Remembering Coach John Wooden

I once heard an old African proverb that says whenever an elderly person dies, a library burns down.

If such is the case, then at least five libraries were torched this past Friday, because we lost a man who was not only the greatest coach in the history of sports, but one of the greatest all around human beings ever, a person whose life and influence transcends athletics.

John Robert Wooden, first and foremost, was a teacher – I believe he preferred to describe himself that way.

I won’t go on about his 620 wins and ten national championships in 12 years, including seven in a row from 1967-1973, during a 27-year tenure as coach of the UCLA basketball team. Nor will I go into detail about his iconic Pyramid of Success, a Ten Commandments for the 20th century that tells people how best to live life and conduct oneself, or the various maxims that he espoused such as…

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

“It’s what you know AFTER you know everything that counts.”

“Make each day your masterpiece.”

I’ll leave those statistics and other obvious things for those who will inevitably review all that stuff for the newspapers, sports channels, and the internet.

Coach Wooden’s – I prefer to call him Mr. Wooden because he was much more than a coach to me – impact on UCLA was a very simple one: He put it on the map.

Before he arrived from Indiana State in 1948 to coach the basketball version of the Bruins, the University of California at Los Angeles was a nice, sleepy little college in a quaint, sleepy little community called Westwood, considered on the outskirts of L.A.

Although they had a few successes in football, including a Rose Bowl appearance in 1943, people thought of UCLA as a commuter school, a twiggy little brother off the U.C. Berkeley tree that was a shadow dweller to well-established crosstown rival USC.

By the time Mr. Wooden retired as the Bruins’ coach after winning his tenth NCAA title in 1975, UCLA was no longer anyone’s twig or in anybody’s shadow.

That quaint little brother of Berkeley had become one of America’s elite institutions of higher learning, a place that would eventually claim more national championships than anyone else and become the nation’s most popular university, with more students applying there than any other school.

And on top of everything else, Mr. Wooden’s success led to the building of the legendary Pauley Pavilion. Just as Yankee Stadium was “The House That Ruth Built”, that on-campus icon is “The House That Wooden Built”.

I had the extreme personal privilege of meeting the man when I was a student at UCLA and played the saxophone in the Bruin Varsity Band at the basketball games in the late 1980s. Mr. Wooden regularly attended the contests; he would always sit just across from me and the band.

Needless to say, it was a thrill just being thirty feet from him, but I felt that I just had to meet the coaching legend. That chance came after a game just before Christmas of 1989.

Wearing my blue mock-turtleneck band shirt and with the game program I hand, I walked up to where he was sitting, my knees virtually knocking like crazy, and said while shaking like the proverbial leaf, “Excuse me Mr. Wooden, sir, may I have your autograph?”

The man had a reputation as being very generous with fans, and he did not disappoint with me. Right there under the championship banners that his teams put up, not only did he sign my program “Merry Christmas, John Wooden”, he also shook my hand and gave me a warm smile. To say that it was quite the thrill would be an understatement of the highest order.

To this day I still have that game program, as well as a book written by Mr. Wooden that he signed for me a year or two ago; to sell those mementos on Ebay or to give them away will always be completely unthinkable. How could I possibly dare to do that to the greatest coach that ever lived?

For practically all of my adult life, I have tried to follow the tenets of the great coach’s Pyramid of Success. I’ve done okay in applying some of those tenets to my own life, but have failed miserably in others, which continues to disappoint me because I feel that I have let Mr. Wooden down, as well as the rest of the UCLA community.

I still have copies of that pyramid on my bedroom walls, as a reminder to always strive to achieve the standards that he set when he first started the pyramid as a high school teacher and coach in Kentucky and his native Indiana in 1934.

It goes without saying that the whole world, in and out of sports, will dearly miss this coaching and teaching legend.

Like Elton John when he sang about being in the 22nd row in his ode to Marilyn Monroe, “Candle in the Wind”, I’m just a guy in the 222nd row when it comes to John Wooden, but I will forever miss that man just as much as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton and the countless others whose lives have been touch so greatly by him.

Mr. Wooden has often said that he did not fear death because he would be with his beloved wife Nell, who passed away in 1985.

Since that’s the case, I’m sure that he is happy wherever he is, because he’s with her now.

And I’m more than positive that this inspirational teacher, coach, and human being will rest in peace.

“Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”  – John Wooden  (1910-2010)