Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

Many of Wooden’s former players worked at the camps or visited him there. They couldn’t believe how relaxed, personable, and, yes, funny the man could be. “I saw a totally different side of him,” said Jim Nielsen, the former UCLA center, who spent several years as a codirector for Wooden’s camps. “He loved to tease me. He’d have me out there demonstrating what foot to pivot on, where your head would be, where your balance would be. He’d always find something that wasn’t right and say, ‘You didn’t listen to me when you were playing for me, and you won’t listen to me now.’”

  The activity that occupied most of Wooden’s time, however, was public speaking. Much of it was unpaid, but Wooden also signed contracts with businesses that committed him to make dozens of appearances per year. He and Nell traveled all over the country as he astounded audiences with his lecture on the Pyramid of Success, which was more relevant to his audiences than it had ever been to his players. Wooden was well into his seventies, but he could deliver the speech without glancing at a single note. He quoted poetry at length (including some poems he had written) and showed off his wit. When he took the stage, he often joked, “I hope the good Lord will forgive my introducer for overpraising, and me for enjoying it so much.” Wooden was a spellbinding raconteur. (“So I said to Bill, ‘You’re right. You don’t have to get a haircut. We’re gonna miss you.’”) When his talk was over, he would stand around signing autographs, posing for pictures, and exchanging words with strangers who would speak of the encounter for the rest of their lives.

  Wooden was flooded with countless letters as well as requests for a signed copy of the pyramid. He did his best to answer each one personally, often paying for the postage himself. Each time he dropped something in the mail, he touched another life. “He had a great coaching record, but what he created after coaching was much more than that,” said Eddie Sheldrake, the point guard on Wooden’s first UCLA team, who remained one of his closest friends. “He developed a following and a mystique. He became like a god.”

  Wooden bristled at that kind of talk, which only made him seem more impressive. It was as if all of those NCAA championships were a prologue to what Wooden was really meant to be. Or rather, what he had been all along. “I considered myself at UCLA, and prior to being there, just as a teacher. That’s all a coach is. You’re a teacher,” he said during one talk to a group of UCLA alumni. The only difference was that his classroom had gotten a little bigger. “He stopped coaching UCLA a long time ago,” Bill Walton said. “Now he just coaches the world.”

  * * *

  As he moved into his seventies, Wooden remained in good physical shape for a man his age. He still took his daily five-mile walk around his neighborhood, reciting poetry and Biblical verses to allay his boredom. His active lifestyle and jam-packed calendar kept his body strong and his mind sharp. However, he soon had to dial back his pace for the saddest of reasons. His Nellie was falling ill, and she wasn’t getting better.

  The cigarettes she had smoked all her life were finally exacting their lethal toll. Among other ailments, Nell’s bones were breaking down. In 1982, she went into the hospital for hip surgery, but because of her chronic emphysema, she went into cardiac arrest during the surgery. Her doctors saved her life by massaging her heart for forty-five minutes. Shortly afterward, she suffered a second heart attack and lapsed into a coma. Wooden was told that it was very likely she would never come out of it.

  John sat at her bedside every day. His children and grandchildren took turns sitting with him. Bill Walton, who was now a member of the Los Angeles Clippers, came by every day that he was in town. Jim Harrick drove down frequently from Malibu. “My wife and I would just go up there and be with him,” he said. “Might sit forty-five minutes without a word being said, but we’d sit there. Trust me, he never forgot stuff like that.” Many other former players would drop in as well. “They never called him, never told him they were coming,” one of the hospital nurses said. “They just showed up, day after day, to be with him.”

  Days, weeks, and eventually months went by, and still Nell slept. At one point, a minister was called in to administer last rites. John was convinced she would wake up. “Dad just never gave up hope, even when we were told that if she did come out of the coma, she wouldn’t know any of us,” Wooden’s son, Jim, said. “It was total devotion.”

  He wasn’t nearly as strong as he tried to appear. “I never broke down in front of my family,” Wooden said. “I can remember going home some nights and—well, maybe I did there. But I was always up again for the next morning.” He followed her doctors’ suggestion that he talk to her. “They said that I might not see any signs, but in her subconscious she might be hearing me.”

  Otherwise, there wasn’t much to do except sit next to her bed and squeeze her hand. Finally, ninety-three days after Nell had gone into her coma, she squeezed back.

  It was a miraculous comeback, but Nell never regained her full strength. From then on, she was mostly homebound. She and John would watch her favorite soap operas for hours. He had no use for those shows, and the television was extremely loud because she was hard of hearing, but he sat with her and watched nonetheless. He still conducted a few speaking engagements, but he crafted his schedule around her needs. Once, when he was asked to make two appearances on behalf of the Wooden Award on the East Coast a few days apart, he flew back and forth to Los Angeles so he could be with her in the interim. When Nell wasn’t in the hospital or at the doctor’s office, she was resting at home, greeting his many visitors with her customary smile and peck on the cheek. “I remember a time when eight or nine of us went to have lunch with Coach. We went to the condo,” Johnny Green said. “Nell was in a walker, but she came out to greet us all. She just wanted to see her husband’s boys.”

  Nell eventually needed to have her gallbladder removed, and her doctors feared her body could not withstand the trauma. It did, and she recovered well enough to go with John to the 1984 Final Four in Seattle. John’s recall for names and faces was legendary, but Nell would always help him identify people whom he did not know. She was too weak to go to the games, so John pushed her wheelchair around town, allowing her to see people and go out to dinner. At one point, as he wheeled her through a hotel lobby and into an elevator, the dozens of basketball fans milling about the lobby gave them a standing ovation. “It was,” John later said, “the last enjoyable thing she did.”

  On Christmas morning in 1984, Nell fell ill and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This time, there would be no miracle. The doctors gave Nell only a few months to live. John resumed his sad, lonely vigil. He kept a running ledger of every dose of medication, every meal, all her sleeping and eating patterns. It was as if he were charting rebounds at practice. “He kept copious notes on every single thing that was said and done,” said Bill Hicks, who played for Wooden from 1959 to 1962. “I found them in his car one day, and he’d literally written down every word the doctor had said, what TV program she was watching at one o’clock, everything that happened to her. That’s the way he kept his mind occupied.”

  On a few occasions, the doctors performed a Code Blue to bring Nell back from the brink. “I remember we’d try to look hard at the doctor’s face as he came out [of her room],” the Woodens’ daughter, Nan, said. “You’d try to guess at the expression he had. Your heart would pound.” Nell spent most of her time sleeping. She knew her time was short. Once, when she awoke to see her husband leaning over her and weeping, she reached up and brushed his tears away.

  In those final days, John was surrounded by family and friends in the daytime. When evening came, however, he preferred to be alone with her. “We respect his wishes,” Nan said. “I’ve known a lot of married people, and I’ve always said what they had was rare. It’s like they were one person.” At one point, John was so exhausted that he fainted. He was advised to check himself into the hospital as a patient, but he refused to leave her. “She’s slowly slipping, and there’s nothing that can be don
e,” he said in February 1985. “What we’re trying to do is to relieve as much of her pain as possible. It’s impossible to take care of all the things that are bothering her.”

  “When she’s awake, she’s very aware, and always thinking of John,” Nan said. “The last few weeks, knowing she isn’t getting any better, her main concern has been for Dad, my brother and myself. She hasn’t thought of herself.”

  For most of his adult life, Wooden had done everything he could to control the events around him. He was obsessive-compulsive, hyperorganized, forever fixating on the smallest details. Here, finally, was a machine that could not be repaired. Yet he tinkered to the very end. He talked to his wife, told her how much he loved her, tried to coax her through another day. He did his best, but in the end it wasn’t good enough. Nell died on the first day of spring.

  * * *

  It was well known that while he was coaching at UCLA, John clutched a silver cross in the palm of his hand during games. It comforted him to know that Nell was sitting in her seat, holding an identical cross in one hand and smelling salts in the other. Before he buried Nell, John took her cross and put it in his pocket. If he couldn’t hold her, at least he could hold their talismans.

  It was one of the countless ways in which John tried to keep Nell’s memory alive. He visited her gravesite every Sunday after church. He wrote her a letter on the twenty-first of every month, because that was the date she died. He listened to the Mills Brothers. He wrote poems for her. When he endorsed checks, he signed her name along with his because “that pleases Nell.” He spoke to her in his prayers. He even spread her nightgown on the bed next to him and refused to go under the covers. Her lipstick sat on the dresser. Her license plate reading “MAMA 7” stayed by the foot of the bed. The room looked as if she had just been there the day before. “It was spooky,” Jack Hirsch said, “but it was part of the man and his aura.”

  But he was lost. Badly, badly lost. Nell was the one area of his life where Wooden violated his cardinal rule about avoiding peaks. Their love had brought him to godly heights, given him a glorious view. Without her there to prop him up, he plunged. It sent him on a long, dark walk through the valley.

  His children hoped that as painful as Nell’s death was at least John would benefit from not having to attend to her manifold illnesses. There would be no more trips to the doctor’s office, no more long nights in hospital rooms. “We thought it would make it easier now because of all that he had gone through and all of us had gone through. It affects everybody,” Jim said. Instead, Wooden sealed himself in his condo and rarely came out. He received a few visitors and still went to breakfast at Vip’s, his favorite local restaurant, but for the most part, he did not want to speak to anyone. When his phone rang, he let his answering machine pick it up so he could listen for who was calling. If it wasn’t someone he wanted to speak to—which was most of the time—he wouldn’t pick up the phone. It got so bad that his children feared he might take his own life. “He just didn’t care whether he lived or not,” Jim said.

  Many of his friends developed the same concern. “I honestly think he was suicidal. He was that despondent. She was just everything to him,” said Betty Putnam, whose husband, Bill, was one of Wooden’s first assistants at UCLA. “I tried calling, but most of the time he wouldn’t answer the phone. He just didn’t want to be with anybody, especially someone who would remind him of Nell.”

  In the eyes of his former players, Wooden’s depression made him seem truly human for the first time. “He was terrible. You really couldn’t get to him that first year,” Hirsch said. “There’s a breaking point to every man. He wasn’t the man that everybody perceived him to be. I always perceived him to be a regular Joe. If he didn’t go down like that, I would have been disappointed, like what kind of cold son of a bitch are you?”

  In an effort to lift the fog, a group of Wooden’s closest friends developed a rotation of days on which they were to call or visit. A member of his family stayed with him most every night. Nothing worked. After several months of this, Gary Cunningham decided it was time for some tough love. “You’re not doing the things you taught us to do,” he told Wooden. “You taught us that when you overcome adversity, you become a stronger person. You’re sitting at home and feeling sorry for yourself. I know you lost one of the most important things in your life, if not the most important, but life has to go on. What kind of example are you setting for all of us who played for you and believed in what you taught?”

  As Cunningham spoke, Wooden cried on the phone. “I don’t know whether it did any good or not, but he needed somebody to say it,” Cunningham said. “You can’t call and just sympathize, sympathize, sympathize. Sometimes you have to say the truth.”

  Wooden later confessed that during this period, his faith wavered. This was not surprising since Nell was always the more devout of the two. She decorated their home with Christian-themed pieces, including a plaque she hung on his office wall that read, “God never closes one door without opening another.”

  It took six months for the new door to swing open. It happened in the fall of 1985 with the birth of Cori Nicholson, the daughter of Nan’s daughter Caryn. She was Wooden’s first great-grandchild. He had been speaking to a group in downtown Los Angeles the night she was born, but he still got to the hospital before the big moment came. He was so thrilled, he said he wanted to take his family out to dinner to celebrate. On his way home, however, he got into a bad car accident. John and Nan spent four hours that night while he was X-rayed at a hospital in Tarzana. He told Nan that as he saw a big truck getting ready to smack him from behind, he thought to himself, “Well, a new one came in and an old one’s going out.” He was recovering not only his will to live but also his sense of humor.

  “The single biggest factor in his recovery was the birth of Cori,” Nan said. Slowly but surely, John began to climb out of the valley. “Picture this seventy-six-year-old man down on the floor with a year-old baby, crawling around and playing with her,” Caryn said. “He’s an unmerciful tease. I used to get mad at him when Cori was little. He’d tease her to the point where she’d really start to whine.” He would eventually have more than a dozen great-grandchildren, all of whom lived within a two hours’ drive. Each time another one came into the world, he was lifted a little higher.

  Wooden managed to resume something close to a normal life, although the years started to catch up with him. When he reached the age of seventy-eight, he decided to stop doing his camps. “My knees don’t handle this very well anymore. I can get through an afternoon, but at night I’m in misery,” he said during his final session. Looking down at the great-grandson he was bouncing on his knee, Wooden said, “Little Johnny will replace all of this for me. I don’t need much more than him and the rest of my family.”

  He was content, but he could never be truly happy again, not without Nell. During a trip to Indiana, Wooden was being visited in his hotel room by Jim Powers, his former guard from South Bend Central High and Indiana State, when he was suddenly overcome with emotion. “He was shaving in the bathroom. Tears came to his eyes,” Powers recalled. “He said, ‘I really miss her. You know, she just did everything for me. I can’t even pack my own bag.’” For a while, Jim Wooden hoped that his dad might remarry, but he soon realized there was no chance of that happening. Nor would Wooden entertain the idea of finding a new place to live. “I won’t ever leave here, because I see her everywhere,” Wooden said four years after Nell died. “I miss her as much now as I ever have. It never gets easier. There are friends who would like to see me find another woman for the companionship. I wouldn’t do it. It would never work.”

  Staying in the home they shared allowed him to keep Nell alive. “I’ve had people tell me they’d go into the condo and sit on that side of the bed, and he’d get upset and say, ‘You can’t sit there. That’s Nell’s side.’ And this was fifteen, eighteen years down the road,” Marques Johnson said. “Maybe it’s psychobabble, but I just didn’t know how
healthy that was for him. But at the same time, it was endearing because you understood the full extent of his devotion to her.”

  Wooden also refused to go back to the Final Four and the coaches’ convention. There were too many memories, and besides, who would be there to remind him about names and faces? Who would be his buffer to the outside world, shooing away autograph seekers when he was too polite to do it himself? “I couldn’t go without her,” he said the year after she died. “I have the feeling I’ll never go again.” He did make brief trips to the Final Four cities to attend a dinner or event, but he never stayed for the games. “I’m having a lot of trouble getting some people to understand,” Wooden said in 1988. “I attended the National Association of Basketball Coaches convention, I think it was thirty-five years in succession, always with my wife. I never went to one without her. I lost her. It would be three years ago this month. And I haven’t felt like going without her. Maybe next year I’ll feel different.”

  When he finished his morning walks, he was often in what he described as “a somber, almost melancholy mood.” In those moments, he turned to poetry. One day he penned an eloquent acknowledgment that he was growing older and would soon die. It began: “The years have left their imprint on my hands and on my face / Erect no longer is my walk, and slower is my pace…” The poem became a longtime favorite. He would recite it hundreds of times.

  This is how it would be for John Wooden the rest of his life. Even when he was cheerful and funny, he carried an elegiac aura. He was an elderly man who spoke freely of his own death. It made him seem even more godly, more ethereal. “I don’t think I’m preoccupied with death, but I will say this: The loss of Nellie is responsible for the fact that I have no fear of death, where perhaps at one time I did,” he said. “That’s the only chance I’ll ever have, if my sins are forgiven, to be with her. So why should I fear?”

  He assured people that he would not do anything to hurry his death along, but if it wasn’t a preoccupation, it was never far away from his consciousness. During a trip back home to Indiana in 1989, Wooden found himself walking through the halls of Martinsville High for the first time in ages. At one point, he stopped to peer at a photo of the Artesians’ 1927 state championship team. As he touched all the young faces in the photo, he repeated, “Gone … gone … gone…”