He kept his eye on the ball
Wooden A Coach’s Life Seth Davis Times Books: 608 pp, $35.00
In July 2009, a year before his death at age 99, John Wooden was named by the Sporting News as the top coach in the history of American sports. Not many argued with the selection. Over his 29-year career he won 664 of 826 games for a winning percentage of .804. From 1964 through 1975 his UCLA Bruins won 10 NCAA championships, and UCLA’s games drew higher TV ratings than most NBA games.
Yet Wooden, arguably the most influential coach in basketball history, has never had a definitive biography until now. In “Wooden: A Coach’s Life,” Seth Davis, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and studio analyst for CBS Sports, has written a virtual cutaway view of the history of basketball in the form of a biography. Davis takes us on bus rides over snow-covered roads to Friday-night high school games, puts us in the frantic whirl of semi-pro basketball barnstorming in the Midwest and, finally, gives us a courtside seat in the pressure cooker of big-time college basketball.
John Robert Wooden was born in 1910 in Martinsville, Ind. His first love was baseball, but he was swept up in Indiana’s passion for “basket ball,” as it was called. He practiced with a ball made of old socks stitched together by his mother, shooting at a basket hung from a hayloft.
John drew his inspiration from basketball’s inventor, Dr. James Naismith, a proponent of “muscular Christianity.” Naismith, in turn, inf luenced Indiana’s coaches, including Ward “Piggy” Lambert, who coached Wooden at Purdue.
After a college playing career that would earn him a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame — he was the first man inducted as both a player and coach — Wooden pursued a master’s degree while teaching high school English and coaching basketball. He made extra bucks barnstorming with his basketball pals in small towns. In these years Wooden’s famous Pyramid of Success, emphasizing sacrifice, dedication and hard work, took shape. It would remain part of his curriculum, even into his retirement.
In 1948, a blizzard prevented a job offer from the University of Minnesota from getting to Wooden. He and his wife, Nell, decided to take the head coaching job at UCLA. In 1947 the Bruins had finished 12-13; in Wooden’s first season they soared to 22-7, the best record in school history.
California was something of a disappointment compared to Indiana, where, as Davis writes, “Basketball was religion. Here it was a diversion.” But by the end of the 1960s, UCLA had become the center of the college basketball world, with Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope often in attendance. Wooden’s greatest players, such as Lew Alcindor (later Kareem AbdulJabbar) and Bill Walton, became household names.
Wooden always insisted that he was not motivated by money. For his first four years, to make ends meet he worked mornings in the San Fernando Valley as a dispatcher for a dairy company. Even after winning championships he supplemented his income coaching youth basketball camps. For years his salary at UCLA was around $6,000, and even at the peak of his success he didn’t top $35,000.
“A Coach’s Life” is all the more compelling because it isn’t a hagiography. The coach saw himself as an idealist; Davis knows better. “Wooden could talk all he wanted to his players about his definition of success, about how their only worry should be whether they were maximizing their potential … [but] his players saw the deeper truth. This was one mean English teacher, and he wanted to win very badly.” Wooden once said that he wanted his players “to know that I was very interested in them as a person.” Lucius Allen disagreed, remarking of his former coach, “When we were there I did not like that man very much.”
Still, no one ever doubted Wooden’s ability to motivate. In his later years he achieved the status of life coach and continued, mailing thousands of copies of his Pyramid of Success to fans.
Davis sums up his account of an epic life in his superb biography: “To many of Wooden’s players, he didn’t even start making sense till long after they had left his classroom.” Even Allen conceded that “It took me three years to realize what a gift I got from that man. I was using the Pyramid of Success and not even realizing it.”