If you followed UCLA basketball during the 1970’s, part of the John Wooden years, you will remember Dave Meyers.

Dave Meyers, the star player on John Wooden’s 10th and final national championship basketball team at UCLA, died Friday at his home in Temecula after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 62.

Meyers played on two Bruins national title teams, as a reserve in 1973 and as the star player in ’75.

After that ’75 season, the 6-foot-8 Meyers was named a consensus All-American and became the second pick in the NBA draft. He was taken by the Lakers. David Thompson from North Carolina State was the first pick.

Nineteen days after the NBA draft, Meyers was part of perhaps the biggest trade in league history. He was sent by the Lakers, along with Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters and Elmore Smith, to the Milwaukee Bucks for Walt Wesley and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Meyers, who was born in San Diego in 1953, was one of 11 children of Bob and Pat Meyers. Bob was a basketball star at Marquette University in Milwaukee in the mid-1940s, but eventually settled his family in Southern California. […]

Meyers was also known as a private person, who shocked the sports world in 1980 — five years into a productive and lucrative pro career with the Bucks — by announcing that he was leaving the NBA to spend more time with his family.

“Remember, David played for an unbelievable teacher at UCLA,” Meyers Drysdale said, referring to Wooden. “He was taught more about life than about basketball.”

Meyers returned to California, and after a stint in sales for Motorola received his teaching certificate and taught elementary school — mostly fourth and sixth grade — for more than 30 years. He began teaching in Yorba Linda and later taught in Temecula.

Dave Meyers was one year ahead of me at Sonora High School, La Habra, California. He led our basketball team to CIF championship in 1971. He was always a gentle soul and will be sorely missed.