On CENTAUR SEASONS, never-before-heard conversations with John Wooden — today’s talk: POETRY, PLAYERS … AND THE ‘PYRAMID OF SUCCESS’

Posted on March 27, 2013

During this 75th anniversay celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Steve McKee’s 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, brought to you by HoopsU.com exclusively through CENTAUR SEASONS. A multipart series now through the Final Four.

Today’s featured conversation: POETRY, PLAYERS … AND THE “PYRAMID OF SUCCESS”

To listen directly, click here.

‘THE JOURNEY IS BETTER THAN THE END. “I got that from Cervantes,” Coach Wooden says, quoting one of his favorite verses. “And I believe it was Robert Louis Stevenson who said: IT IS BETTER TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY THAN TO ARRIVE, and I think that’s true.” As for his players, he says, he was “constantly pointing out to them that their individual ability is to serve only one purpose, and that’s to be put the use for the team as a whole …”

To listen to more of Coach Wooden’s favorite poetry … click here. (Plus observations on preparation, profanity and players late for practice!)

Meanwhile, how did Coach Wooden keep all his little sayings and aphorisms and poetry quoting from sounding corny? He didn’t: “It probably DID sound corny,” he says, “but I thought it would get results, too. It’s just like [Lew] Alcindor … and he talked about my ‘Pyramid of Success,’ how I spoke to them, each year, one time, on that Pyramid. He said … ”

To hear what Kareem Abdul Jabbar thought of Coach Wooden’s Pyramid — and you really should hear it from the Coach … click here.

No team — poetry quoted or not — dominated the first 75 years of the NCAA tournament as completely as did John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins: 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. Because what was basketball to Coach Wooden if not an opportunity for him to teach and his students to learn?

Which we Centaurs certainly did, insists Christopher Cashman, a stalwart on four of those Centaur 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 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.”

But anyway, yes, 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 listen to more of Coach Wooden — “… just because we disagree doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable… ” — click here.)

And yet for all the wins and titles UCLA 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 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, 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.

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 listen to Coach Wooden talk about poetry, players and his “Pyramid of Success” … click here. To facilitate listening, a word-for-word transcript of this conversation is provided. 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.)

Here on CENTAUR SEASONS the full two-hour interview has been aportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, POETRY, PLAYERS … AND THE “PYRAMID OF SUCCESS“ takes you directly to the segment or segments relevant to that theme. Please keep in mind that in nearly every segment other topics were discussed as well. It was a wide-ranging conversation!

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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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).

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.