The Wooden Style

At a banquet before the National Basketball Association's All-Star Game in Chicago two weeks ago, the master of ceremonies surveyed the audience and observed: "Here sit the best basketball players in the world--other than U.C.L.A."

It was a fitting tribute to Coach John Wooden and his undefeated U.C.L.A. Bruins. Heavily favored to win their ninth national championship in ten years, U.C.L.A. seemed more invincible than ever last week as it went for its 62nd consecutive victory against its formidable crosstown rival U.S.C. In fact, the top-ranked Bruins are so steeped in talent that their bench warmers may well be the No. 2 team in the nation. Asked if there is any way to stop Wooden, Oklahoma City Coach Abe Lemons said: "Wait, and some night when the moon is full and the clock strikes midnight, drive a silver stake into his heart. He is unreal."

Giants. It only seems that way. Wooden's coaching philosophy is, in fact, anything but unreal: "Get the players in the best of condition. Teach them to execute the fundamentals quickly. Drill them to play as a team." Cynics scoff at such talk; talented giants, not playground bromides, they say, account for U.C.L.A.'S success. Wooden is, in fact, currently graced with 6-ft. 11-in. Bill Walton, the best center in college basketball. And before Walton, U.C.L.A. had Lew Alcindor, the 7-ft. 2-in. pivotman who led the Bruins to three national titles, then turned pro and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Yet it is also a fact that Wooden won his first N.C.A.A. championship in 1964 with a starting team whose average height was a pygmyesque 6 ft. 3 in. "No one can win without material," says Wooden. "But not everyone can win with material."

So why have Wooden's teams, both tiny and tall, lost only 15 of 281 over the past decade? Former U.C.L.A. players who have graduated to the pros cite various reasons. Milwaukee Bucks' Abdul-Jabbar: "His ability to coach and develop talent is unparalleled." Los Angeles Lakers' Gail Goodrich: "He molds five different personalities into one." Milwaukee's Lucius Allen: "He takes basketball and breaks it into all the little fundamentals." Los Angeles' Keith Erickson: "He's the kind of man you believe in, a man you would like to be."

The kind of player Wooden believes in is part robot and part race horse. Wooden maps out each practice session on a 3-by-5 card, devoting five or ten minutes each to such basics as rebounding, corner shooting and three-man fast breaks. Always on the sidelines, Wooden spurs his charges on with his favorite rallying cry: "Be quick, but don't hurry!" Says he: "The game of basketball is scoring goals, and I want my boys to shoot and shoot. When a boy tells me he'd rather pass than shoot, I know there's something wrong with him." The game is also defense, and for that cause Wooden has another cry: "Pressure! Force them! Force them all the time! Never let up! Pressure! Pressure!"

The result is a fast-breaking, hard-pressing attack that gradually and inevitably overwhelms. "Wooden's success," says one rival coach, "is based on upsetting the tempo and style of his opponent. He does it by running, running and running some more. He mixes that up by ball hawking, by grabbing, by slapping and by hand-waving defense. His clubs dote on harassing the man with the ball." Gail Goodrich, for one, well remembers the grind imposed by "Mr. Run." "There were nights when I'd come home from practice so tired I'd be lucky to get my clothes off. Exhausted. Totally exhausted. But that tremendous practice tempo would prevail in the games. Coach Wooden's words were always the same: 'Don't panic, keep your poise, they'll break.' They did, too. And, heck, how many games did we win on pure condition? No one was in better shape."

And no one is more appreciative on the court than the glad-handing U.C.L.A. players. "I never permit a player to criticize a teammate," explains Wooden. "In fact, when a man makes a basket, I make him compliment the one who passed the ball or started the play. That way, I tell them, you'll get a pass again." Unlike most coaches, Wooden rarely scouts a rival team. "If we play our game as well as we can," he says, "we can beat an opponent no matter what he does. We let them adjust to us, rather than we to them."

At 62, Wooden is a graying, sober-sided eminence who imparts what one player calls the "respect factor." Who, after all, could doubt a man who is a friend of Lawrence Welk, who admires the writings of Zane Grey and St. Francis of Assisi? Wooden is also a deacon in the First Christian Church of Santa Monica. He reads the Bible daily. He neither smokes nor drinks and will not tolerate profanity. On occasion, he will partake of a "Pat Boone Special" (ginger ale with a dash of grape juice). His strongest expletive is "Goodness gracious sakes alive!" And after a tough day on the court, he unwinds by reading poetry (Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman). Or, if he needs a special uplift, he will dash off a few lines of his own. Sample:

Remember this your lifetime

through--Tomorrow, there will be more to

do...

And failure waits for all who stay With some success made

yesterday...

Wooden preaches the power of positive thinking as avidly in the locker room as he does at meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Each season, his players are provided with a copy of his Pyramid of Success, a personal credo that builds on such virtues as sincerity, integrity, resourcefulness and fight. Wooden has been known to begin a halftime pep talk with a discourse on the decline of the Roman Empire.

Once, when u.C.L.A. fell behind in a critical game, he called a time out and told his players that "it's not your fault, but you've given in to a permissive society." Explains Wooden: "In basketball we meet adversity head on. It's so much like life itself: the ups and downs, the obstacles--they make you strong. A coach is a teacher, and like any good teacher, I'm trying to build men."

Wooden's own pyramid of success is rooted back home in Indiana. Son of a Dutch-Irish tenant farmer, he was raised in Martinsville, a town whose chief distinction, as noted in Ripley's Believe It or Not, was that its 5,200 inhabitants built a basketball fieldhouse that seated 5,520. He began with a rag ball and the proverbial peach basket nailed to the hayloft. He was an honor student and a three-time All-America at Purdue, where he financed his way by waiting on tables and taping the ankles of football players for 350 an hour. He is remembered as the "India Rubber Man," a 5-ft. 10-in., razzle-dazzle guard whose suicidal drives to the basket often sent him bouncing off the fieldhouse floor or flying into the seventh row of the Purdue band. Local legend has it that after one memorable spill, he popped in the winning basket while sitting down.

After graduation, Wooden married his home-town sweetheart Nell Riley and took a job as a high school coach in Dayton, Ky., where he introduced his breakneck style by whacking the players with a paddle as they ran down the court. In his first season, his team compiled a 6-11 record--his first and only losing season in nearly 40 years of coaching. After moving back to Indiana in 1934, he coached and taught English at South Bend Central High School during the week and played semi-pro basketball with the Kautsky Grocers of Indianapolis for $50 a game on weekends. After a three-year hitch in the Navy, he took a coaching job at Indiana State Teachers' College. His team qualified for a tournament in Kansas City in his first season, but he refused to go when officials barred a black player from participating.

In 1948 Wooden's success at Indiana State brought him an offer from U.C.L.A. When he first arrived in Los Angeles, he was shocked to find local youths lounging on the beach and playing tennis instead of shooting at the old peach basket. U.C.L.A. boosters were equally bemused to discover that their Hoosier hotshot did not take to the cocktails-and-canapes circuit. His speed was a deviled-egg sandwich and a dish of custard at Hollis Johnson's Fountain and Grill, an eatery that he still frequently attends. Put off at first, the India Rubber Man bounced back by setting everyone straight on what to expect. "The fast break is my system," he declared at a U.C.L.A. banquet, "and we'll win 50% of our games by outrunning the other team in the last five minutes."

Minister. That he did, compiling a record of 552 wins and only 140 losses in a quarter-century of coaching at U.C.L.A. Over the years "Saint John," as some rival coaches refer to him, has mellowed a bit. He has done away with the mandatory coat-and-tie rule on road trips. Curfews are still enforced, but he does not sit in the hotel lobby as of old to check on stragglers. And he no longer insists on crew cuts. Even so, at the first signs of the shaggy look he will pointedly ask: "Isn't that barbers' strike over with yet?" If that does not work, he reminds the players: "I can't tell you how to cut your hair, but I decide who plays." Neat hair, Wooden explains, builds a "sense of discipline."

Though he has his assistants do most of the talent hunting, Wooden lends his considerable presence in personal meetings with prospective players, especially when the stakes are high. As Jabbar's mother said after meeting Wooden: "He's more like a minister than a coach." Adds one rival coach: "We thought we had one kid sewed up, but then Jesus Christ walked in. The kid's parents about fell over. How can you recruit against Jesus Christ?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.