The Wizardry of John Wooden

For basketball junkies who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was deeply unsettling to hear that former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, 99, was hospitalized and gravely ill. His death Friday night marks the passing of a sports legend.

The "Wizard of Westwood," whose teams won an astonishing 10 national championships in a 12-year-period, has been a marvel of longevity. Most of us remember him as the coach that our own favorite college teams could almost never beat. He was the mentor of two of the most dominant centers of all time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) and Bill Walton, in addition to scores of other great players who went on to pro stardom, from Gail Goodrich to Sidney Wicks.

But it wasn't just stellar talent that made Wooden and UCLA nearly unbeatable. Between the Alcindor and Walton eras, he won two championships with the late Steve Patterson, who was more noted for his team cheeseburger-eating record than his awkward-looking jump shot, at center. (In fairness to Patterson, it should be mentioned that the low-scoring defensive specialist could rise to the occasion; he had the best game of his college career, a 29-point scoring outburst, in the 1971 NCAA title game.)

What always struck me most about the Wizard's teams in the early 1970s was their fearsome focus and discipline, the unrelenting faith that they had in Wooden's basketball strategy, which was proof that an idea can be brilliant without being complicated. UCLA didn't win by pouring in spectacular shots, so much as it did by forcing the other guys to make mistakes and then capitalizing on them. UCLA's most fearsome scoring weapon wasn't Bill Walton's ability to elevate to a startling height over the rim and drop the ball down (this was during the era of the NCAA's ill-advised no-dunk rule), but its dreaded 2-2-1 zone press, in which UCLA's players descended upon opponents a second or two after they brought the ball in bounds, and made them run a gantlet to get across the mid-court line. At that point, UCLA abruptly switched into a more conventional but equally fierce man-to-man defense. The players wore down other teams, pressuring them into making turnovers that UCLA converted into easy layups. As Wooden explained in a 1974 Time article : "We are easy to scout, but tough to play against."

What made Wooden such a gifted leader? He was extraordinarily well organized, and almost obsessive about getting the most simple details right--his 1980 how-to treatise,Practical Modern Basketball, even advises aspiring players to smooth the wrinkles in their socks. Oddly, it was only when he endeavored to explain his philosophy that it got complicated. Wooden devised a formula called the Pyramid of Success, a ziggurat of upbeat self-actualization advice that makes me suspect that someday he'll challenge Abraham Maslow to a game of HORSE in heaven. But if you distill his philosophy down to the core, it seems to me that it would be this: Success isn't necessarily winning, but having peace of mind, from knowing that you've worked hard to be the best person that you can be.

And that brings to mind another reason why John Wooden is so beloved. I'm not going to name names, but there are plenty of superstars in sports who, underneath the sanitized image of them presented in sports-drink and shoe commercials, are not very admirable or even likable human beings. John Wooden won more than just about any of them, but unlike them, he never forgot how to be a good person.

For example, in 2006 the book How to Be Like Coach Wooden: Life Lessons from Basketball's Greatest Leader, co-authored by former LA Lakers coach Pat Riley and writer David Wimbish, there's a really moving anecdote about Wooden at a summer basketball camp he put on in the early 1970s. Now, summer hoops camps usually are a place where a lot of college coaches focus on scouting and currying favor with outstanding high schoolers they hope to recruit. Wooden, though, spent a good bit of his time that week consoling a young boy--not an especially promising player, either--who felt insecure about his lack of skills and homesick for his family. As the boy's father recalled:

That's how I'll always think of the Wizard of Westwood, as the coach who proved that winning isn't the only thing after all.