I’m not one for the cult of coaches, but John Wooden was genuinely fascinating. It always sounds like he did well by the people who played for him.
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Michael
All the way up to now, Denny Crum has respectfully referred to John Wooden as “Coach”. He says that Wooden never mentioned winning in locker room speeches, and told his assistants that by encouraging good fundamental play, the wins would follow. He was also keenly interested in the academic development of his players.
Cacti
Never earned more than $36,000 from UCLA ($145,000 adjusted for inflation)…
While winning 10 National Championships.
MikeJ
@Cacti: I wonder what the highest paid prof at the time was.
wobbly
Never heard of the guy, but my spouse knew a lot about him.
I remember asking a Cambodian friend, who was the only one of his father’s thirteen children to survive that shitstorm, of his first impression on arrival in Jamestown, New York, 1970.
He saw adult people playing games, throwing balls around in public, caring about which team beat which…in the midst of a war, mind you, a war in which a lot of Americans were dying also.
His first thought was “Oh, Buddha! This is a nation of children!”
fucen tarmal
wooden deserved the credit he got, even if that sort of success puts ucla in the category of yankees, canadians, celtics.
Cacti
@wobbly:
Shame on John Wooden for not stopping the Vietnam War.
Seitz
John Wooden’s legendary status on the basketball court was dwarfed only by his status as a member of the human race. He turned young basketball players into champions, but more importantly, he turned boys into men. And screw the passive voice: I, along with millions of others, will miss him dearly.
BruinKid
I’m still in shock. I was at the gathering outside the hospital here at UCLA that turned into a vigil. We had been scheduled to meet to do an 8-clap at 8pm for Coach. Quite a few people there didn’t even realize he had just passed away an hour earlier. It was a very weird feeling.
Coach was a saint. Even more than being a great coach, was his being a great human being. There’s so much to say about him, I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll have to gather my thoughts, I’m just too emotional right now.
Mick Y
Wobbly,
John Wooden was, in my opinion, an American Buddha. Yes, he’s known for being the winningest coach in college basketball, but he really considered himself a teacher. Considering what your Cambodian friend went through, I can understand why he would say “this is a nation of children!” However, it was John Wooden who helped some of these children grow up to become responsible adults. He was never in it for the fame or the money and was actually quite humble. I got to meet him once a few years ago. It was quite an experience – like meeting your childhood hero. Such a great person.
PanAmerican
Linkmeister
I lived in Westwood for a couple of years, but left in ’62, before UCLA’s great run of championships. Nonetheless, I was a UCLA fan for years afterward. I still remember that heartbreaking double-overtime loss to David Thompson and NC State in the semi-final of the 1974 tournament.
Wooden was a great great coach and from all accounts an even better person. There aren’t many if any like him left in college sports.
Mary G
When they both came to LA, John Wooden and Vin Scully (Dodgers broadcaster for 53 years) both lived in the same apartment building. They met when Scully helped Wooden bring in his groceries. Two great men of sports we have been very privileged to have in our area.
Linkmeister
One legend announcing the death of another: Vin Scully during tonight’s Dodgers game.
superfly
@PanAmerican:
True, Sam Gilbert helped him get the best players, but Wooden still coached the heck (out of respect for Wooden today, I won’t cuss) out of them.
And it’s not like they weren’t doing the same thing everywhere else.
wobbly
I stand by my post.
What adult in this world devotes his entire life to training children to play?
Shouldn’t the kids be studying or something?
Ned R.
@wobbly: Like you said, wobbly, you didn’t know much about the man, so let me, politely, put you straight here with a few facts:
He taught high school English early in his adult life — all of his siblings were also teachers at one point or another as well.
He went to Purdue University as a college student because of its academic reputation, he himself having been noted in high school for both his athletic AND academic successes.
One of his rules for life, passed down from his father and from him to his many, many atheltes over the years, was the simple, perfect phrase, “Drink deeply from good books.”
Much more can be said. But if all you see is a guy ‘training children to play’ and wondering if they shouldn’t be studying, then you are not seeing at all. You might want to learn more, perhaps.
Ned “UCLA, Class of 1992” R.
Brachiator
@wobbly:
If you have to ask this question, then you likely couldn’t comprehend the answer.
In an interview clip with Coach Wooden on one of the local stations here in Southern California, Wooden noted the number of his former players who successfully graduated from UCLA and who went on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers.
Wooden lived to be 99. His entire life was hardly devoted to any single thing. But as you noted, you don’t know anything about him. There will be any number of obituaries and remembrances. Take a look at a few of them.
One of the best is a brief column written in 1972 by sportswriter Jim Murray, a great sports writer who made quite a career writing about adults who devoted parts of their lives teaching children to play. It contains this little gem.
A group of superstar athletes gather to play a game at the behest of Coach Wooden in order to raise money for a scholarship fund.
That’s quite a legacy.
Yutsano
@Brachiator:
I suppose there is also the fact that “play” is an observed behavior in almost all mammals. It is believed that play is an important factor in teaching both survival skills and social interactions. Humans play because we NEED to. It’s how we figure out our place in the universe and in society. Even if the play is highly regimentalized, it is still, on a basic level, fun. Every human society has games and sports of some kind. It’s a very basic part of the human condition.
John M.
I’ve been reading the comments here at Balloon Juice almost since the beginning. Never has a comment enraged me as much as PanAmerican’s classless comment.
Not necessarily because of the timing, but because how intellectually dishonest one would have to be to quote Bill Walton that way without the context (which was: Walton was complaining that the NCAA’s selective investigation practices were based on nothing but racism). For the record, I’m reasonably sure Walton never even said what PanAmerican has quoted him as saying. But I doubt PanAmerican cares anyway.
I believe you have to be a truly pathetic human being to make a post like that about a man whom many consider to be the greatest sports figure in history on the day of his passing.
Alex
From the LA Times:
This was in 1947-48. The man had aprofound sense of justice.
Thlayli
@superfly:
Rationalize it any way you want.
Tell me anything you want about what a great human being he was.
Tell me anything you want about what a great X-and-O guy he was.
IT WASN’T A CLEAN PROGRAM.
Add in how the NCAA tournament was structured in those days: 16 teams, conference champs only, no regional balancing.
Put it all together, those 10 national titles don’t look quite so impressive.
Adam Collyer
@Brachiator:
This is the reason why John Wooden matters. In a world where coaches have no respect for the academic side of the institution that pays them and no loyalty to their players or supporters, John Wooden stood head and shoulders above the rest. It wasn’t because he won big; plenty of coaches win big (see Carroll, Pete and Calipari, John). It wasn’t because his players went on to live successful lives beyond college basketball; far less coaches care about that. It was because he cared about both.
He was a rare breed – a man truly committed to what Joe Paterno has called the Grand Experiment. As a Penn State alum, watching the UCLA reaction to Coach Wooden made me realize not only how sad I’ll be when JoePa finally leaves, but how lucky we are to have had them at all. In a profession that gives us Lane Kiffin, Charlie Weis, Pete Carroll, Dennis Erickson, and John Calipari, this matters.
StonyPillow
An icon of the generation that made America great is gone. I’m going to pull “They Call Me Coach” off the shelf and spend some time with it this weekend. It’s just about the only truly useful sports book ever written.
Brick Oven Bill
His also gave Sarah Palin a great quote for her book and lots of laughs for ourselves.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-dunn/palins-latest-emrogueem-g_b_373453.html
Too bad he couldn’t take her with him.
StonyPillow
@Brick Oven Bill: Completely different destinations, sir.
BruinKid
@Thlayli: Do you make it a habit to bring up the negative in the life of someone who passed away just hours earlier, and try to diminish their accomplishments? Or are you just that big of a jerk?
And did you even think before you opened your mouth about how it was somehow easier when only conference champions were allowed in? Think about it. Carefully. You had to WIN your conference in the regular season to qualify. There were no bad teams, no fluke teams, unlike now. Are you seriously suggesting a team with a sub-.500 record that managed to get hot for a few days and win its conference tournament is anything more than a glorified scrimmage for the nation’s top teams?
Back in Coach’s days, EVERY tournament game was basically against a Top 20 team. To think today’s expanded field makes it harder is to willfully misunderstand the level of competition back in those days.
You also might want to go back and look up the rosters of the teams we played in those tournaments. You’ll find some of college basketball and the NBA’s greatest players that we vanquished.
SiubhanDuinne
@Brick Oven Bill: You’re not the real Brick Oven Bill. The real Brick Oven Bill loves him some Sarah Palin. You, sir, are a fraud and a charlatan.
BruinKid
@PanAmerican: OK, I’m not going to let you get away with an outright LIE. Bill Walton did NOT say that. That came from the writing of so-called “journalist” Jack Scott, who had a major axe to grind. See this for a blow-by-blow account of how untrustworthy Scott is, and the disgraceful rumor-mongering he routinely peddled in. He’s the Jerome Corsi of sports journalism. Oh, and he helped harbor the people that kidnapped Patty Hearst, so he literally was “palling around with terrorists”. Real trustworthy person there.
And Wetzel, another “journalist”, simply played stenographer to Scott without actually doing any “journalism” to see if the quote was true or not.
And of course you repeat it here as if it were fact. So how exactly do you differ from the mindless zombies who believe every word Glenn Beck says? You’ve just shown the same disregard for the truth. And to do so just hours after the man passed away, in order to try to tarnish his legacy… yeah, you are a sad piece of filth.
jon
John Wooden was a great coach. That’s what he’ll be remembered for in a century, when the Wooden Award will still be handed out.
We’ll probably hear that he had gay sex with Lute Olson’s hair, fingerbanged Dick Vitale, and snorted meth off of Kareem’s buttocks before this thread runs out, but he was a great coach.
baldheadeddork
@Alex: It’s all the more remarkable if you know where he’s from.
Wooden grew up in Martinsville, Indiana, a town about fifteen minutes north of Bloomington. (Where I live now.) During Wooden’s childhood and young adult years it was an epicenter for the KKK in a state where the Klan actually captured control of the state government in the 1920’s. Even after the Klan was driven out of the state house and governor’s mansion, the most virulent racism remained alive in Martinsville and most of rural Indiana for decades.
It’s not an exaggeration to say Wooden’s stand for equality would not have been more out of place if his story had been set in Alabama or Mississippi. It was that much of a break from the standards he was surrounded by, and I think it’s the reason he was never embraced by most of his fellow Hoosiers. Bobby Knight, who isn’t a fraction of the man or coach that Wooden was and isn’t even from here, is still worshiped by almost everyone who doesn’t hate IU. Wooden’s roots here is mentioned in passing, when he’s mentioned at all.
StonyPillow
@jon: We heard it now.
baldheadeddork
@wobbly:
What you say is true for some coaches, but the best use games to teach their students some of the best lessons about character, determination, and grace. That was Wooden.
Alex
Baldhead:
Exactly so. A man who grew up in KKK country in 1947 turning down a post season appearance because it was segregated. That is before Jackie Robinson, 20 years before Texas Western, 20 years before the SEC had a black player. Simply because he believed it was the right thing to do. Dirtbags like Pan can post all the phony Walton quotes they want, but obviously they are lacking the one attribute which epitomized Coach: decency.
Jim C
@Alex:
Was it?
And if so, was it far enough in advance of Robinson’s official debut (April 15, 1947) to merit the point?
charles pierce
But not everybody’s bagman was a connected pornographer.
I’m sorry, but the imminent arrival of a tsunami of Hoosier piety requires that somebody be true to the historical record.
gwangung
@Jim C: Yup. Think about it. And where he was coaching.
PanAmerican
@charles pierce:
Papa Sam? If so, I did not know that. As DougJ intimates there’s an interesting and complex history regarding Wooden. Those that want a marble man can snarl and froth at the mouth all they want, it doesn’t change the truth. As Andy Hill put it “Among the things Coach Wooden was good at, was knowing what he didn’t want to know.”
kuvasz
I think the John Wooden was a great teacher who used basketball as a metaphor for life. After I heard of his death last night I popped “Hoosiers” into the DVD player, and there was Coach Dale as John Wooden stating…….
I was told that no UCLA basketball player ever heard John Wooden talk about winning a game.
RIP Coach Wooden, your likes will not pass our way again.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
Yeppity yep yes.
We learn through play. I was going to write something along those lines originally, but I’m glad I didn’t because you said it much better than I would have.
Alex
Those that want a marble man can snarl and froth at the mouth all they want, it doesn’t change the truth.
Ironic, coming from the guy who quoted Walton saying something Jake Scott wrote. Wooden also avoided sanctimoniousness; perhaps another lesson to be learned in addition to common decency.
baldheadeddork
@charles pierce: Jesus, did you pick up the sand and water Summer’s Eve by mistake or what?
Not to correct the grammar of someone who can drop imminent, tsunami and piety into one hacktacular sentence, but your subject/verb arrangement out of line, Chuck. A tsunami of Hoosier piety would mean Hoosiers as a plural can feel piety for producing someone like Wooden. Not so. If you need it explained to you again, it’s a miracle that he came out of this inbred, knuckle-dragging place with the progressive views on race that he held, and that he was willing to put his career on the line for it when he was only the coach of a small, unknown college.
About UCLA athletes getting gifts during Wooden’s run, almost every major program had that in all of the big sports before, during and after Wooden’s tenure at UCLA. Charles Barkley talks openly about the new Monte Carlo he got from a booster when he was playing at Auburn. OJ Simpson was taken care of at USC. Until Tarkanian took it to a whole other level at UNLV and the press started treating the stories everyone had heard for years as a scandal, boosters giving gifts and walk-around cash to athletes was the standard operating procedure in college sports.
superfly
@Thlayli:
Who’s rationalizing? I stated 3 facts:
1. Wooden was a great coach, and a good teacher and mentor beyond that;
2. Sam Gilbert was a great benefactor to the UCLA program (regardless of the veracity of the Walton quote above);
3. Every college sports program (football or basketball) of that era had a Sam Gilbert, or several. It was the norm, not the exception. Still is the norm, they just find different ways to do it these days.
Any inference beyond that is yours, not mine.
As far as the tournament structure, competition, etc. UNC, Kentucky, Duke, Kansas, etc. never came close to winning 10 of 12, and the reason was they weren’t as good as UCLA, nothing to do with the structure of the tournament, competitive balance, etc. 12 times UCLA went to the Final Four against the best of the best, and they won 10 times. That’s the beauty of sport, no amount of arguing on the internet changes what happened on the court, field, pitch, etc.
baldheadeddork
@Jim C:
The ’47 NAIA tournament was in early March, so yeah, it did precede Robinson’s major league debut with the Dodgers.
I’m not sure how much time would make the point meritorious. Both were major actions against racial discrmination.
I’ll agree that Wooden’s refusal to accept an invitation to the NAIA tournament wasn’t as nationally significant as Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. But I don’t think Branch Rickey signing Robinson was anywhere close to the act of moral courage that Wooden showed, either. Rickey never dreamed of boycotting the World Series because baseball banned black players, and frankly, there was a financial upside and motive for Rickey to sign Robinson. That didn’t exist in Terre Haute, Indiana when Wooden recruited black players at Indiana State.
ISU could have fired Wooden for refusing to accept the invitation to the NAIA and he might have never been heard from again. Instead, he kept his job, won an invitation to the NAIA the next year and got the NAIA to drop their whites-only policy. It also opened the door for IU to sign its first black player in the 47-48 season, making it the first national powerhouse team to be integrated.
Jim C
@baldheadeddork:
Thanks for the comments. As I read “That is before Jackie Robinson” it sounded like it was downplaying the significance of the other accomplishment. The tournament happened a month before Jackie was officially signed to Brooklyn. He’d been with their triple-A team in Montreal for a year at that point, breaking the minor league color barrier a month or so after Wooden’s principled decision.
While it may be arguing from ignorance, I see them as concurrent events, as the behind-the-scenes maneuvers were happening in the same time-frames. I don’t want to diminish what Wooden did at all, or Robinson, or Rickey.
BruinFan
You can’t comment about Coach Wooden without talking about his beloved Nell. Coach continued to write monthly letters to Nell after she died and kept them all. He kept her pictures on their bed and slept beside them every night. When UCLA planned to name the basketball court at Pauley Pavillion after Coach Wooden, he declined unless they named it after him and Nell. He also insisted that her name be first. The basketball court at Pauley Pavillion is now called Nell and John Wooden Court. Everyone who ever played for Coach Wooden says that they think about something he taught them about life every single day and have passed it on to their kids. He was a giant of a coach and even more of a giant of a man.
Waynski
You can’t be easy on people if you’re going to attempt to shape them. Give credit where it’s due. He’s was a great fucking basketball coach and didn’t ask to be any more than that. Fucking A. Or perhaps it should be A+
Thlayli
@superfly:
Oh, but it did. The ACC champ and the SEC champ had to play each other in a regional, the Big 10 champ and the Big 8 champ and the Missouri Valley champ had to play each other in a regional, while UCLA had to play Long Beach State.
And that doesn’t take into account that 3/4 of the Top 10 weren’t even in the tournament because they finished second or third in their conference (or in the ACC’s case got upset in their tourney).
Bobby Knight is a complete prick, and his protege Krzyzewski isn’t much better, but I have a lot more respect for their accomplishments because of the environment they worked in.
PS to “bruinkid”: I’m sorry your fee-fees are hurt because I don’t think Wooden is the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.
Paula
Oh gawd. Did someone actually need the concept and benefits of “play” explained to them?
The stereotype of the humorless liberal lives on …
Stroszek
@wobbly: Your friend should try to be a better Buddhist.