Wooden: A Coach's Life (2 page)

One of the handwritten lessons that Hugh passed to his four sons was what he called his “Two Sets of Threes”:
Never lie, never cheat, never steal. Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.
Here was the chance to walk what he talked. “Through it all, Dad never winced. He laid no blame on the merchant who had sold him the bad serum, didn’t curse the weather, and had no hatred toward the banker,” John would write decades later. “As instructive as it was to hear him recite the two sets of threes, seeing him abide by them as he lost the farm had a most powerful effect on me. That’s where I came to see that what you do is more important than what you say you’ll do.”

Hugh’s response was emblematic of the world in which John Wooden was raised. This was Depression-era Indiana, a time and place that valued masculine self-sufficiency. Feelings were demonstrated, not articulated. If Hugh ever embraced his sons or told them “I love you,” John rarely spoke or wrote of it. Likewise, Wooden’s parents were not physically affectionate with each other in front of their children. Johnny knew they were in love by the way they treated each other. They had married young—Hugh was twenty, Roxie was sixteen. John was their third child, born October 14, 1910, in Martinsville. (For most of his life, John claimed the town of Hall, Indiana, as his birthplace, but shortly before he died, a group of local researchers discovered he had been mistaken all those years.) When Johnny was born, Hugh was working as a buttermaker at a creamery in Martinsville. Three years later, the family moved to Hall, thirteen miles away, where Hugh worked on a small farm owned by a man named Cassius Ludlow. From there they moved to Monrovia, where he took a position as a rural mail carrier. Some of Johnny’s favorite childhood memories involved riding with his dad on his horse-drawn carriage and helping him wash the buggy in a stream until it sparkled. When Johnny was six years old, his maternal grandfather passed away, leaving to his daughter the farm in Centerton. After the family lost that farm, nine years later they moved back to Martinsville, where Hugh and Roxie stayed for good.

By that time, the family had endured hardship far more painful than losing the farm. Johnny’s older sister, Cordelia, died of diphtheria on January 5, 1913, at the age of three years and nine months. “Little Cordelia, as she was familiarly known, was a loving, bright and obedient child,” read her obituary in the
Martinsville Democrat
. “She was greatly loved by all who knew her. Her last sickness was of short duration. She was confined to her bed with diphtheria which developed into pneumonia and paralysis of the heart. Her suffering was great, although she bore it with the patience of a lamb, always ready to take her medicine and do as she was told. She leaves a loving father, mother, two dear little brothers, four grandparents, and a host of relatives and friends to mourn their loss.”

Three and a half months later, Roxie gave birth to another baby girl, who died during delivery. One can only imagine the wrenching anguish Roxie must have felt as she returned to the unremarkable cemetery in Centerton to bury her second daughter in four months. The plot would be marked with a gravestone that read, “INFANT.”

The death of his sisters insured that John would grow up in a male-dominated household. In his later life, he wrote and spoke often about his father, but he seldom mentioned his mother. When he did, it was often in passing. “I think the person probably who had the most influence on me throughout were my mother and father, particularly my father,” he said in one of his typical locutions. If Hugh was omnipresent in John’s life story, Roxie was the quiet, sad shadow in the background. She was the skilled seamstress who stitched socks to create makeshift basketballs for her sons. The diligent maid who handwashed their clothes, mopped their floors, cooked their meals. The poor gal who walked on feet that were deformed from all those years of wearing shoes that didn’t fit. “She was probably depressed,” said Andy Hill, who played for Wooden at UCLA from 1970 to 1972 and became extremely close to him during the final decade of his life. “But in those days they didn’t call it that. You just sucked it up.” Wooden’s daughter, Nan, added, “Daddy said her heart was broken.”

Though the family didn’t have much money, Hugh would sometimes take Roxie into Martinsville and splurge for dinner at Riley’s Café. John often cited Hugh as an exemplar of the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh’s credo that “the best thing a man can do for his children is love their mother.” But without any sisters around, Roxie was the only feminine presence in Johnny’s life, and she was not a strong one. That caused him to be intensely shy around girls. “John did not have an active social life as a kid,” his younger brother, Danny, said. “He was concentrating on his school work and working and being with his family.”

Hugh also embodied another of John’s favorite credos: “There is nothing stronger than gentleness.” Exhibit A was Hugh’s interactions with animals. The Woodens had two mules on their farm, Jack and Kate, but Hugh, who, John said, was strong enough to bend a thick iron bar with his bare hands, refused to whip them. John loved to tell the story of the day he and his father came upon a man who was trying to retrieve two horses from a gravel pit. “The man was whipping them,” John said. “My dad said, ‘Let me take them.’ The horses were frothing at the mouth. My dad just said to them, ‘Get on your feet; let’s go.’ He gave one of the horses a light tap and then pulled them together. Somehow I never forgot that.” John said his father had the same effect on other animals. “Dogs that would scare me, he’d pet ’em and they would wag their tails.”

There was, however, one incident where Hugh was not so gentle. Johnny and his older brother, Maurice had been fooling around in a barn when Maurice grabbed a pitchfork and flipped a pile of manure at Johnny’s face. Johnny lunged at Maurice in anger and cursed at him. Hugh had been standing nearby, but instead of reproaching Maurice for instigating the fight, he came down on Johnny for his foul language. Profanity was forbidden in the Wooden household—Hugh was a devout Christian, and John always claimed he never once heard him swear—and Hugh wanted to make sure Johnny understood the severity of his transgression. He whipped his boy with a switch.

It is odd that a man would refuse to beat an animal yet be willing to use a switch on his own son, but John didn’t see the inconsistency. “It was the only time I remember him using it,” he said of the switch. At any rate, Johnny learned his lesson. From then on, he, too, stayed away from profanity.

Above all else, Hugh imbued his sons with a core philosophy that would guide Johnny throughout his childhood, his marriage, and especially his playing and coaching careers. It was a gospel that would come to define John more than any other. “Dad tried to get across to us never try to be better than someone else. Learn from others and never cease trying to be the best you can be at whatever you’re doing,” he said. “Maybe that won’t be better than someone else, but that’s no problem. It will be better than somebody else, probably, but somebody else is going to be better than that. Don’t worry about that. If you get yourself too engrossed in things over which you have no control, it’s going to adversely affect the things over which you have control.”

“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.