In the sports world, few people are as esteemed as John Wooden. Wooden coached UCLA's men's basketball team to 10 national championships in the 1960s and 1970s, earning a reputation as a brilliant and wise sage of the game.
Some called him the Wizard of Westwood — UCLA lies in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles — while some regarded him as something close to a religious icon. Author Seth Davis, in his stellar 2014 biography of Wooden, said that in the public's view, the Bruins' leader "wasn't just a great coach, but a good man. A teetotaling, church-going, nonswearing, nonsmoking paragon of rectitude. Saint John."
But in "Wooden," Davis paints a much more complex picture of the UCLA coach. Wooden was,
according to many, not just a demanding coach, but a mean and impossibly rigid one. Some of his players complained that Wooden favored the stars of the team and ignored the rest. And some observers charged that Wooden's teams broke NCAA rules on their way to championships.
In all, this is one of the best books I've ever read. In the category of biographies, only Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs comes close. Davis' research is thorough, and his choices of stories to include impeccable. Virtually every page has an interesting anecdote.
Davis takes us from Wooden's boyhood in a small Indiana town to his development into one of the greatest basketball players of the first half of the 20th century. From there, we follow his career first as a high school teacher and coach, then a coach in college.
While Wooden's 10 national championships are widely remembered, David doesn't pass over the less well-known 14 years before then, when the coach labored in frustration with teams that were barely above average. Davis' chapters on the championship years from 1964 to 1975, when Wooden coached such famed players as Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,), Bill Walton, Gail Goodrich and Walt Hazzard, are filled not just with the pressure-packed big games, but many great behind-the-scenes stories as well.
Finally, Davis finishes with a surprisingly robust section on Wooden's retirement, when, free from the stresses of coaching, the coach fully embraced his role as wise elder of UCLA basketball.
"The pressure of being on top eventually got to him, but not nearly as viscerally as it did for so many other great coaches," Davis writes. "The ten championships aside, John Wooden's greatest victory may well have been his ability to emerge from all that tumult without losing sense of who he was — not a perfect man but a very good one, a teacher more than a coach, a Christian, a husband, a father, anything but a wizard."
At 525 pages, this is a long book (so this is a long review). It took me a while to get through it, but I really didn't mind. It was much like a good streaming series, where each episode — or each chapter — is a compelling story unto itself. I didn't want to skim ahead in fear I'd miss something good.
Many great names from sport make appearances in the book: There's Denny Crum, Rafer Johnson, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Bobby Knight, Jerry Tarkanian, even a young broadcaster named Dick Enberg — just to name a handful. Davis offers intimate stories filled with colorful details. There are smaller mini bios of people like Alcinder and Walton, and lesser know players like Clarence Walker Willie Naulls, and a troublesome booster named Sam Gilbert.
One of the most striking things to me in the early part of this book is the number of ways John Wooden almost didn't become, well, John Wooden.
Entering high school in Martinsville, Indiana, Wooden's favorite sport was baseball. But his school didn't have a team, so he devoted his athletic energies to basketball, earning him a chance to play in college at Purdue.
In college he emerged as a nationally known star but his basketball career nearly came to an abrupt end when he accepted a small stipend one summer to play a game with a semiprofessional team (getting paid was against college rules). He eluded punishment only when his teammates convinced him to sit out the second half of the game.
During World War II, Wooden enlisted in the Navy — without even telling his wife ("It was probably the major disagreement that my dear wife and I had in all our years," Wooden recalled). Just before Wooden was shipped to the Pacific aboard an aircraft carrier, he came down with appendicitis and was kept home while he recovered from surgery. Several months later, the man who replaced Wooden (a fraternity brother of his at Purdue) was killed in action.
Then there's the story of how close John Wooden came to not coaching at UCLA. In 1948, Wooden had achieved some success coaching at Indiana State and was being wooed by both UCLA and the University of Minnesota. Wooden was inclined to choose Minnesota, since it would allow him to stay in his native Midwest. It all came down to the night of April 17, 1948, when Wooden expected a call from Minnesota at 6 p.m. and then a call from UCLA at 7 p.m. .
But the call from Minnesota didn't come. Wooden concluded that that school had changed its mind, perhaps hired someone else. So when UCLA called, he accepted the offer. About an hour later, Minnesota called. A snowstorm had knocked out the phone lines, preventing calls from getting out.
Minnesota's athletic director offered Wooden the job. But Wooden said he had already accepted UCLA's offer, and would not go back on his word.
While race issues are not a central part of the book, they were threaded through much of Wooden's career. On this topic, Davis gives Wooden a mixed review.
Wooden was no grand civil liberties champion to be sure, but he didn't hesitate to add black players to his teams, even when few other colleges did so. On more than one occasion, when coaching in the Midwest, he had his team walk out of restaurants that refused to serve a black player. But on another instance, he planned to leave African-American player Clarence Walker behind on a trip, because the tournament did not allow blacks (due to pressure from others, the tournament changed its rules).
Late in his career, Wooden was asked, "Who is harder to coach, white players or black players?" He answered: "Seniors."
Wooden arrived at UCLA in the fall of 1948 at age 38, and immediately started to impose discipline on a ragged program.
His practice sessions were run with precision. Wooded taught the players exactly how to pivot, pass, catch, dribble, and shoot. He showed them how to watch the ball into their hands when receiving a pass. He described precise angles to take on a fast break. He even taught his players how to put on their socks (to avoid blisters). They had never seen a coach like this.
Wooden's new charges were struck at how this genial, quiet, reserved midwesterner was transformed once he stepped onto a basketball court. "He was a tenacious, tough, hard-nosed, vicious competitor," Eddie Sheldrake said. "He looks like a preacher and acts like a preacher ... but when you look at those beady eyes and that pointed nose and you get him on you, he's wiry. Let him guard you for a game and you'd wish you never went on the basketball court."
In telling the John Wooden story many people recall the highs but few remember the lows, like the 14 years Wooden labored in obscurity at UCLA before his first championship.
The school, which had promised Wooden a new arena when he was hired, gave him only lukewarm support and provided the team only a cramped third floor gymnasium that it had to share with the gymnastics team. (The long-promised new arena, Pauley Pavilion, finally opened in 1965.)
By 1962, the local newspapers and UCLA's basketball supporters were starting to grumble about the team and the coach.
"It was about the growing sense that too often his teams were good enough to raise expectations but not good enough to meet them," Davis said.
Among the good subplots of the book is Wooden's icy relationship with the Olympics. Wooden never coached an Olympic team, and never encouraged his players to try out for the squad. It all started in 1956 with Willie Naulls, who Wooden considered at the time the best he had ever had. But Naulls was not selected for the U.S. team that year and from then on Wooden kept his distance from the Olympics.
Wooden could be a stern disciplinarian, a characteristic that led to conflicts with many of his players. But he wasn't too proud to admit his was wrong — often after a feud with a player or one of his assistant coaches, Wooden would reach out to apologize the next day.
One thing Wooden almost never apologized for was his sideline behavior. Despite his reputation as a cerebral tactician, those who were close to him on the bench saw another side. Not only did he relentlessly badger the referees during game, he took it a step further by constantly ridiculing opposing players as well. Only those on the floor of the game were aware of the behavior; from the stands, most fans thought Wooden was simply exhorting his team.
Readers will probably be most interested in the championship years, and Davis fills those with great details on players like Alcindor, Walton, Hazzard and Sidney Wicks. Even knowing the ultimate result, Davis' accounts of some key games had me on the edge of my seat
One of the most remarkable anecdotes from the book was from the 1970 postseason banquet after the Bruins had won their sixth championship. As part of the activities, each player got a chance to address the audience. And senior Bill Seibert, largely a benchwarmer under Wooden, had a lot to say.
Seibert ripped Wooden for "unequal treatment, a "double rules standard," and "lack of communication" between the coaches and players.
As Seibert spoke, his mother started to cry. His father stood up and shouted at him to sit down. But he kept right on talking. "It was," said Enberg, "the most uncomfortable I have ever felt in my life."
UCLA never had a postseason banquet again.
The anecdote illustrates a painful part of Wooden's story. The more he won — including three undefeated seasons and at one point a winning streak of 88 straight games — the more he became a lightning rod for criticism. Fans, the media and team boosters complained if he didn't win every game, or win by enough, and even sometimes if he won by too much. Wooden was tormented by anxieties and insecurities.
"The very years that produced the greatest coaching record in the history of college sports were in many way the unhappiest years of his life," Davis said.
Davis doesn't dodge one of the most uncomfortable elements of Wooden's coaching tenure: The influence of booster Sam Gilbert. Gilbert orbited the world of UCLA basketball, helping players get free meals from restaurants, high-end clothes, jobs, and discounts on car purchases — all potential violations of the college basketball's rules.
Davis is careful to note that Wooden kept his distance from Gilbert (it's notable that even higher UCLA officials were scared of Gilbert because of his association with organized crime) and never encouraged his players to associate with Gilbert. The question, which Davis leaves unanswered, is: Should Wooden have done more?
Wooden's final act was a good one. Wooden left the tumult of the basketball court behind but spent decades in retirement connecting with scores of his former players. Many of them made the pilgrimage to Wooden's small condo (his salary at UCLA was never more than $27,000 a year), sharing stories and memories, and yes, even offering wise counsel. Those were probably his happiest years.
"At the end, this was John Wooden's greatest gift to his former players," Davis writes. "He was finally available — truly, emotionally available — in a way that he never was when he was coaching."
One former player, Marques Johnson, concluded, "Appreciate him for what he was — a great coach, a great person, but not a god."
As much as I like this book, I do have a big complaint: The use of pictures in the book is weak. First, there's not enough of them. "Wooden" is 525 pages long and covers nearly 100 years of history. The narrative includes scores of players and coaches who were in the public eye. But there are only a paltry 22 pictures; the book cries for 100 or more.
Second, those 22 pictures are lumped together in central section of the book. Yes, this is a fairly common format, but it's unfriendly to the reader, who has to zig-zag back and forth from the text to the picture section to see if there's a relevant photo. Why not put the photos at the appropriate place in the book?
