Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  As part of his new gig, Wooden was also required to attend cocktail parties. This was considered necessary to stir up interest in the basketball program, which had never been a problem back in Indiana. Wooden hated public speaking, and his insistence on avoiding alcohol led to awkward moments. During one press luncheon, when Wooden declined a writer’s invitation to imbibe, the writer snapped, “You think you’re too good to drink with us?”

  “In the two years we were at Indiana State, I don’t think John gave more than six or seven talks,” Powell said. “At UCLA, he was now asked to attend every type of function. He doesn’t like to barge into a room full of people, and he doesn’t drink. This disturbed him. One of my major jobs when we’d go to a function was for me to go over and say, ‘So-and-so, have you had an opportunity to meet our coach, John Wooden? C’mon, let me introduce you.’”

  To ease Wooden’s burden, Powell often brought a harmonica to parties as a gimmick. When it came time for the coach to speak, Wooden would say to the group, “Have you ever heard Eddie play the harmonica? You can make a request, but all his songs sound like ‘Red Wings.’”

  “Let me tell you,” Powell said, “he was lost.”

  Wooden’s awkwardness was also apparent to his former Purdue teammate, Dutch Fehring. “John is misunderstood by many people,” Fehring said. “He is quiet and unassuming and really a little shy. Just because he is up and down on the bench doesn’t make him an outgoing fellow.”

  That native shyness stood in stark contrast to the football coach who would be hired midway through Wooden’s first season. Henry “Red” Sanders was a hard-drinking, swashbuckling good ole boy who had previously spent four seasons as the head coach at Vanderbilt. While Sanders would quaff drinks, slap backs, and hold court at these functions, Wooden could be found standing in a corner with his finger to his mouth. “Red had come in and captured the town,” said Vic Kelley, the school’s sports publicist. “He had great personality, magnetism and charisma. He and Wooden would be together at many social events and the people would gravitate toward Sanders.”

  At least Wooden had a job that could fulfill him. His wife did not. That left her feeling even more out of place. When people would say to Nell that they heard she was from “back east,” she would sharply correct them. Not back east. Indiana. “We came out here and we were made to feel unwelcome,” she said.

  To commemorate this new chapter in their lives, John presented Nell with an engraved gold charm for her bracelet, just as he had done for previous significant events. The charm was shaped like a four-leaf clover, an homage to her Irish heritage. The year 1948 was engraved on one side. A question mark appeared opposite that number. John and Nell did not know precisely when they would leave California, but they obviously would not be staying for long.

  * * *

  Wooden placed an advertisement in the school’s newspaper, the Daily Bruin, inviting students to try out for his team. When he held his first team meeting two weeks before the start of practice, just 42 players showed up. In his two years at Indiana State, there were 187 and 178 boys, respectively, at the first day of tryouts. (“I remember those figures because they just transposed the last numbers,” he said.) Now fewer than a quarter of that total had come, despite the fact that UCLA had more than five times the number of undergraduates.

  Many of the players were World War II veterans who were in their early to midtwenties. After taking their names and information, Wooden let them know that the most important thing they needed to do before practice started in two weeks was to toughen up their feet. “I didn’t say anything about their wind because I knew if their feet are going to be toughened up, their wind’s going to be alright too,” Wooden said. Wooden showed them some drills they should do to accomplish this. No matter what state he was coaching in, Wooden’s view of the game always boiled down to basics. He taught the game from the ground up.

  Once practice began, Wooden became even more disheartened. The group reminded him of his phys ed classes at Indiana State. It’s not that these guys were unskilled. They were just accustomed to the plodding, deliberate style taught by Wilbur Johns. Most every school in the eight-team Pacific Coast Conference played walk-it-up basketball. The pace was dictated by elder statesmen like Nibs Price at California, Everett Dean at Stanford, and especially Sam Barry at USC. Barry was the coach who, during a game against UCLA in 1932, ordered his players to hold the ball for so long that some of them literally sat on the court and read from a newspaper while waiting for the Bruins to come out of their zone defense. That game, which UCLA won, 19–17, was instrumental in convincing the national rules committee to add a provision requiring the offense to bring the ball past half court within ten seconds.

  The ability of Wooden’s players was not nearly as big a problem as the facility where they played their games. The men’s gymnasium had been built in 1932, just sixteen years earlier, but it was woefully inadequate. The players had a locker room, but there were no private showers and no separate rooms for the coaches. Everybody had to climb three flights of stairs to get to a practice floor that had just two baskets. Moreover, the basketball team often had to share the floor with the gymnastics team, with wrestlers practicing one floor below. The gymnasts would regularly leave the playing surface covered with chalk. Wooden asked the buildings and grounds workers to build him two six-foot-wide brooms and mops, and each day before practice his assistants would have to clean the floor. “I took the easy job, I must say,” Wooden said. “I’d take a bucket and go along in front of them, just like I was feeding the chickens, to get the floor a little damp.”

  It would have been bad enough if these were just the practice conditions, but the men’s gym was also where the Bruins played their home games. With the bleachers pulled out, the gym could hold only about 2,500 spectators. If the place was filled on game nights, it was hot as hell. “There were a hundred high school gyms in Indiana that were far, far better than what we were playing in,” Wooden said.

  As part of his lecture about the importance of tough feet, Wooden showed his players how to put on their footwear. He instructed them to use two pairs of socks that were 50 percent cotton, and then demonstrated how to smooth the wrinkles to avoid blisters. Their shoes were to be black (always black), tightly laced, and a half size too small. He didn’t want them to smoke or drink alcohol during the season, but he didn’t give them a lot of other rules. “One rule he never had was about when you go to bed,” said Eddie Sheldrake, a five-foot-nine point guard from Los Angeles. “He told us, ‘I’m gonna work you so hard you’ll want to go to sleep.’”

  When practice began, Wooden was true to his word. He did not believe in wind sprints or running on an outside track to build his players’ condition. They did their running in basketball-oriented drills. Practices lasted up to three hours, and there was nary a wasted moment. If the players weren’t participating in a drill, they were practicing free throws—and they were not permitted to drink any water. Wooden gave them salt tablets to prevent cramping, and it wouldn’t be long before the corners of their mouths were caked from dehydration. “We had to suck on a wet towel when he wasn’t looking,” said Art Alper, a sophomore forward that first season. “That first year we didn’t realize what we were going through. We’d have training table after practice, and the football players would come around, and half our guys couldn’t finish dinner because they were so tired. We had all come from a slower game.”

  Wooden’s demeanor was also a reversal from his predecessor’s. “Wilbur Johns was very laid-back. He wasn’t a disciplinarian at all,” Ralph Joeckel said. Wooden, on the other hand, was all business. He could be serene and pleasant away from the court, but he did not exude much warmth. “He was always very serious when I saw him. I don’t think I ever saw him smile,” said Ralph Bauer, who played on Wooden’s first freshman team. Alper added, “He wasn’t a hail-fellow-well-met. He was stern and he didn’t smile a lot. But he was very fair.”

  The new man commanded an inst
ant respect. His players could see from the start that Wooden knew the game and put a great deal of thought into organizing his practices. To him, it was no different than putting together a lesson plan for a high school English class. It was the teacher’s job to show up early and be ready to work. He came to practice in his athletic gear and black shoes, and he constantly referred to his three-by-five-inch index cards as he presided over the workouts.

  Wooden’s experience as a player was invaluable. He had seen this process from that point of view, and he knew just how hard to push without stretching them past their limits. He kept his drills mostly to five-to-ten-minute increments, alternating between difficult and less difficult to keep the workout from becoming mundane. “He had those drills down to a precise point. Just at the point where you felt like you weren’t going to be able to make it another length of the floor, he would change the drill,” said Paul Saunders, a sophomore forward on that first team.

  His instructions were highly specific. He taught them precisely how to pivot, pass, catch, dribble, shoot. He showed them how to watch the ball into their hands when receiving a pass. A shot was to be taken with a flick off the nose. When they ran through his fast break drill, the dribbler always stopped at the foul line, and the two wing players cut to the basket at a forty-five-degree angle. When the pass was made, the players had the option of finishing a layup or pulling up for a shot, but they were always—always—to use the backboard. Wooden learned many of these details from Piggy Lambert, but the specifics of what he taught weren’t important. What mattered was how well he taught them.

  Wooden was exacting but not inflexible. During those first few weeks, he tried to show his players how to shoot free throws underhanded with two hands, as he did, but they were so inept that he gave up after a few weeks. “He said, ‘My high school teams could shoot free throws better than you guys,’” recalled Wayne Boulding, a six-foot-one junior forward.

  Wooden was stronger and in better shape than his players, but this was not the same young buck who had dashed his way through high school practices in South Bend. Wooden turned thirty-eight years old as practice began, and the back injury he had suffered at navy flight school flared up frequently. Sometimes he would have to conduct practice from a chair at half court or from the bleachers. As was the case in Dayton, South Bend, and Terre Haute, Wooden’s new charges were struck at how this genial, quiet, reserved midwesterner was transformed once he stepped onto a basketball court. “He was a tenacious, tough, hard-nosed, vicious competitor,” Eddie Sheldrake said. “He looks like a preacher and acts like a preacher … but when you look at those beady eyes and that pointed nose and you get him on you, he’s wiry. Let him guard you for a game and you’d wish you never went on the basketball court. That’s the truth.”

  As the first game drew nigh, Wooden started putting his players through full-court scrimmages. This was not just a matter of assessing talent; he wanted to experiment with different combinations to discern who played well with whom. Baseball fan that he was (he was a numbers freak who devoured the Sporting News every week), Wooden also kept detailed statistics for every scrimmage. His goal was to decide which six or seven players would make up his rotation for the entire season. Once the games began, Wooden did very little substituting, even when his team held a large lead in the final minutes.

  Everyone wanted to play, of course, but Wooden did not hear much complaining from the benchwarmers. Many of the players came from strict homes, and several had recently served in the military. They were raised in a culture that acquiesced to authority. “I never felt neglected,” said Boulding, who saw very little court time that season. “Once you were relegated to the second or third team, you kind of found your place and did what you could to support everybody else. That’s the way the game is played.”

  In Wooden’s mind, these boys were students first, players second. They saw him at practice, at games, and at team meals. Aside from road trips, he did not spend much time with them away from basketball. If the players had personal or academic problems, they would go to the assistant coaches or the team’s trainer, Ducky Drake, who was also UCLA’s track coach. “I don’t remember ever having a one-on-one with Coach Wooden at any time,” Ralph Joeckel said. “To me, he was the guy that blew the whistle and said here’s what I want you to do.” George Stanich, who played on Wooden’s first two teams, added that a player “might get razzed if you were too tiffy with the coach.” Asked how much time he spent in Wooden’s office just shooting the breeze, Stanich went silent for several seconds. “Gosh,” he finally answered. “I don’t even remember where his office was.”

  * * *

  The 1948–49 season was the first and last that John Wooden opened without having to deal with external pressure. It was a refreshing change from the environment he had left behind in Terre Haute. Shortly before the first game, the Daily Bruin predicted that “under Wooden’s herd-running, modified fire-house type of basketball, the Bruins ought to pull an occasional surprise, although nobody expects them to nail down the PCC bunting at this stage of the proceedings.” Even Wooden’s bio in the school’s media guide, so often an instrument of propaganda, tried to tamp down expectations: “His prospects here are such that might not instill the greatest of optimism in a man with a new job on his hands.”

  What everyone, including Wooden, failed to realize was that this ragtag bunch was in many ways uniquely suited to his style. This owed largely to the presence of the “Sacramento whiz kids,” a group of transfers from Sacramento Junior College who had won a junior college state title in 1946. The players had been brought in by Bill Putnam, himself a Sacramento JC alum, and they had the requisite skills to play fast-break basketball. “They were the runningest, hardest-working guys I’d ever seen,” Joeckel said. “Not much height, but nobody could keep up with them.”

  George Stanich was the best of the bunch. Besides also serving as a starting pitcher for the UCLA baseball team, Stanich was an elite high jumper who had just won a bronze medal at the 1948 Olympics in London. The school billed Stanich as “UCLA’s greatest all-around athlete since Jackie Robinson” and put a photograph of him and Wooden on the cover of the team’s media guide.

  One of the first adjustments Wooden made was to switch the six-foot-three Stanich from center to guard, even though the kid couldn’t dribble a lick. In Wooden’s eyes, Stanich’s quickness was a far greater asset than his size. Moving him away from the basket would enable him to exploit it. “I didn’t like it, and he knew I didn’t like it, but as long as I was playing, I was all right,” Stanich said. Stanich was also the type of player who would benefit from Wooden’s counterintuitive approach to rebounding. Unlike most coaches, Wooden did not teach his players to “box out,” which means blocking an opponent with their bodies so they can establish inside position. He derided that tactic as “negative rebounding.” Instead, Wooden wanted his guys to pursue the ball.

  Wooden didn’t deploy his racehorse style purely for tactical reasons. He also knew it would excite the fans. This was especially important in Southern California, where because of the beautiful weather outdoor sports like football and baseball flourished. Even track and field, which produced Olympic heroes like Stanich, was a bigger draw than hoops. “We have an obligation not only to try to win, but to entertain the customers, especially here in Los Angeles where there are so many other attractions,” Wooden said. “A coach who plays up-tempo style, as opposed to ball control, is less likely to be fired.” The man may have been old-fashioned in many respects, but on this front he was a cutting-edge marketer.

  The Bruins surprised everyone by sprinting out of the gate. They opened with six consecutive wins, equaling the school’s longest streak in fifteen years. But even though the Bruins were winning, Wooden could see that his players were not in the kind of tip-top shape they would need to be in for conference play. So they spent the next few weeks running their tails off.

  This was always Wooden’s fallback position: there wasn’t a pro
blem in basketball that couldn’t be solved with better conditioning. It was right there in the center of his Pyramid of Success, one-third of the belief system instilled by Piggy Lambert: Condition. Skill. Team Spirit. Wooden may have understood at some level the importance of defense, but he didn’t emphasize it. “He didn’t teach too much defense. His theory was to get the most high-percentage shots,” said Don Seidel, a six-foot-one guard on that first team. This way of thinking frustrated his assistant, Bill Putnam, who came from the Wilbur Johns school, where teams slowed the pace and guarded their way to victory. “Bill liked defense, so he and John would bump heads once in a while,” Betty Putnam said. “Bill never said anything derogatory about John, ever. But Bill would come home and work on these defensive moves, and he’d try to get John to use them. Most of the time John wouldn’t pay much attention.” As a result, Putnam took on an administrative role with the team while Wooden and Powell, the two transplanted Hoosiers, did the bulk of the teaching.

  In mid-December the Bruins got the chance to test their mettle in a pair of doubleheaders featuring visitors from the Midwest, a region that the Los Angeles Times described as the “cradle of basketball and spawning ground of the greatest basketball teams the game has ever seen.” In the first game, UCLA squeaked by Northwestern, 49–44, to improve to 6–0. The next night they suffered their first loss, to Wisconsin, by a score of 49–46. These games were played before 6,800 spectators at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, a venue in downtown Los Angeles that often hosted ice shows and hockey games. However, most of those fans were on hand to watch USC, which was also participating in the doubleheaders. “It was,” said Powell, “an SC town.”

  Wooden’s extra conditioning work started to pay off once the conference schedule got under way in January. Over the next two months, the Bruins would play four games against each of the other three teams in the PCC’s Southern Division—California, Stanford, and USC. After losing the opener to Stanford, UCLA used an 11–2 run late in the first half to beat Cal by 9. That was followed by Wooden’s first two-game series against USC. The specter of the fresh face squaring off against the old guard represented by USC coach Sam Barry provided an irresistible story line. “Wooden brought to Westwood a fast-breaking, lung-searing style of play which demands speed and more speed from his players,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in advance of the weekend clashes. “Barry has had singular success with the ‘slow break’ where control of the ball pays off. ‘Race-horse’ teams here have been forced to slow down when confronted by Barry’s pass-and-wait-for-the-breaks performance. So it’ll be interesting to see which team has its own way.”