the Bruins.

"We didn't ever think we could lose a game," says Pete Trgovich, a UCLA guard. "Think about what we're talking about right now: We're talking about two wins that happened 30 years ago."

Oregon State felt it had chipped at the mystique just five days earlier, when it lost to UCLA 80-75 in Los Angeles.

"I think we felt pretty confident we could play with them," says Oxsen, a 6-foot-10 center. "Usually you'd go into a game in that period, and they're 10 points ahead, just because of the intimidation factor."

Then there was UCLA's vaunted 2-2-1 full-court press, the signature of the program. As a kid back home in San Luis Obispo, Calif., Miller would pick it up on KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, in the days when he dreamed about playing for UCLA.

"The Bruin blitz," Miller calls it. "They'd put that press on, and all of a sudden, it would be 18-2."

These Bruins would station the guards, Trgovich and Tommy Curtis, in the backcourt, along with forwards Dave Meyers and Keith Wilkes. If the opposition managed to advance the ball successfully, the damage would be minimal, because the mobile, 6-foot-10 Walton was guarding the basket.

To Ralph Miller, that press had always been a red herring. He had learned his basketball under the fabled Phog Allen at Kansas, and Miller himself was an early practitioner of full-court pressure. While Wooden was the unquestioned lord of the game in Westwood, Miller labored well in backwater places, and it rankled him that the press, his press, was always attached to Wooden.

"I think Ralph had a tremendous amount of competitive juices against Coach Wooden," said Paul Miller.

On this weekend, that press would turn on UCLA. It would mock the Bruins.

With freshman George Tucker and senior Ron Jones handling the ball, Oregon State had little trouble with the press, making only eight turnovers. And when the Bruins committed a third defender to that twosome, the Beavers found the gangly, 6-foot-8 Miller alone on the wing. He hit eight of 10 attempts for 16 points to lead all scorers.

Oxsen, meanwhile, adjusted his defense against Walton who, only 11 months earlier, had turned in the definitive performance in an NCAA championship game, hitting 21 of 22 shots for 44 points to thrash Memphis State. In Los Angeles, Oxsen remembers Walton having "danced on my face" for 31 points as he tried to deny Walton from the high side.

This time, Oxsen was determined to play behind Walton, making him shoot over his defense. Walton took only nine shots and had 15 points and 14 rebounds, but those were numbers you could live with.

UCLA led at halftime, 34-27, but the Beavers had warmed to the game. They were being outshot and outrebounded, but the Bruins uncharacteristically spread 21 turnovers among themselves during the game, and Oregon State took a 57-50 lead down to the final, chaotic moments. The Beavers made several foolish errors but UCLA responded in kind.

With less than a minute left and a full house at Gill Coliseum at full throat, Oxsen took a 15-foot shot from the baseline and missed everything. OSU led by three points, and there was no shot clock in those days. The dynasty would do things like that to you.

"I just remember coming over there, and Ralph looking at me like, 'Have you totally lost your brain?' " says Oxsen, who scored 12 points. "It was not a bad shot, just a bad shot at the time."

It was left to Tucker to down four free throws in the last 25 seconds for a 61-57 victory. During a dead-ball break, the din swirled around Walton and the finality of a conference loss hit home. He turned to Oxsen graciously and said, "Doug, I know I'm not going to be able to tell you this later, but I thought you played a really good game, and your team deserved to win."

The party erupted in Corvallis. The good times had long since been flowing in the home of Paul Miller's parents in San Luis Obispo, where they had called neighbors over, watched the game and toasted the night over and over. Their son called home, wished his mom, Jeanne, a happy birthday, chatted up the game with others, and the revelry continued.

Jeanne Miller awoke the next morning, turned to her husband hazily and said, "Why didn't Paul call last night?"

'A do-or-die day'

Back at the Holiday Inn in Eugene, the mood was grim. The hotel where Oregon stayed on home weekends housed a somber, soul-searching group of Ducks. They were stunned by the news of UCLA's defeat at Oregon State, but mostly, they were consumed by their own struggles.

Thirteenth-ranked USC had blown out Oregon 76-61, a fourth straight defeat for Dick Harter's third-year program. A year after Ralph Miller took over at Oregon State, Harter had brought from Pennsylvania a bruising, in-your-face style of play, and this was the first real crisis.

"It became not as much beating UCLA as, this was going to be a turning point for the season and program," says Bruce Coldren, an Oregon forward. "The coaches made it sound as if it were a do-or-die day."

Harter called Coldren, a sophomore, to tell him he was starting that day. It was time to turn the program over to the younger guys.

The reckoning would come quickly. These were the days of Friday-Saturday scheduling, so by 10 p.m. Friday night, as the Bruins were trying to absorb their upset, they were only 17 hours from a televised Saturday afternoon date at McArthur Court.

Conventional wisdom was that an angry UCLA team would torch Oregon, but in reality, the Bruins may not have had enough time to reconcile the impact of a first Pac-8 loss in almost four years.

"We needed to probably think about it," said Trgovich. "You keep thinking, you're UCLA. You're not going to lose two in a row."

Against Oregon, the Bruins must have thought they had stumbled into a film session; there were eerie similarities to the night before. UCLA pressed guards Ronnie Lee and Mark Barwig, and Oregon center Gerald Willett would hang back to see if Lee needed a screen to free himself.

When a third Bruins defender ran at Lee, he fired an outlet pass to Willett, who charged up the floor with Coldren and Greg Ballard on repeated 3-on-2 breaks. The happy beneficiary of the overplay was Coldren, who set up time and again on the wing, firing in 12 jumpers on 14 attempts. In effect, he was Paul Miller, who had grown up about 100 miles from Coldren in California.

"I remember from practice that week, I was going to have some open 15-, 18-, 19-foot shots," said Coldren.

Willett, a hometown kid who wrung the most from limited skills, fronted Walton, and Oregon got excellent weakside help. Walton played 40 minutes and got only five shots, scoring 11 points and committing seven of UCLA's 17 turnovers. Oregon had only 10, giving the Bruins an unheard-of 20-turnover deficit for the weekend.

Oregon led 32-26 at halftime. The Bruins took a brief lead in the second half, but Oregon regained it and used a delay game to put away a 56-51 victory.

Willett remembers during a free throw a sight he will never forget: Bill Walton shaking, physically shaking.

"I'd never seen Walton ever get nervous," Willett says. "He was always cool and calm, telling people what to do."

Something else shook, too. The scoreboard at aging Mac Court was bouncing on its moorings to a deafening drumbeat of stomping and screaming. In a huddle near the end, on the weekend of the (double) shot heard 'round college basketball, Oregon players couldn't hear their coach's instructions.

Pages of history

At the New York City offices of Sports Illustrated, there was a mad scramble. Mighty UCLA had lost two straight, and editors rushed to redo the magazine. The Ducks went to dinner that night at Eugene Country Club, and Coldren recalls sitting at a table, being interviewed over the phone by basketball writer Curry Kirkpatrick.

A few days later, in the Oregon locker room, Harter hid the magazine behind his back and said, "My God, one of you made the cover." Players began dogging Coldren, but when Harter revealed it, there was Gerald Willett splashed on America's most famous sports publication with the heading "UCLA's Lost Weekend."

Inside was a story written by Eugene resident Kenny Moore that assessed UCLA's sudden fragility while focusing on the details of Oregon's victory. It quoted UCLA's Greg Lee as questioning his diminished playing time.

Thirty years later, it still grates on OSU players and fans that Sports Illustrated robbed them of their moment in the sun. But about once a month, Willett will receive a copy of that SI in the mail, and he'll autograph it and return it to the sender.

The epilogue: UCLA would go on to lose a late lead and fall to David Thompson's North Carolina State team in the national semifinals in Greensboro, marking its first season without the national title since 1966.

It was clear from those fateful 21 hours in Oregon that the dynasty was teetering. In 1975, with Walton now gone, the Bruins managed one last, brave campaign to a national title in San Diego. But between Final Four victories over Louisville and Kentucky, Wooden announced his retirement.

The program would never be the same. Gene Bartow began a succession of coaches frazzled by Wooden's daunting legacy. A few years later, there would be Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and ESPN and a national explosion of competitive programs. Since then, only Duke, in 1991 and 1992, has been able to win consecutive national titles.

Time has not only bronzed the magnificence of those UCLA teams, it has served to petrify the losses, making them the occasion for blurry TV clips and player reunions. Think of it like this: UCLA's failed weekend in Oregon provided one-sixth of the program's defeats in a stretch of nine seasons in which the Bruins went 259-12.

Walton, who would go on to cult-hero status in the very same state with the Portland Trail Blazers, blames himself. He speaks of the weekend like a chunk of his very being was forever forfeited.

"It was a disastrous period for me in my life," he says. "The loss at Notre Dame, to the lost weekend in Oregon — where I could have sworn the Willamette River was running north to south — to the March 23 fiasco down in Greensboro.

"You ask yourself the question: 'How can this be? What is going on here? How can we let that slip?'

"We should have won them all. I'm devastated by the loss. Driven to this very day by it."

Three decades have helped Marques Johnson, then an ultra-gifted freshman, to put that team in perspective. Various forces were gnawing at the Bruins: the pressure of their continued winning and a group of seniors that was increasingly aware of the world around them, resulting in a subtle fragmenting of team purpose.

"Walton was always challenging Coach Wooden," Johnson says.

Walton, he recalls, arranged for the entire team to undergo sessions in transcendental meditation from a guru in Westwood.

"I was a 17-year-old freshman from Crenshaw High School," Johnson says, recalling the training. "We had to bring two pieces of fruit and a handkerchief. Why, I have no idea."

Every individual had his own secret mantra, or so they were told. Johnson remembers one night staring at the ceiling and telling his road roommate, freshman Richard Washington, "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

"You first."

They had the same mantra, Johnson says. And so did the other freshmen.

As a curious season wore on, the Bruins would pass time on bus rides singing along with somebody's taped Jimi Hendrix version of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone." In its words, they found an ironic description of themselves.

You used to laugh about

Everybody that was hangin' out

Now you don't talk so loud

Now you don't seem so proud

About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel?

And when that last line came around, the Bruins would belt it out louder.

Coldren, meanwhile, has a different memory. The happy hubbub of McArthur Court is still now after that afternoon's frenzy, and Walton is shuffling silently toward a door that would lead him to the team bus, his ever-present backpack slung over his shoulders.

A dynasty had slipped from that backpack, never to be found.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com