Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis Page A

he did spend time during the off-seasons playing some golf. During one memorable afternoon, he accomplished the rare feat of scoring a hole in one and a double eagle in the same round. (He kept that scorecard for the rest of his life.) That aside, Johnny, who was now in his late twenties and a married father of two, was still an introverted wallflower. As usual, it was up to Nell to provide balance. “He was very shy,” Powell said. “His wife saw it, too. She knew it when he was speaking to people and would have his finger on his mouth.” Wooden was combative during games, but away from the court it was Nell who was the loud one. One time Ehlers was riding in the backseat of the Woodens’ car on the way home from a difficult loss against James Whitcomb Riley High School. The car was quiet until Nell spied a Riley player, in his purple letterman’s sweater, walking down the street. The young man had an unfortunate pug nose. Nell rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and shouted, “You no-good little bulldog!” John grabbed her and pulled her back inside the car.
    If there’s one thing Wooden understood innately, it’s that a teacher must set a righteous example if he wants his students to follow him. “You have to walk it,” Wooden said. “You can’t fool these kids. They know whether or not you really care about them.” If he insisted that his players never smoked, then he wasn’t going to smoke. If he said that they could never be late, then he could never be late. (He was there to greet them at the YMCA every morning at 6:00 a.m. so he could tape their ankles before practice.) And if he told them that they could not use profanity, he wasn’t going to use any himself. Instead of cursing when he got mad, he adopted the habit of shouting “Gracious sakes alive!” If he was really ticked off, he would say “ Goodness gracious sakes alive!” It was odd that a man with such affection for the English language would construct a phrase that made no sense, but there it was. When I asked Wooden where he came up with it, he replied, “I have no idea.”
    Wooden was a popular, respected basketball coach and English teacher, but there was little to augur that South Bend was witnessing some kind of legend in the making. To wit, when Wooden accepted an invitation to speak at a local banquet, here’s how a local newspaper described the event: “Johnny Wooden, South Bend Central’s basketball coach, will be the featured speaker at Elkhart High’s sports banquet, although they had hoped to line up some prominent college coach.”
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    Day by day, step by step, year by year, he perfected his craft. This wasn’t just some English teacher chasing state championships in his spare time. This was a man who was laying the groundwork for a career that would dominate the sport of basketball.
    Many of the tactics Wooden developed during his eight seasons as South Bend’s head basketball coach were born of necessity. The facilities were so bad, and the gym time so limited, that he had no choice but to map out his practices in rigid detail. “We only had two hours, so he knew he had to get everything done,” Powers said. “The practice had to be highly organized. You didn’t have a moment to think about what you wanted to do.”
    The fixed schedule meant there was no time for frivolity. “He didn’t take no foolishness,” said Tom Taylor, who played at Central High from 1939 to 1943. “I found that out the first time he threw me out of practice. I was fooling around with another guy. He said, ‘Go get your shower.’ Then he’d coach you up later on. He didn’t cuss, but he got it across to you.”
    Taylor was lucky that was all Wooden got across that day. The coach was far more incensed when he found out that his best player, Parson Howell, had been smoking. On the morning that Wooden learned of Howell’s transgression, he marched upstairs to the auxiliary gym where Howell was shooting baskets