Wooden: A Coach's Life (29 page)

In the wake of that revelation, Wooden held individual meetings to ask players if they had ever been contacted by gamblers. He said he had studied game films and saw no evidence that Lawson had fixed games. Wooden was also not exactly crestfallen that he’d lost his leading scorer. “In my twenty-six years of coaching, I’ve never had a boy who resented instruction and correction as much as Lawson did,” he said. “He would have preferred to be completely on his own, even practice on his own and not with the team. He’s a boy who was always looking for excuses.”

When basketball practice began on October 15, 1961, the day after Wooden’s fifty-first birthday, the coach delivered a stern lecture to his players, who saw that he was growing less tolerant of problem children. “This year,” he warned them, “is not going to be like the last one.”

*   *   *

It didn’t matter how talented Lawson was. He wasn’t worth the trouble. Wooden had honed his engineering skills for more than a quarter of a century, and he well understood how one flawed piece, one bad gear, could throw everything off-kilter. “I would explain to my players that we’re like a machine,” Wooden said. “The engine is probably the most expensive to replace, and I might mention one player who was a real standout, that he’s sort of the engine. I might mention another player that maybe got to play a lot but who was not a star in that sense. I might explain that this player is a wheel. But what can the machine do if we don’t have all four wheels? Then I’d say to another player that gets to play even less, now you’re kind of like a nut that holds the wheel in place. But where are we going to go if we don’t have a wheel? Where are we going to go if we don’t have the engine? Some are more difficult to replace, but everyone has a role.”

Whenever the story of John Wooden’s life gets told, his years at UCLA before he started winning championships are usually characterized as a period of struggle. Wooden didn’t view them that way. He was a diligent, persistent man. He enjoyed developing his craft, one small lesson plan at a time. “Little things add up, and they become big things. That’s what I tried to teach my players in practice,” he said. “You’re not going to make a great improvement today. Maybe you’ll make a little bit. But tomorrow it’s a little more, and the next day a little more.”

Wooden did not utilize his Pyramid of Success as a teaching tool the same way he did at Indiana State, where it was part of the curriculum in his coaching class. He might give his players a copy of the pyramid at the beginning of the season, but it was just one of many mimeographed sheets he distributed during the season. “I don’t know anybody on our team that ever looked at the Pyramid of Success or even thought about it,” said Chuck Darrow, who played from 1961 to 1964. “It might have been taped in our lockers, but it just hung there like a jock strap.”

Wooden, however, could glance every day at the pyramid that was framed and hung on a wall in his modest office. It was his lodestar. His industriousness (“There is no substitute for work”), intentness (“Concentrate on your objective and be determined to reach your goal”), alertness (“Be observing constantly”), poise (“Being at ease in any situation”), and confidence (“May come from faith in yourself in knowing that you are prepared”) steeled him during those years when success didn’t come quite so easily. Though he still very badly wanted to win—there’s a reason Competitive Greatness was the block at the top—Wooden was especially well served by the two bits of spackle that he had carved beside that pinnacle: faith (through prayer) and patience (good things take time).

Whenever Wooden’s machine encountered big problems, his instinct was to delve into the smallest details. If the pyramid defines the modern-day image of the man, the more indelible picture in the minds of the men who played for him is that of the three-by-five index card. Every morning before practice, Wooden spent two to three hours drafting his practice plan and then transferring it onto those cards. When practice was over, Wooden filed the cards away for safekeeping. His outline on those cards was precise. His penmanship, exquisite.

Each detail had a larger purpose, although it was not always evident. Nor was Wooden one for explaining such things. He taught his players how to put on their shoes and socks because he didn’t want them to get blisters. Wooden told his boys how to eat, how to sleep, even how to dry their hair after a shower. (The better to prevent common colds.) There was a basketball reason he wanted their hair short—he didn’t want it to fall into their faces or drip perspiration into their eyes—but he also liked his players to look clean-cut. His time in the military taught him that uniformity created cohesion. On road trips the players wore blazers. Their shirttails had to be tucked in. They could not wear hats during meals. When they played, they had to wear the black shoes they had been issued on the first day of the season. One day, Wooden made Dick Banton run hard for fifteen minutes after practice because he had the audacity to wear white shoes after mistakenly leaving his black ones at home. “He would tell you a rule, but he wouldn’t tell you what the consequences were if you broke it,” Banton said. “His practices were brutal. If we weren’t winning, I don’t think the guys would have put up with it.”

Those index cards may as well have been stone tablets. Once Wooden crafted his master plan, he became its servant. “A lot of coaches have a tendency to stay with one facet of practice too long,” said Doug Sale, a former assistant. “His theory was, I’ll hit it today, and if we don’t get it completed, we’ll come back to it tomorrow.”

Wooden may have carried a gentlemanly aspect, but he evinced the authoritarian air of a former navy lieutenant. “I can’t imagine too many coaches being that organized and that precise,” Roland Underhill said. It helped that during those first two decades at UCLA he operated in a culture of conformity. “We never questioned his authority. We never questioned his ability,” Gary Cunningham said. Banton added: “This wasn’t a rebellious time. I can’t imagine a guy getting a bunch of parking tickets or a bunch of players smoking marijuana or something. There wasn’t a big drug culture at UCLA.” Wooden applied the same laws of learning to his basketball classes that he once applied to his English classes: explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and then repetition, repetition, repetition. “I’ll never forget hour after hour working on a pivot,” said Jerry Evans, who had been a freshman during Wooden’s first season in 1948–49.

There was no playbook at UCLA because there were no plays. Wooden’s high-post offense allowed players two or three options for each exchange, but it was up to them to make those decisions. In this respect, Wooden remained a disciple of James Naismith, who believed that coaches were unnecessary, perhaps superfluous. Wooden often said a coach only made four or five real decisions during a game. “It disgusts me to see all these cartoons of raving maniac coaches,” he said. “There is far more overcoaching than undercoaching in basketball. It’s a great game, an intricate game, but we should not make it complicated.”

To Wooden, the games were just the final exams, the coach a proctor. Practice was where the real work got done. Everything he did during those workouts was predicated on quickness. If a player did something Wooden liked, he would bark, “Good! Now do it faster.” Wooden also preferred to serve up his advice in small, individual portions rather than addressing the team as a whole. He was never one for meetings. They just slowed things down.

On game days, the players would have the same meal precisely four hours before tip-off: steak or roast beef broiled medium, baked potato, three pieces of celery, fruit cocktail. That was to be followed by a ten-minute walk. Afterward, Wooden wanted his players to lie on their hotel beds in the dark and try to sleep. No reading, no television, no telephone calls. He wanted them rested for the game, but most of all he wanted them to believe they were doing the exact right thing to prepare for it. That was the whole point—belief. Wooden told his players every day that they were in better shape than their opponents. Were they really? Maybe, maybe not. But in his mind, if they believed they were, then they were.

If there was a Holy Grail to be seized through all those routines and all those drills during all those hours of practice, it was this: balance. In every sense of the word. “The one word that my players will hear from me more than any other in practice is
balance
,” Wooden said. “It can be mental balance. It can be emotional balance. It can be rebound balance. It can be defensive balance. It can be offensive balance, which is most important. So balance entails all things. You don’t have a team without balance.”

His quest for this grail could be compulsive. Wooden liked the scoring to be evenly distributed throughout his lineup. On defense, he insisted that his players’ hands stay close to their bodies and their heads directly above the midpoint between the feet. He wanted their heads in the right place in a broader sense, as well. He lectured that their top priorities should be, in order, family, religion, school. Only then, if there was time left over, were they to concentrate on basketball. His practices were ultraserious—heaven forbid he should catch someone fooling around—but he balanced that by ending with something fun, like a free throw contest.

Wooden even wanted to see symmetry in the jersey numbers. (His own number back in Martinsville was 99. He was quite proud of that.) At UCLA, the guards wore their numbers in the 20s, the centers were in the 30s, the wings were in the 40s, and the forwards were in the 50s. He never issued a number like 31. “A three and one look off-balance, and I like balance,” he said. Late in his career, Wooden boasted that he had charted 36,820 shots attempted by his players over a nineteen-year period at UCLA. His lineups generally featured two guards, two forwards, and one center. The guards combined to take 41.4 percent of the shots, the forwards took 39.4 percent, and the centers took 19.2 percent.

His use of language, which many of his players believed was his greatest asset, reflected his emphasis on balance. For example, he wanted passes to be crisp but not hard. His players should have fun but not be foolish; be spirited but not temperamental; be clever but not fancy; and above all else, move quickly without hurrying. He did not deliver inspirational pep talks, Knute Rockne–style. Sometimes he conducted his pregame meeting with the lights dimmed low. “I wanted the business-like approach covering the essentials and not try to get them all fired up,” he said. “I wanted them ready when we started play and not to lose their fire warming up or in the dressing room.”

The same held true for after games. Wooden did not conduct lengthy postgame meetings. If the Bruins won, he warned the players not to celebrate excessively. If they lost, he encouraged them not to “get their dobbers down.” Either way, when they left the locker room, they should betray no indication of whether they had won or lost. “I never want my players to feel that winning a basketball game was any great accomplishment, and losing a basketball game was nothing to be dejected about,” he said.

No wonder Ron Lawson said playing for Wooden felt like a job. He was hardly the first and wouldn’t be the last. One of Wooden’s few close friends in the profession was Stan Watts, who coached at BYU from 1949 to 1972. When asked if he could recall any humorous anecdotes about Wooden, Watts replied, “John’s not the flippant type. He’s pretty serious. He doesn’t see much humor in basketball other than winning.” That was why Wooden refused to play tournaments in Hawaii as most western coaches did. “I love to play those teams that just came back from Hawaii. I
love
to play ’em,” he said. “That’s when I’d like to play them all. I just don’t think it’s conducive to the development of your basketball team. I’ve had a lot of pressures put on me to go there. A lot of coaches use it for recruiting devices. I’ve had many players ask me, ‘Are you going to go to Hawaii?’ I tell them we’re not, but we are going to go back to the Midwest.”

Wooden could be brutally inflexible. In the days leading up to a season’s first game, he would decide which seven players were going to comprise his rotation. (Sometimes he would choose eight, but most of the time he capped it at seven.) There might some tweaking along the way, but for the most part, once that decision was made, the rotation was set for good. After Wooden retired, a former player asked him what he did if his seventh- and eighth-best players were essentially equal. Wooden responded that he would pick one because either way he couldn’t be wrong, even though it surely felt wrong to the player who wasn’t chosen.

By the time he reached his fifties, Wooden had left most of his hot-headedness back in South Bend. His players marveled at his even temperament. He was a walking, breathing flat line. Sure, he occasionally lost his composure—an outburst here, a kick in the behind there. But the reason those moments are so memorable is that they were so rare. Not only could Wooden correct a player without screaming; he could sometimes do it without saying anything at all. He always maintained that a coach’s best motivator was the bench. “If I see a boy giving up the baseline [on defense], I take him out for the rest of the half,” he once said. “They don’t like that.”

Wooden’s consistency amazed his players more than anything else about him. It was as if the man were a machine himself. “I played varsity for three years and observed him every day in practice. He never once disappointed me in terms of his demeanor, his speech,” said Bob Archer, who played at UCLA from 1955 to 1959. “He was no-nonsense and strict, but he never humiliated people. There was always a kindness underneath his austere exterior. You can’t fake that.”

“The day before my last game as a senior, I ran the same drills I did as a freshman,” Pete Blackman, another former player, said. “So over and over again, you were forced to do these precise things. He was very intense and uncompromising. He made it clear what he expected of you.”

Bobby Pounds said it best: he was a man of actions, not statements. Wooden told his players not to use profanity, so he never used it himself. He asked them to quit smoking, so he did the same. He told them they were never to criticize a teammate—
That’s my job, I’m paid to do it, pitifully poorly I might add
—and he wanted them always to be on time. (Time was of the essence. If you’re on time, you don’t have to hurry.) “There are lots of things I suggest my players do, and a few things I demand they do,” he said. “They learn that I stick by my demands.”