by Seth Davis
In West Lafayette, Lambert fashioned his teams in his own image. Basketball was very much a big man’s game in those days. Not only could a taller player plant himself under the basket and score easily (this was long before the three-second violation), but he was also a great weapon for the center jump that was held after every made basket. Yet Lambert preferred players who were smaller and quicker, and he was determined to speed the game up. Sportswriters branded this strange style “fire-wagon basketball,” but Lambert had another name for it. He called it the fast break.
It was not enough for Lambert’s players to be quicker than their opponents. For his system to work, they also had to be in superior condition. The way he figured it, if his team was able to impose its fire-wagon style for an entire game, it would eventually wear out the opponent and seize control down the stretch. So he ran his guys ragged. “Our practices were hellish,” said Charlie Caress, who played at Purdue from 1939 to 1942. Lambert placed so much emphasis on making his players run that he preferred not to stop practice to talk to his team as a group. When he wanted to correct something, he would pull individual players aside for brief chats. While other coaches let their boys go home during the Christmas holiday, Lambert insisted that they remain on campus so they could keep on running.
During his second season at Purdue, Lambert’s Boilermakers set a new Big Ten record by scoring 35.6 points per game. According to The Big Ten, a voluminous history of the conference, one sportswriter who covered the league at the time “noted that offense was getting too much ahead of defense and predicted gloomily that basketball would soon be spoiled by 40-point games.” Two years later, Purdue won its first undisputed Big Ten title, and over the next twenty-seven years, Lambert would claim ten more conference crowns and eventually earn enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
His ethos dovetailed perfectly with Wooden’s skill set, not to mention his farm-bred work ethic. “He was way ahead of his time in fast break basketball,” Wooden said. “I tried to feel … that no one would be in better condition than I was. They may beat me on ability, but they’ll never beat me on condition.” When Lambert later referred to Wooden as the best-conditioned athlete he had coached, Wooden recognized it as the ultimate compliment.
No detail was too small to escape Piggy’s discerning eye. For example, he was fixated on the condition of his players’ feet. He ordered them to rub their feet twice a week with a solution of benzoin and tannic acid, which Lambert said would toughen up the skin. Instead of having his players wear one pair of thick wool socks as was customary, he told them to wear two—a cotton pair next to the feet to absorb sweat plus a medium-weight wool pair to reduce friction against their shoes. After they showered, he wanted his players to fan their feet, not towel them, and he reminded them to make sure they were dry between the toes.
Lambert was a stickler for routine. For an 8:00 p.m. tipoff, the players ate precisely at 1:15. The menu was always the same—fruit cocktail, medium-sized steak cooked medium well, peas, carrots, celery, green tea, and ice cream or custard cup for dessert. Then he wanted his players to take a short walk and lie down for a nap between 3:00 and 4:30. Outside of basketball, he said they should abide by what he called the “right rules of living.” That meant no smoking, alcohol, overeating, or “irregular hours,” even though Lambert himself was a smoker and inveterate poker player (and not a very good one at that).
When it came to teaching the game, everything Lambert did was predicated on speed. He preferred passing to dribbling because the ball moved faster. Whereas most teams tended to slowly walk the ball up the floor following an opponent’s missed shot, Lambert drilled into his players the habit of immediately firing a long pass. “When you rebounded, your first look was down the floor,” Caress said. “I don’t know how many afternoons we practiced getting our hand behind the ball so that when we threw the ball the length of the floor, it wouldn’t curve.”
Lambert laid out all of these precepts in a textbook he wrote called Practical Basketball. Published in 1932, it was one of the first technical volumes to be authored by a college coach, and for years it was considered to be a bible among Lambert’s peers. The book was packed with intricate jargon that was supplemented by charts and photographs. (One photograph shows a crouched Johnny Wooden demonstrating a “low bounce dribble.” The player is described as having “unusual speed.”) Every facet of the game was broken down in the book, but what really came through was the author’s unshakable faith in the gospel of up-tempo basketball. “The fast-break, with dependence upon the initiative of the players rather than upon set formations is, in my opinion, the ideal system, if the coach has the necessary material,” Lambert wrote.
While Lambert had strict notions on the way the game should be played, his true genius lay in the broad freedom he gave his players to execute his vision. He figured it was his job as the head coach to get his guys into the best possible condition, teach them how to play—and then get out of their way. He had very few offensive plays, substituted infrequently, and rarely talked to his players about their opponent. This was another offshoot of the rules of the day, which forbade coaches from speaking to players during time-outs. (When the action stopped, the players simply huddled on the court.) Lambert often told his players that the team that commits more mistakes usually wins. “One of the dangers in teaching is overloading the players with knowledge,” he wrote in Practical Basketball. “Most young players cannot absorb all of this knowledge, and there is more danger in overcoaching than in undercoaching.”
Lambert whittled his philosophy down to three components: condition, skill, and team spirit. “He didn’t have any complicated systems or anything of that sort,” Wooden said. “He taught me the value of a controlled offense, but one that had freelance aspects to it. You build a base from where the offense would start, trying to get movement by design but not necessarily by a precise pattern. There was always somebody moving, in and out, crossing over, and then he would add little changes within that framework.”
In other words, he was the polar opposite of Glenn Curtis, Wooden’s coach at Martinsville High School. Whereas Curtis taught a deliberate offense and maintained an even keel, Lambert turned his horses loose and behaved frenetically on the sideline. “I’ve seen Piggy getting up, leading cheers, coaching, and officiating all at the same time,” said Clyde Lyle, a college teammate of Wooden’s. A veteran league official once complained that “it’s an uncomfortable feeling to be calling them as you see ’em, knowing the little guy over there has never been wrong on a basketball floor in his life.” When Lambert retired in 1946 after having won 71 percent of his games and eleven league championships during his twenty-nine-year tenure at Purdue, he admitted he was “anxious to be relieved of the nervous strain and mental punishment that accompanies a head coachship.”
Lambert was tough on his players, but he generally took a positive tack. This was yet another way in which Wooden saw Lambert as an extension of Hugh. As Lambert wrote in Practical Basketball, “The coach who continually tells his players they are rotten is sure to make them so.” Added Clyde Lyle, “He was a master psychologist. He had a tremendous vocabulary and he didn’t need a lot of profanity to let the players know what he wanted.”
With Wooden waiting in the wings as a freshman, the Boilermakers’ varsity posted an impressive 13–4 record and finished second in the Big Ten. During one game that season, they set a new conference record by scoring 64 points in a rout of the University of Chicago. Interest in the team’s exploits was so high that four of their home games were moved to Jefferson High School, whose gym was nearly twice the capacity of Purdue’s on-campus facility, Memorial Gymnasium. When the Boilermakers did play at Memorial, the place was so jammed that some fans sat on steel trusses above the floor. Lambert understood that basketball was a form of entertainment, and the customers wanted running and scoring. They would soon get their wish, thanks to the dynamic little player who was ready to hop aboard Piggy’s fire wagon and rip it i
nto higher gear.
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Lambert may have favored speed over size, but he was not ignorant to the value of a big man. In the fall of 1926, two years before Wooden arrived on campus as a freshman, a tall, skinny gift landed in Lambert’s lap: Charles “Stretch” Murphy, the six-foot-eight center from Marion whose team had beaten Martinsville in the state final at the end of Wooden’s sophomore season. Most coaches who had big men on their roster planted them in the middle and told them to stay there, but not Lambert. He resolved to burnish Murphy’s strength, quickness, and skill, just as he did with his guards. The result was one of the first truly great big men the college game had seen.
Murphy was quite the unfinished product at first. His weighed just 173 pounds, and his habit of flinging his elbows when cradling the ball could be a menace to his teammates during practice. “He was a beanpole,” Clyde Lyle said. “He was not clever at all, and most teams were knocking him down by hitting him low because he didn’t have much strength and didn’t know how to keep his feet out for balance.”
Still, Murphy was unusually coordinated for a player his size. Lambert installed him as a full-time starter his sophomore year, and the following season, Murphy set Big Ten records for scoring in a single game (26 points) as well as a season (143). When Wooden joined the varsity for Murphy’s senior year in 1929, the two of them became a must-see tandem, although Wooden was not mentioned in the early stories that previewed the upcoming season. (The main local paper in West Lafayette, the Journal and Courier, referred to him that fall as “Jimmy Wooden.”) After the Boilermakers opened the season with a 19-point drubbing of Washington University, the paper’s beat writer, Gordon Graham, reported that Wooden “had proven himself capable” of handling college competition. The word was out.
The first big game Purdue played that season was a late December clash at Butler. It was such an important contest that Nellie decided to drive up from Martinsville to watch her Johnny play. Wooden bought her a comb, brush, and mirror set as a Christmas present, but he never made it to the game. As he was on his way to catch the train from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, Wooden flagged down a cleaner truck, and the driver invited him to hop on the rear bumper. It had just snowed in West Lafayette, and the roads were icy. As the truck carrying Wooden was stopped on a hill, another truck skidded from behind. Wooden saw the truck coming and grabbed the top of his own vehicle to swing his body, but he couldn’t quite get his right leg out of the way, and it was pinned between the two trucks. His first concern was his gift to Nellie, which had been in his back pocket and was busted in the collision. Wooden was lucky his leg was not broken, but it was lacerated badly enough that he was laid up for days. It was the second straight year he spent Christmas in the hospital. (The year before he had come down with scarlet fever.) “Nellie and her sister and brother-in-law drove through bad weather,” he lamented many years later. “I saw them at the hospital instead of at the game.”
Without Wooden, Murphy was held to zero field goals against Butler, and Purdue lost, 36–29. The Journal and Courier noted that Wooden’s absence was “keenly felt.” Wooden also missed Purdue’s next game, a win over Vanderbilt, but he rejoined the squad for its January 2 home game against Montana State. He wore a football pad on his injured thigh, but he was hurting so badly that he had to ask Lambert to take him out early in the second half. As a result, Purdue suffered its second loss of the season, 38–35.
To the degree that he paid attention to such things, that loss gave Wooden his first taste of the downside of high expectations. Graham’s write-up of the Montana State game was scathing. “The Boilermakers, without a doubt, turned in one of the most disgusting exhibitions of basketball in the Memorial gymnasium last night that an Old Gold and Black team has ever been guilty of. Not ragged, just plain disgusting.” Graham added that because of his accident, Wooden “lacked the stamina to hold the pace.”
Once Wooden returned to form, the Boilermakers were off and running. Wooden was an ideal floor guard for Lambert’s system. Not only was he an excellent passer who could direct the offense with aplomb, but he was also adept at quickly advancing the ball upcourt before the defense could get set. In later years, Murphy would refer to Wooden as “the Bob Cousy of our day.” Gordon Graham recalled that when Wooden drove to the basket, “he often flew five or six rows into the stands, slid into the band instruments, open bleachers, and even brick walls. But he always bounced up and beat everyone else back on defense.”
Wooden had all the playing time he wanted because Lambert hardly substituted. Back then, players were only permitted to reenter a game once. (Open substituting was added to the rules in 1944.) When the Boilermakers followed the Montana State loss with a slim 23–19 victory over Michigan, Wooden scored 7 of the team’s final 14 points—an early example of how his dedication to conditioning paid off late in games. With Wooden and Murphy operating at high speed, the Boilermakers steamrolled through the rest of their opponents. They beat Northwestern, 39–22. They beat Loyola, 25–20 in overtime, to snap the Ramblers’ thirty-four-game winning streak. Then, on February 2, they exploded for 60 points in a thrashing of Ohio State. Murphy scored 28 points in that game to break the conference single-game mark he had set the year before, while Wooden poured in a cool 17 of his own. Chicago coach Nels Norgren, whose squad lost to Purdue by 10 points on February 8, said, “You need to put two men on Murphy and two men on Wooden, and there are not many left to score baskets.”
The fire wagon was running hot, thanks to this stellar, inside-outside tandem. It was just how Piggy envisioned it. “Lambert gave us considerable freedom in our play,” Murphy said. “We attracted attention from the scouts, most of whom thought the kind of basketball we played was nuts. We figured if we could hold our opponents to 25 or 30 points, we could beat them.”
Wooden’s performances weren’t just effective. They were enthralling. This was a critical part of his basketball education. Most of the language in the Journal and Courier’s coverage was straightforward and anodyne, but references to Wooden were frequently embellished by colorful expressions. He was labeled the “Martinsville flash,” “Purdue’s electric dribbler,” and “the fastest and cleverest little fellow we have ever seen on a court.” His ability to beat the defense down the floor for uncontested layups was described as “his prize act.” His “brilliant dribbling thrilled the crowd” in one game. In another, “the little Martinsville speedster got quite a hand from the overflow crowd for his spirited dashes.”
After a win over Northwestern, Graham referred to Wooden as the “India Rubberman” in homage to his ability to bounce off the floor following his many hard falls. The nickname stuck, although in the decades that followed, many sportswriters mistakenly reported that Wooden’s nickname had been the “Indiana” rubber man.
In between his falls and rubberlike bounces, Wooden developed some odd superstitions. One day he happened to tuck his locker key into the laces in his shoe, and he played so well that he decided to do that for every practice and every game. Moreover, his teammates, just like the guys he played with in Martinsville, were struck by a serene demeanor that belied Wooden’s tenacity between the lines. “When I was a freshman and played against John in practice, I held him, pushed him, and shoved him, but I could never take the ball away from him,” said Bob Hobbs, a Purdue teammate who was a year younger than Wooden. “After a workout, he’d come up and say, ‘Nice practice, Bob.’ He never held a grudge and you simply couldn’t rattle the guy.”
On March 3, 1930, Purdue clinched the Big Ten title by defeating Michigan, 44–28. It was the third time in five years that Lambert’s team had won or shared conference honors. The only remaining items of suspense were whether the Boilermakers would go undefeated in league play, and whether Murphy would finish the season as the Big Ten’s scoring champ. For most of the season, he had been locked in a tight race with Indiana center Branch McCracken, who was a close friend of Wooden’s from childhood. (When Wooden lived in Centerton, his
backyard and McCracken’s backyard abutted each other.) Though Murphy ended up with the higher scoring average, McCracken took the overall title because Indiana played twelve conference games while Purdue played only ten, thus enabling McCracken to accumulate more points. However, Murphy got the last laugh by leading Purdue to the first perfect conference record in the Big Ten since Minnesota’s in 1919.
The season culminated a week later when Wooden and Murphy were selected by the Associated Press to the Big Ten’s five-man “all-star” team. They were joined by McCracken and two other centers. The AP called Wooden “a sophomore who promises to become an immortal of this league.” It also noted that among the five all-stars, Wooden was “the only player who worked at guard all season to gain a job in his natural position. He is also the only man who will return next season.”
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Basketball fed Johnny Wooden’s competitive appetite. It validated his devotion to hard work. The games were exciting. But the sport would not have held Wooden’s regard if his mentors had tried to appeal to his baser instincts. As passionate as Piggy Lambert was about the intricacies of the game and the merits of the fast break, he was foremost a congregant in the Church of Naismith, where basketball had been conceived as a pathway to heaven. Wooden was raised in a home where the dominant male figure was to be paid proper respect without anyone questioning his authority. He gave Lambert the same kind of respect, and in later years when he became a coach, Wooden would demand the same from his own players.
The most indelible example of his deference to Lambert occurred during the spring of 1930, soon after Wooden’s sophomore campaign was over. Lambert called Wooden into his office to report that a well-to-do doctor in town had offered to take care of Wooden’s living expenses. When Lambert asked Wooden what he thought, Wooden replied that it sounded terrific.