Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Despite his diminishing influence, Naismith remained a revered figure around the world. His pinnacle came in the summer of 1936, when he traveled to Berlin, Germany, to see basketball played in the Olympic Games for the very first time. Upon returning to the States, Naismith resumed his duties as athletic director and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, where he had coached the basketball team from 1898 to 1907. When Wooden traveled to Kansas for a coaching clinic, he had the pleasure of shaking hands with the man who invented basketball. “He was a very gentle, nice person. I liked him,” Wooden said. “It was a brief meeting—a moment in time.” By the time Naismith died in 1939 of a brain hemorrhage at the age of seventy-eight, an estimated 20 million people around the world were playing his game.

  * * *

  Wooden played as many games as he could, but he never fully embraced life as a professional athlete. Besides the taxing commutes and rough play, the enterprise lacked competitive integrity. That was evident one night in Detroit, where the Kautskys had held a double-digit lead throughout the second half, only to wonder why the game was not ending. The players checked with the official timer (there was no scoreboard), who informed them that there were still two minutes remaining. So they played some more and checked with the timer, who once again reported that there were two minutes left. “We finally got the idea, so we went back to the center jump, and each time they’d throw the ball up, we’d stand and not move,” Wooden recalled with a chuckle. “When they made the basket that put them ahead, why, the game was over.”

  Toward the end of the 1936–37 season, Wooden was invited to play an exhibition game against the Celtics for a new team based in the town of Whiting. The team’s owner was a flamboyant young automobile dealer named Ed Ciesar, and though the team lost by 20 points, Ciesar got Wooden to agree to a one-year contract. “It was big news when Wooden signed. I remember the newspapers making a big splash of it,” said Joe Sotak, another player on that squad. For the 1937–38 season, Kautsky and the other owners decided to change their name back to the National Basketball League (even though all the teams were located in the Midwest) and eliminated the center jump after every made basket. Ciesar had stocked his team with celebrity players like Wooden, and he called them the All-Americans. Their most exciting game that year came against league-leading Oshkosh. The contest was held in a brand-new, six-thousand-seat, $600,000 civic center in Hammond. With the All-Americans trailing by 2 points, Wooden banked in a layup in the final seconds to send the game into overtime. Then he sealed the win with a steal and a free throw in double overtime.

  Ciesar was a good businessman, but he was no Frank Kautsky when it came to dealing with players. Wooden found that out after he and a teammate drove through a nasty blizzard to make it to a game in Pittsburgh. It was a scary trip, with their car spinning full circle several times, but they made it there by halftime. When Ciesar handed out checks to the players later that night, Wooden and his friend noticed that they were being paid half the usual amount. When Wooden asked why, Ciesar said it was because they had only played one half. Wooden protested that they had risked their lives just to make it to the arena, but Ciesar wouldn’t budge.

  Though they were supposed to play a game the following afternoon, Wooden told Ciesar that he and his buddy were going back to Indiana. “He was very upset,” Wooden recalled. “He told us that we couldn’t just go home. We had another game to play. I protested that if he was going to treat us this way, we were leaving. He eventually gave us our money, but he raised an awful fuss. We agreed to play the next game, but we quit right after that.” Wooden finished out the season with the Kautskys, but all those years of diving to the floor were taking their toll. He gave up playing for good in 1939.

  The National Basketball League went unchallenged until after World War II, when the Basketball Association of America was launched on the East Coast. After several years of cannibalizing each other in the hunt for the best players, the NBL and BAA decided to merge in 1949 to create a comprehensive pro league, the National Basketball Association. Wooden never played a game in the new league, but he had no regrets about quitting when he did. He had a good family, a good job, lots of good memories. Wooden had done much to push high school and college basketball to new heights. The pros would have to ascend without him.

  * * *

  After World War II broke out, Wooden could have avoided being drafted because he was a married father and high school teacher, but eventually duty compelled him to enlist in the navy, a little more than a year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Regrettably, duty did not compel him to inform his wife beforehand. Nell hit the roof when he broke the news. “It was probably the major disagreement that my dear wife and I had in all our years,” Wooden said.

  He was one of dozens of teachers and coaches in the South Bend school system who enlisted or were drafted into the armed services. They were all promised they could have their jobs when (and if) they returned. Wooden had no sea or air training, but the navy saw value in him as a high school coach and former college athlete. Uncle Sam wanted him to get young navy flyers into fighting shape.

  The navy staged many of its training sites on college campuses. On April 22, 1943, Lieutenant (junior grade) John Wooden began his first assignment at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He and the other cadets were put through a thirty-day program that prepared them to enter the Naval Air Corps’ V-5 physical fitness program. After completing his stint there, Wooden was sent to preflight school at the University of Iowa, where he received his first deployment orders. On what Nell later called “the saddest day of my life,” Wooden learned he was going to serve as a fitness officer aboard the USS Franklin, an aircraft carrier stationed in the South Pacific.

  Shortly before setting off for the Franklin, Wooden returned to South Bend for a brief leave so he could spend a couple of days with his family and tidy up his affairs. As he was driving back to Iowa City, he felt a sharp pain in his abdomen. When he arrived, he went straight to a doctor, who diagnosed appendicitis. At the time, the navy had a rule requiring at least thirty days to pass between the time a serviceman had surgery and the day he reported for duty on a ship. Wooden’s deployment was therefore postponed.

  As it turned out, Wooden knew well the man who replaced him aboard the Franklin. He was Freddy Stalcup, a former Purdue football player who was Wooden’s fraternity brother in Beta Theta Pi. Several months later, Wooden received a piece of news that left him dumbstruck: Stalcup was working a gun position aboard the Franklin when the ship was struck by a Japanese kamikaze pilot. He was killed along with dozens of other men on board. Had Wooden’s appendix not become inflamed, he could very well have lost his life that day.

  The close call only fed Nell’s ominous feelings about her husband’s decision to enlist. Her children were young, but they picked up on her anxiety. “When Dad had to go into the service, I was very unsettled,” Nan said. “I remember I had bad dreams. Mother worried a lot about it and I think it rubbed off on me.”

  After resuming his work at the Iowa preflight school in the summer of 1943, Wooden awaited his next deployment orders. The navy decided it was too hot to ask the cadets to play basketball in the University of Iowa’s Field House, so they assigned Wooden to be a boxing coach. The cadets would typically spend the morning running, swimming, playing soccer, and otherwise developing their physical stamina, followed by an afternoon cramming in ground school. Then they would have dinner and meet Lieutenant Wooden for boxing class. “He explained all the techniques to us, how to protect your head and all that stuff,” said Ed Orme, a former high school basketball player from Southport, Indiana, who was a flight student that summer. “He was a quiet motivator. As I look back, I can see why guys would really play their hearts out for him. He had that ability to get on you when you needed it, but he also had the ability to have a lot of fun with you.”

  Wooden was transferred three more times—first to flight preparation school at Williams College in William
stown, Massachusetts; then to a radar training station on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, where he stayed for eighteen months; and finally in the winter of 1945 to Chicago, where he worked as an underway watch officer on the USS Sable, an aircraft carrier anchored in Lake Michigan. Wooden brought Nell and the kids with him to the first two stops, but he did not want them living in Chicago, so they returned to South Bend. It was the longest he would ever live apart from them.

  Along the way, Wooden played some basketball with his shipmates, but he suffered a nasty injury when another player accidentally pushed him into a steel post, rupturing a disc in his lower back. The injury would trouble Wooden the rest of his life, forcing him to wear a brace for long stretches and putting him through several hospitalizations. It also caused him to walk with a slight stoop that grew more pronounced as he got older.

  During this extended period away from South Bend, Wooden had an epiphany. He received many letters from his basketball players, yet he hardly corresponded with his English students. He realized that even though he liked to think of himself as an English teacher, he was having a far greater impact as a coach. “I loved to teach English, but you get closer to those under your supervision in sports, I believe, than you do in just the classroom,” he said. “I can name almost all of the basketball players who played for me, even going back in high school, but I can’t begin to name all of the English students I had.”

  Wooden never got the hang of life on a ship, failing to grasp even the most basic aspects of navy life. “I often teased him. He’d say things like, ‘We parked a boat.’ I’d say, ‘You don’t park a boat,’” Ed Powell said. Fortunately, Japan surrendered while Wooden was still anchored on Lake Michigan, and he was honorably discharged as a full lieutenant in January 1946. He had managed to serve for two and a half years without leaving the country. Asked many years later about his experiences in the navy, Wooden replied, “I don’t know how we ever won the war.”

  Having done his duty, Wooden was ready to return to civilian life in South Bend. It looked like it was going to be a happy existence, but the reality turned out to be different. For starters, the family to whom Wooden had leased his home had stopped making their rent payments. The bank that held his mortgage wanted to charge Wooden for the past-due amount, but he didn’t have the money. As a result, he lost the house. His return to coaching at Central High also caused a painful split with his temporary replacement, Charlie Stewart, who had previously worked as Wooden’s assistant. According to Jim Powers, Stewart was “incensed” that Wooden had reclaimed his job, and the two of them never spoke again. “It was a bitter experience,” Ed Powell said.

  Wooden took over for Stewart for the second game of the season, and he piloted the Bears to a 16–10 record. It was not an easy situation, but at least he had his old job back. That was not the case for many of his fellow coaches who returned from the war. The school system declined to rehire several of them, and Wooden couldn’t help but notice that the ones who were shoved aside had been replaced by men whose teams won a greater percentage of their games. “I was a little disenchanted,” he said.

  He put the word out that he wanted to work elsewhere. Not surprisingly, he had plenty of suitors, including the athletic director at Williams College, who had gotten to know Wooden while he was stationed there. But Wooden liked being a high school teacher and coach, so when he was contacted about vacancies in Kokomo and Marion, two Indiana schools with proud traditions and immense gymnasiums, he thought hard about which one he would want to take.

  Around that time, he received a surprise phone call from the president of Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute. Wooden’s former high school coach, Glenn Curtis, an Indiana State alumnus, had been the coach there for eight years, but he was leaving to take over the Detroit Falcons in the Basketball Association of America. Curtis had recommended Wooden to be his successor. The president called Wooden and offered him the job over the phone.

  Wooden had turned down college jobs before, but since this one was in his home state, he figured he might as well take a flyer. It ended up being an immense life decision, but it did not feel that way at the time. “I talked it over with Nellie, and I said, ‘Why not? We’ll try it. If things work out and I want to continue this and I can do well, maybe I’ll get a chance in the Big Ten,’” Wooden said. “I figured if it didn’t work out, I’ve got a lifetime teacher’s license and degree. I’ll always have a job and won’t go hungry.” So he piled his wife and two kids back into his car and headed for Terre Haute. It was time to give this coaching thing the old college try.

  8

  The Hurryin’ Sycamores

  The new head basketball coach at Indiana State Teachers College stood on the baseline next to Bobby Royer, a sophomore forward from Bowling Green, Kentucky, who was the quickest player on the team. Both of them held a basketball. “Let’s race,” the coach said. “See who can get the ball to the other end of the court the fastest.”

  With his teammates looking on, Royer took off dribbling. He made it just a few steps before the coach fired a pass to another player waiting at the far end of the court. Race over.

  “Let’s try again,” the coach said. Once again, Royer took off dribbling. Once again, he was no match for the pass.

  Johnny Wooden, still channeling Piggy Lambert, had made his point. “We pass instead of dribbling,” he told his team, “because that’s the fastest way to get the ball down the court.”

  Since that philosophy was the direct opposite of the plodding system preferred by Glenn Curtis, it was not easy for the new coach to impart it. In fact, there was much about the job that was not easy for Wooden at first. Not only was the program stocked with returning players from Curtis’s last team, which had won twenty-one games and lost seven, but hundreds of young men had returned to the school from military service to resume their education. On the first day of tryouts in the fall of 1946, Wooden, who also served as Indiana State’s athletic director and baseball coach, was greeted by 187 men. This was astounding considering there were just over 1,000 male students in the entire school.

  They scrimmaged for a full week across two courts. There were no officials—the players called their own fouls—and Wooden sat in the bleachers evaluating them without interruption. Each day, Wooden would post a new, shorter list of players who had passed the previous day’s examination. It was not a pleasant task. “I always felt in teaching, one of the most difficult things I had to do was cutting the squad,” Wooden said. “You have a lot of players come out, they all want to play, and you can only take so many. That’s hard.” The returning players were not well suited to Wooden’s fire-wagon style. By the time tryouts were through, Wooden’s team included fourteen freshmen and one sophomore, many of whom had played for him in South Bend.

  This did not go over well, especially since so many of Curtis’s players had grown up in Terre Haute. One of the few local boys whom Wooden kept was Duane Klueh, a wiry, agile, six-foot-five freshman center. “A lot of the locals were really disturbed with Coach Wooden when he came,” Klueh said. “The team had been very successful the year before, and a lot of servicemen came back. Then all these guys from South Bend came to town. Some parents went to the sports editor to complain.”

  Besides coaching and teaching English, Wooden was also pursuing a master’s degree in education at Indiana State. He taught a course in coaching, and he made his Pyramid of Success part of the curriculum. In the years since Wooden was in Dayton, Kentucky, he had continued to rework his pyramid in small, significant ways. He kept the blocks in the same order, but he introduced phrases that explained their meaning, and he frequently massaged those words. (“Industriousness: There is no substitute for work. Worthwhile things come from hard work and careful planning.… Confidence: Respect without fear. Confident not cocky. May come from faith in yourself in knowing that you are prepared.”) Wooden also divined a clever way to introduce even more concepts—not by replacing the blocks but by spackling these f
resh ideas into the gaps along the edges. The left slope imparted, from bottom to top: Ambition, Adaptability, Resourcefulness, and Fight. Climbing the right side were Sincerity, Honesty, Reliability, and Integrity. Finally, the two most important ideas were grafted together at top, right above Competitive greatness: Faith and Patience. After fourteen years of tinkering, Wooden decided his pyramid was complete. He would not spend much time discussing it with his players, but he hung a framed copy on his office wall, where he could meditate on its neatly stacked lessons for the rest of his working days.

  Wooden’s pursuit of his master’s degree also required him to write a thesis. He wanted to submit a paper on the question of why high school students were reluctant to study poetry—he had been accumulating material on the subject for several years—but his department chairman preferred that Wooden write about basketball. So he compiled a study examining the effects of the elimination of the center jump rule. “It’s amazing to me the thesis would be accepted, to tell you the truth, but it was,” he said.

  Many coaches who advocated getting rid of the center jump argued that it would de-emphasize the need for height. So Wooden collected data from the nation’s top teams to see if they had indeed gotten shorter. What Wooden discovered may seem obvious when viewed through a modern lens, but at the time it was a counterintuitive revelation: size still mattered. Rather than experiencing a decline in height, the top teams had actually gotten taller by an average of around two inches. The findings would seem to undercut the argument against the center jump, but Wooden still believed eliminating it was a great idea. “Men closely associated with the game are almost unanimous in the opinion that there has been tremendous improvement in the game as a result of the rule change, even though it may have failed to accomplish one of its primary aims,” he wrote in his conclusion. “The game has been speeded up greatly by the change, and attendance records are continually being established—evidently voicing approval of the basketball fans.”