Wooden: A Coach's Life (11 page)

And slowing down was the last thing Wooden wanted his players to do. Lambert’s fire-wagon style was more prevalent in Indiana than in any other part of the country, but for the most part, it was still the exception. Wooden thought it was particularly important that his South Bend teams be proficient at the fast break because they tended to be smaller than the teams they were playing. “The trick was to get all five guys thinking the way he thinks,” Ed Powell said. “I used to wonder, what kind of coach would Coach Wooden be once he gets height?”

Also like Lambert, Wooden made sure his players took care of their feet. He taught them how to rub their feet with powder and wear two pairs of socks, and he had them wearing shoes that were one size too small. “I noticed that most players wear shoes that are too large,” Wooden said. “Basketball is a game of quick movement—stop, start, turn, change of direction, change of pace. If there’s that much sliding to the end of the toe, you’re going to get some blisters. So I decided what size shoe you’re going to wear. I want your toe right at the end of the shoe so that when you stop, there’s not going to be any sliding back and forth. I think that’s important.”

In Wooden’s eyes, blisters were about the worst enemy that could visit a basketball team. He was so concerned about them that he forbade his players to attend dances during the season. He even coached the way the players ate. “Wooden ordered the pregame meal, and even a manager had to eat the same dry roast beef and dry head lettuce and toast without butter he ordered,” Jacobs said. “He was very concerned about nutrition, and he was very careful about food and what we ate. He had very strict training rules compared to other coaches of the day.”

When the Bears ran their fast break, Wooden wanted the guard to stop at the foul line. When the guard fed the wings, Wooden wanted him to throw a bounce pass. Everything had to be precise. During one game, a Central player tried to catch and shoot a bounce pass that was thrown too low, but he lost his balance and the ball hit the underside of the rim. The Bears won the game, but Wooden had spied a deficiency that needed to be addressed. So at practice the following week, he devised a drill where he repeatedly rolled his players the ball as they ran full speed toward the basket. “There is no pass that is lower than a roll, so if you can handle a roll, you can handle anything,” Powell said. “The next time there was a situation where the pass was low, we picked the ball up and put it in like nothing.”

He wanted free throws to be shot two-handed and underhanded, just as he did. And in case his players doubted whether that form could be effective, Wooden was happy to demonstrate. “When I tell young coaches about the night after practice at the old South Bend YMCA that [Wooden] made 96 out of 100 free throws, they don’t believe it,” said Billy Bender, a former player. “When I tell them it was done shooting two-handed, they really don’t believe it.”

This was another of Wooden’s assets as a teacher. Whatever he asked his players to do, he was able to do it far better himself. He showed how to get a rebound by grabbing the ball and sticking out his elbows. Sometimes he would show off by standing at midcourt sinking two-handed set shots. “He would demonstrate everything. There was nothing he couldn’t do to perfection,” Bob Dunbar said. Added Jim Powers, “He was a young buck. He could rebound better than we could, he could shoot better than we could, and he could dribble better than we could. He taught you by demonstrating. He didn’t leave it to you to learn how to do things.”

This came in especially handy when Wooden was displeased. One season, as the team was in the midst of a long winning streak, Wooden decided his boys were getting a little too cocky, so he set up a scrimmage with some other faculty members. “We couldn’t stop him,” Powell said. “I don’t think he missed a shot the whole game. He had us faked out of our supporters. It was a humbling experience, but it brought us back down to earth.”

He was, in short, a hard-to-please, detail-obsessed, hyper-organized taskmaster and control freak—which made it all the more jarring when he adopted a hands-off approach during games. Wooden believed it was his job to prepare his team to play. Once the game began, it was their job to show what they had learned.
Don’t look over at the bench when the game starts
, he told them.
Just do what you’ve been taught to do
. “Practice was Mr. Wooden’s domain. The game was the players’ domain,” Dunbar said. “He expected you to perform what you practiced all week. He made some adjustments, but you never saw him running up and down the sideline.”

Wooden did not like calling time-outs. He saw them as a sign of weakness, and they only gave the other team a chance to rest. Likewise, if the opponent seized momentum, Wooden did not believe in making strategic adjustments. He would rather err on the side of consistency. “Back then, we used to think Wooden wasn’t flexible enough,” Powell said. “He couldn’t change his style of coaching in the tougher, more demanding tournament games. He thought he could win just by having the better-conditioned teams. I think he learned later on that it took more than that.”

Which is not to say Wooden was disengaged. For example, he could be brutal on referees. He may have mostly stayed in his chair, but he maintained a running dialogue with the officials. Jim Powers recalled a game that was officiated by a man named Pinkie Fink. When Wooden didn’t like one of Fink’s calls, he shouted, “Fink, you stink!” Oftentimes, Wooden let his assistant do the baiting, but there was no doubt who was giving the orders. “He was a lot more fiery than people knew,” Ehlers said.

Wooden even had the bright idea to set up a regular game against a rival school coached by his older brother, Maurice. John later recalled that when his team won, Maurice “didn’t speak to me for a year.” After South Bend won three straight, the brothers decided not to play again. “It was not a healthy situation,” John said.

Above all, he was a fighter, quite literally if he was pushed enough. One person who found that out early on was Mishawaka coach Shelby Shake, who was a cousin of Glenn Curtis. During his eleven years at Mishawaka, Shake’s teams won four sectional championships. He also had a flair for showmanship. He once dressed his players in warm-up pants with vertical stripes for a state tournament game, and for Mishawaka’s home games, Shake introduced a contraption called the “Bask-O-Lite,” where after each basket a red light mounted behind the rim would flash and the lights above the backboard would display the word “Goal.” Like Wooden, Shake was an exponent of fire-wagon basketball, so when they squared off during Wooden’s first season at Central, their teams put on a great show. Unfortunately for Shake, Central prevailed in both regular season meetings, the first time that had happened in thirteen years.

When the coaches went to shake hands following the Bears’ second win, Shake muttered to Wooden, “How much did you pay those officials?” They exchanged a few tart words, and then Shake called him a liar.

That was the wrong thing to say to Johnny Wooden.

Wooden rushed at Shake and swung his fist. Immediately, players and a few fans moved in to separate them. One of Shake’s players, a cocaptain named Art Van Tone, saw a boy wearing a Central letter sweater restraining Shake, so he intervened to protect his coach. According to the
South Bend Tribune
, Van Tone “dove into the pile and put on a flying block that knocked down more persons than any punches swung before since the dispute had opened.” Wooden and his players eventually went to their locker room to cool off and change their clothes, but that did not dissipate the tension. “We had to have a police escort out of the building—the team and all—because there were people waiting for us,” Ed Powell said. “I’ve never seen [Wooden] as upset as I did that night.” Shake apologized for igniting the ruckus, but after the season, Arthur Trester, the secretary of the IHSAA, ordered Mishawaka to remove him as coach.

If Wooden was going to be a fighter, he would accept no less from his players. Eddie Ehlers found that out during a game against Goshen High School in 1941. On an exchange early in the first half, one of Goshen’s players pinched Ehlers so hard on the leg that he was bleeding. Ehlers was furious. He showed Wooden the wound and was ready to retaliate, but Wooden told him to wait until the right time. Ehlers kept his composure until late in the second half. With Central holding a comfortable lead, Ehlers found himself being guarded on an inbounds pass by the player who had pinched him. Ehlers looked over at the bench and caught his coach’s eye. Wooden nodded. “He was telling me to take care of him,” Ehlers said. On the inbounds play, Ehlers faked in one direction, and when he shifted the other way, he punched the kid in the stomach as hard as he could. “I knew I hit him good because I could feel his backbone,” Ehlers said.

The referees did not see the punch. After the next whistle, Wooden took Ehlers out of the game. The two never said a word about what happened, but as Ehlers sat down on the bench, Wooden touched him on the shoulder. “He handled it masterfully,” Ehlers said. Told that his recollection contradicted the modern-day image of Wooden as a kindly old man, Ehlers replied, “He was anything but that. He was mean.”

*   *   *

Not surprisingly, Wooden was at his most intense during the state tournament. During his fifth season, in 1940–41, the Bears were playing a tough state semifinal game against Jefferson High School in Lafayette. The team, and Ehlers in particular, had played a poor first half, and Wooden was eager to express his displeasure. But when they got to the locker room at intermission, the door was locked. They tried in vain for several minutes to find someone to unlock it. Finally, Wooden kicked it open. When the team got inside, he ripped them for the way they had played, Ehlers most of all. “I have never been chewed out like he chewed me out,” Ehlers said. “I still don’t know what I did to this day, but he raked me over the coals. It must have worked because we went out in the second half and beat them going away.”

Wooden wanted to do for South Bend Central what Glenn Curtis did three times for Martinsville High School—win an Indiana high school state championship. But greater forces always intervened. Three times Wooden guided the Bears to a sectional championship, and twice they claimed a regional title, but he was never able to take them to the top. The most heartbreaking loss came right after the win over Jefferson in the 1941 regional final, when the Bears fell by one point to Froebel High School from Gary, Indiana. “I never saw Wooden so dejected in my life,” Ed Powers said. “He was sick, because he thought he had a team that was going to go all the way. But we just weren’t meant to be.” Weeks later, Wooden’s pain was still palpable. “I can recall at our banquet, he talked about how he was still really dejected,” Ehlers said. “We were all depressed. We had a team that was good enough to win the championship.”

Two years later, the 1943 tournament ended in similar fashion. Central had risen to the No. 1 ranking in the state during the season, and they faced another local rival, Elkhart High School, in the state tournament. Wooden’s Bears entered the fourth quarter trailing by 16 points, but as usual they were the stronger, better-conditioned team down the stretch. They scored 17 points in the last stanza but fell 4 points short. “Those kids never quit,” Wooden said softly in the locker room afterward. “You can’t ask for anything much better than that rally in the last quarter.”

His despair revealed an inner dichotomy that was at odds with the “thou didst thy best” image he tried to project. Wooden could talk all he wanted to his players about his definition of success, about how their only worry should be whether they were maximizing their potential, but his walk told them something else. He said so himself: you can’t fool these kids. His players saw the deeper truth. This was one mean English teacher, and he wanted to win very badly.

7

The Kautskys

Besides teaching, coaching, mentoring, and occasionally feeding his players during his early years in South Bend, Wooden would from time to time invite them to watch him play professional basketball. It was a kick for his boys to see him in action. “I tell you, he was phenomenal,” Ed Powell said. “He was very quick, although not very tall. But he could dribble—and I’m not exaggerating—down the floor faster than the rest of the players could run without the ball.”

Just as he was the best collegian of his era, Wooden was among the most successful professional players in America in the 1930s. Problem was, professional basketball barely existed in America in the 1930s. The sport was mostly limited to a small group of franchises that barnstormed to each other’s towns for exhibitions. Even for a player of Wooden’s caliber, pro basketball was just a side gig, something that could feed his competitive desires while he made a few extra bucks.

Several professional teams were drawing sizable crowds in the Northeast, but Indiana, not surprisingly, was the hub of the Midwest. The visionary who tapped into that wellspring was Frank Kautsky, who owned a modest but profitable two-level grocery store on the south side of Indianapolis. A short, bald, cheerful man with a round face and a squeaky voice, Kautsky was a bundle of energy who fancied cigars and three-piece suits. He had played some semiprofessional baseball and sponsored his own baseball team in the 1920s, but after being introduced to basketball by a friend, he saw how much fun that game could be. More important, he saw how profitable it could be in his home state.

In 1930, he formed Kautsky A. C., which stood for Athletic Club. The team was generally called the Kautskys, and its owner displayed top-level talent before crowds that numbered in the hundreds. Though the Great Depression was wreaking havoc everywhere—forcing the nation’s most popular pro circuit, the East Coast–based American Basketball League, to fold in 1931—Kautsky kept ticket prices low and never failed to pay his players what he promised. He carried a wad of cash in his pocket—his guys referred to it as his “big head of lettuce”—and if they had performed well, he’d slip them an extra five or ten bucks.

Kautsky loved the action, but during those first few years, he lost money. He understood that if pro basketball was ever going to turn a profit, he would need a real star. He got his chance in 1932, when Johnny Wooden finished his senior season at Purdue. Kautsky met with Wooden in Indianapolis and was able to convince him to play because, unlike the Celtics, the Kautskys would not require Wooden to give up teaching. Kautsky went out of his way to treat Wooden well, and in return, Wooden took a liking to him. “He was a very wonderful person,” Wooden said. “It was very seldom that there wouldn’t be a little extra in my envelope. He knew a little something about my eating habits, too. He knew I liked fruit salad, for example. I took a little rapping from some of the other players, but I got along with him very well. We had some wonderful times.”