Great story on “clean” Gene Bartow.

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1090484/index.htm

UCLA Bruins (Pac 8) (1975–1977)
1975-1976 UCLA 28-4 13-1 1st NCAA 3rd Place
1976-1977 UCLA 24-5 11-3 1st NCAA Sweet 16

Would have been great if he would have stayed for 20 years instead of 2.

JD Morgan handpicked Bartow over former Wooden assistant, then Louisville coach whose name escapes me.

On his own merits, Bartow could indeed coach and fared relatively well, if only he be not judged, unfortunately, on the same level as the Wizard he succeeded. As such, Westwood expected everything he did on the court to replicate Wooden’s, down to the caliber of recruits he brought in. He tried mightily, and would have pleased the Pauley fans’ impossible wishes had he not run into the juggernaults of Bobby Knight’s rugged, physically brutal Hoosiers, hellbent on avenging their narrow loss to Kentucky, which subsequently succumbed to Wooden’s Bruins team in the final of that year.

That was Knight’s intensely jaded perspective then. According to him, had Scott May, father of North Carolina’s Sean May, and Hoosiers’ starting forward not injuring his wrist at the eve of the game against Kentucky, Indiana would have faced Wooden and prevailed.

As fate would have it, Bartow opened the season as the coach of the defending national champions against Indiana in a nationally televised exhibition game in St. Louis. UCLA, under its new coach, suffered a rare double digit loss. It only portended the worst to come, despite an impressive regular season records because Bartow ran into Knight’s undefeated team again in the final four at Philadelphia. With virtually the same starting lineup, minus Dave Meyers, from the championship year previously, Bartow again fared no better than another blowout to the savagely physical Hoosiers and its maniacally demeanored coach on the sideline.

The mild mannered Bartow and his talented, finesse sqaud never had any solution to counter Hoosiers’ brute strengths underneath the baskets.

He never recovered. His quick exit, followed by Larry Brown’s hiring surprised many. This time, Brown almost did it too. Again, it was the Louisville coach whom many thought Morgan should have tapped to succeed Wooden that stood in Brown’s way.

I agree with that thinking too. Who knows how many more banners Pauley would have hoisted before Harrick scored his.

There was some talk, hearsay should I put it, to the effect that Denny Crum’s then divorced status ran contray to Morgan’s conservative, almost puritanical Christian philosophy. Pundits then, as I recall now, claimed it being the factor that tipped the scale for first Bartow, then Cunningham and Brown.

But UCLA reached into the well once too many times, when they hired Farmer, then Hazzard, all insiders, following Brown’s departure. Were it Denny since post Wooden day one, you and I would have been looking at a few more banners high up Pauley’s rafters in the last two decades. No questions about it.

Certain fanatics taunted Bartow even in person when they happened to see him stop by some place for coffee and bagel. Bun in all fairness, though, he wore his emotions on his sleeves more than he should, given his status as sucessor to Wooden.

Even when NC State overcame a ten or twelve point UCLA advantage in overtime, and upset the heavily favored team, Wooden sat stoically, hardly betraying any roiling emotions inside him. For Bartow, whenever TV camera focused on him as his team trailed, something seldom happened during the Wooden years, too often I saw a bespectacled man, wrecked with anxieties, tapping fingers on his thighs, desperate for answers. He coached much better than the impressions TV viewers had of him, of course. His winning percentages in those two years still rank near the top of all coaches after Wooden, but in my opinon, he never survived those two ugly, bookend losses to Indiana all within the same season. So when Richard Washington, Oregon’s National Player of the Year, recruited by Wooden and star forward of his last championship team, bitterly complained, perhaps out of frustrations after the second blowout loss to Indiana, about the team strategy in the locker room and declared that he would go hardship, it more or less numbered Bartow’s days in Westwood.

Idaho State’s upset next year was the final nail.

What baffles me still was Hazzard’s appointment after Farmer’s dismal experience