Posted on March 29, 2013
During this 75th anniversay celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Steve McKee’s memory blog, CENTAUR SEASONS, 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 here on HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. A mutlipart series now through the Final Four.
Today’s featured conversation: BACK HOME IN INDIANA.
To listen directly, click here.
“I went to Purdue to become a civil engineer,” Coach Wooden says. Funny how life works out sometimes. To get a C.E. degree the young John Wooden would need to attend summer camps. “But there weren’t scholarships and my folks had no financial means and I had to work in the summertime, that’s all there was to it.” The rest is history, or just about. “So that’s when I changed and took the liberal arts course and majored in English. … Soon as you become a teacher … then I realized that I’d probably coach.”
Funny how life works out sometimes. Before he joined the Navy during World War II, Coach Wooden had been coaching at South Bend Central High. If not for that war, he says, “I probably would have stayed there until retirement.” He says this with no regrets, of course. But he says it also knowing that had he stayed, put in his 40, 45 years at SBCH — a high school basktball coach in the Hooiser state — well, that would have been its own wonderful life, too.
As we all know, Coach Wooden didn’t stay in Indiana, and because he didn’t 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 snugly around the years of this CENTAUR SEASONS blog. We Centaurs went 37-72; the Bruins in those same seasons 174-8. But Centaurs and Bruins together in the same 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, insists Christopher Cashman, a stalwart on four of those teams. “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.”
Anyway, recognition the Bruins got: 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.
To return now with Coach Wooden to his Indiana roots, click here.
And yet for all the wins and the titles accrued, 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.
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 (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 hear more of Coach Wooden as he remembers his formative years in Indiana … click here. A word-for-word transcript of this conversation is provided.
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, BACK HOME IN INDIANA takes you directly to the segment relevant to that theme. Keep in mind that in nearly every segment other topics were discussed as well.
Clicking on two previous CENTAUR SEASONS posts can also access the full 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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