Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  “I think I had it pretty good, learning from Dad,” John added. “He told me to try to avoid peaks and valleys.”

  Later in life, when John wasn’t quoting his father or telling parables about him, he was serving up Hugh’s teachings in bite-sized portions. His own children began their mornings with a hearty bowl of oatmeal. If one of Wooden’s basketball players uttered a profanity during practice, he was through for the day. Then there was the time after he retired when one of his former players at UCLA, Swen Nater, showed Wooden his new dog. “Do you hit him?” Wooden asked.

  Yes, Nater confessed, sometimes he did.

  “Don’t,” Wooden replied. “It never works.”

  * * *

  Hugh’s decision to move the family back to Martinsville after losing the farm turned out to be a smart one. The town was prospering due to bountiful artesian wells that had been dug there in the late nineteenth century. The water, which was full of minerals, had been accidentally discovered by prospectors who were searching for natural gas and oil. The liquid was said to have curative powers, even though it smelled rancid. Nearly a dozen sanitariums were built in and around Martinsville. These facilities were part spas, part hospitals, and they attracted people from all over the Midwest. The largest and most opulent of these resorts was the Home Lawn Sanitarium, which featured a dining room appointed with lush carpet and crystal chandeliers. Hugh found a job as a masseur at the Home Lawn. “I think that’s why Daddy always has been such a generous tipper,” Nan Wooden said. “A big part of Grandaddy’s income was based on tips.”

  The move to Martinsville also exposed Hugh’s sons to a growing local passion. It was a brand-new game called “basket ball,” and though all the Wooden boys were quite good at it, Johnny was the best of them all.

  Their first goal was an old tomato basket that hung on a hayloft inside their barn in Centerton. Hugh had popped the bottom out and tacked it up so that Johnny and his brothers could blow off steam. “He said there’s always time for play. That’s after the chores and the studies are done, of course,” John said. Eventually, Hugh took a forge and replaced the basket with a real hoop made out of iron. Roxie made a ball by stuffing an old sock with rags and sewing it closed. Maurice was a good athlete—he later played football, baseball, and basketball for Franklin College—but even though his nickname was “Cat,” Maurice was no match for Johnny’s quickness and toughness.

  At that time, the entire town of Centerton contained barely a hundred people, yet every Saturday and Sunday, the basketball court next to the grade school was teeming with kids. The court was not even paved; rather, it was made of sand and clay, a mixture chosen so it would dry quickly after it rained. The locals often referred to it as a “basketball diamond.” In the wintertime, the kids often had to shovel snow off the court if they wanted to play. The school was just a few hundred yards up the road from the Woodens’ house, and Hugh delighted in watching his boys play those weekend games. Hugh liked basketball, but his best sport was baseball, where he excelled as a pitcher. He even carved a diamond, Field of Dreams–like, amid the wheat and alfalfa on the family farm.

  Centerton’s school had three rooms for eight grades. The principal, who taught in the room for seventh- and eighth-graders, was a strapping young man named Earl Warriner. When Johnny was eleven years old, his dad allowed him to play basketball under Warriner’s supervision. “Johnny says what helped him the most was the desire to play,” Warriner said. “He wasn’t a bully and neither was he a sissy. He had the grit to stay in there and fight.” Wooden needed that grit to make up for his lack of size, but what really made him effective was his speed. “My trouble was trying to keep others up with him,” Warriner said. “John was so much faster than everybody else, and he had his heart and soul in what he did.”

  Centerton’s basketball team played a haphazard schedule of five or six games a year (weather permitting) against other schools in the area, including the junior high school team from Martinsville. The boys didn’t have much by way of uniforms, just a bib to be worn on top of their overalls. “They were lucky if they had shoes,” Warriner said. They played with a lopsided leather ball that often had to be unlaced and reinflated. Wooden later credited that ball, along with the lumpy court, with forcing him to develop into an expert dribbler.

  However, it was baseball, not basketball, that was fast becoming Johnny’s favorite sport. Though his diminutive stature prevented him from having much pop as a hitter, his quickness and agility made him an effective shortstop. “That little rat John,” as Warriner called him, was still a teenager when he played for the town team alongside men who were in their twenties. “All he could do was get the ball over the infield, but he got more hits than anybody,” Warriner said.

  Young Johnny also fancied himself a bit of a practical joker. One day in winter, Warriner was feeling chilly while sitting in his office, so he went to the school’s basement and asked a janitor named Hiram to turn up the heat. Hiram did as he was told, but the room was still freezing. They went back and forth several more times until Warriner checked the basement, where he discovered that the flue to his office had been shut.

  Several months later, Warriner was walking around the school grounds and noticed that someone had written on the wall of an outdoor bathroom, “I turned off the furnace. Guess who?” Soon after, he was invited to dinner at the Woodens’ house, where he revealed to the rascal that he knew his little secret. When Johnny asked Warriner how he found out, the principal replied, “John Bob, if you graded as many papers as I do, you’d know everybody’s writing, too.”

  On the few occasions when Wooden was foolish enough to test Warriner, he paid a heavy price. Johnny was around nine years old when he and three of his classmates decided that they did not want to sing the national anthem at the morning assembly. So they pretended to sing it. The next day, Warriner called them out of the assembly, brought them into his office, and told them that if they didn’t sing, they would get the business end of a paddle. They refused again, so Warriner brought them out and stung their behinds while all the other kids watched. One of the boys had worn two pairs of pants in anticipation of the punishment, but Warriner made him pull down the outer pair so he could properly feel his penance.

  When Warriner’s discipline combined one day with Johnny’s love for basketball, the result was the ultimate life lesson. It happened when Wooden was in the eighth grade. Centerton was supposed to play a game against Hazelwood, but the game had been in doubt because of rain. The schools had called each other several times during the day to figure out whether they should play. They finally agreed to play when the skies cleared, but Wooden had not brought his game uniform to school. When Warriner asked him to go home and retrieve it during recess, Johnny refused, even though his house was right up the road. “I guess John wanted me to beg him to play,” Warriner said.

  Warriner told another player, named Freddy Gooch, that he would substitute for Wooden. Johnny was shocked. As soon as school was over, he raced home, got his uniform, and ran back to the school. He was there in plenty of time to warm up with his teammates, but when the game began, Warriner left him on the sideline. He stayed there during the entire contest, which Centerton lost. After the game was over, Warriner put his arm around Wooden’s shoulder and said, “Johnny, we could have won with you in there, but winning just isn’t that important.”

  It was a day the boy would never forget. “Johnny Wooden learned early in life he was not a necessary article,” Wooden said during one of his frequent retellings of the incident. “It didn’t make any difference how good I was in sports, business, or anything else. If I don’t put out, I’m not worth a dime.” He also learned that day that the bench was all the motivation a coach ever needed.

  When Wooden graduated from the eighth grade, he faced the choice of going to Martinsville or Monrovia for high school. The Woodens were still a year away from losing the farm, and each town was the same distance from their home in Centerton. Martinsville, however
, was a real hotbed for basketball. The school routinely drew huge crowds for games and had just won a state championship. The idea of making a living playing or teaching the sport wasn’t remotely in Johnny’s mind, but he did know that he loved playing and was very good at it. So he chose Martinsville. This was Indiana, after all. It was only natural that he would want to follow that bouncing ball.

  2

  The Artesians

  On March 21, 1925, Dr. James Naismith arrived at the Indianapolis Exposition Building, where he had been invited by the Indiana High School Athletic Association to speak at the annual state championship game. There was, however, a problem at the door: the arena was full, and a security guard was not allowing anyone else inside. Naismith showed the man his ticket and his official’s badge, but the guard wouldn’t relent. Finally, a police captain approached and asked what was going on. When Naismith revealed his identity, the captain said, “Good Lord, man, why didn’t you say so long ago?”

  Naismith got a chuckle out of the mix-up. But what really tickled him was the spectacle that greeted him after the police captain showed him to his seat: a crowd of close to twenty thousand full-throated fans who were on hand to watch the sport Naismith had invented just thirty-four years before. That sight, Naismith wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Basketball: Its Origin and Development, “gave me a thrill that I shall not soon forget.”

  Thus did Naismith discover what those twenty thousand spectators already knew: basketball may have been conceived in Massachusetts, but it was born in Indiana.

  “Basket ball,” as it was still known, was part of an experiment that appealed to pious farm boys like Johnny Wooden. The organization that invented and proselytized the sport, the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, advertised its mission as promoting a person’s “mind, body and spirit.” Wooden never had Naismith as a mentor per se, but the two were kindred spirits all the same. Like Wooden, Naismith grew up on a farm (in Ontario, Canada) where he learned the value of a hard day’s work. He originally intended to become a minister, but upon graduating from the theological college at Montreal’s McGill University, Naismith decided he could have just as much impact through athletics as he could through the ministry. In 1890, he began formally studying at the YMCA’s training school in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  In those days, many religious scholars viewed athletics as a tool of the devil. A group of liberal Protestant ministers rebutted that way of thinking by launching a movement called “muscular Christianity.” In the summer of 1891, the head of the Springfield YMCA’s training school’s physical education department, Dr. Luther Gulick, assigned Naismith the task of creating a new game that students could play indoors during the winter. Naismith used a phys ed class as his laboratory, but his first few attempts proved futile. Gymnastics was too boring, football and rugby were too rough, and there wasn’t enough space in the gymnasium to play soccer or lacrosse.

  Sitting in his office, Naismith tinkered with adapting a game he used to play as a boy in Canada called “Duck on a Rock,” where points were scored by lofting small rocks so they would land on a bigger rock. But he was still concerned things would get too rough. That’s when he experienced his eureka moment: there should be a rule against running with the ball! If the players couldn’t run, they wouldn’t be tackled. And if they weren’t tackled, they wouldn’t get hurt.

  Excited by his breakthrough, Naismith sketched out thirteen rules using just 474 words. The rules did not include dribbling, so the players were stationary, and therefore safe. He then asked the building’s superintendent to fetch him a pair of eighteen-inch boxes to use as goals. The superintendent didn’t have any boxes, but he offered a couple of peach baskets instead. Naismith decided these would have to do.

  The class consisted of eighteen students, and the first game featured nine men on each side. It was an instant hit. In the months that followed, Naismith continued to develop and modify his invention in the hope that other YMCAs and athletic clubs would adopt it in coming winters. He had two means of spreading the word. The first was the YMCA’s official publication, The Triangle, which was delivered to clubs across the country. The second was the army of clergymen who came to study under Naismith at the training school in Springfield.

  One such missionary was a Presbyterian minister named Nicolas McKay, who was the secretary of the YMCA in Crawfordsville, Indiana, sixty miles north of Martinsville. During the winter of 1892, Reverend McKay spent several months observing the new game and engaging in long talks with its inventor. He took his notes and a copy of Naismith’s thirteen rules with him back to Crawfordsville, where he taught the game to his own students, including a pint-sized boy named Ward Lambert, who would later coach Johnny Wooden at Purdue University. Thus was a direct lineage established: Naismith to McKay to Lambert to Wooden.

  The state of Indiana’s first organized basketball game was played at the Crawfordsville YMCA on March 16, 1894. The next day’s Crawfordsville Journal reported, “Basket ball is a new game, but if the interest taken in the contest last night between the teams of Crawfordsville and Lafayette is any criterion, it is bound to be popular.” That was an understatement. As it turned out, the state provided the ideal platform for Naismith’s game to lift off. Unlike neighboring Ohio, the Hoosier state did not have a bunch of urban manufacturing centers with schools that were big enough to field football teams. Rather, it was clustered with hundreds of small rural communities. The farming calendar was also not conducive to supporting football because autumn was harvest season. If people were going to look for entertainment, it had to be in winter—and indoors. Best of all, since basketball required only five men a side (as determined by a rule that was put in place in 1897), no school was too small to field a team. With high school teams popping up all over Indiana, the natural next step was a statewide tournament. The inaugural edition was held in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Crawfordsville, fittingly, was crowned the first champion.

  Martinsville was not going to be outdone by its neighbor. So in May 1923, the town set out on an ambitious project: to build the world’s largest high school gymnasium. Thanks to the money spent by all those outsiders who came to visit Martinsville’s gleaming spas, the town was able to complete its mission in swift fashion. On February 7, 1924, Martinsville unveiled its grandiose landmark in time for its first game against Shelbyville. On the morning of the game, the Martinsville Daily Reporter revealed that more than four thousand tickets had already been sold, and that 1,500 people from Shelbyville were planning to attend as well. Officially, the gym held 5,382 people, which was more than the entire population of the town. (That fact earned a mention in a popular, nationally syndicated column by Robert Ripley entitled “Believe It or Not.”) Train lines that had been specially set up for the occasion brought spectators from neighboring burgs. Writers from Indianapolis, Vincennes, Frankfort, and Lafayette were on hand, as were a dozen or so local basketball coaches.

  The occasion was so intoxicating that even the hometown Artesians’ 47–41 loss couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm. Under the headline “Gymnasium Dedication Was a Great Event,” the next day’s Reporter declared, “The fact that this city now has a gymnasium that will take care of any crowd that wishes to witness a basket ball game overshadowed the feelings of regret because of the defeat. The big gym was packed to capacity, and the cheering throng, the music by the bands and the brilliant display of school colors presented a scene never to be forgotten by those who were present.” Within a few years, dozens of communities across Indiana would build large high school gymnasiums of their own. From that point on, the sound of leather pounding wood would serve as the state’s steady heartbeat.

  * * *

  By today’s standards, a town of fewer than five thousand people is considered small, but back then the citizens of Martinsville justifiably thought of themselves as cosmopolitan and urbane, living as they did among the hustle and bustle of all those out-of-town visitors. Wooden was a small-town kid who
seemed out of place when he arrived at Martinsville High School in the fall of 1924. “We Martinsville fellows were city slickers and he was a country boy,” said Floyd Burns, a high school classmate. “John had on a drugstore outfit, snow white and clean, and we looked on him as a greenhorn. He was inexperienced, and he’d run faster than he could dribble and he’d lose the ball. But we all liked him and were amazed that he learned so quickly.”

  Since baseball was Johnny’s favorite sport, he might have focused on that if Martinsville fielded a high school team, but it didn’t. Nor did it have a football squad. Wooden lettered for two years in track—he finished sixth in the state in the 100-yard dash as a senior—but he devoted most of his energy to basketball. When that season came around, Wooden found himself under the tutelage of Glenn Curtis, known as the “Old Fox,” who was emerging as one of the finest high school coaches in the state.

  Curtis had already won two state championships, with Lebanon in 1918 and Martinsville in 1924. Like many coaches in those days, he deployed a plodding, ball-control offense that made it virtually impossible for opponents to recapture a lead once Curtis’s teams seized it. This was aided by the rules that were in place at the time. After each made basket, the teams returned to center court for a jump ball. There was also no half-court line—that would not be added until 1932—and thus no ten-second counts or backcourt violations. And of course, the sport was decades away from implementing a shot clock. Thus, if a coach had guards who were reliable, quick dribblers, they could use the entire floor to avoid the defense and run out the clock.