John Wooden - plain and simple

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the University Athletic Association of the Philippines kicked off their respective season with their collegiate basketball tournaments opening days apart from each other. NCAA’s San Sebastian Stags and UAAP’s Ateneo Blue Eagles defend their respective crowns in the college division with the latter going for its first ever three-peat.

Of the two leagues, the UAAP race is expected to be much tougher with all squads beefing up their line-up by recruiting not just from the United States but also from Africa. National University, which had a taste of the basketball championship for the first and the last time in 1954, has brought in the 6’5” Cameroonian, Emmanuel Mbe.    

Adamson University, which won its first UAAP title in 1977, has recruited Lionel Manyara who is reported to be either from Kenya or Cameroon. Far Eastern University which has won 19 titles, the last one in 2005, also has Cameroonian, Pipo Noundou, in addition to a number of homegrown mature players which makes the Tamaraws definitely the hottest title favorite this 73rd season of the UAAP.

Speaking of basketball, the sport lost on June 4, 2010, its most outstanding coach in the name of John Robert Wooden who died four months short of 100 years. Wooden, who led the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) Bruins to an unprecedented 10 national championships over 27 seasons, was born on Oct. 14, 1910. The 99-year old icon of American sports died at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center of natural causes after being in hospital since May 26 for dehydration.

To pay tribute to the coach after whom, a basketball clinic, among others, has been named, the highly prestigious Los Angeles Times, came out with a 26-page supplement simply called “Remembering John Wooden”.

Most of the pieces written about Wooden in the supplement are gems of sports literature. We shall therefore share these gems with our readers by freely quoting from them. To do otherwise would be an injustice to Wooden, the writers and the LA Times.

In the first article, “ A simple value system”, writer Scott Kraft says, “A transplanted Midwesterner, Wooden clung to his homespun roots. And even after he left UCLA, he kept teaching those principles.”

Kraft says that like many Californians, Wooden was an immigrant from the plains of the Midwest. But he arrived from Indiana at the age of 37 with principles such as honor and family learned to the level of instinct. Among the sports glitterati of Los Angeles, he stood out like stalk of corn in a field of arugula.

The LA Times writer adds that Wooden didn’t want to come to California in the first place. When UCLA asked him to coach its basketball team back in 1948, Wooden and his wife Nell (of 53 years when she died in 1985), were hoping for a different kind of invitation – from the University of Minnesota, closer to his physical and philosophical home.

As Kraft narrates it, a snowstorm in Minnesota knocked out the phone lines, and that offer came 15 minutes too late. Wooden had already said yes to UCLA, and, according to Kraft, one thing Wooden never did was renege on a promise. Kraft says that one of Wooden’s many maxims, we now call Woodenisms, was, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Character is what you really are; reputation is what you are perceived to be.

The article states that Wooden would spend the next six decades of his life in Southern California, clinging to his home-spun roots. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (formerly Lew Alcindor) wasn’t the only UCLA player who at first blush, found the former English teacher’s value system a bit “corny” – nor was Abdul Jabbar the only player who, as an adult, pledged to live by those values.”

Various other sources state that Wooden lived by old traditional American values. Kraft confirms this by stating, “Wooden came by it honestly. His father, who lost his farms in the Depression, taught him a set of life principles, which the coach carried on a piece of paper, ‘Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.’”

Kraft says that, at 64, when Wooden retired in 1975 at the top of his game, he had amassed a record 10 NCAA basketball championships. His annual compensation package – though no one called it that in those days – was about $40,000. (“I never compare myself to anybody else,” he said years later when basketball coaches of his caliber were earning 20 and 30 times that. “My father taught me that. ‘Don’t look back, don’t whine, don’t complain.’ So I don’t.”)