Posted on April 2, 2013
During this 75th anniversary celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Steve McKee’s memory blog, CENTAUR SEASONS, here on HoopsU.com is remembering not to forget John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins.
HOW? By listening here to the Coach talk about the game and his life (and his life in the game) in a wide-ranging, never-before-heard, two-hour audio conversation conducted 16 years after he retired in 1975.
A MARCH MADNESS special, brought to you by HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. A multipart series through the Final Four.
Today’s featured conversation: THE BIG GAME (IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK).
To listen immediately, click here.
Care to count how many big games John Wooden and his Bruins played? Well, there’s the 10 championship games, for sure, the national semifinals, the … STOP! “The game that you’re playing now – that’s a big game,” says Coach Wooden, obviously counting on a calculator of his own. “Is it a bigger game to play a game for the national championships than it is to play, uh, for a game that gets you there? Uh, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know that it is.” And if he doesn’t know, how can we? And maybe that’s why his teams did so well in, you know, the, uh, big games.
No team dominated the first 75 years of the NCAA tournament’s big games as completely as did Wooden and the Bruins from 1963-64 to 1974-75. In those days you simply could NOT play college basketball, at any level, without just always knowing that UCLA and Wooden were glaring down from the mountaintop — setting the standard, defining the game, winning the titles.
And yet for all that it can be difficult now to appreciate how ridiculously overwhelming the Bruins and Coach Wooden were, in their time.
Remember: Magic and Bird had yet to appear. So too Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Christian Laetner, Carmello Anthony, Kemba Walker. There was no Jimmy V, John Thompson, Tark the shark. Rick Pitino, Coach K, John Calipari, Shaka Smart. ESPN? Phi Slamma Jamma? Forty Minutes of Hell? Runnin’ Rebels? Valparaiso at the buzzer? “Diaper Dandies, BABY!”? Blue Devils? One-‘n’-Done? 8 vs. 9? Bracketology? No one knew.
There was UCLA and there was John Wooden. That was all. That was everything. That was enough.
It made for a lot of big games, or whatever you want to call them.
Coincidentally (or maybe not) the Bruins’ championship run fits snugly around this CENTAUR SEASONS blog. From 1968-69 to 1973-74, the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs went 37-72; the UCLA Bruins in those same seasons went 174-8. But Centaurs and Bruins together in one sentence is jarring only on first blush. Really. What was basketball to Coach Wooden if not an opportunity for him to teach and his students to learn?
Which we Centaurs did, I say. Though it is Christopher Cashman, a leading stalwart on four Centaur teams, who declared it best: “The experience we got playing at Allentown College in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,” he says, “is no less important to us than are the experiences that Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Tom Ingelsby got at their big-time programs.”
Cash, a year ahead of me, went to Cardinal Dougherty High School in Philadelphia and was best friends there with Tom Ingelsby, who went on to Villanova and started against UCLA in the ’71 NCAA Final. Cash’s relationship to and with the big time provides its own clarity: “Maybe it was even more important to us,” he says adamantly, “because we did it just for the joy of the game rather than any expectation of recognition.”
So here at CENTAUR SEASONS, during this month of madness (wait: “March Madness” wasn’t officially coined until 1982), we’d like to remember again for the first time the prominence and dominance that was UCLA and John Wooden.
In a never-before-heard, two-hour audio interview conducted nearly 23 years ago, Coach Wooden talks here on CENTAUR SEASONS about a wide variety of on- and off-court college basketball topics: Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, that game in the Astrodome, his most pleasurable victories, the N.C. State loss, his “Pyramid of Success,” growing up in Indiana, and much much more.
To listen to Coach Wooden talk about every game being the big game … click here.
At CENTAUR SEASONS the full two-hour John Wooden conversation has been apportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, THE BIG GAME (IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK), takes you directly to that segment. Keep in mind that in nearly every section other topics were discussed as well. It was a wide-ranging conversation! Some segments are just a few minutes; the longest is about 13.
I conducted the full interview with Coach Wooden on Saturday, May 18, 1991, for what eventually became the book “COACH,” an oral history of the sideline profession. (Coach Wooden was one of about 150 coaches I interviewed.)
Clicking on two previous CENTAUR SEASONS posts can also access the interview with Coach Wooden. This one: “AT THE END OF THE BENCH: What a Centaur-Turned-Coach Learned at Allentown and Shares with Coach Wooden.” Or this one: “U.C.L.A. CENTAURS; A.C. BRUINS: An Exclusive Interview with John Wooden.”
OR, click here to proceed directly to the CENTAUR SEASONS John Wooden Interview page.
However you get there, here’s hoping you enjoy listening to John Wooden on CENTAUR SEASONS.
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