Posted on March 26, 2013
During this 75th anniversay celebration of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the memory blog CENTAUR SEASONS here on HoppsU.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 in April.
Today’s featured conversation: WINNING WITH WALTON — AND THE NC STATE LOSS.
To listen directly, click here.
“When [Bill] Walton came,” Coach Wooden says, “and his group, his first year … they had an undefeated year, I said to them, uh, at the close of the season: It was a wonderful year, they were tremendous, I enjoyed working with them. And I said next year’s going to be a better year. It’s definitely going to be a better year, because the fact that, that I’ll know you better, you’ll know me better, and we are going to improve. So it will be a better year. But when you’re seniors, by the time your seniors, you’ll probably be intolerable. … ”
What about that NC State loss in the 1974 semifnal? “Well, disappointing. …. Not disappointing because we were outsocred, but disappointed because of, uh, some of the mistakes we made which I just didn’t think we should make at that particular point. … Now, don’t misunderstand me: I’m not blaming the players for making the mistakes. That’s my fault. I’ve had a long time to teach these players. And if they’re making those mistakes, I’m the one that’s responsible.”
Notwithstanding that 1974 NC State loss Bill Walton’s senior year, 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. 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 Centaur team. “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.”
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 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, 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.
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, WINNING WITH WALTON — AND THE NC STATE LOSS takes you directly to that segment. 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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