BOOK EXCERPT: The Book of Sports Virtues — John Wooden

Sports Feel Good Stories is proud to post an excerpt from Fritz Knapp’s The Book of Sports Virtues — Portraits from the Field of Play. The focus is on the virtue of discipline and profiles basketball coach John Wooden.  With March Madness upon us, what better time to reflect on the greatness of John Wooden?

John Wooden played and coached basketball tenaciously. As a
coach, he emphasized conditioning and teamwork. Fast-breaking
offense designed to wear down the other team and tough defense
keyed his teams’ successes. The UCLA teams he coached won sev-
en straight national championships from 1967 to 1973, and ten out of
twelve from 1964 to 1975. Off the court, Wooden was a loyal husband
and devoted father, and he lived by the highest moral standards in every
area of his life.

John Wooden was born October 14, 1910, in rural Hall, Indiana, the
fourth and youngest of four boys born to Joshua and Roxie Wooden.
The Wooden family farmed land Roxie had inherited from her parents.
From a young age, John assisted his father, who worked at least twelve
a day, six days a week, tending crops and livestock. Mr. Wooden taught
his sons the importance of work and the role it played in keeping the
farm productive. Sunday was always reserved as a day to rest and go to
church. Mr. Wooden was a stern disciplinarian who corrected his son’s
misbehavior lovingly but firmly. John Wooden described his father as a
man of “gentle strength” and “someone who would always be fair with
me and had my best interests at heart.” Roxie Wooden, according to
John, “provided a role model for how to do my job regardless of the
particular circumstances.”

Sports were the best outlet for the Wooden boys. Their father also
enjoyed sports, especially baseball, so he made sure he could participate
in their fun. Because he and his son enjoyed baseball so much, Joshua
Wooden cleared a section of farmland to make room for a baseball field.
He also built their first basketball goal out of a tomato basket. Mrs. Wood-
en produced the “ball” from discarded linens stuffed into old hosiery.

The Wooden household stressed education, too, and books were
more prominent than sporting equipment. Mr. Wooden read and quot-
ed books constantly. He passed on to his sons a love of literature and es-
pecially poetry. John Wooden would later say that his father “profoundly
influenced me,” especially in the area of learning. Joshua Wooden held
his sons to a high standard, but he also provided them a living example.
He did not ask of them more than he could model himself. He did not
tolerate foolishness, wouldn’t drink, smoke, use foul language, or speak
harshly about another person. His steadfast rule was that if one couldn’t
say anything nice about a person, they shouldn’t say anything at all.
John Wooden treasured his relationship with his father. For more
than half a century he kept a little piece of paper in his wallet that his
father had given him in grade school. It read:
1. Be true to yourself.
2. Make each day your masterpiece.
3. Help others.
4. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
5. Make friendship a fine art.
6. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
7. Pray for guidance, count and give thanks for
your blessings every day.

John Wooden put his father’s advice to good use. He studied hard
and did well in school, played high school sports (football, basketball
and baseball) with considerable success, and proved himself college ma-
terial in an era when most high school graduates went to work rather
than to college. He received a basketball scholarship offer to attend Pur-
due University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1928, but at that time there
were no pure athletic scholarships. All scholarships and grants required working as well as playing a sport. Wooden worked a variety of jobs, including waiting tables and selling programs at football games, all four
years to pay the tuition his parents couldn’t afford.

On the court, Wooden excelled as a quick, playmaking guard. At 5
foot 10 inches in height and 180 pounds, he also scored his share of bas-
kets, due in part to his tremendous leaping ability. Ward “Piggy” Lam-
bert, Purdue’s coach, relied heavily on Wooden’s playmaking ability and
“court sense.” Purdue played a fast-breaking style, and Wooden’s speed
and finesse kept the offense running smoothly.

Coach Lambert and his star player had a special bond. Lambert saw
in Wooden a unique individual, a true leader. Wooden admired Lam-
bert for his coaching genius. During Wooden’s sophomore year, Lam-
bert offered him a total athletic scholarship (made available to Lam-
bert by a West Lafayette doctor) that would allow him to study and play
without having to work. For most of Purdue’s athletes, that would have
been a dream come true. Not for Wooden. He turned it down, knowing
that without work he would feel as if he had not earned his education.

Lambert respected Wooden’s decision, and understood it had not even
been a difficult one for him to make. Wooden was guided by the prin-
ciple that he should earn his way and not settle for an easy or comfort-
able lifestyle handed to him on a silver platter. He hustled on and off the
court to pay his way through college. He twice earned All-American
honors in the process.

John Wooden was so good at basketball that kids throughout the
state of Indiana, an emerging basketball hotbed, wanted to be like him.
Said a former professional football player who had watched Wooden play
at Purdue: “In my era, Wooden was to kids what Wilt Chamberlin or Ka-
reem Abdul-Jabbar are today. He was a superstar, the idol of any kid who
had a basketball. In Indiana, that was every kid.” Despite his superstar
status, John Wooden was intensely shy and quiet. Beneath that, however,
there lurked a fierce competitor who hustled and scrapped all over the court, earning the nickname “The India Rubber Man.” He would bounce, like a rubber ball, off other players and even walls in some of the smaller gyms, only to get right back into the action. His ability to bounce back
proved helpful in another situation. He had dated Nellie Riley all through
high school and college and planned to marry her after his graduation.
But in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, he lost all the money he
had saved ($909.05) when his bank went out of business. He married Nell
anyway, in 1932, penniless but very much in love.

Wooden’s high school and college coaches had such a significant in-
fluence on him that he decided to coach after graduating from Purdue.
Dayton High School in Dayton, Kentucky, gave him his start, inauspi-
cious as it was. There he recorded his first and only losing season, but he
forged a philosophy that served him well the rest of his lengthy career:
“Get the players in the best of condition, and make them believe they
are in better condition than our opponents so they won’t fold in the sec-
ond half. Teach them to execute the fundamentals quickly but without
hurrying. Get them to play as a team, always thinking of passing the ball
before shooting it.”

A year after his Kentucky experience, he returned to his native state
to coach South Bend Central High School, which soon became a bas-
ketball powerhouse. In eleven years at South Bend his record was 218
wins and 42 losses. He also extended his own playing career. He contin-
ued to play basketball, semi-professionally, for an Indianapolis-based
team, and kept himself in peak physical condition.

John Wooden put his country ahead of his thriving career. When
the United States entered World War II in 1941, Wooden, at the age of
thirty-one, enlisted in the Navy. He spent three years as a physical edu-
cation instructor for naval air troops and instilled in them the training
and discipline they needed to win a contest far more important than
a basketball game. When the war ended, Wooden returned to coach-
ing at South Bend Central and then moved up a notch to the collegiate
ranks two years later. Indiana State offered him a job when their coach,
Wooden’s own former high school coach, Glenn Curtis, resigned to take
a job coaching professional basketball. It had been Curtis who mentored
Wooden and taught him the mental toughness needed to win close ball-
games. In Wooden’s words, “He was one of the four most important
men in my life.”

Wooden’s first Indiana State team went 18–7 and made the con-
ference post-season tournament in Kansas City, Missouri. When the
league refused to allow the lone black player on Indiana State’s roster
to play purely on the basis of his skin color, Wooden was outraged. He
had witnessed Ku Klux Klan activity as a youth, and he was determined
never to bow to racial hatred or discrimination. The player, Clarence
Walker, was “not a great ballplayer,” according to Wooden, and the team
easily could have won without him. But Wooden’s higher principles
prevailed, and he removed his team from the tournament rather than
compromise his belief in racial equality.

Wooden soon began to receive offers to coach “big time” college
programs. His success became evident to a national audience of coach-
es and athletic administrators. In 1948, he was hired to head the pro-
gram at UCLA in the powerful Pacific Coast Conference. UCLA had
finished in last place the previous year, but Wooden was optimistic. He
told an audience of boosters before his first season began, “We’ll win
fifty percent of our games by out-running the other team in the last five
minutes.” He exceeded his own wild prediction by winning twenty-two
and losing only seven. He called that season “my most satisfying year of
coaching” because he had taken a team with mediocre talent and made
winners out of them. An observer called his team “uninhibited” and
“blitzing.” The very next year, their record of 24–7 was good enough
to win the conference championship. Wooden’s UCLA teams quickly
made an impression on their opponents and gained national prestige.

Winning basketball games thrilled Wooden, his players, and UCLA
fans everywhere. But Wooden’s philosophy was not to win at any cost.
Many times he was satisfied that “we’ve accomplished all we’re capable of
accomplishing, win or lose.” His attitude was to dare his players to be great
in basketball and life, and to put every ounce of strength into achieving
their highest attainable goals. His focus was laser-like, but he never sacri-
ficed his moral principles to gain success. He did not like recruiting play-
ers; he did not want to have undue influence on an important decision
in any given player’s life. In this aspect, Wooden admired Amos Alonzo
Stagg, the college football coach who believed recruiting bred corruption.
So he handed over most of UCLA’s recruiting efforts to assistant coach-
es. While he toughened his players by working them hard in practice, he
rarely punished his players in front of others. He said, “I try to work with
players like doves. Some need to be held a little tighter.… Others don’t
need to be held as tightly.… Above all, a coach must be patient.”

Referees and opposing players sometimes bore the brunt of Wood-
en’s competitive character. He sometimes screamed at them from the
bench, usually nothing more than a challenge to ensure fairness. His
admonishments included absolutely nothing profane or indecent. His
father had taught him better. “Yes. I yell at officials. I want my players
to know I’m behind them.” He, like his mentor, Glenn Curtis, became
“a master psychologist,” deriving the absolute best from his teams. His
1964 team proved that. His first national championship team, basket-
ball’s “Lilliputians” (no starter was taller than 6 foot 5 inches), won with
“quickness and fanaticism”—the Wooden model.

Wooden’s UCLA teams won better than eighty percent of their
games during his twenty-eight years as coach. He became a legendary
basketball teacher and strategist. He claimed he “was much more of
a ‘practice coach’ than ‘game coach,’” which meant that he drilled his
teams in practice to handle instinctively the pressures of a game situ-
ation. They responded brilliantly, winning a total of 664 games while
losing only 162.

Along the way, Wooden developed his “Pyramid for Success” as
a teaching tool. In it, he defines success as “peace of mind which is a
direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to be-
come the best that you are capable of becoming.” Wooden’s depth of
understanding about the ingredients of success is evident on this very
page. Wooden chose not to copyright his Pyramid for Success so that
all coaches and teachers, athletes and spectators, could copy his work
to gain inspiration.

Inspiration is what John Wooden gave to his players. His former
superstar centers, Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, attest to that.
Said Walton: “Coach [Wooden] gained respect with a very simple meth-
od: by his personal example.… He never had to tell you that he was the
one in charge or get up and give rah-rah speeches to get your attention.
He led by being himself.… You saw how true he was to doing things
right, by thinking right. Coach Wooden was more interested in the pro-
cess than in the result.” Abdul-Jabbar called Wooden a “fine man, a su-
perb coach, and an honest and decent individual.” Many other former
players have achieved success in life because of the strong values and
work ethic Wooden imparted to them. He once said “little things make
big things happen,” and his little deeds produced huge results.

Wooden’s greatest asset was his inner strength. He wrote:

No coach should be trusted with the tremendous responsibility
of handling young men under the great mental, emotional, and
physical strain to which they are subjected unless he is spiritually
strong. If he does possess this inner strength, it is only because
he has faith and truly loves his fellow man.… Youngsters under
his supervision will develop wholesome disciplines of body, mind,
and spirit that will build character.

When John’s beloved wife, Nell, died in 1985, he fell into depression.
His children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends rallied to
his side. They helped revive his broken and grieving spirit. Over the
course of several years, Wooden recovered, but he still visits his wife’s
grave almost every day. John Wooden made an indelible mark on athlet-
ics, creating a towering example for others to follow. His maxims about
sports and life are etched in the minds of many athletes and coaches.
Wooden continues to have an impact. Nearing the age of 100, he main-
tains a website, www.coachjohnwooden.com, from which he shares his
philosophy and personal and professional histories.

John Wooden’s many honors include being the first, and for more
than twenty-five years the only, person elected to the Basketball Hall of
Fame as both a player and coach. But his proudest achievements are his
family and former players, not the accolades. “I’d like to be remembered
as a good teacher and a good person, not as someone who won a lot
of basketball championships,” said Wooden. “I am just a common man
who is true to his beliefs.”

###

Book excerpt posted with permission from author Fritz Knapp.

About the Author: Fritz Knapp graduated from the College of William & Mary in Virginia where he played lacrosse.  He has taught and coached extensively in the Richmond Area.  He is a teacher and coach at Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia.  He is the founder of the Blue Sky Fund, an orgnization which serves at-risk students in the Richmond area.  20% of the author’s royalty from sales of this book will serve at-risk students through the Blue Sky Fund.

To purchase the book: www.sportvirtues.com

30 Youth Basketball Practice Plans — Be ready for every practice in 5 minutes! Go to www.coachingwhiz.com

| | | | | |

Tags: Basketball Hall of Fame, Indiana, John Wooden, NCAA Basketball, UCLA