Wooden: A Coach's Life (7 page)

The first big game Purdue played that season was a late December clash at Butler. It was such an important contest that Nellie decided to drive up from Martinsville to watch her Johnny play. Wooden bought her a comb, brush, and mirror set as a Christmas present, but he never made it to the game. As he was on his way to catch the train from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, Wooden flagged down a cleaner truck, and the driver invited him to hop on the rear bumper. It had just snowed in West Lafayette, and the roads were icy. As the truck carrying Wooden was stopped on a hill, another truck skidded from behind. Wooden saw the truck coming and grabbed the top of his own vehicle to swing his body, but he couldn’t quite get his right leg out of the way, and it was pinned between the two trucks. His first concern was his gift to Nellie, which had been in his back pocket and was busted in the collision. Wooden was lucky his leg was not broken, but it was lacerated badly enough that he was laid up for days. It was the second straight year he spent Christmas in the hospital. (The year before he had come down with scarlet fever.) “Nellie and her sister and brother-in-law drove through bad weather,” he lamented many years later. “I saw them at the hospital instead of at the game.”

Without Wooden, Murphy was held to zero field goals against Butler, and Purdue lost, 36–29. The
Journal and Courier
noted that Wooden’s absence was “keenly felt.” Wooden also missed Purdue’s next game, a win over Vanderbilt, but he rejoined the squad for its January 2 home game against Montana State. He wore a football pad on his injured thigh, but he was hurting so badly that he had to ask Lambert to take him out early in the second half. As a result, Purdue suffered its second loss of the season, 38–35.

To the degree that he paid attention to such things, that loss gave Wooden his first taste of the downside of high expectations. Graham’s write-up of the Montana State game was scathing. “The Boilermakers, without a doubt, turned in one of the most disgusting exhibitions of basketball in the Memorial gymnasium last night that an Old Gold and Black team has ever been guilty of. Not ragged, just plain disgusting.” Graham added that because of his accident, Wooden “lacked the stamina to hold the pace.”

Once Wooden returned to form, the Boilermakers were off and running. Wooden was an ideal floor guard for Lambert’s system. Not only was he an excellent passer who could direct the offense with aplomb, but he was also adept at quickly advancing the ball upcourt before the defense could get set. In later years, Murphy would refer to Wooden as “the Bob Cousy of our day.” Gordon Graham recalled that when Wooden drove to the basket, “he often flew five or six rows into the stands, slid into the band instruments, open bleachers, and even brick walls. But he always bounced up and beat everyone else back on defense.”

Wooden had all the playing time he wanted because Lambert hardly substituted. Back then, players were only permitted to reenter a game once. (Open substituting was added to the rules in 1944.) When the Boilermakers followed the Montana State loss with a slim 23–19 victory over Michigan, Wooden scored 7 of the team’s final 14 points—an early example of how his dedication to conditioning paid off late in games. With Wooden and Murphy operating at high speed, the Boilermakers steamrolled through the rest of their opponents. They beat Northwestern, 39–22. They beat Loyola, 25–20 in overtime, to snap the Ramblers’ thirty-four-game winning streak. Then, on February 2, they exploded for 60 points in a thrashing of Ohio State. Murphy scored 28 points in that game to break the conference single-game mark he had set the year before, while Wooden poured in a cool 17 of his own. Chicago coach Nels Norgren, whose squad lost to Purdue by 10 points on February 8, said, “You need to put two men on Murphy and two men on Wooden, and there are not many left to score baskets.”

The fire wagon was running hot, thanks to this stellar, inside-outside tandem. It was just how Piggy envisioned it. “Lambert gave us considerable freedom in our play,” Murphy said. “We attracted attention from the scouts, most of whom thought the kind of basketball we played was nuts. We figured if we could hold our opponents to 25 or 30 points, we could beat them.”

Wooden’s performances weren’t just effective. They were enthralling. This was a critical part of his basketball education. Most of the language in the
Journal and Courier
’s coverage was straightforward and anodyne, but references to Wooden were frequently embellished by colorful expressions. He was labeled the “Martinsville flash,” “Purdue’s electric dribbler,” and “the fastest and cleverest little fellow we have ever seen on a court.” His ability to beat the defense down the floor for uncontested layups was described as “his prize act.” His “brilliant dribbling thrilled the crowd” in one game. In another, “the little Martinsville speedster got quite a hand from the overflow crowd for his spirited dashes.”

After a win over Northwestern, Graham referred to Wooden as the “India Rubberman” in homage to his ability to bounce off the floor following his many hard falls. The nickname stuck, although in the decades that followed, many sportswriters mistakenly reported that Wooden’s nickname had been the “Indiana” rubber man.

In between his falls and rubberlike bounces, Wooden developed some odd superstitions. One day he happened to tuck his locker key into the laces in his shoe, and he played so well that he decided to do that for every practice and every game. Moreover, his teammates, just like the guys he played with in Martinsville, were struck by a serene demeanor that belied Wooden’s tenacity between the lines. “When I was a freshman and played against John in practice, I held him, pushed him, and shoved him, but I could never take the ball away from him,” said Bob Hobbs, a Purdue teammate who was a year younger than Wooden. “After a workout, he’d come up and say, ‘Nice practice, Bob.’ He never held a grudge and you simply couldn’t rattle the guy.”

On March 3, 1930, Purdue clinched the Big Ten title by defeating Michigan, 44–28. It was the third time in five years that Lambert’s team had won or shared conference honors. The only remaining items of suspense were whether the Boilermakers would go undefeated in league play, and whether Murphy would finish the season as the Big Ten’s scoring champ. For most of the season, he had been locked in a tight race with Indiana center Branch McCracken, who was a close friend of Wooden’s from childhood. (When Wooden lived in Centerton, his backyard and McCracken’s backyard abutted each other.) Though Murphy ended up with the higher scoring average, McCracken took the overall title because Indiana played twelve conference games while Purdue played only ten, thus enabling McCracken to accumulate more points. However, Murphy got the last laugh by leading Purdue to the first perfect conference record in the Big Ten since Minnesota’s in 1919.

The season culminated a week later when Wooden and Murphy were selected by the Associated Press to the Big Ten’s five-man “all-star” team. They were joined by McCracken and two other centers. The AP called Wooden “a sophomore who promises to become an immortal of this league.” It also noted that among the five all-stars, Wooden was “the only player who worked at guard all season to gain a job in his natural position. He is also the only man who will return next season.”

*   *   *

Basketball fed Johnny Wooden’s competitive appetite. It validated his devotion to hard work. The games were exciting. But the sport would not have held Wooden’s regard if his mentors had tried to appeal to his baser instincts. As passionate as Piggy Lambert was about the intricacies of the game and the merits of the fast break, he was foremost a congregant in the Church of Naismith, where basketball had been conceived as a pathway to heaven. Wooden was raised in a home where the dominant male figure was to be paid proper respect without anyone questioning his authority. He gave Lambert the same kind of respect, and in later years when he became a coach, Wooden would demand the same from his own players.

The most indelible example of his deference to Lambert occurred during the spring of 1930, soon after Wooden’s sophomore campaign was over. Lambert called Wooden into his office to report that a well-to-do doctor in town had offered to take care of Wooden’s living expenses. When Lambert asked Wooden what he thought, Wooden replied that it sounded terrific.

Lambert persisted. How was Wooden going to pay the man back?

Now Johnny was confused. He responded that he didn’t realize the doctor was expecting to be paid back.

Lambert told him he wasn’t, but surely Johnny would
want
to pay him back, right? Of course, if he turned down the offer altogether, he wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. He could finish up his last two years at Purdue and leave school without owing anyone a cent. Lambert told Wooden to think about it for a few days and then come back with his decision.

Even though Lambert didn’t tell him what to do, Wooden understood what the coach wanted. Johnny returned a few days later and told Lambert he could tell this doctor fellow no thanks. “I knew you’d say that,” Lambert replied. “When you walk out of here, your head will be up.”

Lambert wasn’t blind to Wooden’s financial hardships. The coach had noticed that when the team traveled to places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, Johnny didn’t have a coat to keep him warm. So Lambert told Wooden that this same doctor would buy him a thick coat, some decent clothes, and a pair of shoes. In return, Wooden would give the man his game tickets. Lambert promised that if Nellie or Wooden’s family wanted to come to the games, he would get them in.

Thus did the ball that had bounced from Springfield to Crawfordsville to West Lafayette bounce again toward Johnny Wooden. With Lambert serving as his minister as well as his wagon driver, Wooden instinctively grabbed the ball and ran, sensing it was leading him to higher ground.

5

Johnny Wooden, All-American

The 1930–31 season was looked upon in West Lafayette as a rebuilding year. Three starters, including Stretch Murphy, had graduated from the team that ran the table in the Big Ten. Lambert named Wooden cocaptain alongside his fellow junior, forward Harry Kellar. The
Courier and Journal
noted that the new captains, both of whom were five foot ten, were “comparative midgets” next to the guys they replaced.

Wooden had attacked the rim with such verve as a sophomore that for his junior season, Lambert stationed football players along the baseline so they could catch Wooden before he careered into the bleachers. “The thing I remember the most is that he was so fast,” said Bob King, who watched Wooden play in college and later became an assistant basketball coach at Purdue. “He ran into the stands and they threw him right back on the floor.”

The young Boilermakers were not going to be able to ease into the season. Their first opponent was Notre Dame, which was squaring off against Purdue for the first time in seven years. With the game having been moved to Jefferson High to accommodate the heightened interest, Wooden rose to the occasion by scoring 21 points in a 34–22 rout. The
Indianapolis Star
reported that during the game, “Wooden was unstoppable on his speedy dribbles under the basket that usually ended with a seemingly impossible one-handed shot through the netting.” After dispatching Washington University at home by 22 points, Purdue played a huge road game in late December at Pittsburgh, which had been tagged as the mythical national champions the year before. The
Courier and Journal
asserted that the Boilermakers needed to “defend the honor of Indiana, Big Ten and mid-western basketball.” The paper also highlighted the opportunity for the Boilermakers to take their star performer on the road: “The majority of basketball critics rank Wooden as the most brilliant individual player the game has seen in years and the east’s reaction to this ‘India Rubber Man’ will be interesting to say the least.”

Alas, Wooden suffered yet another mishap in the days beforehand, when his hip got snagged on a loose floorboard during one of his frequent dives during practice. “It took a hunk of meat—and I mean
meat
—out of my hip,” Wooden said. “It didn’t hurt so much at the time. Things like that don’t. But late that night I got in bad shape. I got a big kernel in the groin, so they took me to the hospital for that. They didn’t have penicillin and things of that sort.” For the third year in a row, he celebrated Christmas from a hospital bed.

Wooden accompanied the team to Pittsburgh for the game on December 30, but he was too sore to play for most of the game. With three minutes remaining in the second half and the Boilermakers trailing by 4 points, Lambert inserted Wooden into the contest. He immediately stole a pass and broke free for a layup to cut the margin to 2. About a minute later, Wooden missed a chance to tie the score when his outside shot rimmed out. Pittsburgh got the rebound and held on to the ball the rest of the way, dealing the Boilermakers a 24–22 loss.

As Wooden continued to delight crowds, Nellie attended as many games as she could, but she could never steady her nerves the way her beau could. During one intense game his junior year, she actually fainted in the stands and missed the end of the second half. Even as the Boilermakers lost four out of nine games beginning in January, Wooden developed a reputation as one of the finest guards in all of college basketball. His methods were as effective as they were uncomplicated. He simply worked harder than everyone else. “He was always moving,” said Wooden’s future assistant coach Ed Powell, who grew up in South Bend and attended several of his Purdue games. “He would be passing, cutting, dribbling, moving. Whoever guarded him would stay with him maybe for a quarter or two or three, but then, towards the end, John would get one or two steps away, just enough to score the winning basket. He didn’t do anything differently towards the end than he did during the game, except that conditioning paid off.”

Wooden and his teammates closed the season with five straight wins to finish second in the Big Ten with an 8–4 record. Lambert’s young guns had matured quite a bit over the course of the season. Best of all, not a single starter or significant reserve was a senior. That meant the team was going to return intact for what was shaping up to be a very promising senior season for Johnny Wooden.