Wooden: A Coach's Life

by Seth Davis

  Johnny did not hold the Old Fox in high esteem at first. His older brother, Cat, had been a member of Curtis’s 1924 championship team, but Cat barely got into the games. Curtis appeared to confirm Johnny’s fears early on while breaking up a fight between Wooden and one of his teammates. In Wooden’s eyes, Curtis had unfairly backed up the other fellow. “You’re not going to do to me what you did to my brother!” Johnny shouted. He flung off his jersey, his shorts, his shoes, and his socks, and he stormed off the floor in half-naked protest. He decided then and there to quit the team.

  Curtis could have regarded Wooden as an intemperate fool and bade him good riddance. But he didn’t. Instead, he spent the next two weeks trying to coax Wooden back on to the squad. Wooden resisted at first, but eventually he relented. He also never forgot his coach’s graciousness in letting him back on the team, a lesson that Wooden would apply to his own players after he started coaching.

  Wooden was fortunate to encounter early in his life a man who took his craft so seriously. Curtis systematically broke down the game into its smallest, simplest elements. His players worked for long stretches without using a basketball, and on his command they efficiently shuttled from drill to drill. A decade later, in 1936, Curtis started using a friend’s movie camera to film games and instruct his teams. He was so impressed that he convinced the high school to purchase a camera so he could use it whenever he wanted. An official from the Eastman Kodak Company told the Daily Reporter that “no one has yet attempted to teach basketball through this medium.”

  Curtis was also renowned for delivering spine-tingling locker room speeches minutes before tip-off. That was one tactic that did not impress Wooden. Hugh had so emphatically pounded the importance of keeping an even keel that Johnny did not want his emotions to overtake him. However, once the games began, Wooden was struck by how Curtis regained his composure. On one occasion, when an opposing player took a cheap shot at Wooden, Curtis prevailed upon young Johnny not to retaliate. “They’re trying to get you out of the game. Don’t lose your temper,” he told Wooden. Then he joked, “After the game is over, I’ll take on the coach and you can take on the players.”

  Unlike his brother, Johnny was a starter on Curtis’s team, and he led the Artesians to a sectional title in the 1926 Indiana state tournament. The final rounds were to be played in Indianapolis at the Exposition Center, which was called the “cow barn” because twice a year it hosted livestock shows. Martinsville made it to the championship game—its third contest of the day—where it faced Marion High School. Marion’s nickname was the “Giants,” which was appropriate because the lineup featured the tallest player Wooden had ever seen: Charles “Stretch” Murphy, a six-foot-eight-inch center. The center-jump rule made having that kind of player an enormous asset. Wooden failed to score as Martinsville lost, 30–23.

  Despite the disappointing finish, it was a terrific first season of varsity basketball for young Johnny. In the parlance of the day, he played the position of floor guard, which made him responsible for directing the offense much as a point guard does today. (A team’s other guard at that time was typically called a back guard because he served as a de facto goalie, hanging back on defense to protect his team’s basket.) As it turned out, Wooden’s innate physical gifts were uniquely suited to this young sport. “I didn’t have as much size as many, but I was quicker than most all, and that was my strength,” he later recalled.

  In addition, Wooden possessed a sturdy frame, thanks to all those years of physical labor on the farm. He also showed very little regard for his safety, which made him seem quicker because he was able to charge heedlessly toward the basket without slowing down to protect himself. “He could dribble with either hand, and when he’d drive for the basket, he’d go flying on the floor and into the end zone,” one of his Martinsville teammates, Vinnie Bisesi, said. “He always had floor burns all over his legs, and he never was licked.”

  As a free throw shooter, Wooden was without peer. Using a two-handed, underhanded style, he could toss in shot after shot with ease. Quick as he was, he could stop on a dime and change direction, an essential skill for a game played in a confined space. He also had unusually large hands, which made him adept at dribbling quickly without losing control of the ball. “John could palm a basketball. I never could. Usually it takes a big man to do that,” Billy Wooden said. Most of all, Johnny was in supreme condition—and he knew it. He stayed in constant motion so his defenders would eventually get tired.

  Still, in the Wooden family, a game would always take a backseat to work. Since there was very little money, Johnny had to scrounge for whatever jobs he could find. He washed dishes, served meals, and cleaned the kitchen one day a week at the local Elks club. On weekends, he’d work as a box boy at a supermarket or the Collier Bros. Creamery. He canned tomatoes and peas at the Van Camp packing plant. He installed telephone poles, worked in an ice cream factory, laid gravel, dug sewers, and collected garbage. During the summers, he and his friends hitchhiked around the state looking for jobs. Sometimes, they would be away for weeks at a time.

  Johnny and his buddies also liked to hang out at Wick’s Candy Kitchen as well as a local pool hall, where he sharpened his billiard skills. Did Wooden also earn a few extra cents scamming the locals at pool? It’s conceivable. He was, after all, not above a quick hustle. For example, when a carnival rode into town, he and Cat devised a plan to fleece the man working at the basketball shot. “They’d have these ‘Shoot the free throw’ contests,” their brother Billy said. “They’d make an awkward pass. The fellow would persuade them to invest their money, and then they’d take their coat off and sink free shot after free shot. After they got prizes for everybody, finally the guy would try to get rid of them.”

  Wooden’s classmate Floyd Burns recalled that Wooden developed a curious habit of keeping a toothpick in his mouth at all times—including when he played basketball. “It really could have been dangerous, but he always had a toothpick. Sometimes when we’d go into a store, he’d pick up the whole pack,” Burns said. “He always wore his letter sweater and he’d carry the toothpicks inside the tucked-up part of the waist. And was he jealous of them. You’d have thought they were gold nuggets. John would always play [basketball] with a toothpick in his mouth, and I often heard a teacher say, ‘John Robert, take that toothpick out of your mouth.’”

  It was around this time that Wooden began to develop his fondness for phrases and aphorisms. “When he’d get hold of an expression, he’d use it all the time. And he loved to quote expressions he picked up from the classics, though they wouldn’t always be exact,” Burns said. “Many times we’d be walking out of the drugstore after having a Coke, and he’d stop, put his arm as if he were on the stage, and say, ‘Varlot, insect, knave, back to the kitchen, the smell of the pots and pans is on ye.’”

  Another favorite saying came from a newspaper cartoon called Out at Our Place. When one character asked his friend how he was doing, the friend would reply, “Pretty pert.” Johnny copied it so often he answered to the nickname “Pert.” That nickname appeared next to his basketball photograph in the Martinsville High yearbook for all three years he was a student there. Over the decades that followed, Wooden would tell people he got that nickname because it was short for “impertinent.”

  It was clear to his friends that Wooden had inherited his father’s even temperament. One summer day when Wooden and his teammate Sally Suddith were digging sewers, Suddith accidentally hit Wooden’s finger with a hammer as they were putting up some boards to hold the dirt. Wooden dove on top of Suddith and started pounding him. Suddith assumed Wooden was irate, but after a few moments Johnny started laughing so hard he rolled on the ground. When Suddith asked if he was mad, Wooden replied, “Lord, no.”

  Curtis noticed this, too, and was not altogether pleased. He told Wooden that he would never win important games because he wasn’t mean enough.

  * * *

  Martinsville in 1926 was a wonderful place and time t
o be a basketball star. Interest in the Artesians’ games was so intense that homeroom teachers were assigned the task of finding tickets for students who couldn’t afford them. On game night, the only gas station in town would close and put out a sign that read, “Be back after the game.” (No need to say which game.) The only downside to all that attention was that it became difficult for the players to violate Curtis’s 10:00 p.m. curfew. If one of them was in a movie theater, he might be visited by a flashlight-wielding usher saying it was time to go home.

  In his junior year, Wooden paced the team in scoring and led the Artesians back to the cow barn for the 1927 championships. Over the course of two weeks, a field of 731 teams had been whittled down to 16, and the IHSAA removed hog and cattle stalls at the Exposition Center so they could squeeze in a few thousand more spectators for the final games. Wooden was the perfect floor guard to lead Curtis’s ball-control offense. During the Saturday tripleheader, Wooden led Martinsville to a 26–14 win over Gary’s Emerson High School in the morning and then put up 13 points in a 32–21 win over Connersville High School in the afternoon.

  That earned the Artesians a date in the final for the second straight year. Their opponent, Muncie Central High School, was a much larger school, but the Bearcats learned early on that stopping their opponents’ crafty little guard would not be easy. According to the Daily Reporter, Wooden took a pass off the opening tip-off in the title game and “dribbled under at lightning speed and scored a two point marker.”

  Down 4 points with four minutes to play, Muncie tried to ignite a rally, but Curtis countered with his patented stall. The tactic made for unexciting basketball, but it worked to perfection. Wooden tallied a game-high 10 points as Martinsville eked out a 26–23 win. Even by the standards of the era, it was not a pretty offensive game. Martinsville shot 9-for-42 from the field while Muncie shot just 8-for-33. Wooden was the second-leading scorer among the sixteen teams assembled in the cow barn that weekend. The Muncie Star reported the next day that the hometown Bearcats had suffered from a case of “too much Wooden.” The article added, “The ever-fighting, plunging Wooden was as spectacular in the final victory as he had been throughout the earlier contests.”

  One of the officials for that 1927 championship game was Birch Bayh, who went on to sire a son (Birch Jr.) and grandson (Evan) who would represent Indiana in the United States Senate. Bayh officiated dozens of high school games in Indiana, and four decades later he still remembered the way Martinsville’s whirling dervish dominated the games. “I’ve never seen another player give everything, regardless of what might happen to him, the way he did,” Bayh said. “He would score by flying in from the side and use his bank shot. Many times he would slide on the floor and wind up under the bench. He spent a lot of time on the floor. I don’t mean that he was awkward. He just gave everything. He held nothing back.”

  The young man’s comportment made an even more lasting impression. “John was a complete gentleman,” Bayh said. “I don’t think I ever remember John showing any resentment to an official and I refereed a lot of his games. He never lost his temper and he never used bad language.”

  Needless to say, the victory over Muncie was big news back home. Hundreds of fans staged a parade and celebration the following Monday afternoon. The banner leading the procession read, “A team that won’t be beat can’t be beat—Martinsville High School.” The mayor followed behind, as did packs of fans and students from every school in town. When the parade reached the town square, each member of the team got a chance to speak. Upon taking his turn, Wooden was asked how it felt to hit the floor so many times. “Wooden replied that it was not half so bad as it looked,” the Daily Reporter wrote. The shy Wooden even flashed a rare smile for the team photo that was taken that day.

  Each member of the Artesians’ championship squad received a silver Hamilton pocket watch. (On the day Wooden died, that watch was still sitting in his Los Angeles condominium under a glass bell, ticking as well as it had more than eighty years before.) Several days later Wooden was selected all-state. Reporting the honor, the Daily Reporter said of Wooden: “Local people swell up like prideful toads at the mere mention of his name—and the greater the friendship, the bigger the swell.”

  Such praise could make a guy feel pretty pert.

  3

  Nell

  She was, as he often described her, “the only girl I ever went with.” She was also everything he wasn’t. He was of Scottish and Dutch descent, cool and composed. She was red-blooded Irish. He was shy. She was outgoing. He avoided confrontation. She sought it out. She loved to socialize and go out on dates and was the life of the party. He hated parties. If he went at all, he’d mostly stand in the corner. She was hot-tempered, effusive, affectionate, feisty, and fun. If you crossed her—worse, if you disrespected him—she would let you know and wouldn’t forget.

  Also, she liked to dance. He didn’t. On the rare occasions when he indulged her happy feet, she told him he looked like he was dribbling a basketball.

  Nellie Riley was a year younger than Johnny Wooden. During his sophomore year at Martinsville High School, he noticed her in the hallways, but he never did anything about it. “Never met her or anything, but I saw her. I thought she was cute,” he said. Nellie was best friends with a girl named Mary Schnaiter, the daughter of a well-to-do local businessman who owned a grain mill and building supply company. One day during the summer between Johnny’s sophomore and junior years, Nellie joined Mary and her brother in the Schnaiters’ family automobile, and the three of them took a drive out to Centerton. When they pulled up to the Woodens’ farm, they saw Johnny in the distance plowing corn behind a mule. He was sweaty and caked with dirt. “I made a turn on this gravel road. They drove up to where I was turning. They motioned me over but I refused to go,” Wooden recalled. “They kept trying but I refused. So they left. I didn’t think anything about it.”

  Two months later, Johnny was coming out of his homeroom and was on his way to his first class. Nellie was waiting for him in the hallway. She walked right up to him and demanded to know why he had been so rude. “We made all these arrangements to go see you, and you didn’t even come over to say hello,” she said. He explained to her that he was dirty and didn’t feel like socializing. “You all would have just made fun of me,” he said.

  Nellie replied, “I would never make fun of you.”

  They started spending time together almost immediately. Johnny would carry her books to school and take her on dates on the weekends. They spent evenings in her parents’ living room playing songs like “Ramona” and “In a Little Spanish Town” on her parents’ Victrola record player. There was a clandestine thrill to the relationship, because Glenn Curtis had a strict rule against his players dating during basketball season. This was a problem because the Rileys lived next door to Curtis, but Johnny still came around. “He was always polite and my parents liked him,” Nell said, “but he was so bashful he could hardly hold his head up to say ‘How do you do’ to them.”

  Nellie did what she could to draw him out. She encouraged him to take a public speaking class. He did, but he didn’t warm up to the teacher, Mabel Hinds, until she learned of Johnny’s affection for poetry. Ms. Hinds got him to read aloud by assigning him Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” (“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r / And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave / Awaits alike th’inevitable hour / The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”) It would become Johnny’s favorite poem.

  Nellie was no stranger to basketball. When she was in grade school, she once made ten consecutive shots in a free throw contest. At Martinsville High, she fulfilled her fondness for music by joining the ukulele club, the dramatic club, the glee club, and operetta. Nellie’s band instrument was the cornet, though Johnny teased her that she only held it to her lips and pretended to play. Playing in the band meant she had good seats for the games.

  Once basketball season started, Johnny and Nellie developed a
private pregame ritual. As he emerged from Curtis’s huddle, he would find her in the stands, wink, and flash her the “okay” sign. They performed this ritual before every game he played and coached, right through his last at UCLA.

  Johnny was a straight arrow, but Nellie had wandering eyes. This drove him to distraction. Even though Nellie professed devotion, she said she still wanted to have dates with other boys. Johnny was part sucker, part cuckold, tacitly granting Nellie permission to have her fun even though he had no interest in dating other girls himself.

  On at least one occasion, she went too far. During the summer between John’s junior and senior years of high school, Nell went on a date with a boy whom John didn’t want her to see. John had been thinking about hitchhiking north to look for some fieldwork, so the day after Nellie mentioned the date, he expressed his displeasure by packing an extra pair of overalls and some belongings and hitting the road with a couple of buddies. The boys wore their letterman’s sweaters because they knew it would make motorists more likely to stop.

  Eventually, they made it to Lawrence, Kansas, where John asked the University of Kansas’s forty-one-year-old basketball coach, Phog Allen, for help finding work. Allen got Wooden’s crew a job pouring concrete for the new football stadium. The coach had ulterior motives. Allen knew full well about Wooden’s basketball exploits, and he tried to convince him to move to Lawrence and eventually play for Kansas. Wooden declined and headed back to Martinsville, but he was still so angry with Nellie that he didn’t even let her know he was home. “I didn’t want to see her. She had to find out I was back,” he said. Asked how she won him over, Wooden reached up his index finger and stroked his cheek, limning the tracks of her tears. “I’m ashamed,” he said. “I have a bit of stubbornness in me, that’s true. I admit that.”