by Seth Davis
One of those players, Bobby Osborne, happened to be the son of the assistant principal. The father insisted that Wooden reinstate Bobby and his three friends. The principal, P. D. Pointer, tried to intervene on the players’ behalf, but Wooden told him that if he was forced to accept the boys back on the team, he would quit. Pointer backed off. “That made Wooden in South Bend,” said Ed Powell, who arrived at Central in Wooden’s second season and soon became one of his favorite players.
“It really shook up the town,” said Eddie Ehlers, who at the time was an eighth grader and one of the better players in town. “One of the boys’ mothers called my mother and told her Coach Wooden was a bad man and she shouldn’t let me play for him. Thank goodness my mother said, ‘I believe in my son, and he wants to play for Mr. Wooden.’”
Ehlers followed through on that desire once he reached high school. He also played baseball for Wooden, although the coach did not approach that task with the same degree of sobriety as he did basketball. “It was fun for him,” Ehlers said. “It wasn’t like basketball, where from the minute you walked out on the floor it was serious.” When the players rode their bikes to baseball practice, they often stopped at a bakery along the way to buy five-cent pies. Wooden, who had a serious sweet tooth, would sit with them at the start of practice and devour the desserts. Still, the competitor in him came out during games, such as the day in 1939 when he sat his whole team down for fifteen minutes to express his displeasure at an umpire’s missed call, and then resumed the game under protest. (The South Band Tribune reported that Wooden “registered vigorous disapproval” of the umpire’s ruling. His protest was later denied.)
Wooden was just as stern while conducting his English classes. “It was always very orderly,” Ehlers said. “Some of the coaches have class and it’s an opportunity to goof off, but not with Coach Wooden.” Ed Powell recalled that Wooden was a “stickler for good penmanship.” Occasionally, Wooden would pass along a favorite poem to his players and ask them to commit it to memory. One he particularly liked was titled “Mr. Meant To”:
Mr. Meant To has a comrade
And his name is Didn’t Do
Have you ever chance to meet them?
Did they ever call on you?
These two fellows lived together
In the house of Never Win
And I am told that it is haunted
By the ghost of Might Have Been
Since Wooden learned most of what he knew about basketball from Piggy Lambert, it was only natural that he would implement many of Lambert’s ideas. That included enforcing the coach’s “right rules of living” away from the court. “Three or four times a year, he would sit us down on the floor and talk to us about things other than basketball,” said John Gassensmith, one of his former players. “How to behave, being good to the teachers. I remember he told us, after you eat dinner, congratulate your mother. Tell her what a good meal it was.”
From the very beginning, Wooden put in place a strict smoking ban, making clear that a violation would result in dismissal. In one instance where he had caught a player smoking, the player repeatedly asked to return to the team, but Wooden refused. At the time, the player appeared to be headed for college, but after being kicked off the team, he never pursued his higher education. Though Wooden couldn’t be sure things would have turned out differently if he had let the player return, he came to regret his inflexibility. “He quit school. Never went to college. I think he ended up a common laborer,” Wooden said. “I’m not putting them down, but here’s a player who was going to get a college education, to have a better chance, and it was because of my being perhaps too stubborn [that he didn’t go]. But I saw no middle. It was either black or white. There was no gray area, and there is a gray area on many things. So that bothered me.”
Wooden kept the no-smoking rule in place, but he subsequently dropped the specification of what the penalty would be. “Instead of saying if you smoke you’re off the team, he said, ‘There is to be no smoking. It will not be tolerated,’” said Jim Powers, who attended Central from 1939 to 1943. During Powers’s senior year, Wooden briefly suspended one of his best players, Parson Howell, for smoking, but he allowed the other players to vote him back onto the team.
Ironically, Wooden was a smoker himself. He admitted as much to his players, but he also told them that he quit when practice began and didn’t resume until the season was over. “He used this as an example to show that he could quit when he wanted to if he really put his mind to it,” Powell said. Nell was also a heavy smoker, but unlike John, who eventually quit for good, she was never able to kick the habit.
Through it all, Johnny Wooden had no better friend, supporter, and defender than his Nellie. On every game night, she and John carried on the same pregame ritual they had begun back in Martinsville, with Wooden turning to the stands to make eye contact with his bride and then flashing her the “okay” sign right before tip-off. Nell had several more fainting incidents, but she never missed a game. There were no laundry facilities at the school, so John asked Nell if she would wash his players’ sweaty uniforms, socks, and jock straps after each practice. She obliged, just as she did when he asked to invite his players to their house on Woodward Avenue. “She was almost my mother,” Powers said. “She’d have those parties after the season was over. They knew I loved ice cream, so they’d get me a gallon of it beforehand.”
Wooden was not a man of many hobbies, although he did spend time during the off-seasons playing some golf. During one memorable afternoon, he accomplished the rare feat of scoring a hole in one and a double eagle in the same round. (He kept that scorecard for the rest of his life.) That aside, Johnny, who was now in his late twenties and a married father of two, was still an introverted wallflower. As usual, it was up to Nell to provide balance. “He was very shy,” Powell said. “His wife saw it, too. She knew it when he was speaking to people and would have his finger on his mouth.” Wooden was combative during games, but away from the court it was Nell who was the loud one. One time Ehlers was riding in the backseat of the Woodens’ car on the way home from a difficult loss against James Whitcomb Riley High School. The car was quiet until Nell spied a Riley player, in his purple letterman’s sweater, walking down the street. The young man had an unfortunate pug nose. Nell rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and shouted, “You no-good little bulldog!” John grabbed her and pulled her back inside the car.
If there’s one thing Wooden understood innately, it’s that a teacher must set a righteous example if he wants his students to follow him. “You have to walk it,” Wooden said. “You can’t fool these kids. They know whether or not you really care about them.” If he insisted that his players never smoked, then he wasn’t going to smoke. If he said that they could never be late, then he could never be late. (He was there to greet them at the YMCA every morning at 6:00 a.m. so he could tape their ankles before practice.) And if he told them that they could not use profanity, he wasn’t going to use any himself. Instead of cursing when he got mad, he adopted the habit of shouting “Gracious sakes alive!” If he was really ticked off, he would say “Goodness gracious sakes alive!” It was odd that a man with such affection for the English language would construct a phrase that made no sense, but there it was. When I asked Wooden where he came up with it, he replied, “I have no idea.”
Wooden was a popular, respected basketball coach and English teacher, but there was little to augur that South Bend was witnessing some kind of legend in the making. To wit, when Wooden accepted an invitation to speak at a local banquet, here’s how a local newspaper described the event: “Johnny Wooden, South Bend Central’s basketball coach, will be the featured speaker at Elkhart High’s sports banquet, although they had hoped to line up some prominent college coach.”
* * *
Day by day, step by step, year by year, he perfected his craft. This wasn’t just some English teacher chasing state championships in his spare time. This was a man who was laying the groundw
ork for a career that would dominate the sport of basketball.
Many of the tactics Wooden developed during his eight seasons as South Bend’s head basketball coach were born of necessity. The facilities were so bad, and the gym time so limited, that he had no choice but to map out his practices in rigid detail. “We only had two hours, so he knew he had to get everything done,” Powers said. “The practice had to be highly organized. You didn’t have a moment to think about what you wanted to do.”
The fixed schedule meant there was no time for frivolity. “He didn’t take no foolishness,” said Tom Taylor, who played at Central High from 1939 to 1943. “I found that out the first time he threw me out of practice. I was fooling around with another guy. He said, ‘Go get your shower.’ Then he’d coach you up later on. He didn’t cuss, but he got it across to you.”
Taylor was lucky that was all Wooden got across that day. The coach was far more incensed when he found out that his best player, Parson Howell, had been smoking. On the morning that Wooden learned of Howell’s transgression, he marched upstairs to the auxiliary gym where Howell was shooting baskets and repeatedly kicked him in the rear end as the two of them walked down two flights of stairs. “He literally helped Parson down the stairs by booting him all the way,” Powers said. Gassensmith recalled that when Wooden kicked someone, he could actually lift him off the ground. “I tell you, for a little guy he was powerful,” Gassensmith said.
“Not everybody came out of their exposure to John Wooden and made the grade. He was very strict, and some people had a problem with that,” said Stan Jacobs, another of his former South Bend players. “There were some failures, too, who were disappointments to him, who drank, who didn’t stick to training rules, and who didn’t get their academic work done and keep it up to par.”
Like Piggy Lambert, Wooden immersed himself in the smallest details. He refused to move on to the next fundamental until the players had mastered the one they were working on. It was all part of a grand design that extended well beyond a single practice. Once again, Wooden viewed a basketball season through the eyes of the engineer he nearly became. First, he had to set the foundation—a row of pipes here, a couple of gears there—and then he laid everything in place piece by piece. If a gear got stuck, he had to go back and apply a little more oil. Every drill, every practice built toward something, and Wooden was the only one who could see the full blueprint.
The season began with a focus on conditioning, footwork, and movement. “Everybody was in motion all the time. Everything was done at full pace,” Powers said. When Wooden taught the players how to shoot, they had to learn the proper form first. The ball came later. Same thing with learning how to run an offense. “You just never had the ball in your hands,” said Ed Powers, Jim’s older brother. “You were always playing three on two, two on one, one on one, but you never shot the ball. It was just ballhandling. After you did that for two weeks, then you finally got to play basketball.”
Wooden’s education as a coach was bolstered in 1941, when Notre Dame, just across town in South Bend, hired Frank Leahy to be its football coach. Leahy jealously guarded his own practices—no writers or coaches were allowed—but he took a liking to Wooden and invited him to watch. Wooden considered himself organized, but he was floored by how efficient Leahy’s workouts were. He ran a beautiful, well-designed engine. The players shuttled from drill to drill without missing a beat. The coaches also did very little talking, since each word that was spoken meant time standing idle. As a result of those visits, Wooden developed the habit of writing his practice plans on index cards so he could pull them out of his pocket without slowing down the action.
And slowing down was the last thing Wooden wanted his players to do. Lambert’s fire-wagon style was more prevalent in Indiana than in any other part of the country, but for the most part, it was still the exception. Wooden thought it was particularly important that his South Bend teams be proficient at the fast break because they tended to be smaller than the teams they were playing. “The trick was to get all five guys thinking the way he thinks,” Ed Powell said. “I used to wonder, what kind of coach would Coach Wooden be once he gets height?”
Also like Lambert, Wooden made sure his players took care of their feet. He taught them how to rub their feet with powder and wear two pairs of socks, and he had them wearing shoes that were one size too small. “I noticed that most players wear shoes that are too large,” Wooden said. “Basketball is a game of quick movement—stop, start, turn, change of direction, change of pace. If there’s that much sliding to the end of the toe, you’re going to get some blisters. So I decided what size shoe you’re going to wear. I want your toe right at the end of the shoe so that when you stop, there’s not going to be any sliding back and forth. I think that’s important.”
In Wooden’s eyes, blisters were about the worst enemy that could visit a basketball team. He was so concerned about them that he forbade his players to attend dances during the season. He even coached the way the players ate. “Wooden ordered the pregame meal, and even a manager had to eat the same dry roast beef and dry head lettuce and toast without butter he ordered,” Jacobs said. “He was very concerned about nutrition, and he was very careful about food and what we ate. He had very strict training rules compared to other coaches of the day.”
When the Bears ran their fast break, Wooden wanted the guard to stop at the foul line. When the guard fed the wings, Wooden wanted him to throw a bounce pass. Everything had to be precise. During one game, a Central player tried to catch and shoot a bounce pass that was thrown too low, but he lost his balance and the ball hit the underside of the rim. The Bears won the game, but Wooden had spied a deficiency that needed to be addressed. So at practice the following week, he devised a drill where he repeatedly rolled his players the ball as they ran full speed toward the basket. “There is no pass that is lower than a roll, so if you can handle a roll, you can handle anything,” Powell said. “The next time there was a situation where the pass was low, we picked the ball up and put it in like nothing.”
He wanted free throws to be shot two-handed and underhanded, just as he did. And in case his players doubted whether that form could be effective, Wooden was happy to demonstrate. “When I tell young coaches about the night after practice at the old South Bend YMCA that [Wooden] made 96 out of 100 free throws, they don’t believe it,” said Billy Bender, a former player. “When I tell them it was done shooting two-handed, they really don’t believe it.”
This was another of Wooden’s assets as a teacher. Whatever he asked his players to do, he was able to do it far better himself. He showed how to get a rebound by grabbing the ball and sticking out his elbows. Sometimes he would show off by standing at midcourt sinking two-handed set shots. “He would demonstrate everything. There was nothing he couldn’t do to perfection,” Bob Dunbar said. Added Jim Powers, “He was a young buck. He could rebound better than we could, he could shoot better than we could, and he could dribble better than we could. He taught you by demonstrating. He didn’t leave it to you to learn how to do things.”
This came in especially handy when Wooden was displeased. One season, as the team was in the midst of a long winning streak, Wooden decided his boys were getting a little too cocky, so he set up a scrimmage with some other faculty members. “We couldn’t stop him,” Powell said. “I don’t think he missed a shot the whole game. He had us faked out of our supporters. It was a humbling experience, but it brought us back down to earth.”
He was, in short, a hard-to-please, detail-obsessed, hyper-organized taskmaster and control freak—which made it all the more jarring when he adopted a hands-off approach during games. Wooden believed it was his job to prepare his team to play. Once the game began, it was their job to show what they had learned. Don’t look over at the bench when the game starts, he told them. Just do what you’ve been taught to do. “Practice was Mr. Wooden’s domain. The game was the players’ domain,” Dunbar said. “He expected you to perform what you
practiced all week. He made some adjustments, but you never saw him running up and down the sideline.”
Wooden did not like calling time-outs. He saw them as a sign of weakness, and they only gave the other team a chance to rest. Likewise, if the opponent seized momentum, Wooden did not believe in making strategic adjustments. He would rather err on the side of consistency. “Back then, we used to think Wooden wasn’t flexible enough,” Powell said. “He couldn’t change his style of coaching in the tougher, more demanding tournament games. He thought he could win just by having the better-conditioned teams. I think he learned later on that it took more than that.”
Which is not to say Wooden was disengaged. For example, he could be brutal on referees. He may have mostly stayed in his chair, but he maintained a running dialogue with the officials. Jim Powers recalled a game that was officiated by a man named Pinkie Fink. When Wooden didn’t like one of Fink’s calls, he shouted, “Fink, you stink!” Oftentimes, Wooden let his assistant do the baiting, but there was no doubt who was giving the orders. “He was a lot more fiery than people knew,” Ehlers said.
Wooden even had the bright idea to set up a regular game against a rival school coached by his older brother, Maurice. John later recalled that when his team won, Maurice “didn’t speak to me for a year.” After South Bend won three straight, the brothers decided not to play again. “It was not a healthy situation,” John said.
Above all, he was a fighter, quite literally if he was pushed enough. One person who found that out early on was Mishawaka coach Shelby Shake, who was a cousin of Glenn Curtis. During his eleven years at Mishawaka, Shake’s teams won four sectional championships. He also had a flair for showmanship. He once dressed his players in warm-up pants with vertical stripes for a state tournament game, and for Mishawaka’s home games, Shake introduced a contraption called the “Bask-O-Lite,” where after each basket a red light mounted behind the rim would flash and the lights above the backboard would display the word “Goal.” Like Wooden, Shake was an exponent of fire-wagon basketball, so when they squared off during Wooden’s first season at Central, their teams put on a great show. Unfortunately for Shake, Central prevailed in both regular season meetings, the first time that had happened in thirteen years.