COACH JOHN WOODEN PASSED AWAY TONIGHT AT THE AGE OF 99. THIS IS AN UPDATE OF A POST WRITTEN TWO YEARS AGO.
Coaching is one of the most honorable professions there is. A few money- and headline-grabbing exceptions distort the fact that the fast majority of sports coaches are motivated by factors other than money. No team can reach its potential without good coaching, and no coach brought more teams closer to realizing their potential than John Wooden, the best basketball coach, and one of the best coaches of any game, who ever lived.
Wooden’s teams changed the the sport of basketball, from a polite Hoosiers-style half-court square dance, to a baseline-to-baseline rampage of disruptive defenses and extreme athleticism., and they have the championships to show for it. As someone who grew up in Indiana like Wooden did, I always related to how The Coach used basketball as an allegory for life. That’s how it was for a high school kid in Indiana. Basketball was life.
Coach Wooden’s teams showed how the game, and not just the game of basketball, any game, should be played. He was an educator who just so happened to use a basketball court as his classroom. The players who had the good fortune to play for him got gifts that lasted long after their playing days were over. Here are some of Coach Wooden’s fundamentals:
THE TEAM CONCEPT. The game is played not according to some particular philosophy or dogma, but rather, to get every player in position to utilize their individual strengths, resulting in optimal performance by the team in any given situation. Sure, Wooden had great players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (at UCLA, Lew Alcindor) and Bill Walton who could dominate a game, but he also won when the performance of his teams could not have been predicted by the individual talents of its members. “I don’t play my five best,” the Coach used to say, “I play my best five.”
DEAL IN REALITY. Wooden never asked his players or his teams to ‘give 110 percent’, which struck him as a meaningless idea. 100 percent, he explained, is as much as any person can give, and no one ever even gives that. Understand your limitations and your potential, and work at realizing that potential to the fullest.
DETAILS MATTER. He taught the little things, because a steady progression of the little things gets a person to the tops of mountains. The first lesson in the first practice of the season was how to put on your socks. Smooth and unwrinkled, so as not to rub up blisters.
PERFORMANCE IS BUILT ON FUNDAMENTALS. Wooden ran practices that were intense and focused on consistent execution of the fundamentals of the game. His players came to understand that these fundamentals were the building blocks of achievement. And not just in basketball, in life.
THE GAME IS NOT LIFE I was stunned when my friend Frank Allocco, who played against several Wooden-coached UCLA teams (and now coaches basketball himself at Concord de LaSalle High School in northern California) told me that Wooden was a vicious needler from the bench during a game. “If you’re in front of their bench, he gets on you,” said Allocco. “He tells you they’re going to humiliate you, that they’ve got your number and that you’re soft.” Off the court, I have never heard that Coach Wooden was anything but a courtly, thoughtful gentleman.
A COACH IS ALWAYS COACHING. My friend Jeff Thompson asked me to take a picture of him with his hero, Coach Wooden, after a Notre Dame-UCLA game in 1975, what would turn out to be Wooden’s final year of coaching. I was about to snap the picture when the Coach told me to wait. “Nell,” he said, “come here and be in this picture with us.” He gestured to a small woman in a flower print dress and a hat who stepped shyly out of a protective forest of tall athletes and took her place by Wooden’s side. And then I snapped the picture of Jeff Thompson with Coach and Mrs. Wooden. Your hero is not only the basketball coach at UCLA, The Coach seemed to be saying to my friend and me, your hero is Nell Wooden’s husband.
When my son, Adam, had an issue on his high school basketball team, I wasn’t quite sure what to tell him. I wrote to Coach Wooden care of the athletic department at UCLA asking the Coach how to deal with it. Coach Wooden sent me a two-page handwritten letter in response. The essence of it was that sooner or later opportunity comes everyone’s way, and that my son should focus on preparation so that he would be ready when it did. After I gave my son Coach Wooden’s advice, he had a very good game, because the opportunities presented themselves, and he was prepared.
The game can prepare you for life, give you your approach to life, and even give you the money to enjoy life. But it is not life. The relationships you have with family and friends and students, the respect of your peers, the fact that three generations of players came back to visit you whenever they were in town, and that when you’re in your 90s, you still take the time to answer a letter from a clueless dad about what to tell his basketball-loving son..that’s life.
Tags: basketball, Bill Walton, Coaching, Educator, Fundamentals, GameChanger, John Wooden, Lew Alcindor, Life, Success, Teaching, Teamwork, UCLA, Winning