Posted on March 20, 2013
During this 75th anniversay celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the memory blog CENTAUR SEASONS on HoopsU.com remembers not to forget John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins with a never-before-heard, two-hour audio interview.
A MARCH MADNESS SPECIAL, brought to you here on HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. A multipart series now through the Final Four
Today’s feature: THE PLEASURES OF WINNING — WITHOUT ALCINDOR, WITHOUT WALTON.
To proceed directly to the conversation, click here.
“When I had [Lew] Alcindor playing for me,” Coach Wooden says, “I felt that immediately we had an edge. I felt that when I saw him as a freshman before he ever played a varsity game, that the next three years would be very good.”
And indeed they were: eighty-eight wins, two losses, three national championships.
“But the fact that we won three championships with him,” Coach Wooden explains, “did not give me nearly the pleasure that it gave me to win the first championships [1963-64, 1964-65], with no one over six-five, or my last championship [1974-75], when we had lost four starters from the preceding year, including two, well, super players, [Bill] Walton and Keith [now Jamaal] Wilkes.”
Having a Lew Alcindor on your team, a Bill Walton — that, the coach says, creates a different challenge entirely. “Well … like with the two injdividuals you’ve named, you’ve got to sure you have a team. [There are] too many cases when [teams]’ve had one outstanding individual, they’ve relied on that individual so much that they lose a bit of the team-play concept. … ”
To listen to Coach Wooden reflect on winning with and without his two greatest stars … click here.
No team and coach dominated these first 75 years of the NCAA tournament as completely as the UCLA Bruins and John Wooden: Ten titles in 12 years.
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.
Remember: Magic and Bird had 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? “Diaper Dandies, BABY!” Blue Devils? One-‘n’-Done? 8 vs. 9? Bracketology, for crying out loud? No one knew.
During the years of these CENTAUR SEASONS there was UCLA and there was John Wooden. That was all. That was everything. That was enough.
With or without Alcindor and Walton.
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. 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 facilitate your listening, a word
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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