Their names alone invoke greatness: Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich, Sidney Wicks and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
John Wooden, too.
It’s almost unfathomable, given what would transpire over the course of the 1960s, that UCLA was merely a middling college basketball program at the dawn of the decade. Wooden had taken the Bruins to three NCAA Tournaments during the ‘50s, but the program was stuck out on the West Coast and largely out of the national consciousness until the 1961-62 season.
That’s when Hazzard and Co. took eventual national champion Cincinnati down to the wire in a 72-70 loss in the Final Four.
Two years later, the Bruins would win the first of back-to-back national championships. Two years after them, and led by a 7-foot-2 phenom from New York named Lew Alcindor — later Abdul-Jabbar — they would win the first of seven in a row, a streak of pure dominance that wrapped up the 1960s and carried right into the ’70s.
At one point, the Bruins had a 38-game NCAA Tournament winning streak, went to 10 consecutive Final Fours and two of their four undefeated seasons came in the 1960s. The would eventually spend 134 consecutive weeks ranked No. 1.
Not surprisingly, when The Associated Press compiled its weekly polls to celebrate the AP Top 25’s 75th anniversary — Kentucky was crowned the all-time No. 1 — the Bruins were the best of the ’60s. Schools were awarded points based on how they fared on each ballot, just as they are in weekly rankings, and UCLA had 2,394. Here are the other top schools:
Adolph Rupp never won another national championship after 1958, but he kept the Wildcats competing for them throughout the 1960s. They went to the Elite Eight four times and lost to the Bruins in the 1966 title game.
Long before Mike Krzyzewski arrived in Durham, Vic Bubas had the Blue Devils humming. They went to the Final Four three times in a four-year span, though they never won a championship. They lost to UCLA in the 1965 title game.
Dean Smith brought what he learned under Phog Allen at Kansas to Chapel Hill in 1958, became the Tar Heels’ head coach in 1961 and spent the next 36 years achieving greatness. Smith ended the 1960s with three straight trips to the Final Four.
The Bearcats began the decade with back-to-back national championships under Ed Jucker, and nearly made it a three-peat before losing to Loyola in overtime in the 1963 title game. But they would only reach the NCAA tourney once more in the ’60s.
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