The Blizzard of Westwood

Post date: Nov 27, 2020 7:22:48 PM

April, 1948.  John Wooden, a basketball coach at Indiana Teacher’s College, was a candidate for the head coach position of the University of Minnesota basketball team. He was also a candidate for the same job at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA).  Wooden and his wife Nellie were both from Indiana and she preferred to stay in the Midwest. Because of that, the job at Minnesota seemed like a better fit.  But when Wooden was offered the Gopher's job, there was a catch.  Athletic Director Frank McCormick asked Wooden if he would keep current head coach Dave MacMillan as an assistant, because MacMillan was still under contract.  Wooden however, wanted to bring his own assistants.  McCormick was unsure he could agree to that (and the salaries involved) without getting approval from University officials. The two agreed that McCormick would seek permission and then call Wooden back. 

But McCormick didn’t call back by the agreed upon time.  Thinking that Minnesota had changed their mind, Wooden agreed to take the job at UCLA.  When McCormick finally did call, Wooden told him he had already come to an agreement with UCLA, and couldn’t go back on his word.  By all accounts, Wooden was a man of great integrity.   

Minnesota then hired Osborne “Ozzie” Cowles as their next coach.  Cowles had coached Michigan to the conference championship the previous season.

John Wooden went on to become the greatest coach in the history of college basketball and built UCLA into a dynasty.  “The Wizard of Westwood” as he would come to be known, coached at UCLA for 28 years, compiling a 620-147 record. His teams won 10 National championships, the most of any coach in NCAA history. (Second place is currently occupied by Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski at 5).  Wooden coached players like Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Walton and Gail Goodrich.

Ozzie Cowles coached at Minnesota for 11 seasons, compiling a 147-93 record, but never won a conference championship.  During the 28 seasons Wooden was at UCLA, Minnesota went though 5 different head coaches (Cowles, John Kundla, Bill Fitch, George Hanson, and Bill Musselman) and won the conference championship only once (1972).  That was the same season they made their only NCAA tournament appearance of that era, winning a game against Marquette.  That victory, however, would be vacated due to scandal and an NCAA investigation into the basketball program that led to Musselman fleeing to take an ABA job with the San Diego Sails.

Minnesota hiring Wooden could quite possibly have changed all that history as well as the future of the basketball program.  So why didn’t McCormick return the phone call to Wooden?  The story, as legend goes, is that a "torrential snowstorm had shut down phone lines in Minneapolis" and prevented McCormick from getting the call through to Wooden.  

Winters in Minnesota are difficult.  Only the heartiest can handle all the snow and sub-zero temperatures.  Minnesotan's are all too familiar with snowstorms canceling school, ruining Halloween or deflating the Metrodome (5 times!).

Aw shucks!  A snowstorm prevented the greatest basketball coach of all time from coming here and taking us to the promised land.  It's just our luck, right?  As we like to say, "That's so Minnesota Sports."   

The problem is, “The Blizzard” part of the story isn’t true.  Let me rephrase that. It’s probably not true.  

Here’s what we can prove.

-Wooden was a candidate for the job at Minnesota.

-Wooden was announced as the UCLA coach on April 20, 1948  [6]. 

That’s it.  The rest of the story has no substantiated documentation.  

Fast forward to April 2019.  I had recently written the “Minnesota Sports Disappointment Calendar” - a list of all the heartbreaking events that have happened in Minnesota sports.  KFAN's Dan Barreiro began to use the list on his radio show “Bumper to Bumper”, calling it the “Calendar of Calamity”.  As it started to become a regular bit, I'd often receive suggestions for events to add to the Calendar.  One day, a coworker suggested “The Blizzard” story about Minnesota missing out on Wooden.  I looked it up and found a Daily Bruin article claiming that the day “The Blizzard” caused the missed phone call was April 17th, 1948.  [10]  So, I went with that date on the Calendar. 

When April 17th came around, Barreiro, a former ink-stained wretch (his term for a newspaper man), couldn’t corroborate the date in the Daily Bruin article. He also couldn't find any weather data to back up the snowstorm being on April 17th, 1948, and reached out to me to question the date.  

This taught me a very valuable lesson about sources and I learned to be more cautious about trusting the internet.  I began using newspaper archives to validate information and regularly incorporated the actual newspaper clips in the daily Calamity Calendar posting.  

But I often thought back to "The Blizzard" story.  It bothered me that I hadn't found the correct date.  I felt like I needed to track it down, and eventually began to research it further. 

The Daily Bruin article I originally cited said the missed phone call was on April 17, 1948, which was a Saturday.  In Wooden’s book, A Game Plan for Life, he says the missed call was on a Sunday (not a Saturday) AND said that “The Blizzard” occurred in the Twin Cities.  I researched Minneapolis weather data for a two-week period surrounding that weekend, there were no blizzards or snow storms. Temperatures that weekend were a low of 38 and a high of 72.  Temperatures that are definitely not conducive to snow, let alone a blizzard.  Below are links to the Minneapolis Tribune weather maps from April 16-20, 1948.

April 16      April 17       April 18      April 19       April 20

Regardless of which day the missed phone call was, we know Wooden's decision was made that weekend of the 17th/18th.  

Prior to that weekend, Wooden had met with UCLA athletic director Wilbur Johns in L.A. on April 12. The next day the LA times reported the meeting took place and that Wooden was a candidate for the UCLA job. [11]  On April 13th, the Minneapolis Tribune reported that McCormick and Wooden were meeting in Chicago that upcoming weekend to discuss the Minnesota job. [12]  Therefore, if Wooden signed his UCLA contract on the 20th, the missed phone call had to happen Saturday the 17th  or Sunday the 18th after the Chicago meeting.   

In a 2010 Star Tribune article, Sid Hartman wrote that “The Blizzard” was in South Dakota and that McCormick had been traveling to visit a friend when the phone lines went down. [9]  I researched the weather information in South Dakota newspapers for that same weekend.  Again, no blizzards.  I did find a note in several papers that Watertown, South Dakota received 7.5” of snow on the evening of April 12/13th[15] .  But the snow melted right away and there was no mention of any downed phone lines.  That was also the same day Wooden was in LA meeting with Johns, and 4 days before the alleged missed phone call.  I also found an article that snow had knocked out phone lines in Deadwood, South Dakota on April 25th, but that was 5 days after Wooden had signed his contract with UCLA. [13] According to that story, most of those lines were repaired within a day. 

If McCormick went to visit a friend in South Dakota, it had to be after the Chicago meeting with Wooden.  If that's true, and that friend lived near Watertown, AND snow had knocked down the phone lines on the 12th/13th (which there is no documentation of), its not very likely those phone lines would still be down 4-5 days later.  Even if they were, (lots of if's here) wouldn't McCormick have known that before going there?  Its not like he was already there and was stuck when the storm hit.  His visit would have been well after the storm.  The whole scenario just isn't very likely.     

If the Wooden blizzard story isn't true, where did it originate?  It seems  that the story first appears in print around the time that Wooden was planning to retire in 1975.  (Note: The newspapers site doesn’t have access to every newspaper in the country.  In other words, there may have been information in other newspapers that I don’t have access to, but that seems unlikely).  When you find articles about “The Blizzard” from that time, they all have the exact same story.  Almost word-for-word in some cases, as they probably all used the same wire story as a source.  Since then, the story has become canon and part of the Wooden legend.  Its been told and retold so many times, its just accepted as true.  When Wooden died in 2010, the story resurfaced and Sports Illustrated even did a famous photo showing the juxtaposition of Wooden in a UCLA warmup and what he would’ve looked like in a Minnesota Warmup. [14]

Why would someone make this up?  WARNING:  Speculation ahead.  If the story originated when Wooden was about to retire, it would make sense that media were digging back through his life attempting to document and celebrate his legendary career.  It’s likely that they came across the “almost” Minnesota story.  Could “The Blizzard” story have been conjured up to protect Minnesota or someone from the University from looking bad?  April snowstorms in Minnesota are fairly common.  What better excuse than our "Minnesota weather" to blame it on?  Seems like an easy target and prevents anyone from being responsible for one of the biggest HR disasters in Minnesota sports history.

It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth because there isn’t anyone we can ask about it.  Sid Hartman was the only person who was around and involved in Minnesota athletics at the time.  Unfortunately, he recently passed away at the age of 100, after a long and legendary career covering Minnesota sports. 

In addition to the mystery of the origins of “The Blizzard”, the Wooden story is also one of the greatest “what ifs” in Minnesota sports.  There’s no way of knowing what would have happened had Wooden come to Minnesota.  We can’t assume Minnesota would’ve been as successful as UCLA was.  Let’s be honest, it's still Minnesota sports.  The Star Tribune headline for Sid's article said , "Wooden missed chance to coach at U."  That might be wishful thinking. According to another one of my coworkers, “That snowstorm is probably the best thing to ever happen to John Wooden.”

In case you were wondering if Ozzie Cowles, (the guy Minnesota hired after the Wooden miss), kept Dave MacMillan as an assistant coach like Wooden was asked to do?  He didn’t.  MacMillan retired in June of 1948 (a few months after “The Blizzard”) and was “given a full-time appointment at the University in another capacity.” 

Sources

1. Wooden, John and Yaeger, Don. “A Game Plan for Life”

2. Hartman, Sid. “Vancisin, Herkal in as Aids” The Minneapolis Tribune (Newspapers.com) June 30, 1948

3. Gordon, Dick. “’Felt I Belonged Here, ‘ Explains Cowles; Ambition Realized” The Minneapolis Tribune (Newspapers.com) May 15, 1948

4. Gordon, Dick. “Crisler: Will Not Stand in Cowles’ Way” The Minneapolis Tribune (Newspapers.com) April 28, 1948

5. Hartman, Sid with Rippel, Joel A. “Sid Hartman’s Great Minnesota Sports Moments”

6. Unnamed Writer. “Wooden to UCLA; Off Minnesota List” The Minneapolis Star (Newspapers.com) April 20, 1948

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/46974988/ 

7. Perry, Dwight. “Just Like the Lakers, Minnesota lost John Wooden to Los Angeles” The Seattle Times (SeattleTimes.com) October 8, 2009.

8. Harvey, Randy. “Thanks to a Blizzard, Gophers Missed a Wizard” The Los Angeles Times (Newspapers.com) March 24, 1997

9. Hartman, Sid. “Wooden missed chance to coach at U” Star Tribune (Newspapers.com) June 6, 2010

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/48905208/  Star Tribune 6-6-10

10. Fahy, Claire. “Remembering John Wooden’s legacy” Daily Bruin (DailyBruin.com) February 25, 2015

https://dailybruin.com/2015/02/25/remembering-john-woodens-legacy/

11. Unnamed Writer. "New Candidate Enters Bruin Cage Picture" LA Times (Newspapers.com) April 13, 1948

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75636244/

12. Unnamed Writer. "Indiana Coach in "U" Picture " Minneapolis Tribune (Newspapers.com) April 13, 1948

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75634831/ 

13. Unnamed Writer. "Telephone Service Cut By Storm" Lead Daily Call (Newspapers.com) April 26, 1948

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75764069/

14. Sports Illustrated

https://assets.si.com/images/john-wooden-what-if_0.jpg

15. Unknown AP writer. "Heavy Snow Falls In Eastern End of S.D." Rapid City Journal (Newspapers.com) April 13, 1948

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75764385/

16. Newspapers.com

17. College Basketball Reference