Posted on April 3, 2013
During this 75th anniversary celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Steve McKee’s memory blog, CENTAUR SEASONS, here on HoppsU.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 on HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. A multipart series now till the Final Four.
Today’s featured conversation: THE MEANING OF SUCCESS (AND HOME).
To listen immediately … click here … and then here … and finally here.
“Success is within yourself. It’s not what others perceive you to be, it’s what you ARE,” Coach Wooden says. Easy to expound, I suppose, when you’re flying the most championship banners. Except Coach Wooden isn’t talking about his finest years, he’s talking about his worst: the 14-12 team from 1959-60. “I think that may be one of my finest coaching jobs was the poorest year that I had,” he says. “I felt GOOD about that year!”
What made him feel bad in those early years was that his Bruins had no home court to call their own — even after winning two National Championships. “I had become, I must honestly say, uh, discouraged in the fact that, uh, we still [had] no place to play.” He had long ago learned the value of the “home” game, he says, back at Purdue when he played for Piggy Lambert in the early 1930s. “He felt that intercollegiate sports should be played, should be primarily for the students of the schools involved, and should be played on the campuses, uh, if it was at all possible.”
To listen to Coach Wooden talk about judging success on your own terms, and of finally finding a home court for the Bruins to call their own … click here … and then here and finally here. A word-for-word transcript is provided. (Warning! Clicking that third time will take you to 13-minute interview segment.)
Coach Wooden and the Bruins moved into Pauley Pavilion in the fall of 1966, taking two NCAA trophies with them. Another eight famously followed.
Indeed, no team dominated the NCAA tournament’s first 75 years 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, 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.
To listen to Coach Wooden reflect on success and explain how the Bruins finally arrived at Pauley Pavilion, click here … and then here … and finally here.
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 declares 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 reflect on success and explain how the Bruins finally arrived at Pauley Pavilion, click here … and then here … and finally here.
At CENTAUR SEASONS the two-hour John Wooden conversation has been apportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, THE MEANING OF SUCCESS (AND HOME), takes you directly to the first segment, then the second segment, and finally the third segment. Keep in mind that in nearly every section other topics were discussed as well. It was a wide-ranging conversation!
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 here on CENTAUR SEASONS.
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