Welcome to a very special CENTAUR SEASONS here on HoopsU.com: the opportunity to listen to a brand-new interview with the legendary UCLA basketball coach JOHN WOODEN. Here’s the story of this interiew, an explanation as to why you’re reading about it here on CENTAUR SEASONS at HoopsU.com, and and how to listen to this new Coach Wooden interview.
On the Saturday afternoon of May 18, 1991, I interviewed John Wooden, the legendary and then-retired basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins, for a book about coaching and the coaching profession. I called him at his home in Los Angeles from my place in Brooklyn, thanked him for his time and explained my project. To set some parameters, I said, “I have plenty of questions I can ask, and I’ll keep asking for as long as you want to keep talking.”
He laughed and said, “Okay.” And then we talked for nearly two hours. Or rather, he talked and I listened. “You’re wearing ME out!,” I finally had to tell him.
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“An Interview with John Wooden” here on HoopsU.com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pa. Steve played on four of the school’s first seven teams, was MVP senior year and in 1974 graduated in the sixth class.
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At one point during our conversation, without my having asked about it, Coach Wooden volunteered how “discouraged” he had been for years after he arrived in Los Angeles because the Bruins had no permanent, large-enough, on-campus arena to play home games. Colleges need such gathering places.
He had left Indiana State and moved west to L.A. for the 1948-1949 season, he said. “I was led to believe – and don’t misunderstand me now; I was NOT promised – but I was led to believe that if I came, and by the end of my contract we’d have a nice place to play on campus. Had I not been led to believe that, I don’t believe that I would have come.”
That nice place to play, Pauley Pavilion, opened in the fall of 1965. History records that Coach Wooden was still there, of course, preparing for his 18th season, two NCAA championships in the trophy case, a freshman named Lew Alcindor waiting in the wings, eight more championships still to be won.
So why had he stuck around? “When I saw going into the third year, that, uh, that’s not going to happen, by THAT time I LIKED California!,” he told me.
I was reminded of my interview with Coach Wooden actually a few months ago while laying the pipe for CENTAUR SEASONS. I knew I wanted to write a couple of posts placing the tiny and brand-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales basketball team within the larger college basketball picture. A portrait that back then was completely dominated by John Wooden and his UCLA Bruins. We Centaurs were little more than a brushstroke, impossible to notice. Unless you knew where to look.
Working on those posts I recalled how gracious the then-80-year-old coach had been to me, how generous with his time, how delighted — grateful, even — he seemed for an opportunity to talk of the glory years, all the while maintaining that Midwestern modesty he was famous for.
But the idea that this Wooden interview might make its way from a box in my basement to CENTAUR SEASONS didn’t occur to me until I began interviewing some of my former teammates and/or rereading interviews I had done with some of them a few years before.
I was struck by the number of guys who expressed such an appreciation, an affection, even, for Joseph J. Billera Hall at Allentown College. Though perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me – after all, we spent so much time there.
Billera Hall was our gym – on campus, up and running within 39 months of the school’s opening in September 1965. (Likely within the timeframe of the first Wooden contract, as it were.) “Just watching Billera going up,” says Bob Koch, a member of the school’s first graduating class in 1969, “was a big thing for all of us.” Soon there would be no more schlepping to a local orphanage for practice, with every game somewhere on the road. Soon there would be home games just a healthy walk from the dorms.
Billera, the fifth building erected at this cornfield college, was testament to the fact that the school was trying as hard as it could.
There was this, too, about Billera: “You walked into that gym,” remembers Jerry Wilkinson, a senior co-captain when I was a sophomore, “and you said, ‘Wow, this is the nicest place I’m going to play in.’ ”
It was comments like these about Billera that triggered my memory of Coach Wooden’s Pauley Pavilion. Or, rather, his lack for so long of a Pauley Pavilion.
I dug out the tapes, listened to them, transcribed them. The sound quality was very good and had held up. The tapes have been digitalized and the entire interview, divided into 24 parts, is available for listening here at CENTAUR SEASONS. A word-for-word transcription accompanies each segment.
At one point when we were talking, Coach Wooden enumerated — again with no prompting from me — the myriad places where the Bruins had played their home games, pre-Pauley. He ticked them off quickly: “Venice High School [high school!], Santa Monica College, Long Beach City College, Long Beach Auditorium, Pan-Pacific Auditorium, Olympic Auditorium.”
When the Los Angeles Arena “came into being,” he said, the team started playing most of its home games there. “But always in doubleheaders with USC.” Clearly, this still rankled. “Los Angeles Arena is practically on the USC campus,” he said. “I had become quite concerned about that, I must honestly say, and it was kind of getting to me a little bit.”
Then came Pauley, a place to call his own. Just like our Billera.
By the time I arrived at Allentown, Billera was already a given. Still, I can honestly say I never took it for granted. In reverse of Coach Wooden’s early seasons, we played too many away games in too many rented gyms (junior highs, mostly) against too many teams that didn’t have their own place to play. That we had Billera, that Billera was special, was self-evident.
(Though we did play Rutgers-South Jersey in cavernous, broken-down Camden Convention Hall, which was very cool, and Shelton College in the ballroom of the old Admiral Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, which was just bizarre.)
Coach Wooden said he learned the value of an on-campus home for a college basketball team from his coach at Purdue, Ward Louis “Piggy” Lambert. “He felt that intercollegiate sports should be played,” Coach Wooden said, “should be primarily for the students of the, uh, of the schools involved and should be played on the campuses, uh, if it was, was at all possible.”
That slightly awkward word-for-word transcription is on purpose, by the way. Coach Wooden died in 2010 at age 99; he isn’t available for reading back a quote or two. I hope this exactness assists with the context.
Dusting off these interview tapes has led me to listen again for the first time to Coach Wooden, with an ear to how what he talked about then might be applied now in CENTAUR SEASONS. I hope to write about these connections and associations — these U..C.L.A. Centuars & A.C. Bruins — in future posts.
For instance, Coach Wooden also talked more than once about how for him the goal every year wasn’t to win the NCAA championship. It really wasn’t, he said. It was for his team to play to its potential. That was always our goal, too.
TO LISTEN TO THE JOHN WOODEN INTERVIEW ON CENTAUR SEASONS, CLICK HERE …
TO GO TO THE CENTAUR SEASONS WEBSITE, CLICK HERE …
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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