Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Later that summer, Wooden received an even more lucrative offer from a barnstorming team called the New York Celtics, which had played in the American Basketball League before the ABL folded in 1931. The Celtics were willing to pay Wooden $5,000 for just one year. That was a lot of money for anybody during the Great Depression, much less someone who grew up as poor as Wooden did. However, when Wooden approached Lambert for his blessing, he was subjected to another Socratic grilling. “What did you come to college for?” Lambert asked.

  To get an education, Wooden replied.

  “Do you think you got it?”

  Yes.

  “Would you like to use it?”

  Yes.

  “So how would this be using it?”

  Wooden turned the Celtics down. “He told me without telling me,” he said of Lambert. “That was his way with so many things.”

  It’s not that Wooden couldn’t have used the money. Lord knows, he didn’t have much. But he was bred to believe that there was something inherently unclean about using Naismith’s game as a tool of avarice. That’s not why the game was conceived, and it’s not how Wooden was raised. Both his father and his coach believed the best path to a well-lived life was to get an education and use it. Wooden may have been itching to play ball and earn some dough, but the last thing he wanted to do was let either man down.

  The best way for Johnny to honor both Hugh and Piggy was to become an English teacher and basketball coach. That, however, put Wooden in conflict with another cherished male role model, Dr. Creek, who suggested to Wooden that he remain at Purdue to study as a fellow in the English department. Lambert told Wooden that he could coach Purdue’s freshman basketball team as well, but Creek was against that idea. “He wasn’t much for athletics at all. He thought my thinking about going into teaching to become a coach was kind of foolish,” Wooden said. Stuck between two mentors whom he greatly admired, Wooden preferred not to make the choice. He told Dr. Creek no thanks.

  Wooden finally got an offer he could accept from a high school in Dayton, Kentucky. The barnstorming he did in the spring and summer of 1932 had left him with $909.05 deposited at the Martinsville First Bank and Trust. It was a nifty little sum, and Wooden planned to use that money to buy a new car. He had ordered a Plymouth for around $500, and the car was scheduled to be delivered in the first week of August. However, when Wooden went to the bank to take out his money, he found that First Bank and Trust had gone under. Wooden was completely wiped out. The only money he had to his name was the $2 bill his father had given him when he graduated from Centerton’s grade school.

  Wooden would never be the same after seeing his life savings disappear in a Martinsville flash. Like many people who lived through the Depression, he emerged from that experience with a deep-seated suspicion that nothing in life was totally safe, that even those entities with the word “trust” in their name can prove devastatingly unreliable. It imbued in Wooden a streak of insecurity that would forever be a part of his makeup.

  After he lost his life savings, Wooden told Nellie he thought they should postpone the wedding, but the father of her good friend Mary Schnaiter said he would lend Wooden $200 to get him and Nellie through their first few weeks of married life. And so, on August 8, 1932, just a few days after the Martinsville bank went belly-up, Johnny Wooden and Nellie Riley were married at a small church in Indianapolis. Wooden’s brother Cat drove up with his wife to stand as witnesses. After the ceremony, the newlyweds celebrated over dinner at the Bamboo Inn. As it happened, Wooden’s favorite singing group, the Mills Brothers, were giving their first-ever performance in Indianapolis that evening at the Circle Theater. Johnny and Nellie, who had made their chastity vow four years before as high school sweethearts, took in the show, and prepared to begin their new life together.

  The show dragged on for several hours. Many years later, Wooden had a chance to meet the Mills Brothers in Los Angeles. He told them that he and his new bride had watched the group play on their wedding night. “You guys sang so long, I thought you would never stop,” Wooden teased. It may have been the closest he ever came to telling a dirty joke.

  6

  An English Teacher

  There would be no time for a honeymoon. At the crack of dawn on August 9, 1932, the day after the wedding, John Wooden hopped the interurban railroad from Indianapolis to Martinsville to meet Piggy Lambert. The two of them then drove to Vincennes, Indiana, where Wooden assisted Lambert at a coaching clinic. Having just incurred a $200 debt, Wooden was happy to make a few bucks, but he and his new bride were still pretty much broke. A few days later, Nellie’s sister, Audrey, and her husband, Ray, drove the newlyweds to Dayton, Kentucky, to Wooden’s new job. Everything John and Nellie owned—which wasn’t much—was piled into the back of the car. “We went down there with nothing, no place to stay or anything,” Wooden said. When they arrived, the superintendent who hired Wooden, a fellow Purdue graduate named Olin W. Davis, brought Johnny and Nellie to their new apartment, on the top level of a duplex.

  Dayton was a small hamlet across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. The high school had only about three hundred students, and the Wadsworth Watch Case Company and the Perry and Derrick paint factory were the only industries in town. The high school had a decent football program, but basketball lagged far behind. Wooden was hired to change that, which meant that the regular varsity coach, Willard Bass, was demoted to the girls’ team.

  Wooden had many responsibilities. On top of coaching football, basketball, track, and baseball, he was the athletic director and curriculum adviser for all physical education classes in grades one through twelve. He also taught five English classes a day. The only part that concerned him was coaching football. Martinsville High did not have a football team, and aside from the couple of days he practiced with the squad at Purdue, Wooden had no experience in the sport. Before he left Purdue, he spent some time picking the brain of Noble Kizer, the Boilermakers’ football coach, as well as that of his assistant. It helped, but Wooden knew he was woefully unprepared. And there were few things Wooden disliked more than being unprepared.

  The temperament that served Wooden so well as an athlete turned out to be in short supply when he had a whistle around his neck. It got the better of him one day in practice when he was giving a hard time to a big, rumbling lineman. The player got tired of hearing Wooden chastising him for his lack of effort, so he went right up to the head coach, who was several inches shorter, and dared Wooden to make him listen. “You’re not man enough to do it,” he said.

  That was the wrong thing to say to Johnny Wooden.

  It only took Wooden a few seconds to flatten the kid with his fists. Wooden suffered no repercussions for getting physical with a player—it was hardly unusual in those days—but it helped him realize the job was not for him, even though his team lost only one game. When the season ended, he asked the superintendent to relieve him of his football duties.

  Basketball didn’t go much better. Most of the students who came out for the team were football players moonlighting during the winter. Moreover, Wooden was asking them to execute a completely different style than the one they had been accustomed to under Bass. That meant a lot more running.

  He conducted his practices with a firm hand. Sometimes he even carried a paddle in that hand, perhaps because he remembered how his grade school principal, Earl Warriner, had used the instrument to good effect the day Wooden and his friends refused to sing the national anthem. “We had some real loafers on our team,” said Bill Smith, who was a captain of that first basketball team in Dayton. “He wanted us to go full blast up and down the court. He’d stand there with a paddle and speed ’em up.” Charles Carmichael, a six-foot-two forward on that team, added, “If you missed an easy layup, he’d be right there to crack you. While he was doing it, the other guys would be standing there laughing at the guy getting paddled.”

  Wooden never used profanity with his players, and he rarely invoked his own pedigree. “He didn’t s
ay anything about his reputation as a player. He didn’t boost himself at all to us,” said Ben Stull, a sophomore on Wooden’s first team. Then again, he didn’t have to. When Wooden didn’t like what his players were doing, he simply showed them what he wanted. Sometimes he would grab a couple of scrubs and challenge the starters to a scrimmage. “Fastest dribbler I’ve ever seen, bar none. Nobody could beat him to the basket,” Smith said. During these workouts, Wooden would encourage the players to do whatever they wanted to stop him. “He wanted us to rough him up,” one player said. “But if you got near him, you wound up on the floor. And we were all pretty good-sized guys, too.”

  “He was trying to teach the type of basketball that wouldn’t be popular for thirty years,” Smith said. “That’s why we didn’t win very many games. We just couldn’t grasp his fast-breaking style.”

  As the years went on, Wooden would often wince as he reflected on this period of his life. “Having been a player of outstanding reputation, perhaps I expected too much,” he said more than thirty years later. “The worst fault of a beginning coach is he expects too much and doesn’t have enough patience.”

  At the end of one particularly heated game against Newport High School, the opposing coach, Lou Foster, accused Wooden of teaching “dirty basketball.” Wooden, enraged, lunged at him. One eyewitness recalled decades later that as some players and bystanders restrained Wooden, the Dayton sheriff quipped, “Aww, turn him loose.” The witness continued, “Johnny was so furious that it would have been the wrong thing to turn him loose. Foster would have been no match for him.”

  Wooden tried to encourage his players not to be concerned with winning and losing, but he got discouraged as the losses piled up. The most stinging defeat came when he took his team to play at Martinsville. “That was the first time I was ever in a big basketball court like that,” Stull said. The local fans gave Wooden a glorious ovation. Then they cheered as Glenn Curtis led their Artesians to a 27–17 victory. Dayton finished the season with just 6 wins to 11 losses. It was the first losing basketball season of Wooden’s life.

  Despite the setbacks, the players couldn’t help but appreciate Wooden’s dedication. His office in the corner of the gymnasium was a hub of activity as students came by to shoot the breeze. “He was a very considerate man … and he’d treat you like a real person. He was such a good Christian man,” Carmichael said. Wooden also made sure his players were home and resting the night before a game. “He laid down a set of rules and expected the guys to follow it. He used to walk the streets after 9 p.m. to see if any guys were out,” said Bob Williams, who was a student manager. “You either produced for him or you didn’t. It was as simple as that.” Another former player, Howard Fahrubel, recalled that Wooden would host the players at his house the night before a game to be sure they weren’t up late carousing. “He’d invite us for supper and we stayed the rest of the evening,” Fahrubel said.

  Wooden brought the same devotion to the classroom. Since he had to cover material within a week or two that he had studied for entire semesters at Purdue, he had to be thoroughly organized and prepared for each class. Students would long remember his meticulous, elegant penmanship. Though his reputation as a former collegiate basketball star overshadowed everything he did, Wooden thought of himself as an English teacher who happened to coach, not the other way around.

  There was, however, one aspect to teaching that bothered him—the parents. Wooden noticed early on that they seemed overly concerned with their children’s grades. To Wooden, this seemed counterproductive, immoral even. It reminded him of fans and sportswriters who judged a team’s performance solely by the numbers on the scoreboard. Wooden knew from his playing experience that sometimes you can play very well and still lose; other times you can play poorly and win. To one student, a B is a great achievement; to another, it should be a disappointment. As an athlete, Wooden preferred to be judged solely on his effort. He wondered why parents weren’t doing the same when it came to their own children.

  As he ruminated on this problem, he thought foremost of his father, who had encouraged his four sons to be satisfied with their best effort even if it yielded an unsatisfying outcome. Wooden also reflected on an assignment he had once been given by his high school history teacher in Martinsville. The teacher had asked his students to come up with their own personal definition of success. Like most of his classmates, Wooden’s answer centered on material gains, but now his definition was evolving.

  While waiting to get his hair cut one day, Wooden came across a brief poem whose author was anonymous. It read: “Before God’s footstool to confess / A poor soul knelt and bowed his head / ‘I failed,’ he wailed. The Master said, / ‘Thou did thy best, that is success.’” Thus inspired, Wooden took another stab at his old teacher’s assignment. The revised definition was a little clunky and verbose, but it was better than the one Wooden had proffered as a high school student: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

  Finally, Wooden summoned the “ladder of success” that Glenn Curtis had presented to him when Wooden played for the Artesians. Wooden wanted to broaden that concept, so he settled on the idea of a pyramid. Thinking like the civil engineer he had originally aspired to become, he figured he would first need a pair of really strong cornerstones. From Curtis’s ladder he selected “enthusiasm” and “industriousness.” Building up from there, he took Lambert’s three-part philosophy of condition, skill, and team spirit and laid them across the middle. Wooden plugged in additional elements in Curtis’s ladder and added a few more of his own. It was a good first pass, but it would take more than a decade of tinkering for him to decide that his Pyramid of Success was complete.

  After a year of implementing Lambert’s fast-break system and running his players mercilessly in practice, Wooden’s Dayton Greendevils enjoyed much more “success” in year two, posting a 15–3 record. The school’s yearbook, the Dayton Pilot, observed: “Having only two regulars left from last season’s squad, Johnny Wooden, our versatile coach, whipped into shape one of the best teams Dayton has sponsored in recent years.” The Greendevils appeared poised for an even better season in year three. Not only were many of the players underclassmen, but a couple of the seniors were thinking about failing a few classes on purpose so they could stay and play another year. “Because of the Depression, there weren’t any jobs for us anyway. So we figured there was nothing else to do but play ball,” Smith said.

  Wooden, however, was not long for Dayton. During the summer of 1934, Nellie had given birth to a daughter, Nancy Anne, in nearby Covington, and they ached to get back to Indiana. An opportunity to do just that presented itself shortly after the start of the 1934–35 academic year, when Wooden was offered a job in the South Bend school system. It was a chance to go to a bigger school in a bigger city for a little more money ($2,400). There was only one catch: the school already had a head basketball coach, so Wooden would be the assistant. Wooden didn’t hesitate. He could be plenty happy just being an English teacher.

  * * *

  At South Bend’s Central High School, Wooden was again wearing many hats. Besides teaching English and serving as athletic director, he also coached baseball and tennis. In addition, he was the school’s comptroller, which was ironic since he was never very good with numbers. With so many responsibilities, Wooden did not plan to immediately get involved with the basketball team, but he spent the last four weeks of that first season working as an assistant to the head coach, Ralph Parmenter. Given Wooden’s credentials as a player, his ascension to the head spot was inevitable. The shift occurred in the spring of 1936. That was a milestone year for the Wooden family, as Nellie gave birth to a son, Jim, that fall.

  The town of South Bend was mad for basketball, but it was still a long way from Martinsville. The gymnasium was so small the basketball team could not even practice there. Instead the players trekked a couple of mi
les down the street to the YMCA, and the squad played its “home” games at various schools around town. While Wooden considered coaching to be secondary to his duties in the classroom, he understood that his superiors did not share that view. “I don’t think South Bend knew whether I’d be a good English teacher or not. They hoped from my background that maybe I could be a pretty good basketball and baseball coach,” he said. “I wanted to be a good English teacher. I wanted to be the best English teacher I could be, but they’re not always looking for that.” Wooden was so deft with language that when he took a job on the side as an editor for the Harper Grace publishing company, the executives there tried to hire him full-time.

  It didn’t take long for the folks in South Bend to realize just how stubborn their new head basketball coach could be. One of Wooden’s primary team rules was that every player had to be on time. On the night of one of his first road games, several of Wooden’s players, including the two cocaptains, were a few minutes late for the bus. Wooden climbed aboard and told the driver to leave without them. The players found their own way to the game, but Wooden left them on the bench.

  Things did not get much better for the team as Wooden finished his first season as Central’s coach with a record of 8 wins and 14 losses. This was apparently an unpleasant experience for him, because for most of his life he pretended it never happened. In the many interviews he gave and books he wrote over the decades, as well as in all of his officially distributed bios, Wooden always claimed that that first year in Dayton was the only losing record of his coaching career. It was a classic case of selective amnesia.

  The benching of the tardy cocaptains was but a minor kerfuffle compared to the storm Wooden ignited during his second season as Central’s head coach, in 1937–38. The Bears were scheduled to play their main rival in the Northern Indiana Conference, Mishawaka High School, on the same night that a big dance was being held at the high school by a club called The Smiters. Four of Wooden’s players failed to show up for the game. The next day, Nell was looking through a newspaper and came upon a picture of the players at the dance. Wooden immediately booted them off the team.