Posted on March 19, 2013
During this 75th anniversay celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the memory blog CENTAUR SEASONS here on HoopsU.com remembers not to forget John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins with a wide-ranging, never-before-heard, two-hour audio interview.
A MARCH MADNESS special, brought to you on HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. The first installment of a multipart series now till the Final Four
Today’s featured section: A TEACHER, NOT A COACH
To listen immediately, click here. And then click here.
“I enjoyed teaching, always enjoyed teaching” Coach Wooden says. “Many times in my career I was offered other, other, well, other teaching-coaching jobs … that, uh, had a lot more money. [And I was] offered jobs outside of coaching where I could have been much, much better off financially. But I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed working with youngsters.”
To listen to Mr. Wooden talk about one of his favorite subjects — coaching as teaching and teaching as coaching — click here … and then click here. (Plus: the perils of television, missing out on the big money and growing close to his players, “despite all efforts to the contrary.”)
No team and no coach dominated the first 75 years of the NCAA tournament as completely as did the UCLA Bruins and John Wooden: Ten titles in 12 years, 1963-64 through 1974-75.
Coincidentally (or maybe not) the Bruins’ championship run fits as snugly as a ball bag around the years of this CENTAUR SEASONS blog, 1967-68 through 1973-74. In those days you could not play college basketball, at any level, without just always knowing that UCLA and Wooden were at the top — 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.
Magic and Bird were yet to appear. So too Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Christian Laetner, Carmello Anthony, Kemba Walker. There was no Jim Valvano, John Thompson, Rick Pitino, Coach K., John Calipari, Shaka Smart. ESPN? Phi Slamma Jamma? Forty Minutes of Hell? Runnin’ Rebels? Valparaiso? Blue Devils? One-‘n’-Done? 8 vs. 9? Bracketology, for crying out loud? No one knew.
During the CENTAUR SEASONS there was UCLA and there was John Wooden. That was all. That was everything. That was enough.
So here at CENTAUR SEASONS, during this month of madness (there’s another one! “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. With 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, the “Pyramid of Success, growing up in Indiana, and much much more.
To listen to Coach Wooden talk about coaching as teaching and teaching as coaching, you can click here … and then click here.
To facilitate the listening, you will be able to read an exact word for word transcript of the conversation.
I conducted this 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.)
Here on CENTAUR SEASONS the full two-hour interview has been aportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, A TEACHER, NOT A COACH takes you directly to the segment or segments relevant to that theme. Keep in mind that in nearly every segment other topics are also discussed. Some segments are just a few minutes in length; the longest is 13.
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 your talk with John Wooden on CENTAUR SEASONS.
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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