Posted March 22, 2013
During this 75th anniversary celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the 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 on HoopsU.com, brought to you exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS.
Today’s featured conversation: AT INDIANA STATE, BREAKING A BARRIER.
To listen immediately, click here.
No. 4 of a 12-part series. (Listed as segment 14 in the full interview.)
The year is 1947. In Coach Wooden’s first season at Indiana State the team is invited to play in the NAIB (now the NAIA) postseason tournament in Kansas City. “I wouldn’t go,” Coach Wooden says in this short interview segment. “I wouldn’t accept because of the fact that we had one black player and they wouldn’t let him play.”
To hear Coach Wooden tell the full story of his stand at Indiana State … click here. To assist with the listening, a word-for-word transcript is provided.
Coach Wooden left for UCLA after that second year at Indiana State. He needed 17 more seasons to nab his first NCAA title, but once he did no coach and no team has dominated the NCAA tournament’s 75 years as completely as did Wooden and the Bruins: Ten titles in 12 years, 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 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 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 now to Coach Wooden tell the full story of his stand at Indiana State … click 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. Christopher Cashman, a leading stalwart on four of those Centaur teams, 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 Inglsby, 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 (“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 access Coach Wooden’s recollections about his stand while coaching at Indiana State, you can click here.
At CENTAUR SEASONS the full two-hour John Wooden conversation has been apportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, AT INDIANA STATE, BREAKING A BARRIER takes you directly to that segment. Please 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 here 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.
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