My Personal Best
Page 6
The Sycamores finished with an 18–8 record, won our conference, and received a postseason tournament invitation to the 1947 NAIB
national play-offs (National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball,
later the NAIA). It was held in Kansas City, Missouri, and drew top teams from all over the country. But it produced an unexpected crisis for me.
The invitation carried with it a prohibition against black players. Like most people, I had been raised to believe segregation was wrong.
“You’re just as good as anybody,” Dad would tell me, “but no better than anyone.” Not better, but just as good—equal. Now as a coach, I was being asked to participate in segregation, a system based on the belief that some people are better than others. That was not what Dad taught me.
THANKS, BUT NO
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Clarence Walker, a student-athlete
from East Chicago, was a ninth or
TION
tenth man on the Sycamore team
and worked hard, attended class,
and was a good fellow. He also was
black. The NAIB wanted me to
tell Clarence to stay home while
his fellow team members—who
were a team in part because of
him—enjoyed the benefits of what
the team had achieved. Clarence’s
THE SYCAMORES, SPEED, AND SEGREGA
reward was to be left behind while
the Sycamores traveled to the big tournament in
Kansas City. How do you do something like this to a
young man? I quietly turned down the invitation.
The following year it happened again. We finished
27–7 and had attracted nationwide attention with our
so-called racehorse style of basketball. When the
invitation from the NAIB arrived, it was difficult to say no quietly—
we would be one of the main attractions in Kansas City.
Nevertheless, I informed the committee that the Sycamores would not attend and gave my reason. They offered a compromise: “Walker can play in the games, but he must not be seen publicly with the team.
He must stay in a private home away from the other players. He must not attend publicity functions with the Sycamores.” I felt this humilia-tion was worse than leaving Clarence behind in Terre Haute. The answer was easy: “No.”
Then I received a call from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) suggesting I reconsider, “If Clarence agrees to the impositions, he will become the first black player ever permitted to play in a national college basketball tournament.” I 79
talked it over with Clarence, who then talked it over with his parents in Chicago. They all agreed that it was worth it, so I accepted the TION
NAIB’s invitation to play in Kansas City starting March 8, 1948. It had some unexpected consequences for his white teammates, who got a taste of Jim Crow.
Traveling by bus through segregated towns on the way to Kansas City meant we encountered some restaurants and diners that wouldn’t serve Clarence, which meant I wouldn’t allow them to serve his teammates. Instead, we stopped at poorly stocked roadside stores where my assistant coach, Ed Powell, would buy some hard rolls and cold cuts.
THE SYCAMORES, SPEED, AND SEGREGA
There were some hungry boys on that bus by the time we got to Kansas City, but they had learned in a small way what it’s like to be considered inferior and undesirable simply because of your skin color. Of course, this was something Clarence already understood.
Other coaches objected to the segregation policy of the tournament just as I did. I wasn’t acting in a vacuum. However, years later an all-black team won the event, and I would guess a few coaches never for-gave me for fielding the first team that included a black student-athlete.
We had a wonderful tournament, but lost in the finals to Louisville 92–70, a well-coached and superior team. For the Sycamore players, fans, and me, however, it had been a very rewarding season both on and off the court.
The success we enjoyed brought offers from other colleges as far away as California. My goal, however, was to get back into the Big Ten where I’d played as a Purdue Boilermaker.
Among others, the Minnesota
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Gophers—a Big Ten team—Boston
University, and the UCLA Bruins
were interested. Minnesota was my
first choice, but I flew out to Califor-
nia on a DC-3 to talk about the
UCLA job. When I returned, I told
MY PERSONAL BEST
Nellie, “We’re going to Minneapolis
if they’ll let me pick my own staff.”
This was the only unresolved issue I
had with the Gophers.
On Monday, Minnesota officials
said they’d let me know by six the
following Saturday night, April
17th. UCLA said they’d call at 7 p.m.
to find out what I was going to do. After several days of discussion Minnesota relented, and on Saturday afternoon they decided I could pick my own staff. At exactly 6 p.m. they picked up the phone to call with their good news. But the line was dead. All telephones lines in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area had been knocked out by a freak April blizzard, and phone service wasn’t restored until 7:15 p.m.
By then I had talked to Wilbur Johns, UCLA’s athletic director, and accepted their offer. “Minnesota never called back,” I told Wilbur.
Fifteen minutes later Nellie answered the phone, and it was Minnesota on the line telling me the job was mine.
It was too late. I had agreed to go to California.
After completing my duties as coach of the Sycamore baseball team that spring, Nellie and I packed up our family for the trip west. One of the things I packed with pride was the Pyramid of Success.
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TION
THE SYCAMORES, SPEED, AND SEGREGA
Success is not something that
others can give to you.
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THE PYRAMID
DEFINING AND ACHIEVING SUCCESS
A s a brand-new teacher in 1932 at Kentucky’s Dayton High School, I was greatly troubled by the pressure parents put on children in my English classes. Anything less than an A or a B was viewed as failure even if the youngster had worked hard—to the best of his or her ability.
In sports, I had learned painfully that sometimes you’re defeated—
outscored—even when you do your best. Twice, even though we gave it all we had, my Martinsville Artesians lost the championship game of the Indiana state high school tournament. And yet we were neither losers nor failures. The Indiana State Sycamores had been outscored by Louisville in the 1948 NAIB championship game and yet had every right to be proud of their performance. At UCLA we were on the short end of the score 148 times, including twice in the final seconds of the Final Four. But on those occasions when the Bruins prepared and played to near their potential, I considered them a success. Was there something more I could require of them? I think not.
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Likewise, I believed any student in my English class who did his or her best but received a B or a C shouldn’t be judged a failure nor made to feel ashamed. Perhaps other students had worked just as hard but were simply better at the subject.
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
I had not always felt this way. At Martinsville High School, my history teacher, Mr. Scheidler, asked students to write an essay on the question, What is success? My answer was the same as everyone else’s in class—namely, fame, fortune,
and power, or an A in Mr.
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Scheidler’s class.
But over the years my feel-
ings changed. As a teacher,
coach, and parent I wanted to
come up with a better way than
/> grades or a winning percentage
MY PERSONAL BEST
for judging success and fail-
ure —something that was both
fair and very productive. I
remembered what Dad had told
me, “Don’t worry about being
better than somebody else, but
never cease trying to be the best
you can be.” At Dayton I began thinking that success should be measured along the lines he described—by one’s effort in the classroom, in sports, or in life.
At about this same time, I read a very insightful poem while I was waiting for a haircut in a Dayton barbershop. It gave me some additional perspective:
At God’s footstool to confess,
A poor soul knelt and bowed his head.
“I failed,” he cried. The Master said,
“Thou didst thy best, that is success.”
That summed it up pretty well for me—do your best, that is success.
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Thus in 1934, after careful consideration for the exact wording, I wrote down my personal definition of success. It is the standard by which I have judged myself and those under my supervision: “Success PYRAMID
is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing THE
you did your best to become the best that you are capable of
becoming.”
I wanted those under my supervision to
Success is peace of mind
understand the highest goal and greatest reward
which is a direct result of
exist in the effort they make to achieve their
self-satisfaction in knowing
potential. This is what Cervantes was getting at
you did your best to become
when he wrote, “The journey is greater than the
the best that you are capable
inn.” For me the “journey” is my effort, and it is
of becoming.
truly much greater and more rewarding than the “inn” provided by fame or fortune, grades or victories. So I began teaching this idea to English students, student-athletes, and parents. It wasn’t easy then, and it’s harder now.
Our society tells us all that matters is, “Who’s number one?” By this standard, most of us are losers. I think the opposite is true: we all have the potential to be winners. We may or may not drive a bigger car, get a better grade, or score more points than someone else. But for me the
“score” that matters most is the one that measures your effort—and ultimately, only you know the score.
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BUILDING THE PYRAMID
Soon enough I realized that I had only addressed half of the issue: defining success. As a teacher I understood the need for showing students exactly how to achieve it. That’s when I began the Pyramid of Success—a combination of personal qualities and values that I believe are intrinsic to making the effort to reach your potential as a person.
MY PERSONAL BEST
I remembered that Coach Curtis had used a drawing of a ladder, where each of its rungs represented something he viewed as important for achievement. Well, I couldn’t use a ladder, but then I realized a pyra-mid was a better device for representing important qualities and char-acteristics, as well as how they fit together and complemented one another.
I worked on it for a period of about fifteen years and didn’t finish until 1948, just before we left Indiana State Teachers College for California and UCLA. Here is the Pyramid of Success that I have taught from that day forward.
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WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
A RUDE AWAKENING
C alifornia was almost frightening to Nell, Nancy, Jimmy, and me. I was a farm boy at heart, and our whole family had loved small-town life in Indiana. Suddenly we were far from friends, family, and loved ones in a city with too much traffic and
not enough weather. Christmas
felt like summer, and there was no
winter, spring, or fall. We had
loved the changing of seasons, but
in California the season never
seemed to change.
Adding to our sense of loneli-
ness and loss came very sad news
one day: my father, Joshua Hugh
Wooden, had passed away—the
man who had given me the com-
pass I followed in life was gone.
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Copyright © 2004 by John Wooden and Steve Jamison. Click here for terms of use.
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A sad day—Mom, my brothers, and I say goodbye to Dad.
Living in Los Angeles was not an easy adjustment. Socially, I often didn’t fit in, because I was a teetotaler who didn’t smoke or swear and on many occasions was made to feel uncomfortable about it. On top of MY PERSONAL BEST
everything else, the traffic scared us. One day while I was driving very cautiously on the Pasadena Freeway, I looked at Nell and said, “What in the world are we doing out here, honey?” She was kind enough not to remind me that it was all my doing.
I was barely able to make a down payment on a modest home in Mar Vista, California, by cashing in my retirement plan at Indiana State Teachers College. I couldn’t, however, keep up the mortgage payments with my $6,500 UCLA salary; I had to find a second job. So during the
summers of my first four years as head coach of the UCLA Bruins, I started work at 6:30 a.m. as a dispatcher for Edgemar Dairy Farms Processing in Venice, California.
For three hours each morning I issued delivery orders to Edgemar truck drivers carrying butter, milk, and eggs to local
stores. After they made their
rounds, I’d call in the next
day’s orders, sweep up the
office, and head to UCLA.
WELCOME TO UCLA
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During the basketball sea-
son, my assistant, Ed Powell,
and I would start the coach-
ing part of my day by filling
up two buckets with hot
water and mopping down
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
the court of the gymnasium.
On my first day of prac-
tice as the new head basket-
ball coach of the UCLA
Bruins—Friday, October 15,
1948—here’s what greeted
me on that freshly mopped
court: a group of young fellows who’d been picked to finish dead last in the Pacific Coast Conference and looked like they should. Many wore old T-shirts from home, mismatched and frayed trunks, and sneakers needing replacement. Even the basketballs were worn out. This was due, in part, to the fact that basketball was a poor cousin to the football program and was funded accordingly.
I’m ashamed to admit I
didn’t believe in our team
at first. I never made that
mistake again.
UCLA’s record the previous
year was 12–13 overall and 3–9 in
the conference (a tie for last place),
and during the preceding two
decades, the Bruins had only four
winning seasons.
Our gymnasium—nicknamed
“B.O. Barn” because of the foul
smell caused by poor ventilation—
was a dingy, crowded place with
only two baskets. Private team
meetings were impossible, and
practices were conducted in the
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noise and commotion of Greco-Roman wrestlers and trampoline gymnasts working out at the same time. It was a raucous hodgepodge not conducive to good teaching.
The fans who showed up for games didn’t even fill the modest roll-out bleachers in the gymnasium. This in spite of the fact that it held less than half as many spectators—about two thousand—as the one at Mar-WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
tinsville High School. In fact, I felt the Artesians c
ould probably have given these players a pretty good scrimmage.
There was no question in my mind that if someone had produced a magical ticket back to Terre Haute, South Bend, or Dayton, Nell and I would have packed up the kids and returned—happily. But to my great astonishment the 1948–49 UCLA Bruins gave me what is perhaps the
single most satisfying year of my entire teaching and coaching career.
The young men also taught me a good lesson.
For whatever reasons—perhaps the losing years—Eddie Sheldrake, George Stanich, Ralph Joeckel, Carl Kraushaar, and the other boys were willing and eager to accept my coaching. They immediately took to the fast-break style I taught—the same one Piggy Lambert had taught me at Purdue.
Our speed caught slower West Coast opponents by surprise—Stanford, California, Washington State, Loyola, University of Southern California (USC), Fresno State, and others. To the amazement of almost everybody, the Bruins won the final 12 games of the regular season and finished the year with a 22–7 record—champions of the 96
Southern Division of the Pacific Coast Conference. Even though we lost to Oregon State in the conference’s title game, it was truly an unforgettable, almost stunning, season.
The team surprised me and we surprised opponents as well as fans, alumni, and the media. While I was pleased at the turnaround, I wasn’t happy that I had been among the skeptics. The shoddy uniforms, the MY PERSONAL BEST
rundown men’s gym, UCLA’s losing reputation, and the opinions of others affected me and lowered my expectations of the boys. It was a betrayal of those who looked to me for leadership.
The lesson I learned in watching these young men work hard and improve through the season was valuable: before casually discounting the potential of any individual or team, give them a chance to succeed—give them your sincere belief and full support. I was slow in
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The Christmas tree in my UCLA office had some unusual “decorations.”
WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
doing that, a cautious doubter. I corrected this mistake by late January of that first season at UCLA and never repeated it again. It served me well in 1964 when UCLA—not even ranked among the top fifty teams in preseason polls—won the NCAA national championship.