by Seth Davis
When the coaches went to shake hands following the Bears’ second win, Shake muttered to Wooden, “How much did you pay those officials?” They exchanged a few tart words, and then Shake called him a liar.
That was the wrong thing to say to Johnny Wooden.
Wooden rushed at Shake and swung his fist. Immediately, players and a few fans moved in to separate them. One of Shake’s players, a cocaptain named Art Van Tone, saw a boy wearing a Central letter sweater restraining Shake, so he intervened to protect his coach. According to the South Bend Tribune, Van Tone “dove into the pile and put on a flying block that knocked down more persons than any punches swung before since the dispute had opened.” Wooden and his players eventually went to their locker room to cool off and change their clothes, but that did not dissipate the tension. “We had to have a police escort out of the building—the team and all—because there were people waiting for us,” Ed Powell said. “I’ve never seen [Wooden] as upset as I did that night.” Shake apologized for igniting the ruckus, but after the season, Arthur Trester, the secretary of the IHSAA, ordered Mishawaka to remove him as coach.
If Wooden was going to be a fighter, he would accept no less from his players. Eddie Ehlers found that out during a game against Goshen High School in 1941. On an exchange early in the first half, one of Goshen’s players pinched Ehlers so hard on the leg that he was bleeding. Ehlers was furious. He showed Wooden the wound and was ready to retaliate, but Wooden told him to wait until the right time. Ehlers kept his composure until late in the second half. With Central holding a comfortable lead, Ehlers found himself being guarded on an inbounds pass by the player who had pinched him. Ehlers looked over at the bench and caught his coach’s eye. Wooden nodded. “He was telling me to take care of him,” Ehlers said. On the inbounds play, Ehlers faked in one direction, and when he shifted the other way, he punched the kid in the stomach as hard as he could. “I knew I hit him good because I could feel his backbone,” Ehlers said.
The referees did not see the punch. After the next whistle, Wooden took Ehlers out of the game. The two never said a word about what happened, but as Ehlers sat down on the bench, Wooden touched him on the shoulder. “He handled it masterfully,” Ehlers said. Told that his recollection contradicted the modern-day image of Wooden as a kindly old man, Ehlers replied, “He was anything but that. He was mean.”
* * *
Not surprisingly, Wooden was at his most intense during the state tournament. During his fifth season, in 1940–41, the Bears were playing a tough state semifinal game against Jefferson High School in Lafayette. The team, and Ehlers in particular, had played a poor first half, and Wooden was eager to express his displeasure. But when they got to the locker room at intermission, the door was locked. They tried in vain for several minutes to find someone to unlock it. Finally, Wooden kicked it open. When the team got inside, he ripped them for the way they had played, Ehlers most of all. “I have never been chewed out like he chewed me out,” Ehlers said. “I still don’t know what I did to this day, but he raked me over the coals. It must have worked because we went out in the second half and beat them going away.”
Wooden wanted to do for South Bend Central what Glenn Curtis did three times for Martinsville High School—win an Indiana high school state championship. But greater forces always intervened. Three times Wooden guided the Bears to a sectional championship, and twice they claimed a regional title, but he was never able to take them to the top. The most heartbreaking loss came right after the win over Jefferson in the 1941 regional final, when the Bears fell by one point to Froebel High School from Gary, Indiana. “I never saw Wooden so dejected in my life,” Ed Powers said. “He was sick, because he thought he had a team that was going to go all the way. But we just weren’t meant to be.” Weeks later, Wooden’s pain was still palpable. “I can recall at our banquet, he talked about how he was still really dejected,” Ehlers said. “We were all depressed. We had a team that was good enough to win the championship.”
Two years later, the 1943 tournament ended in similar fashion. Central had risen to the No. 1 ranking in the state during the season, and they faced another local rival, Elkhart High School, in the state tournament. Wooden’s Bears entered the fourth quarter trailing by 16 points, but as usual they were the stronger, better-conditioned team down the stretch. They scored 17 points in the last stanza but fell 4 points short. “Those kids never quit,” Wooden said softly in the locker room afterward. “You can’t ask for anything much better than that rally in the last quarter.”
His despair revealed an inner dichotomy that was at odds with the “thou didst thy best” image he tried to project. 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 walk told them something else. He said so himself: you can’t fool these kids. His players saw the deeper truth. This was one mean English teacher, and he wanted to win very badly.
7
The Kautskys
Besides teaching, coaching, mentoring, and occasionally feeding his players during his early years in South Bend, Wooden would from time to time invite them to watch him play professional basketball. It was a kick for his boys to see him in action. “I tell you, he was phenomenal,” Ed Powell said. “He was very quick, although not very tall. But he could dribble—and I’m not exaggerating—down the floor faster than the rest of the players could run without the ball.”
Just as he was the best collegian of his era, Wooden was among the most successful professional players in America in the 1930s. Problem was, professional basketball barely existed in America in the 1930s. The sport was mostly limited to a small group of franchises that barnstormed to each other’s towns for exhibitions. Even for a player of Wooden’s caliber, pro basketball was just a side gig, something that could feed his competitive desires while he made a few extra bucks.
Several professional teams were drawing sizable crowds in the Northeast, but Indiana, not surprisingly, was the hub of the Midwest. The visionary who tapped into that wellspring was Frank Kautsky, who owned a modest but profitable two-level grocery store on the south side of Indianapolis. A short, bald, cheerful man with a round face and a squeaky voice, Kautsky was a bundle of energy who fancied cigars and three-piece suits. He had played some semiprofessional baseball and sponsored his own baseball team in the 1920s, but after being introduced to basketball by a friend, he saw how much fun that game could be. More important, he saw how profitable it could be in his home state.
In 1930, he formed Kautsky A. C., which stood for Athletic Club. The team was generally called the Kautskys, and its owner displayed top-level talent before crowds that numbered in the hundreds. Though the Great Depression was wreaking havoc everywhere—forcing the nation’s most popular pro circuit, the East Coast–based American Basketball League, to fold in 1931—Kautsky kept ticket prices low and never failed to pay his players what he promised. He carried a wad of cash in his pocket—his guys referred to it as his “big head of lettuce”—and if they had performed well, he’d slip them an extra five or ten bucks.
Kautsky loved the action, but during those first few years, he lost money. He understood that if pro basketball was ever going to turn a profit, he would need a real star. He got his chance in 1932, when Johnny Wooden finished his senior season at Purdue. Kautsky met with Wooden in Indianapolis and was able to convince him to play because, unlike the Celtics, the Kautskys would not require Wooden to give up teaching. Kautsky went out of his way to treat Wooden well, and in return, Wooden took a liking to him. “He was a very wonderful person,” Wooden said. “It was very seldom that there wouldn’t be a little extra in my envelope. He knew a little something about my eating habits, too. He knew I liked fruit salad, for example. I took a little rapping from some of the other players, but I got along with him very well. We had some wonderful times.”
When the team hit the road, Kautsky plastered posters displaying Wooden’s picture in
advance of the games. “My dad always said [Wooden] could stop on a dime and give you five cents change,” recalled Kautsky’s son, Don. Kautsky signed up other prominent players, including Stretch Murphy, Branch McCracken, and Frank Baird, who had starred at Butler, but Wooden was the main attraction. Baird recalled a night when the Kautskys walked into a gymnasium in Pittsburgh packed with fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the India Rubber Man. “The first thing they asked us when we entered the court was, ‘Which one was John Wooden?’” Baird said. “I don’t know that John had ever played in Pittsburgh before, but he was certainly a drawing card there.” Those fans would go home disappointed, as Wooden’s teaching duties had kept him back in Dayton that night.
In that respect, Wooden was typical. “We played usually on Saturdays and Sundays because all the players, you see, were teaching or working somewhere else,” Wooden told the author Todd Gould. “We had a loosely knit league. There were no commissioners, and each team got their own officials.” The players also had to bring their own gear and provide for their transportation. “Sometimes I drove all night, went home, got a shower, put on a clean shirt, and went right to school,” Wooden said. “I often worked on my lesson plans as I traveled. I don’t think my teaching suffered because of it, but it wasn’t easy.”
Always on the hunt for prime competition, Kautsky linked up in 1932 with a businessman in Akron, Ohio, who worked for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Together they set up a circuit featuring the best teams from their respective states. They called themselves the National Basketball League. One game drew more than four thousand fans, who saw Wooden score 21 points in a 1-point loss, but there were not enough such nights to sustain their efforts. The NBL disbanded after just one year.
Kautsky was unbowed. He could see that Indiana basketball fans were willing to embrace his product if he gave them something compelling to watch. So he continued to scavenge for opponents. The most popular draws were the three titans from the East Coast: the Original Celtics, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the best of them all, the Harlem Renaissance, who were known more commonly as the Rens. During the 1932–33 season, the Rens won 120 games and lost 8. Kautsky invited them to Indiana several times that season. It was not unusual for high school teams in Indiana to have black players, but the notion of entire teams comprised only of blacks was new to this part of the country. Whatever their attitudes on race, the people in Indiana loved entertaining, team-oriented basketball. Many of the games featuring the Rens drew upward of fifteen thousand fans into Butler Fieldhouse.
The first time Wooden faced off against the Rens in the Fieldhouse, he was held to just 7 points in a 34–28 loss. As a fan of the game himself, he was spellbound by the Rens’ talent, their grace, and most of all, their exquisite teamwork. He often said it was the best team he ever saw. “I’d have to be careful I didn’t stop playing and start watching them,” Wooden confessed.
The next day’s Indianapolis News paid similar tribute. “Great! That sums up the marvelous passing, ball handling, teamwork and basket scoring ability of the New York Renaissance colored quintet, which Sunday afternoon defeated the Kautskys 34–28 in one of the greatest, if not the greatest, exhibitions of basketball ever seen in this city,” the story read. “Even Johnny Wooden’s clever dribbling was lost as [Rens guard] Clarence Jenkins policed the Kautsky star throughout the contest.”
The Kautskys weren’t too shabby themselves. They prevailed over the Rens in a rematch later that season, and they also defeated the Celtics 37–29 at the Armory in downtown Indianapolis before another standing-room-only crowd. The Indianapolis News boasted that Wooden and the local boys had given the Celtics a “neat lesson in basketball,” but the game was marred by an ugly fight between Kautsky guard Clarence “Big Chris” Christopher and the Celtics’ Nat Hickey. The News reported that “Hickey tried to put Chris in the bleachers” but that Christopher was “smiling. After all, Chris takes it all in good fun. The fans expect him to be rough.”
The scene was all too common. Pro basketball at the time was far different than the game Wooden had played at Purdue. The fans who attended college games were usually middle- and upper-class folks, graduates of the colleges that were playing or local citizens eager to take in the purity of competition. Pro ball, however, attracted a less-educated, blue-collar fan who wanted to feel a little civic pride. Those fans liked their basketball rough, and the teams obliged them. One of the more prominent barnstorming squads of the 1930s was an all-Jewish team from Philadelphia run by a man named Eddie Gottlieb, who promised “a fight in every game, guaranteed.” Butler Fieldhouse was always filled whenever Gottlieb’s team came to play against Kautsky’s.
Wooden was never a fan of excessive roughness—like Piggy Lambert, he believed that basketball should be a finesse game—but he was never one to back down from a fight, either. One confrontation turned comical. Wooden had been playing against the Celtics when he was tripped by their center Joe Lapchick, the best big man of his era. (He would go on to coach for many years for St. John’s University and the New York Knicks.) “I went down hard and I came up fightin’ mad,” Wooden said. “I went after him but I couldn’t get him.… He had his long arms out and he had me by the shirt and I was swinging wildly but I’m not getting anywhere. It finally got funny and we both laughed.”
Wooden’s decision to move from Dayton to South Bend Central in the fall of 1934 lengthened his commute to Indianapolis, but since he was not the school’s head basketball coach in his first year, he was able to make it to most of the games. “Wooden used to be gone two or three days a week,” Ed Powers said. “He taught his classes, but he would leave at least a couple days a week, maybe three times, at two thirty in the afternoon when the next to last class would be over. He would go to Fort Wayne or Hammond or Indianapolis and he played ball. Then he could come back that night and the next morning he would be teaching.”
With Wooden spearheading Kautsky’s fire wagon, the team averaged nearly 40 points per game during the 1934–35 season, leading the local press to nickname them the “speed merchants.” In one game against the Celtics, they scored 63 points. They were so well received that in November 1935 Kautsky reached out to his erstwhile partner from Akron to form yet another new league, the Midwest Basketball Conference. Their most popular events were doubleheaders at the Armory that also featured the Rens or the Celtics. Wooden was the league’s leading scorer during the 1934–35 season, but the highlight was his incredible streak of 134 consecutive free throws. When he sank the one hundredth—underhanded, naturally—Kautsky came out of the stands and handed him a crisp $100 bill. “I was pretty excited, but my wife was really excited. She came down out of the stands and grabbed that $100 rather quickly,” Wooden quipped. The Kautskys ended the 1934–35 season with a 9–3 record, but they faltered in the league championship game, where they lost to a less-heralded team from Chicago.
* * *
The Midwest Basketball Conference gained a foothold that would last several years. As the games continued to draw respectable crowds, the league wasn’t just building on the popularity of professional basketball. It was helping to change the way the game was played.
The main dilemma basketball faced at the college, professional, and international levels was the prevalence of delay tactics that were bringing games to a standstill. In an effort to speed things up, the NCAA’s rules committee added a center line in 1932 and required that the offensive team bring the ball past that line within ten seconds. The Midwest Basketball Conference took a more dramatic step in 1935 when, following a trend that was overtaking professional basketball, it decided to give the home team the option of eliminating the center jump after made free throws. Three years later, both the league and the NCAA eliminated the center jump altogether (except at the start of each half or quarter), a move that had already been made in international play. This was arguably the most significant rule change the sport ever adopted, before or since.
The center jump had long been a con
tentious issue among basketball’s cognoscenti. The strongest voice opposing its elimination belonged to James Naismith, but by this time, his influence was on the wane. Naismith had been appointed as an original member of NCAA’s rules committee when it was formed in 1909, but he disengaged from the sport he invented while traveling abroad for several years following World War I. In 1924, Naismith returned to the States and was named honorary chairman of the rules committee for life, but as the title suggests, that was mostly a symbolic position.
Naismith viewed the center jump as akin to a kickoff in football. He worried that its elimination would allow too much scoring, and the fans would grow bored. “One of the reasons I am sorry to see the center jump relegated to a subordinate place is that it takes from the game one of the large elements of suspense—something desirable in any sport,” Naismith wrote in his memoir. “Which, do you think, appeals to the spectator the more: the actual dropping of the ball through the basket, or the suspense—the seconds when one wonders if the ball is going in?”
Wooden’s only disappointment was that Naismith hadn’t lost the argument sooner. “I’d have loved to play [more years] without the center jump,” he said. “I would have been a far more effective player because my strength was my speed and quickness.”
