by Seth Davis
Lambert persisted. How was Wooden going to pay the man back?
Now Johnny was confused. He responded that he didn’t realize the doctor was expecting to be paid back.
Lambert told him he wasn’t, but surely Johnny would want to pay him back, right? Of course, if he turned down the offer altogether, he wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. He could finish up his last two years at Purdue and leave school without owing anyone a cent. Lambert told Wooden to think about it for a few days and then come back with his decision.
Even though Lambert didn’t tell him what to do, Wooden understood what the coach wanted. Johnny returned a few days later and told Lambert he could tell this doctor fellow no thanks. “I knew you’d say that,” Lambert replied. “When you walk out of here, your head will be up.”
Lambert wasn’t blind to Wooden’s financial hardships. The coach had noticed that when the team traveled to places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, Johnny didn’t have a coat to keep him warm. So Lambert told Wooden that this same doctor would buy him a thick coat, some decent clothes, and a pair of shoes. In return, Wooden would give the man his game tickets. Lambert promised that if Nellie or Wooden’s family wanted to come to the games, he would get them in.
Thus did the ball that had bounced from Springfield to Crawfordsville to West Lafayette bounce again toward Johnny Wooden. With Lambert serving as his minister as well as his wagon driver, Wooden instinctively grabbed the ball and ran, sensing it was leading him to higher ground.
5
Johnny Wooden, All-American
The 1930–31 season was looked upon in West Lafayette as a rebuilding year. Three starters, including Stretch Murphy, had graduated from the team that ran the table in the Big Ten. Lambert named Wooden cocaptain alongside his fellow junior, forward Harry Kellar. The Courier and Journal noted that the new captains, both of whom were five foot ten, were “comparative midgets” next to the guys they replaced.
Wooden had attacked the rim with such verve as a sophomore that for his junior season, Lambert stationed football players along the baseline so they could catch Wooden before he careered into the bleachers. “The thing I remember the most is that he was so fast,” said Bob King, who watched Wooden play in college and later became an assistant basketball coach at Purdue. “He ran into the stands and they threw him right back on the floor.”
The young Boilermakers were not going to be able to ease into the season. Their first opponent was Notre Dame, which was squaring off against Purdue for the first time in seven years. With the game having been moved to Jefferson High to accommodate the heightened interest, Wooden rose to the occasion by scoring 21 points in a 34–22 rout. The Indianapolis Star reported that during the game, “Wooden was unstoppable on his speedy dribbles under the basket that usually ended with a seemingly impossible one-handed shot through the netting.” After dispatching Washington University at home by 22 points, Purdue played a huge road game in late December at Pittsburgh, which had been tagged as the mythical national champions the year before. The Courier and Journal asserted that the Boilermakers needed to “defend the honor of Indiana, Big Ten and mid-western basketball.” The paper also highlighted the opportunity for the Boilermakers to take their star performer on the road: “The majority of basketball critics rank Wooden as the most brilliant individual player the game has seen in years and the east’s reaction to this ‘India Rubber Man’ will be interesting to say the least.”
Alas, Wooden suffered yet another mishap in the days beforehand, when his hip got snagged on a loose floorboard during one of his frequent dives during practice. “It took a hunk of meat—and I mean meat—out of my hip,” Wooden said. “It didn’t hurt so much at the time. Things like that don’t. But late that night I got in bad shape. I got a big kernel in the groin, so they took me to the hospital for that. They didn’t have penicillin and things of that sort.” For the third year in a row, he celebrated Christmas from a hospital bed.
Wooden accompanied the team to Pittsburgh for the game on December 30, but he was too sore to play for most of the game. With three minutes remaining in the second half and the Boilermakers trailing by 4 points, Lambert inserted Wooden into the contest. He immediately stole a pass and broke free for a layup to cut the margin to 2. About a minute later, Wooden missed a chance to tie the score when his outside shot rimmed out. Pittsburgh got the rebound and held on to the ball the rest of the way, dealing the Boilermakers a 24–22 loss.
As Wooden continued to delight crowds, Nellie attended as many games as she could, but she could never steady her nerves the way her beau could. During one intense game his junior year, she actually fainted in the stands and missed the end of the second half. Even as the Boilermakers lost four out of nine games beginning in January, Wooden developed a reputation as one of the finest guards in all of college basketball. His methods were as effective as they were uncomplicated. He simply worked harder than everyone else. “He was always moving,” said Wooden’s future assistant coach Ed Powell, who grew up in South Bend and attended several of his Purdue games. “He would be passing, cutting, dribbling, moving. Whoever guarded him would stay with him maybe for a quarter or two or three, but then, towards the end, John would get one or two steps away, just enough to score the winning basket. He didn’t do anything differently towards the end than he did during the game, except that conditioning paid off.”
Wooden and his teammates closed the season with five straight wins to finish second in the Big Ten with an 8–4 record. Lambert’s young guns had matured quite a bit over the course of the season. Best of all, not a single starter or significant reserve was a senior. That meant the team was going to return intact for what was shaping up to be a very promising senior season for Johnny Wooden.
* * *
During the summer between his junior and senior years, Wooden was again offered the chance to play professional baseball, based largely on the potential he showed while playing semipro ball the previous summer. The Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds, who were either unaware of or unconcerned about his bum shoulder, offered Wooden contracts to join their farm system. Lambert had played some minor league baseball himself, so he knew what a grind it was. He also regarded the notion of playing sports for money as a corrupt enterprise. “You can’t play in the dirt without getting dirty,” he liked to say. He didn’t tell Wooden explicitly not to play, but Wooden got the drift.
Wooden was more serious in contemplating an offer to be appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The academy had the ability to recruit athletes from other schools and allow them to play for another four years. This time it was Nellie who shot down the idea. She had agreed to wait for him to finish at Purdue, but she did not want to wait any longer. She told Wooden that if he accepted, she would call off the marriage and join a convent.
So much for West Point.
After abandoning his initial plans to be a civil engineer, Wooden committed himself to become a high school English teacher. His plans took on another dimension at the start of his junior year when Purdue added a Physical Education department. The state of Indiana had just passed a law requiring teachers to have a Phys Ed degree in order to coach high school sports. Wooden hadn’t given much thought to coaching, but with the new department in place, he loaded up on electives and got the extra degree. With an English degree, a Phys Ed degree, and a teacher’s certificate, Wooden figured that he would always be able to find work in the state of Indiana.
As always, Wooden remained on the lookout for ways to make extra money. After Stretch Murphy graduated, he handed over to Wooden the rights to concession sales around Purdue football games. During his senior year, Wooden made a killing one weekend selling sandwiches, soft drinks, and cigarettes on the train that carried Purdue fans to the annual football game against the University of Chicago, which was coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg. Lambert had connected Wooden with a local butcher who provided him a couple of large hams. Wooden then brought the meat to the cook at the Beta house
so they could grind it up and spread it on bread like butter. “We could make a lot more sandwiches that way,” Wooden said. “I used to say I walked to Chicago and back because I was walking up and down the train all the way.”
Most of the fans in West Lafayette knew Wooden for his exploits on the basketball court, but they learned of his equivalent talents in the classroom when the Courier and Journal published a story under the headline, “Johnny Wooden sets fast pace in class room.” Purdue’s registrar office had provided the newspaper with records indicating that Wooden had been on the school’s Distinguished Student honor roll. Stating that Wooden “is generally recognized as the greatest dribbler of modern day basketball, and his alertness on defense has no equal,” the article concluded: “Wooden is a senior in the school of physical condition, and intends to take up coaching as a profession after his graduation this June.”
* * *
Wooden’s final team at Purdue may have been long on experience, but it was short on stature. The Boilermakers were, in the words of their hometown newspaper, “a squad that depends more on speed and cleverness than physical power.” They demonstrated as much by blitzing out of the gate with wins over Washington, Notre Dame, and Pittsburgh by a combined 45 points. By going on to score 51 points against both Montana State and Monmouth in Memorial Gym, the Boilermakers not only remained undefeated but pulled off the unusual feat of averaging more than a point per minute through their first five games. That was unheard of in 1931.
No matter how hard opposing coaches tried to collar the “Martinsville flash,” Wooden’s fully evolved skill and guile rendered their efforts useless. Notre Dame coach George Keogan went so far as to devise a “Wooden defense” specifically to contain his drives. Keogan assigned one player to guard Wooden up close while another shadowed him closer to the basket. “Finally John decided that going through our defense was playing it the hard way,” Keogan later recalled. “What does he do? He started popping from out around the center, way back of the key.”
For once, Wooden did not sustain a major injury in late December. However, his tonsils did flare up, and he had to have them removed during the semester break. That gave Wooden a clean sweep: four years at Purdue, four Christmases spent in a hospital.
On January 6, two days after the Boilermakers sprinted to a 49–30 win over Indiana, the Associated Press published a story describing the unique style with which Purdue was steamrolling its opponents. “Overwhelming offensive strength shown in pre-conference tilts and analysis of Coach Ward Lambert’s veteran personnel are responsible for great optimism among Boilermaker fans on the eve of the twelve-game conference schedule,” the story read. “[The players] are thoroughly fitted into the quick-breaking, free-shooting clever dribbling Lambert scheme. ‘Fire department basketball,’ they call it in Indiana, and the pellmell, headlong style of game seems to be coming back in vogue this season—with reservations—after giving way, for several seasons, to a slower, more methodical brand.”
Wooden would not avoid the injury bug for long. A couple of days before the Big Ten opener against Illinois, he sliced the ring finger on his shooting hand while working in the Beta kitchen. Then, as he was riding to the game, the car driven by Lambert and carrying Wooden slid off the road and flipped. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured, but Wooden suffered a badly bruised thigh. He still played against the Illini, but he had an obvious limp and was restricted by the heavy bandage on his shooting hand. He scored just 10 points as the Boilermakers lost, 28–21.
As it turned out, that would be the team’s only hiccup. In its next outing, Purdue squeaked by Marquette, 26–23, after the final gun failed to go off when the scoreboard ticked down to zero. (Glen Harmeson, the freshman coach, had to rush onto the floor to inform the referee that the game was over.) Wooden was held in check for much of the following game against Ohio State, but when the contest went to overtime, he broke a 33–33 tie with a steal and quick assist to a teammate, a field goal of his own, and a free throw with a few seconds left, enabling the Boilermakers to prevail by 5. As the Courier and Journal reported, “Wooden had the faculty of delivering in the pinches.” He added 15 points in a 15-point pasting of Northwestern and 17 in a 13-point win over Indiana. After watching Wooden increase his season scoring total to a league-leading 93 points against the Hoosiers, Illinois coach Craig Ruby, who was scouting the game, called Wooden “the greatest basketball player I ever saw in action.”
Many of the victory margins would have been even greater had Lambert not emptied his bench once his team built huge leads. Oftentimes, he would leave Wooden as the only starter on the floor. “He had a way of stalling the game out by fantastic dribbling,” said Wooden’s younger teammate, William “Dutch” Fehring. “He would dribble from backcourt to frontcourt, and all around the court, and nobody could get that ball away.”
Purdue would not have won in such dominating fashion had it been a one-man show. Still, everyone knew who the headliner was. On one train trip to a road game, Lambert took a blanket away from one of the reserves and gave it to his senior star. “Wooden’s going to play tomorrow. All you’re going to do is sit,” Lambert said. Wooden was no longer an unbridled colt learning how to harness his talents. He was a seasoned veteran, and he had a bag full of tricks. “He had a very unusual thing he did. He would drive down to the foul circle, and he’d change directions, cause he’s like a cat anyway. He would change directions and go either way and he could confuse everybody,” said Kenneth Watson, a friend from Martinsville who watched many of Wooden’s games at Purdue. Bob King added, “Wooden was somewhat of a folk hero here in Indiana. He was a tremendous competitor. He was a guy you had to kill, almost, to beat him.”
In their penultimate game of the season, the Boilermakers again embarrassed Northwestern, their main challenger in the Big Ten race, by a score of 31–17 behind Wooden’s 15 points. That clinched their second outright conference championship in three years. It was also the fourth time in seven years that Lambert’s team had either won or shared the title. The only question to be settled in Wooden’s finale against Chicago was whether he would score 15 points and break the Big Ten single-season scoring record of 147 set by his friend Branch McCracken two years before.
Wooden didn’t score 15 points. He scored 21, leaving the new mark at 154 points. Purdue also established a league record for points scored in a season as the Boilermakers completed their campaign with a best-ever 17–1 record. At the time, there were no postseason tournaments or wire-service polls to determine an official national champion, but four years later, when the Los Angeles–based Helms Athletic Foundation retroactively selected national champions in college basketball dating back to 1901, it awarded Purdue the 1932 crown.
There was no question as to who should get most of the credit. An organization called the All-America Board of Basketball Coaches had convened for the first time that winter to vote on the five most outstanding college basketball players in the United States. The story that appeared in newspapers around the country was authored by a board member who knew Wooden all too well: Wisconsin coach Dr. Walter Meanwell. Though the board did not officially designate a national player of the year, Meanwell made clear who he thought belonged at the head of the class. “If the most brilliant amateur basketball player in the country was to be selected, the name of John Wooden outshines all others,” Meanwell wrote.
Wooden was even more pleased a few months later when Purdue’s president, Edward Elliott, presented him with the Big Ten’s academic achievement medal. At the end of the first semester of Wooden’s senior year, he ranked nineteenth in a student body of 4,675. He would forever cherish that honor. In his later years, that medal was one of the first pieces of memorabilia Wooden showed to visitors who came to see him in his condominium in Encino, California. “My teammates and my players helped me win every trophy I ever won, but this one I had to earn for myself,” he said.
Wooden’s exploits at Purdue were the stuff of legend. In 1943, when the Helms F
oundation celebrated the first fifty years of organized American basketball by naming an all-time all-star team, it called Wooden “probably the greatest all-around guard of them all.” In 1960, four years before he won his first NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) championship as the coach at UCLA, Wooden was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. To this day, he is one of just three men to be enshrined as a player and a coach. (The others are Lenny Wilkens and Bill Sharman.) When the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame inducted Wooden in 1962, it was, in the words of the historian Ron Newlin, “because people remembered him thirty years prior as one of the greatest basketball players in the first seventy years of the game, not as a great coach.”
Today, John Wooden is celebrated as the greatest coach the college game, and maybe any game, has ever known. But to folks of a certain era, he was Johnny Wooden, India Rubber Man, an electric flash who darted and dribbled his way around the court like no other, flinging his body to the floor and bouncing up. Nowhere were those images more indelible than in the Hoosier heartland. “Wooden to the kids of my era was what Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, or Lew Alcindor is today,” Tom Harmon, a former prominent high school player in Indiana whose brother played with Wooden at Purdue, said in 1968. “Johnny Wooden was king, the idol of every kid who had a basketball. In Indiana, that was every kid.”
* * *
In 1932, there was not much pro ball to speak of outside of a few disparate leagues and barnstorming tours, but there was enough to keep Wooden busy through the spring and summer. He latched on with Stretch Murphy and several other former teammates in April to play a game in Chicago. Later in the spring, George Halas, the owner of the NFL’s Chicago Bears, invited Wooden to play for the basketball team he owned, for a three-game play-off series. Halas paid Wooden $100 a game, which was a lot more than he ever made selling ham sandwiches.