Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  That was the style he taught his new players in Terre Haute. Once again, he busied himself with the smallest details, beginning with the proper way to put on their shoes and socks so they wouldn’t get blisters. “I can remember sitting in that little locker room we had, and he showed us how to put Vaseline on our feet, then put on a pair of socks, some powder, and then another pair of socks,” Klueh said. Klueh also recalled that Wooden had strict ideas about what they should eat. “He would order roast beef, but it would be four ounces—not eight or six, but four ounces. He was a very easy person to talk to, but he was in charge, no question about that.”

  Most of all, he made them run. And run and run and run. Each day’s practice began with thirty minutes of three-lane running drills mimicking various fast break patterns. That was followed by another fifteen minutes using two defenders in the lane. Practices lasted for three hours or longer, with much of that time spent scrimmaging full court. “Even the night before a game, we’d scrimmage for an hour,” Klueh said. “He said games are won in the last two minutes. He wanted us to do well when the other guys were huffing and puffing.”

  To help him implement his unique style, Wooden hired Ed Powell, his former player at South Bend Central High, to be his assistant. “We had a saying,” Powell said. “If we stay with them the first half, we’ll beat them the second half.” One of their more innovative tactics was an unusual full-court press. Instead of applying the pressure through man-to-man defense, as was customary, Wooden sometimes used a zone, which enabled his players to trap the ball handler with two defenders and still have a third well positioned to intercept the pass and break for a layup. Wooden would use the press in brief spurts if his team got behind.

  After losing their opening game by 2 points to a team of servicemen from Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the Sycamores won seven of their next nine, eclipsing the 70-point mark in three of those wins. (One of the losses came in mid-December at Purdue, where 8,500 fans turned out to see the Boilermakers beat their favorite son’s team, 54–49.) Sportswriters, having been accustomed to Curtis’s stallball over the previous eight seasons, were whiplashed. They dubbed the team the “Scrappin’ Sycamores,” the “Hurryin’ Sycamores,” and “the fast-breaking Sycamores of State.” This team didn’t just win. It was also fun to watch.

  Wooden still taught by demonstrating, but he was not the same young buck who barreled through his players as a high school coach. “He’d occasionally play three on three with us, but he had a bad back,” said Charlie Foudy, a reserve guard from Terre Haute. One day in practice, Wooden told his players they had to make ten straight free throws before they could leave. Then, according to the Terre Haute Tribune, “Wooden took the ball and sank 15 charity tosses in rapid fire succession without missing one—just to prove he hasn’t lost his eye for the basket.”

  Wooden’s combative side shone through on game day. He had developed a habit of clutching a rolled-up program in his hands while sitting on the bench, and when he saw something that really displeased him, he would smack that program loudly into an open hand. He also lobbed caustic barbs at officials and opposing players. His own players described him as generally composed, but there was one occasion that first season when Wooden really lost his cool. It happened during a bad stretch in late February after his team suffered a grinding 49–48 loss at Evansville, its third consecutive defeat and the fourth in five games. As the Sycamores readied to leave the arena, they found their bus surrounded by Evansville fans. “Somebody made some kind of remark, and Coach Wooden didn’t appreciate it,” Klueh recalled. “He fired his coat off. He was ready to take on a guy twice his size. It didn’t go to blows or anything like that, but it could have.”

  There were other moments when Wooden’s need for control seemed excessive. In mid-February, he took his team to New York City for a big showdown against St. John’s in Madison Square Garden. The game would be Wooden’s first real experience with big-time, big-city college basketball. He took command of every aspect of the trip, including the food his players ate along the way. As they made their way east by automobiles, the team stopped for lunch, but some of the players left the meal still feeling hungry. So they pulled over in their car and bought some sandwiches. In Wooden’s mind, this was close to mutiny. “He was so upset with what they did, not following his orders, that he didn’t play anyone else but the five starters,” said Lenny Rzeszewski, another Indiana State player who had played for Wooden in South Bend. “He was just that type of individual. Basically, he was tough.”

  Once they got to the Garden, the Hurryin’ Sycamores performed well. With 16,593 fans looking on, they staged a fabulous tussle with the Redmen of St. John’s, who were coached by Wooden’s former pugilist from their pro days, Joe Lapchick. St. John’s was arguably the most prominent college program in the country, having qualified for six of the nine National Invitation Tournaments that had been played and winning titles in 1943 and 1944. Led by six-foot-nine forward Harry Boykoff and prized guard Dick McGuire, St. John’s built a 13-point lead midway through the second half.

  At that point, the Sycamores’ superior conditioning took hold. They rallied furiously to within 2 points with a minute to play before losing, 62–58. The Associated Press reported that during their second-half surge, Indiana State “literally ran the Red Men off the court.” It was a harbinger of things to come.

  Indiana State ended the 1946–47 season on a seven-game win streak as Duane Klueh set a school record for points in a season with 337. While that did not earn the Sycamores an invitation to the still-nascent NCAA tournament (the event was in its ninth year and included an eight-team field), they were asked to compete in a thirty-two-team single-elimination tournament hosted at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri, by the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB). (The organization later changed its name to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA. The NAIA still exists today separately from the NCAA.) The Sycamores had played in the 1946 championship game, so they benefited from the NAIB’s policy of automatically inviting the previous year’s finalists.

  Indiana State, however, turned down the invitation. At the time, it did not seem like a big deal to the players. “Those things weren’t as important then as they are now,” Klueh said. “We just knew the season was over.” When the school announced it was turning down the NAIB, the Terre Haute Tribune reported that the reason was academics. “It was the feeling of the athletic committee that because of several extended road trips this month no additional school work should be missed by participation in the tournament,” the paper wrote. “Coach Johnny Wooden said that the tournament experience would have been valuable to the team, but in view of existing conditions it was advisable to pass up the tourney this season.”

  In later years, Wooden would offer another explanation for his decision. The NAIB had a policy forbidding the participation of blacks, and the Sycamores had a black player on its roster named Clarence Walker. A five-foot-eleven guard from East Chicago, Indiana, Walker was a little-used reserve whom Wooden had already left behind from the team’s trip to New York City. New York was not a segregated town, but bringing Walker meant dealing with segregated restaurants and hotels on the way there. Wooden’s decision caused Walker immense pain. Now, according to Wooden, he did not want to face either the hassle of bringing Walker or the difficulty of leaving him in Terre Haute. So he passed on going to Kansas City altogether.

  If Wooden truly did not accept the invitation for the reason he later claimed, it is disappointing that he declined to reveal it and speak out against the ban, instead of hiding behind a phony explanation about schoolwork. But that was not his way. When he stood up for racial progress, Wooden did so firmly but quietly. While Wooden’s actions in this area sometimes fell short of his ideals (as with the decision not to take Walker to New York), the fact that he held those ideals was nonetheless remarkable for a man who grew up where he did, when he did.

  * * *

  M
artinsville, Indiana, was not exactly a bastion of racial diversity when John Wooden was young. There were so few blacks in town that many decades later, Wooden could specifically recall the two whom he knew. “One was a track man on our team. The other one worked in the barbershop shining shoes and things like that,” he said. “I would say both were very, very well-liked by all the people.”

  This was hardly unusual. According to the census of 1920, the year Wooden turned ten, blacks accounted for less than 3 percent of the population in Indiana. During the decade that followed, the state was the setting for an unprecedented rise to power by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan soared through the state like a comet—burning bright and traveling fast, and flaming out just as quickly—but in Martinsville, the legacy of racial intolerance has sadly endured like a never-ending tail.

  The Indiana Klan’s watershed moment arrived during the statewide elections of 1924. Under the leadership of David Curtis Stephenson, the Klan sponsored an array of Republican candidates who won dozens of offices, including governor. Their reign did not last long. The following year, Stephenson was convicted of rape and second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. In 1927, the Klan-sponsored governor, Ed Jackson, was indicted for bribery. Scores of other Klan-backed Republicans were sent to jail as part of the scandal, and though Jackson served out his term, by the time he left office, the Klan in Indiana was a shell of its former self.

  To this day, Martinsville is frequently referred to as a former midwestern “headquarters” for the KKK. That is flatly untrue. According to Citizen Klansmen, an exhaustive history of the KKK in 1920s Indiana written by the historian Leonard J. Moore, nearly one-third of all white men living in the state were dues-paying members of the Klan, and in some communities the figure approached 50 percent. Martinsville’s participation was actually below average. The membership in Morgan County, where Martinsville sits, was 26.8 percent in 1925. That was substantially lower than other counties like White (37.7 percent), Hamilton (35.4), Tipton (34.3), Hendricks (33.2), Madison (33.2), and Rush (32.8). Martinsville was the site of a Klan rally in October 1923 that attracted several thousand followers, but that was dwarfed by the national convention held that same year in Kokomo, where more than a hundred thousand attendees assembled from Indiana and surrounding states. The most notorious lynching in the state’s history occurred in 1930 not in Martinsville but Marion, more than a hundred miles away. Asked if he could recall any Klan-related activities in his hometown while he was growing up, Wooden replied, “I’d hear about it, but I never saw it.”

  Still, there is no denying that compared to most places in America, Martinsville was unwelcoming to blacks during the 1920s. Wooden, however, emerged without a trace of racial hostility, which he attributed to his father, even though Hugh Wooden never couched his teachings in racial terms. “He talked about treating everybody alike, that you’re no better than anyone but just as good as anyone, but he never mentioned race,” Wooden said. Though the Indiana Klan was committed to the notion of white supremacy, its primary mission at the time was the enforcement of Prohibition. It was also vehemently anti-Catholic; it’s likely Wooden witnessed more prejudice directed toward his Irish Catholic girlfriend than the two blacks he knew.

  Wooden’s experiences playing basketball contributed to his progressive views on race. As evidenced by his adulation for the Harlem Rens, he learned at an early age that a basketball didn’t care about the color of the hands that shot it. If the arc was true, the ball went in. Wooden didn’t coach any black players during his two years in Dayton, Kentucky, so his racial attitudes were not tested until he arrived in South Bend. The blacks there faced no restrictions on buses or streetcars, but there were plenty of other Jim Crow–like impediments.

  For example, black people in South Bend were not permitted to swim in the community pool at Playland Park except for a single day at the end of the summer. They could buy hamburgers at the downtown five-and-ten-cent store, but they couldn’t sit in the downstairs dining room. They could go to the movies, but at certain theaters they were required to watch from the balcony. “You knew what you could do and couldn’t do,” said Mamie Taylor, a black student at South Bend Central who dated and later married one of Wooden’s players, Tom Taylor. “There were a lot of places in South Bend we couldn’t eat. The black girls couldn’t swim at the pool in the school. We couldn’t even sing at the glee club.” According to Mamie, Wooden stood out among the faculty at Central High. “There were a lot of racist teachers at Central, but Wooden was always nice to me. He would tease me and say, ‘If Tom doesn’t treat you right, let me know.’”

  Central’s interracial basketball team was met with some disapproval among the townsfolk. “I’d see people on the street, and they’d say, ‘You use the same towels as that black kid?’” Jim Powers said. “That was kind of the environment at the time, but it just was not a factor on the team.” As Wooden chaperoned the Bears around the state, he took stand after stand on behalf of his black players. He once led his team out of a local movie theater when the manager insisted that the black players sit separately upstairs. He threatened to do the same thing at a restaurant called Clark’s. As Mamie Taylor recalled, “He said the whole team eats here or nobody does. They let them eat there. He broke that barrier.” Before a game at Madison, one of Wooden’s black players, Pete Donaldson, was momentarily refused entry into the gym. “Wooden came over and said, ‘What’s going on?’” John Gassensmith recalled. “They said he couldn’t come in. Wooden said, ‘If he can’t come in, nobody can come in.’ So they let him in.”

  When Wooden took the Bears to Martinsville, he was embarrassed when a restaurant refused to serve them. When they played in the state tournament, he wouldn’t let the team eat at another restaurant because the manager had asked a black player, Parson Howell, to dine in the kitchen. “I remember him in his polite, beautiful English telling people that it wasn’t going to hurt to have his team eat there with one or two or three black kids eating there,” said Stan Jacobs, a former South Bend player. Jacobs recalled a separate instance when Wooden took the team to a nearby grocery store to buy lunch meat because a local restaurant had refused to serve the black players. They ate while sitting outside by a park.

  “He looked after us,” Tom Taylor said. “If we traveled, he’d call ahead and make sure that if we were going to stay at a hotel, everybody was treated equally. I never remember staying at a different hotel or eating separately from the team.”

  Through it all, Wooden never explained to his players what he was doing and why, even though it might have accelerated their own understanding of the importance of racial equality. As usual, Wooden was all walk and no talk. “He never talked to us about race,” Powers said. “I don’t think he wanted to get into the political thing. He just took care of number one. There was no difference between a black kid and a white kid on his basketball team.”

  In this respect, as in so many others, Wooden’s wife was a kindred spirit. Having faced discrimination against Catholics while growing up, Nellie shared Wooden’s disdain for bigotry. That was especially evident when Wooden brought the family to Georgia while he was serving in the navy. “Mom always butted heads with some of the locals about the way they treated blacks,” Nan said. “Mom always said she didn’t understand. ‘They won’t sit and eat with them, yet they allow them to serve food and nurse their babies. It doesn’t make sense.’” When Nan went to school on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, her father playfully suggested she ask her teacher what she thought of his favorite president, who was still held in low regard throughout the Deep South for having freed the slaves less than a century before.

  Wooden would have been content to continue making his stands through modest, unremarked-upon gestures, but his new job would not allow it. That was never more true than at the end of his second season at Indiana State, when Wooden played an unintentional, unaccustomed role in breaking down a significant barrier. Racial progress was slow in America in the 1940s. It was
only fitting that the Sycamores should hurry it up.

  9

  Clarence

  Wooden was on much firmer ground with the locals as his second season at Indiana State got under way in the fall of 1947. The Sycamores lost just one player from the team that had gone 17–8 the year before, and with nine sophomores and a junior comprising the ten returning lettermen, the future was bright. Sure enough, the team hurried its way to eleven wins in its first twelve games.

  Up-tempo basketball was becoming more in vogue, especially in the Midwest, but it wasn’t being played everywhere. In late January, Indiana State traveled to Chicago to play in a doubleheader that also included Oklahoma A&M, which by then had already won two NCAA championships. (The school would later change its name to Oklahoma State University.) The Cowboys’ coach, Henry Iba, had built his powerhouse with a style that couldn’t have been more different from Wooden’s. His “swinging gate” man-to-man defense was one of the game’s foremost innovations, and he buttressed it with a brutally slow pace on offense. Iba’s presence in Chicago provided an intriguing contrast with the run-and-gunning upstarts from Terre Haute. “Oklahoma A&M, coached by Henry Iba, is one of the few college basketball teams which still believes in a planned, ball-controlled system of attack,” the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote on the eve of the doubleheader. “It is likely that the invading Sycamores will go to the other extreme in performance and exhibit the speed and finesse known throughout the Hoosier state as fire department basketball.”

  Both teams won their games that night, giving each man some validation. That set in motion a long-running narrative pitting Wooden against Iba, both professionally and socially. At the time, Iba was by far the more popular and accomplished coach, whereas Wooden was just getting started. Over the years, Wooden often expressed respect for Iba, but his praise sometimes carried a hint of condescension. “At the beginning of each year, if you were to say that among the top five defensive teams in the country as far as points scored, Oklahoma State’s going to be among them,” Wooden said. “But it wasn’t because of their defense and it wasn’t because they didn’t play good defense. It’s because they held the ball so long on offense.”