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 …”
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 … ”
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.
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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