Wooden: A Coach's Life (81 page)

A few hours later, the Bruins were putting the finishing touches on an 89–78 victory over Arkansas. It would be UCLA’s first NCAA title in men’s basketball since Wooden’s final game twenty years before. With a little over a minute remaining, Wooden got up from his seat and started making his way out of the arena. A fan shouted his congratulations. “Not to me,” Wooden replied. “To the team.” When the final buzzer sounded, the Bruins players celebrated wildly and jumped into each other’s arms, but Wooden never saw it. It was a triumphant moment, but it belonged to someone else.

34

Andy

He lived.

At the end, this was John Wooden’s greatest gift to his former players. He was finally available—truly, emotionally available—in a way that he never was when he was coaching. Back then, their interactions were limited to basketball. Now, there was no basketball. There were only moments, memories, and the lessons they shared.

To many of Wooden’s players, he didn’t start making sense until long after they had left his classroom. Take, for example, Keith Erickson, who played twelve years in the NBA. Toward the end of his career, Erickson was playing in a 1976 play-off game with the Phoenix Suns. The game was close, and as it entered the final minutes, a teammate threw Erickson a pass for a layup. Just as the ball arrived, Erickson reached up to swipe the hair out of his face. The ball went through his hands and sailed out of bounds.

The Suns ended up winning the game, but as Erickson replayed the sequence in his mind later that night, he couldn’t believe how boneheaded he had been. “I thought to myself, that’s why Coach Wooden told us to keep our hair short,” he said. “Before the next game, I went out and got a haircut.”

Lucius Allen experienced many such moments during his first few seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks. The team usually had other guards who were more gifted, but Allen still was able to find ways to earn playing time. “I was better equipped than other guys because I had all the fundamentals. I could shoot, I could defend. It gave me longevity,” Allen said. “It took me three years to realize what a gift I got from that man. I was using the Pyramid of Success and not even realizing it.”

Jack Hirsch spent a lot of time with Wooden in his later years. Since Wooden lived near Hirsch’s mother, Hirsch would often ring up his coach and get together for lunch or just drop by to chat in Wooden’s den. “At a certain point, you start looking at your parents as people. You start thinking your dad was right,” Hirsch said. “That’s what happened with every one of Wooden’s players. Once you’re done with the program and you’ve been brainwashed by one of the best minds that ever lived, you start saying and doing things that he taught you, and you don’t know where those things came from.”

Gene Sutherland could relate to that notion. He had never liked the way Wooden was so ultraserious all the time, so when Sutherland became a high school coach and ran his own practices, he tried keeping things loose. It backfired. “I saw the practice deteriorating,” he said. “They were having fun, but they weren’t learning. So I thought, I can’t do that. I have to keep that distance.”

Most of the Bruins arrived at these discoveries in small increments over long periods of time. That was not the case, however, with Andy Hill. In the years after he left UCLA, Hill remained bitter about the humiliations he had experienced when Wooden would insert him in the final minute into blowouts. He still got angry when he thought about all those times they butted heads over the Vietnam War protests or the way Wooden subjected Hill to a paranoid (Nixonian?) interrogation in the wake of the Bill Seibert banquet fiasco. In the early 1990s, Hill received a visit from his good buddy and former teammate Terry Schofield, who had become a successful professional basketball coach in Germany. Schofield had his own lingering discontent about Wooden, but he was struck by the level of resentment Hill harbored. “I said to Andy, ‘Man, you gotta let this go.’ It was ruining his life,” Schofield said. “I even suggested he should write some of this stuff down because it might help him come to terms with it. I had the feeling it was sort of consuming him. He had to find another place to be.”

Hill had tried his hand briefly at playing professionally in Israel, and when he returned to the States, he spent a few years coaching junior college in Southern California. But he realized that coaching was not for him, so he pivoted to the entertainment industry, where his intellect, charisma, and ambition served him well. Hill became a successful movie and television executive at Columbia Pictures Television, formed his own production company, and went on to become president of CBS Productions. For a while, he maintained ties to UCLA and went to a few games, but when those interactions proved awkward, he broke away from the program altogether. He figured he was done with UCLA—and John Wooden—for good.

Then, one day in 1998, Hill was playing golf with some buddies. As he took a practice swing in the fairway, one of his playing partners chastised him. “Stop hurrying,” he said. “You’re losing your balance.” Hill laughed to himself. For an instant, he felt like he was back inside the symphony of a UCLA practice. When he striped his approach shot and tapped in for birdie, he had to acknowledge that something significant had just happened.

The moment set Hill to thinking. Despite falling short of his basketball ambitions, he had done extremely well for himself in the business world. He began to ponder the qualities that had enabled him to become successful and where he had gotten them from. He realized—conceded, perhaps—that he had learned most of them in John Wooden’s classroom. The epiphany was exhilarating and humbling at the same time. He felt the need to share it.

The problem was, Hill had not spoken to Wooden in more than a decade. The idea of just calling him out of the blue filled him with trepidation. Still, he went for it. With his heart pounding in his chest, Hill dialed Wooden’s home number. The answering machine picked up—
Please speak slowly and distinctly, and leave your name and number after the tone
—and Hill started rambling. After a few seconds, Wooden came on the line.

“Andy!” he said cheerfully. “How are you? Where are you?”

Hill made small talk and indicated that he would like to visit whenever Wooden could carve out some free time. “Now would be fine,” Wooden said. The comment sent Hill’s heart racing anew. He asked if he could come the next day, and Wooden agreed. When the time came, Hill climbed into his car and headed north. He had an appointment with his teacher as well as his past.

*   *   *

The first conversation was less awkward than Hill had expected. He was a little taken aback at how Wooden’s eighty-seven years had worn him down physically, but the coach’s mind was sharp and his ears were open. Hill talked to Wooden about what he had been doing since graduation. He told Wooden what had happened to him on the golf course and what it had made him realize. The teacher was pleased. “So you did learn something after all,” Wooden said.

When they were through talking, Hill asked Wooden if it would be all right to call on him again. Wooden said sure. The visits continued regularly for months. Hill described it as “tippy-toeing back into a relationship. It’s awkward because you’re not sure it’s real.” But the conversations were intellectually stimulating. As an executive, Hill had long been fascinated by the subject of leadership, so he prodded Wooden at length about it.

At one point, Wooden reached into a cubbyhole and pulled out a card that listed some of his favorite leadership principles. One of them was the importance of making people who aren’t in the spotlight feel appreciated. For a moment, Hill figured he should leave well enough alone. Then he reconsidered. “I thought to myself, nah, that’s not fair. If we’re going to have a really adult relationship, it should based on being truthful,” Hill said. “So I said, ‘You know, Coach. I think I have come to a point where I understand that in your heart, that’s what you meant to do. But I think you need to know that you didn’t really do it.’”

As Wooden digested the remark, Hill wondered if he should have just kept his mouth shut. But Wooden surprised him by saying, “If that’s what you remember I’m sure you’re right, and I’m sorry about that.” It was a pivotal moment in their renewed relationship. “My dad was an alcoholic,” Hill said. “I waited for ‘I’m sorry’ my whole life, and I never heard it.”

Hill’s creative instincts (and clever marketing skills) convinced him that the story of his experiences with Wooden, tracing the arc from frustrated college student to successful entertainment executive to middle-aged man who returned to the classroom, would make for a compelling story. He broached the idea that they should write a book together. Once again, Wooden assented. From that point on, their sessions became more interviews than conversations.

When word spread about the collaboration, some mutual friends were skeptical. “Everybody was terrified when Andy said he was going to write a book,” Schofield said. “John Ecker told me that he had talked to Denny Crum, and Crum was worried that the thing was going to be an exposé. Because there is enough material there for an exposé.”

Hill’s book was no exposé. (Wooden would not have cooperated if it were.) But it was no free pass, either. The warm photograph of Hill and Wooden on the cover, combined with the title,
Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry!
, gave the impression that it was yet another gauzy, sterilized tribute, but the story inside was more complicated, more layered. Hill wrote in detail about his discontent as a player, his conflicts with Wooden over protesting the war, even the whole Bill Seibert episode. (There was, however, no mention of Sam Gilbert. “For crying out loud, give me a break!” Hill laughed. “I was worried enough.”) Hinting at that underlying discord was a smaller photo tucked into the corner of the book’s cover. It shows Hill and Wooden together cropped from a black-and-white team photo. “Look at his face in that team picture,” Hill said. “He ain’t smiling.”

The book was published in 2001. In the ensuing months, Wooden and Hill embarked on a lengthy promotional tour. Wooden was nervous about how the public would react to these hints of imperfection. As he signed the books, he would often say to people, “Get past the first thirty pages. He ends up liking me.”

Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry!
didn’t set any records, but it sold well enough. Then again, all of Wooden’s books sold well. He also published a series of inspirational books, and with the help of his most trusted coauthor, Steve Jamison, he dabbled in children’s books. Wooden came up with the characters Inch (a worm) and Miles (a mouse) and set them on a course to learn the true meaning of the word “success” from their teacher, Mr. Wooden.

This was one of Wooden’s more enjoyable projects because it earned him invitations to do readings at elementary schools. One day during one of these appearances, a little girl asked him if he was afraid of dying. There was a murmur of discomfort in the room until Wooden broke the tension by saying, “Now that’s a rather odd question to ask of a ninety-three-year-old man.” He then gave his stock answer, which is that while he wasn’t doing anything to accelerate his demise, he also did not fear it, because that would be the only way he could be reunited “out yonder” with his dear Nellie. Wooden used that phrase so many times, it inspired Swen Nater to write a poem called “Yonder.” Wooden loved to recite it during his talks:

Once I was afraid of dying

Terrified of ever-lying

Petrified of leaving family, home and friends.

Thoughts of absence from my dear ones

Brought a melancholy tear once,

And a dreadful fear of when life ends.

But those days are long behind me

Fear of leaving does not bind me

And departure does not hold a single care.

Peace does comfort as I ponder

A reunion in the yonder

With my dearest one who is waiting for me there.

For Andy Hill, the chance to travel with Wooden to speeches and book signings did wonders for his peace of mind. It also enabled him to see a softer version of the hard-edged man he had played for. One day as Hill was driving Wooden home, Wooden turned to him and said, “Have I ever told you how much I love you and how much I appreciate doing this book with you?” On another occasion after they had breakfast, Hill drove Wooden back to his apartment. When the doors opened, Hill extended his hand as he always did, but this time Wooden ignored it, moved toward Hill, and gave him a hug.

Even after all this time together, Wooden still had the capacity to surprise. His speaking engagements usually ended with a question-and-answer session, and though Hill got used to hearing the same questions over and over, one day someone asked a question that Hill had never heard before: What would Wooden have done if Bill Walton had refused to get that haircut? Was he really going to put him off the team? Hill perked up. He wanted to know the answer himself.

“Well,” Wooden said. “Bill sure thought so.”

Hill chuckled. “I thought, he’s ninety-five years old,” he said, “but if you’re sitting at the table playing poker with John Wooden, you still don’t get to see the hole card.”

*   *   *

Even well into his nineties, Wooden managed to feed the public’s insatiable demand for his stories and ideas, feeding the image that he was a wise and near-perfect man even as he expressed discomfort that people were making so much of a fuss. He coauthored books with Swen Nater and Jay Carty. He was the subject of numerous television specials and a critically acclaimed HBO documentary. There was even a doctoral thesis written about him by Marv Dunphy, who was working toward a physical education degree at BYU. Dunphy spent dozens of hours interviewing Wooden, his former players, and his former assistants. When he showed Wooden the manuscript, Wooden returned it with numerous markings that corrected spelling and punctuation errors. Dunphy was mortified that the coach had spent so much time doing that. “That’s okay,” Wooden told him. “I enjoyed it.”