A
coach when student athletes were really students, and the thought of making millions of dollars rolling out basketballs in the gym seemed preposterous.
A coach when it meant more to mold the lives of young men than to proclaim his own greatness.
A coach who offered a new life lesson to his charges almost every day.
"Learn as if you were going to live forever," he would tell his players. "Live as if you were going to die tomorrow."
John Wooden didn't live forever. His tomorrow finally came Friday, when he quietly passed away just months before his 100th birthday.
The end came, fittingly enough, on the same UCLA campus where he tutored a player then known as Lew Alcindor. The same place he seemingly couldn't lose with Bill Walton.
The place where he dispensed wisdom that his players remembered long after they had forgotten the X's and O's.
"What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player," he would say.
His players listened. How could they not when the man giving advice lived by the same code?
He was born on a farm in Indiana without running water or electricity, and his values were as solid as the land his parents worked. He lived into a time he could never have imagined, but nothing changed.
The championships seemed to come as an annual rite of spring. There were 10 of them in all, an accomplishment so staggering that no other college coach will ever come close.
The other statistics blurred together over time, but they won't be matched either. Still, it wasn't the 88-game winning streak, four 30-0 seasons or even the 38 straight NCAA tournament wins that defined the humble Midwesterner who ended up at UCLA almost by accident.
He had the best players. They came because of him, and they came in spite of him.
Playing for Wooden, you see, was never easy. He was the boss, practices were brutal, and things were always done in his meticulous way.
The players who bought in would one day become his lifetime friends. Those who didn't would never understand.
The first practice of every season began not with a midnight slam dunk contest, but a demonstration by Wooden on the proper way to put on shoes and socks. Wrinkles in the socks could lead to blisters, he explained, and blisters could lead to losing.
The fundamentals never went out of style, and Wooden never changed his approach.
His players learned, and they grew. He taught them how to win, but he also taught them bigger things, like his belief that a life not lived for others is a life not lived well.
He wouldn't accept less than their best effort both on and off the court, and that's usually what he got.
"Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but what you should have accomplished with your ability," Wooden would warn them.
Walton was one of those with ability, and tons of it. The redhead was one of the greatest college players ever and the bedrock of the UCLA team in the early
'70s that won the 88 straight.
Walton was also very much an individual in a time of individualism. One day, during a break in the season, he showed up at practice with a wild, red beard, ready to play for a coach who didn't allow facial hair.
"It's my right," he told Wooden.
"That's good, Bill," Wooden replied. "I admire people who have strong beliefs and stick by them. We're going to miss you."
