The timing couldn't have been any better than to grow up 15 miles from UCLA's campus and to be a high school basketball star in the winter of 1963-64.
The Bruins won their first NCAA title that season, 30-0, and if you were Don Saffer, averaging 26.1 points for Westchester High School, you could look into the bleachers some nights and see UCLA's John Wooden or USC's Forrest Twogood and sometimes a coach from Stanford and Cal.
Summoned to Wooden's small office in the days before Pauley Pavilion, Saffer remembers how proud he was to go home and tell his working-class parents that he had been offered a scholarship.
"The meeting was typical of coach Wooden," says Saffer, a retired Tucson educator. "Low key. No pressure and no promises."
Unburdened by a UCLA ultimatum, Saffer chose to take a final recruiting visit, to Cal, which happened to coincide with UCLA's annual visit to the Bears' Harmon Gym. Saffer spent halftime in Cal's locker room, listening as coach Rene Herrerias gave final instructions. By happenstance, when the teams returned to the court, Saffer literally bumped into Wooden and the UCLA coaching staff.
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Saffer, 64, laughs at the memory: "A few days later, my high school coach gave me a message from coach Wooden. It was basically, 'Are you going to be a Bruin or not?'"
He would.
"I wanted to play for the best and UCLA was the best," Saffer says. "But I had no idea of just how good we would be and that it would last for a lifetime."
By the time Saffer graduated from UCLA in the spring of 1969, the Bruins had won four more national championships, Pauley Pavilion had been built and Wooden had become a national legend.
And yet if you ask Saffer about memories of his former coach, who died Friday at 99, he talks not about the championships or the big games. He talks about respect and gratitude.
"Did you know I wore jersey No. 25?" Saffer asks. "That was Gail Goodrich's number. If anyone should have had his number retired, it was Gail. As a freshman, I would sit and watch the varsity practice and I would just marvel. Sometimes Gail would shoot 20 shots and make 19 of them. He was an amazing talent."
After Goodrich led UCLA to back-to-back NCAA titles, Saffer somewhat uncomfortably inherited No. 25.
"Coach Wooden treated everyone the same," Saffer says. "There was no star system. He expected us to be gentlemen and treat our opponents with respect.
"When we won the national championship my sophomore year, 1967, there was no big celebration. Coach Wooden wasn't a celebrator. We had a low-key gathering in a hotel suite in Louisville. Coach was a gentleman."
Here's what Saffer means by "gentleman": In 1970, my old school, Utah State, reached the Elite Eight, matched against Wooden and the Bruins in Seattle. Because I was the team manager and a reporter for the student newspaper, I made the NCAA tournament trip.
UCLA was bigger than life in those days, and nobody had a larger presence than Wooden. After the Bruins pulled away to beat the Aggies 101-79, I was commiserating in the losing locker room. Wooden walked in.
No one said a word.
He approached our star player, Nate Williams, a future NBA standout who had injured his ankle in the first half and was unable to play much. Everyone in the locker room watched.
"Young man," Wooden said, "don't let this get you down. You will have better days and so will your teammates. Congratulations."
Everyone in uniform and even those carrying water bottles lined up to shake John Wooden's hand. It almost felt like we had won.
Ten years ago, Saffer received a call from a former UCLA teammate, Mike Warren, informing him of a fundraising endeavor that would endow college scholarships for Wooden's grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Wooden's career ended long before college basketball coaches were paid millions of dollars. He had not had enough money to contribute financially to the education of his extended family. The coach told Warren, privately, that it was the one unfinished aspects of his life.
A few months later, Saffer and about 300 people connected to the UCLA basketball family traveled to the San Fernando Valley to honor Wooden and present him with the scholarship money.
Says Saffer: "At the end of the evening, Mike Warren asked coach Wooden if he felt he had left anything unfinished. Was there anything else we could do for him?
"Coach stood up, very sincere, and said, 'I am still working on one goal. I am trying to be a better human being.' He was 89. There wasn't a dry eye in the room."
