Playing for Bruins Was Only Option

When Sidney Wicks was a senior at Hamilton High, solidifying his reputation as one of the most dynamic players in City Section history, the thought of turning down a basketball scholarship to UCLA was all but unimaginable.

John Wooden was the coach, Lew Alcindor the star.

“At that time,” said Wicks, a real estate developer based in Wilmington, N.C., “there was no question that UCLA had fantastic tradition. They had the best coach in college basketball, they had the best team in college basketball. I said to myself, ‘Why would I go anywhere else, if these guys want me?’ ...

“It was so cool to see that type of basketball being played. The way the guys played, it was the way you wanted to play. They didn’t make any mistakes. Everybody did the right thing, everybody said the right thing. They moved the right way, looked the right way. It was so cool. Why would anybody want to go anywhere else?”

The only glitch was, Wicks didn’t have the grades. Almost any other school would have taken him, he said, and he briefly considered California and Utah State, whose coach, Dale Brown, would later tutor Shaquille O’Neal at Louisiana State.

Still, Wicks’ heart was set on UCLA, even if going there meant first spending a year at Santa Monica College.

He enrolled at Santa Monica, transferred as a sophomore and played on three national championship teams at UCLA. As a junior and senior, he was the Bruins’ leading scorer and rebounder, bridging the gap between Alcindor and Bill Walton.

“The bad part about it was, you never had enough tickets,” Wicks said of his college experience, which preceded 10 NBA seasons. “That was the only bad thing about playing at home. There was no other thing that was bad.”

-- Jerry Crowe