College Career
He attended college at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he finished as the school's all-time leading scorer and played on the school's first two national championship teams in 1964 and 1965. He was a two-time All-America and the Helms Foundation’s “Co-Player of the Year” (along with Princeton’s Bill Bradley) in 1965.
In the 1965 NCAA championship game, he scored a record 42 points as UCLA beat favored Michigan. This record stood until 1973 when Bill Walton scored 44 in the finals vs. Memphis State, and through 2007 it is still the 2nd highest total scored by a player in the championship game. While at UCLA, Goodrich was also a member of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity.
Goodrich has said that he had originally wanted to attend the University of Southern California (USC), where his father had once been a star player, but that coach John Wooden of UCLA ultimately showed a great deal more interest in Goodrich than did USC. Like many Division I colleges, USC was wary of Goodrich's short stature. He was only 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) his junior year in high school and even at his ultimate height of 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m), he was short by college basketball standards. He was called Stumpy by his teammates.
A tenacious and fiery competitor, Gail Goodrich used intelligent ball-handling skills and excellent court vision to lead two of the most successful teams in basketball history. The left-handed Junior guard was the team’s main scorer. He finished with an average of 21.5 points per game and guided the 1963-64 UCLA Bruins to a 30-0 record. For the first time ever, a UCLA team won all 30 of its games en route to the school’s first NCAA title. Goodrich and Keith Erickson were the only returning starters from the team that won UCLA's first national title in 1964. As a senior the Bruins repeated as NCAA champions as Goodrich scored 24.6 points a game. At UCLA Goodrich helped compile a 78-11 three-year record. In both of those championship seasons, Goodrich was named to the NCAA Final Four All-Tournament team and he finished as UCLA's all-time leading scorer (1,690 points).
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