It was a beautiful sunny day at The Wedge in Newport Beach, Calif. in August 1966. Yet, below the clear skies was a rumbling growing beneath the ocean waters. The stirring in the water turned into waves that ranged from 10, 15 to 17 feet and on. They smacked against the shore, and there were no timeouts.

It wasn’t long before Bruce Chapman, 18, was swept into the surf. 

“The coach picked me up in a new Chrysler convertible,” said Chapman, former University of Nevada, Las Vegas basketball player.      

It was the spring of 1968.

Chapman had just finished his sophomore year at Orange Coast College, a junior college in Orange County, Calif., where he averaged 20 points per game as a six-foot-eight “power forward” – a term barely used in Chapman’s time.  Coached under Bob Wetzel, all eight players on the team earned full scholarships to major colleges after their two years. Chapman was one of the leading scorers for OCC along with John Vallely, who later became a University of California, Los Angeles Bruin and NBA player. 

Chapman shooting a jump shot while competing in a game with Orange Coast College (photo courtesy of Bruce Chapman).

Out of Costa Mesa High School, Chapman received 10 to 15 scholarship offers from schools. Following his years at OCC, it was an entirely different ball game. His game matured and as a result he was offered a total of over $125,000 in scholarships from schools across the country, including every four-year college on the West Coast except for UCLA and Long Beach State. At the time, Long Beach was coached by Jerry Tarkanian, future UNLV head coach (1973-1992).

From 1965-1970, Rolland Todd, a former NBA and ABA basketball player, was the head coach for UNLV, which was known as Nevada Southern University at the time. Todd said he first saw Chapman play at OCC, and his shot and size was what caught his attention. He felt that his skills would fit well with the way the Rebels played.

From the airport, Chapman and Todd headed to the Sahara Hotel in the fire engine red convertible. As Todd drove into the hotel that was located on The Strip there was a crowd of 40 to 50 people waiting by the entrance.

“Whoa, slow down. Careful,” Chapman said to Todd.

The group of people gathered around the car once it pulled into the driveway. There were also TV cameras there; something that he had never seen before.

“What’s going on?” Chapman said.

“Well this is for you,” Todd replied.

Chapman, 20, was dumbfounded. With his small suitcase in hand, he stepped out of the car.

He was greeted by the general manager of the Sahara Hotel and by Herbert “Herb” McDonald, president of Del Webb Corporation.

The GM told Chapman that Las Vegas was his place for the weekend.  

A group of people followed Chapman, Todd, McDonald and the GM into the elevator in the hotel. They didn’t even have elevators back in Chapman’s hometown, Newport Beach, Calif. – the buildings there weren’t more than three stories high. While in the elevator, the GM handed Chapman a key that gave him access to anything in the hotel he desired.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I like that kind of deal,’” Chapman said.

Once the doors to the elevator opened on the top floor, the GM instructed him to go down the hallway. The rooms had double doors and a nameplate at the top of each set of doors. Chapman walked down the hall and read “Don Rickles.” He walked a little further and saw the name “Johnny Carson.” He passed more famed names and, once he reached the last set of double doors, he saw “Bruce Chapman.”

“I walked into the room, and I had never seen anything like this,” Chapman said.

The room was adorned with a canopy bed and a balcony overlooking the hotel’s pool.

That night, one of the boosters had a banquet for a team that was graduating and Chapman was introduced to the hundreds of people in attendance. After, the booster took Chapman to the Flamingo Hotel and asked him if he wanted to see Wayne Newton perform.

Chapman didn’t know who Newton was, but the booster encouraged him to go. The two passed the people waiting in the long line for the showroom to the front of the stage in a large booth. The show got under way, and Newton took the stage.

“‘We have a very special person here we’d like to introduce,’” Chapman recalled the singer’s words. “‘He’s a potential basketball player that’s going to be coming here.’ Wayne Newton introduced me in front of the crowd.”

However, his visit wasn’t all about entertainment. He went through a practice with the basketball players that were already attending the school.

“I always left a lot of the recruiting to my players that were already there,” Todd said. “So they had a lot to say about who we recruited.”

Todd purposefully had recruits spend more time with the current players than with him because he said it was vital that the players had chemistry with their future teammates. If Chapman chose to become a Rebel, he would be entering a team that’s now in the UNLV hall of fame. 

Chapman knew there was going to be high surfs on that hot August day in 1966. That’s why he was there. What he didn’t know was how these waves were going to affect him, even if he had surfed in these conditions before.

Whenever there’s going to be high surfs at The Wedge it’s announced. Spectators come to watch the few that dare to go surfing against the waves that could be 15 to over 20 feet tall.

Next to the entrance to Newport Harbor is The Wedge. There’s a long jetty made up of large rocks that allow the boats to come and go safely. It also keeps the water in the harbor deep for the boats. This jetty to Newport Harbor has allowed sand to build up around what’s known as The Wedge.

“The waves at The Wedge are average in height for much of the year, waist to just overhead high,” said Jim Turner, a lifeguard battalion chief who has been working at The Wedge for 41 years. “During Southern Pacific winter storms and hurricanes off the west coast of Mexico the waves jump to 10 to 15 feet, and even 20 feet plus on big swells.”

He said these large surfs occur only a few times during the summer, and sometimes they don’t arise to those heights at all. Since these waves break so close to shore, The Wedge is able to attract large crowds.

A part of the large crowd that The Wedge attracts. It was a sunny day with high surfs like the ones Chapman was caught in (photo courtesy of Jim Turner).

“It’s fun to be able to watch people bodysurf so much closer than normal,” Turner said. “At other sections of Orange County beaches sometimes the waves break quite a ways further out to sea.”

Chapman was bodysurfing against the large waves, but the last wave he surfed left him lying on the sand on his stomach. There was an enormous wave close behind him and only building in size. He said the waves were probably 17 to 18 feet high that day.

And then it hit him. 

There were other offers from colleges that were trying to lure Chapman to their school. These offers went far beyond money. Promises of cars, a guaranteed degree, a modeling contract and more were all being thrown at him.

After seven weekends of travelling, and still a stack of plane tickets remaining, he knew the tiny school surrounded by dirt streets that made it seem like The Strip was a mile away, was the right choice.

“I wanted to get out of the state of California and Las Vegas was only 260 miles from the beach so I figured this might not be a bad deal to go to Vegas,” Chapman said.

Because Las Vegas was a small city, with almost 100,000 people, some fame came with the territory of being a Rebel basketball player. On Chapman’s first day in town, he went to the Safeway on Maryland Parkway. Before he left the store, he signed nine autographs.

In his Las Vegas home, Chapman was looking through the album of UNLV newspaper clippings and photos that his father had put together.

Nevada Southern, which was renamed the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Chapman’s senior year, ran the style of basketball that he enjoyed playing.

“The team we played on together at Orange Coast, we were always scoring anywhere from 90 to 100 points,” said Tom Read, Chapman’s teammate from OCC. “We just got up and ran. We liked to run and gun.”

Under Coach Todd, the Rebels ran a motion offense. He described motion as a “pass and cut kind of game” that was always “running” even if there wasn’t a shot clock in the pros or college basketball. He expressed that all the teams he’d been involved with, as a player and a coach, were always fast.

“You can go right into it,” Todd said. “If we didn’t get a shot up on the initial break, then we were right into the offense.”

Todd felt that the quick play was a benefit to Chapman because he was a “long ball shooter.” As one of the guards came bolting down the court on a fast break, Chapman was ready, and usually open, on the perimeter for the shot.

Unfortunately for Chapman, and all the other shooters that thrived from beyond the arc, there was no three-point shot.

“Had the three point shot been in place he would have scored more points,” Read said. “He would have been a really good tall outside player in today’s game. He was really good at creating space with the defense and getting his shot up.”

Read added that he doesn’t remember Chapman ever getting blocked. Yet, he thought that Chapman had an unorthodox shot because he shot with one hand, and didn't really use his guide hand. Todd had a different opinion though. He said that he has a friend who analyzes shooting and gathered film on some of the NBA’s greatest shooters.

“What he discovered was that they all looked the same when they released the ball,” Todd said. “So, Bruce’s organizing of the shot may have looked different, but his release was classic. His release was just like everybody else’s. It was really good. So I never thought of it being that much different because one, I’m looking at the release and second, I’m looking at the result.”

Since 1983, the Rebels have been playing in the Thomas & Mack Center, but before the Rebels played in The Rotunda of the Las Vegas Convention Center. From the outside, The Rotunda looked like a “large silver flying saucer.”

Inside the “large silver flying saucer,” Chapman was impressed by the theater type seating that surrounded the court; a major upgrade from the bench seats at Orange Coast. The seats in The Rotunda may have been nice, but the Rebels’ victories that ran the opponent out of the arena kept those 6,000 seats filled every game.

With a large and loud support system in the crowd and a team that didn’t stop moving until the clock hit zero, the Rebels averaged 100 points a game.

“We’re kind of considered the original Running Rebels,” Chapman said. “The team that really got it started running wise was the team we played on.”

The Rebels finished the 1968-1969 season with a 21-7 record. This was the first year that the Rebels were playing larger schools as well. 

In his junior year, Chapman averaged 20 points per game. The other four players that accompanied Chapman in the starting lineup were center Cliff Findlay, point guard Curtis Watson, shooting guard Tom Watkins and Dean Lyons, a deaf-mute six-foot-seven small forward.

Chapman knew how to speak sign language after playing basketball with Lyons, which ended up being beneficial throughout his life.

Sometimes they would speak sign language to each other when they were lined up on the free throw line to try to throw off the other team. The remarks they would sign to one another mostly poked fun at the opponent such as, “look at the haircut on that guy.” 

Chapman’s closest friends on the team were Findlay, who was his roommate for the road games and is now the CEO of Findlay Automotive, and Watson, a former State Farm insurance agent who passed away two years ago at the age of 64 due to pancreatic cancer. In 2010, Watson was ranked by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as No. 58 out of the top 100 players in UNLV history; Chapman was ranked at No. 54.

Chapman had high praises for both of the guards on his team, Watson and Watkins. In his eyes they were “the two best guards in the country.” He described them as very unselfish, which was seen in the stats. Two players were averaging 20 points per game and another two were averaging 19 points per game.

Read described Chapman as a “jokester” off the court, but on the court he was a competitor. His mental and physical toughness helped him win the Nevada Athlete of the Year award in 1969. That same year, Nevada Southern University became the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and they went from Division II basketball to Division I. Watson and Lyons also left the team that year, and they were replaced with Otis Allison and Lou Small. They finished the 1969-1970 season in the new conference 17-9 overall, and Chapman finished his senior year with 17 points per game.

This was Todd’s final year with the Rebels as well. He went on to become the first coach for the Portland Trailblazers for two years. Now, he is the founder and CEO of Todd Coaching, LLC since 1986.

Following Chapman’s final season at UNLV, he felt like he had to find a job. He found one during spring break at Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in North Las Vegas.  

His time there came to an abrupt end after four days because of a phone call that changed everything.

When the surfs are predicted to be high or the currents will be dangerous to a large percentage of the public, it’s called a “Red Flag Day.” And on that day in 1966, a red flag hung from the lifeguard tower.

During the summer in the United States, it’s winter in the southern hemisphere. The winter storms or hurricanes brewing below the equator cause the 15 to 20 feet surfs. Wind is what causes waves as well, so Turner said that a large wind vent could trigger the huge surfs.

As the first wave smashed down on Chapman, his back instantly broke. He started screaming and flapping his arms because that first hard-hitting wave caused him to be taken further out to face the surfs head on. By the second and third waves his neck was broken, and he was blind and paralyzed from the waist down.

His heart was pounding. He was terrified. And each time he popped up from the aggressive chokehold of the waves, he screamed in the hopes that someone would hear.