Not 20 miles from Bloomington, within the pale of Bob Knight, the banquet hall erupts with approval.
The sphinx of the Pyramid of Success rests his left forearm against his stomach, parallel to the ground. His left hand is a socket for his right elbow. His right forearm forms a hypotenuse leading to his chin, where the index finger sticks upright, hovering just over his mouth. When speaking, Wooden strikes this pose frequently and unconsciously. A photograph of him in the same pose—Nell’s favorite—hangs in their bedroom.
It is an enigma, that finger to the mouth. Is it the stern Midwestern schoolteacher, meting out discipline, admonishing the class? Or is it the kindly grandfather, guiding the wayward and confused young, giving them assurances that everything will be all right?
Or is it both? Wooden’s greatest achievement isn’t the 10 in 12, or seven in a row, although such a feat will surely never be accomplished again. It is rather that he did all this during the roily years from 1964 to ’75—an era in which 18 to 22-year-old males were at their most contrary—at UCLA, a big-city campus awash in the prevailing freedoms.
Your star player lies down in rush-hour traffic to protest the Vietnam War. (Stand up for what you believe, Bill Walton’s coach always said, but be willing to accept the consequences.)
Four of your players ask to use your office after practice to conduct meditation sessions. (You let them.) One asks your permission to smoke marijuana, saying he’d heard it would relieve the pain in his knees. (I am not a doctor, you tell Walton. All I know is it’s against the law.)
College players still take drugs, but none today go in to discuss it with the coach beforehand. What was it about Wooden that caused Walton to broach this subject? “Decisions are more apt to be accepted when you’ve listened to suggestions first,” says Wooden. “I wanted them to see the reason behind what I asked of them, not to do things just because I said so.”
Yet Wooden threw down the clipboard when he had to. Former UCLA center Steve Patterson remembers the day, in the fall of 1970, that he and forward Sidney Wicks asked to be excused from practice to show solidarity with a nationwide rally protesting the Vietnam War. “He asked us if this reflected our convictions, and we told him it did,” says Patterson. “He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at UCLA.
“We blinked. I don’t think he was necessarily unsympathetic to the statement we wanted to make. He may even have agreed with us. But I see the connection. I didn’t at the time, but I do now. He continually challenged you about your attitude toward the team as a whole. He set the standards. He didn’t let us set the standards, even though we wanted to.”
Wooden’s practice gym was a sort of one-room schoolhouse, transported from the Indiana plains. For two hours in the afternoon his pupils listened to material that seemed to have emerged from a time warp. They listened because they knew they would win if they learned their lessons. The fundamentals came complete with hoary precepts: Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. Be quick, but don’t be in a hurry. Don’t mistake activity for achievement. The purpose of discipline isn’t to punish but to correct. Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out.
One sentiment is so dear to Wooden that he has mined the anthologies for two renderings of it. “The journey is better than the end” comes from Cervantes. And Robert Louis Stevenson said, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” Says Wooden, “I appreciated that notion more later, after we started to win championships. The saying that it’s tougher to stay on top than to get there—I don’t believe it. It’s very tough to get there. And along the way you learn, as Lincoln would say, not just what to do, but what not to do.
“People say we could never win those championships again, what with parity. But I’m not so sure it couldn’t happen today. Winning breeds winning. If we had had freshman eligibility during the 1960s, we would have won another one [with Lew Alcindor, now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in 1965–66]. When everyone has good players, teaching will be a telling difference.”
Wooden taught basketball according to the simplest pedagogical principles. He used what he calls the whole-part method. Show the whole and then break it down, “just like parsing a sentence,” he says, “or solving a math problem.” He followed his four laws of learning: explanation, demonstration, correction and repetition. For 16 years there was talk of a new gym, and when UCLA finally opened Pauley Pavilion in 1965, Wooden made sure he didn’t get just an arena, but a classroom with bleachers that roll back.
Wooden taught English at South Bend Central High before heading to Indiana State for two seasons and then to Westwood for the rest of his coaching life. He always preferred the practices to the games. The games were just exams, when the teacher’s work was done. “There again,” he says, “the journey’s better than the end.”
Piggie Lambert, Wooden’s coach at Purdue, preached that the team making the most mistakes would win, for good things come to those who risk error by taking the initiative. Thus, initiative is part of Wooden’s Pyramid. You would think, given his success, that someone might still coach his way today. But rare is the coach who doesn’t have a tight rein, a hard derriere or both. How can a real teacher not indulge mistakes? “George Patton is not my idol,” Wooden says. “I prefer Omar Bradley.”
As he sees all the games the networks satellite-dish out, Wooden concludes that, besides turning the young men into dogs and ponies, television has transformed the coaches into showmen. Coaches today overcontrol. Instead, they should teach players the game and let them play it. Goodness gracious sakes alive—you may hear that truncated to Gracious sakes, but from Wooden you’ll hear no stronger oath—coaches nowadays haven’t even hit their forties before they’re writing books with titles like A Coach’s World and Born to Coach.
Wooden’s first book is still in print. Published in 1966, it’s called Practical Modern Basketball. Read it and you’ll learn that basketball is a game of threes: forward, center, guard; shoot, drive, pass; ball, you, man; conditioning, skill, teamwork. These last three elements made up Lambert’s hoops trinity, and they are the three blocks at the heart of the Pyramid. The Wooden text also holds that the way to play the game—soundly, and with balance—isn’t a bad way to live your life.
“You might have thought of that as a golden time, when you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain. But we were at the top of the mountain when we showed up.” Greg Lee is talking about the Walton era, the three seasons Lee played at guard, between 1971 and ’74. “Half the time we didn’t even know who our opponent would be,” he says. “Winning 88 straight games—that’s not normal. It would have been better if we’d have struggled.”
When Lee and his classmates were precocious sophomores, Wooden warned them that, as seniors, they would be intolerable. Headstrong young men like Walton, guard Tommy Curtis and Lee—“I’d like to be able to say I didn’t contribute to the problems,” Wooden says, “but I did”—didn’t prove him wrong. But Wooden bent too much, and his normally steady hand seemed to waver. He relaxed some of the inviolable principles on which he had always insisted. He excused Walton from practice on Mondays and Tuesdays because of the center’s aching knees. Detecting inconsistency, the team took advantage.
That March, as if to vindicate 25 years’ worth of strictures suddenly allowed to go flaccid, UCLA squandered a seven-point lead in the second overtime of the NCAA semifinals and lost to North Carolina State. “Bill was such a megastar he probably didn’t need to practice,” says Lee. “But maybe the team needed him to practice.”
Lee, now coach at a high school near San Diego, has learned that lesson in discipline in retrospect. But Wooden, even if he denies it today, relearned it then and there. The next season, with the Bruins again playing on his exacting terms, they became champions once more.
Since his retirement, the catty strains of Wooden revisionism have made their way through the coaching fraternity. Unlikely as it may seem, be
tween 1948 and 1963 Wooden did not win an NCAA crown at UCLA, and during this period the critics accused him of being a jockey of referees and opposing players. They said that he overheated the old “B.O. Barn,” the Bruins’ second-floor gym, because he knew his teams could stand it. They said that he had two sets of standards, one for stars and another for everybody else. But the most persistent whisper has always been that the cornerstone of the Pyramid was no middle-American verity, not conditioning or skill or teamwork, but a Los Angeles contractor and UCLA booster named Sam Gilbert.
Gilbert was everything Wooden wasn’t. Worldly and wealthy, he offered players advice and, in violation of NCAA rules, gave them gifts and paid for their girlfriends’ abortions. Black players, in particular, received healthy doses of his street wisdom and regular invitations to the lavish spreads at his house on Sunday mornings. “I remember we were on a road trip in Chicago, and five guys all got on the bus together wearing matching coats with fur-lined collars,” says Lee. “It was pretty conspicuous. It’s not like Coach was an ostrich about Sam, but he wouldn’t confront the problem.”
Wooden insists that no one enrolled at UCLA because of Gilbert. But once a player became a Bruin, few were denied his largess. With the inertia born of a successful program, and with Wooden’s lack of interest in matters outside the gym or the classroom, Gilbert went unchallenged. After becoming the UCLA coach in the late ’70s, Larry Brown, who resented Gilbert’s sway with his players, tried to run him off. Gilbert responded by threatening not only to cut off Brown’s testicles but also to do it “without him even knowing it.” In 1987 a Florida grand jury, unaware of Gilbert’s death four days earlier, indicted him in a drug-money-laundering scheme.
In the simplistic analogy, Gilbert is the hoodlum on the fringe of the school yard, and Wooden is the teacher who can only tell his pupils to Just Say No. “I warned them, but I couldn’t pick their friends,” says Wooden. Today Wooden owns up to breaking NCAA rules himself. He invited players to have meals with him and Nell during in-season school vacations so they would not be alone in dormitories on campus. He helped pay the rent of a player with a child and a sick wife. He bailed out of jail another player who had been picked up for delinquent parking violations. These transgressions all conformed to Wooden’s higher rules.
“I honestly feel Sam meant well,” says Wooden. “He felt whatever he did was right, even if it was against the rules.” As different as he and Gilbert were, Wooden felt much the same way.
“I never had a smarter player than Mike Warren,” Wooden frequently says. He also says, “I never had a better athlete than Keith Erickson.” This is a salutary lesson about race, from a man who grew up in Indiana, then a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. Warren, who later starred in Hill Street Blues, is black; Erickson, white. In a sport infected with racial code phrases like “heady ballplayer” and “great athlete,” Wooden’s comments are March on Washington stuff. But he says he isn’t the slightest bit aware of their stereotype-busting implications. Wisdom subdues bigotry. With the experience to judge, one need not prejudge.
By her husband’s count, Nell was twice at death’s door before she finally succumbed. A heart attack, which she suffered while undergoing a hip-replacement operation in 1982, put her in a coma. Friends and family took turns visiting St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Los Angeles, not to see Nell in her quiet as much as to succor her husband. He spent 10- and 12-hour days at her bedside, and he might not have found time to eat were it not for their solicitude.
“The doctors told me to talk to her,” says Wooden. “They said that I might not see any signs, but in her subconscious she might be hearing me.” Three months after Nell entered the coma, as her body lay suctioned and plugged with intravenous tubing, he took her hand and squeezed it, and he felt a squeeze back. There are no nets to cut down when something like that happens.
But shortly thereafter Nell had to go back into the hospital to have her gallbladder removed, and that, the doctors said, was a no-hoper. No way she could weather the trauma. Yet she survived the surgery, recovering enough to live life rather than just muddle through it. She even made one last Final Four—Seattle, in fact, in 1984. She was in a wheelchair but was still alert and vivacious, still matching the names with the faces. “It was,” the coach says, “the last enjoyable thing she did.”
That is why this weekend in Seattle would have been so difficult. Early on Christmas morning in 1984, Nell had to be rushed to the hospital. By then a number of ailments, including cancer and emphysema, had gotten ornery. At 73 she just wasn’t going to pull off any more miracles. Nell fought on through the rest of the winter, playing out the season. She died on the first day of spring.
Before every tip-off back at Martinsville High, Wooden had looked up from his guard position and caught her eye in the stands, where she played the cornet in the band. She would give him the O.K. sign and he would wave back. They kept up that ritual even as Johnny Wooden (Hall of Fame, inducted as a player in 1960) became John R. Wooden (Hall of Fame, inducted as a coach in 1972). He’s the only person with the old one-two combo. Few knew that he clutched a cross in his hand. Fewer knew that she clutched an identical one in hers. She took it with her to the grave.
The reclusiveness that ruled Wooden’s first year as a widower alarmed doctors, family and friends alike. Former players and assistant coaches conspired to telephone regularly until Wooden’s granddaughter, Caryn, gave birth to a girl, Cori, and he brightened somewhat. “I try to be thankful for the time Nellie and I had together,” says Wooden. “But sometimes you wonder what you could have done. There’s a certain amount of second-guessing that goes on.”
He never went off to scout opponents, never brought the practices home and didn’t make more than a dozen recruiting trips in his entire career. What could so faithful and doting a husband possibly regret? “We did things because I wanted to, not because she did,” he says. “We never went to Ireland. Nellie always wanted to go to Ireland. We had planned to, too. But something would always come up. And Nellie loved to dance. I was not a dancer, you know.”
He averts his eyes, betraying his small-town bashfulness. That’s what Nell, at 13, had to crack; that’s what she and her friend Mary Schnaiter would talk about when they repaired to the quarries outside town. Of course, Johnny was already smitten. “She was as cute as can be,” says Mary. “Little, with a turned-up nose. She could do just about anything she wanted.”
And my, the life John and Nell spent together. You can almost hear Alistair Cooke in the voice-over: Johnny, born in Hall, Ind., in 1910, one of four sons of a simple and devout couple, spent much of his youth in a farmhouse with a three-holer outhouse out back. His father forged the iron goal he learned to shoot at. John and Nell waited out his four years at Purdue, only to have their savings—$909 and a nickel—wiped out in a bank failure on the eve of their wedding.
So rock-solid a couple was grossly misplaced amid the shifting-sand values of Los Angeles. When John and Nell left Indiana State for UCLA, they found the support of two familiar Midwestern pillars. Wales Smith, the minister at the church they joined in Santa Monica, had been in Wooden’s class at Martinsville High. Ralph Irwin, the doctor they chose, had performed an emergency appendectomy on Wooden in Iowa City. With a pastor and a doctor they could trust, John and Nell needed little more. “Oh, you’re from back East!” people would say. Crossly, Nell would correct them.
She would speak up at times when John wouldn’t. She upbraided the fans who she thought were too greedy. She threw withering looks at the caviling men along press row. She badgered J. D. Morgan, UCLA’s shrewd and parsimonious athletic director, about her husband’s insulting salary and the anemic retirement package awaiting them. “I know John Wooden never lies,” one coach said during the early ’70s, “but he can’t be making twenty-nine-five.” At the time he was. And he never made more than $32,500.
He had no shoe contracts or courtesy cars, either. In the early days, before all the titles, before Pauley was bu
ilt, Wooden’s Bruins practiced amid the gymnasts and wrestlers and shared a locker room with the other men’s sports. The dust from all the gym classes would build up by practice time, and Wooden and his managers had to mop the floor themselves. The undisciplined circumstances under which he was asked to teach ate away at him, but he and Nell never really considered going elsewhere, even as offers from NBA teams and several schools in the Big Ten came his way. Their son, Jim, had fallen for surfing; their daughter, Nan, for Hollywood, where she and her girlfriends staked out the stars, autograph books clutched to their breasts. Soon enough Wooden made peace with the broken promises and his chaotic classroom. “I whipped it,” he says, “by recognizing it.”
Some people think Wooden was too deferential to Morgan. Certainly, the same couldn’t be said of Nell. “She really thought they were taking advantage of him,” says Nan. “And Daddy never wanted to complain, because he never wanted for anything. But Daddy didn’t have to get mad. He could stay very serene, because his other half was getting it out. Nobody was his champion the way Mother was.”
Championing a champion took its toll. During his early days as a coach, Wooden would stop smoking the day practice began and forswear cigarettes for the balance of the season. In 1955, he quit entirely. But it wasn’t so easy for Nell. From the time she first acquired a taste for cigarettes, Nell had relied on smoking to help her cope with the stress. Her husband desperately wanted her to give up the habit that would hasten her departure from him, but she played games with him, stashing butts in her purse, retiring to her daughter’s house to get a fix.
As the dynasty pushed into the ’70s, success was spoiling what should have been glorious times and edging Wooden toward retirement. “Sometimes I’m very slow making up my mind,” he says. “But once I make it up, I’m very slow to change it.”
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