Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis

just as stern while conducting his English classes. “It was always very orderly,” Ehlers said. “Some of the coaches have class and it’s an opportunity to goof off, but not with Coach Wooden.” Ed Powell recalled that Wooden was a “stickler for good penmanship.” Occasionally, Wooden would pass along a favorite poem to his players and ask them to commit it to memory. One he particularly liked was titled “Mr. Meant To”:
    Mr. Meant To has a comrade
    And his name is Didn’t Do
    Have you ever chance to meet them?
    Did they ever call on you?
    These two fellows lived together
    In the house of Never Win
    And I am told that it is haunted
    By the ghost of Might Have Been
    Since Wooden learned most of what he knew about basketball from Piggy Lambert, it was only natural that he would implement many of Lambert’s ideas. That included enforcing the coach’s “right rules of living” away from the court. “Three or four times a year, he would sit us down on the floor and talk to us about things other than basketball,” said John Gassensmith, one of his former players. “How to behave, being good to the teachers. I remember he told us, after you eat dinner, congratulate your mother. Tell her what a good meal it was.”
    From the very beginning, Wooden put in place a strict smoking ban, making clear that a violation would result in dismissal. In one instance where he had caught a player smoking, the player repeatedly asked to return to the team, but Wooden refused. At the time, the player appeared to be headed for college, but after being kicked off the team, he never pursued his higher education. Though Wooden couldn’t be sure things would have turned out differently if he had let the player return, he came to regret his inflexibility. “He quit school. Never went to college. I think he ended up a common laborer,” Wooden said. “I’m not putting them down, but here’s a player who was going to get a college education, to have a better chance, and it was because of my being perhaps too stubborn [that he didn’t go]. But I saw no middle. It was either black or white. There was no gray area, and there is a gray area on many things. So that bothered me.”
    Wooden kept the no-smoking rule in place, but he subsequently dropped the specification of what the penalty would be. “Instead of saying if you smoke you’re off the team, he said, ‘There is to be no smoking. It will not be tolerated,’” said Jim Powers, who attended Central from 1939 to 1943. During Powers’s senior year, Wooden briefly suspended one of his best players, Parson Howell, for smoking, but he allowed the other players to vote him back onto the team.
    Ironically, Wooden was a smoker himself. He admitted as much to his players, but he also told them that he quit when practice began and didn’t resume until the season was over. “He used this as an example to show that he could quit when he wanted to if he really put his mind to it,” Powell said. Nell was also a heavy smoker, but unlike John, who eventually quit for good, she was never able to kick the habit.
    Through it all, Johnny Wooden had no better friend, supporter, and defender than his Nellie. On every game night, she and John carried on the same pregame ritual they had begun back in Martinsville, with Wooden turning to the stands to make eye contact with his bride and then flashing her the “okay” sign right before tip-off. Nell had several more fainting incidents, but she never missed a game. There were no laundry facilities at the school, so John asked Nell if she would wash his players’ sweaty uniforms, socks, and jock straps after each practice. She obliged, just as she did when he asked to invite his players to their house on Woodward Avenue. “She was almost my mother,” Powers said. “She’d have those parties after the season was over. They knew I loved ice cream, so they’d get me a gallon of it beforehand.”
    Wooden was not a man of many hobbies, although