Wooden: A Coach's Life (5 page)

The couple grew even closer during Johnny’s senior year—so close, in fact, that Curtis worried that Johnny would give up the chance to play basketball in college so he could stay in Martinsville and marry Nellie. Curtis warned Nellie’s mother that she did not want her daughter to marry someone who would never make more than twenty-five dollars a week. Said Nell, “Mother thought to herself, if he ever makes twenty-five dollars a week, I’ll be surprised.” They were quite the item. The caption next to Wooden’s senior picture in the
Artesian
that spring described him as “another person who lived in Centerton, but then it’s not necessary to introduce ‘John Bob,’ especially to Nellie.”

Though their personalities could not have been more different, they were soul mates in all the important ways. Wooden understood, at least subconsciously, that if he ended up with someone who was just like him, he would only retreat further into his shell, not quite distrusting the world but not fully embracing it, either. He needed a life partner who would challenge him. Someone who could ignite his passions, fight his battles, prod him, protect him, maybe even get him to dance once in a while. As a coach, Wooden would often tell his players that the two most important words in the English language were
love
and
balance
. Nellie Riley was the one person who gave him both.

*   *   *

Wooden was dedicated to his studies, so there was little doubt that he was going to college somewhere. The only question was whether his senior season would end with the Artesians claiming their second consecutive state championship.

The interest in the 1928 tournament was at an all-time high. The come-one, come-all field included a record 740 teams, and the finals would be played at Butler University’s brand-new field house in Indianapolis. The arena had cost the school $1 million to build and had a capacity of fifteen thousand. The university originally planned to build a more modest venue, but the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) convinced it to erect a bigger place so it could stage the state high school finals there. That was Indiana in 1928: basketball was a bigger deal to high schools than to colleges.

Once again, Martinsville won its sectional and regional tournaments to earn a berth in the sixteen-team pool that assembled in Indianapolis. By the time the big weekend arrived, Wooden was a statewide celebrity. A writer in Indianapolis dubbed him “the tumbling artist from Martinsville,” adding that Wooden “is fast, he can dribble like a streak, he can guard, he can shoot long, he can twist ’em in as he flies under the basket.”

After beating Rochester in the Friday night quarterfinal, Martinsville beat Washington on Saturday morning and Frankfort in the afternoon to earn a date with Muncie Central on Saturday night. The rematch of the previous year’s finalists drew unprecedented attention. At WFBM radio in Indianapolis, a Dictaphone was set up in the studio to record the game announcers. It was just the second time a sporting event was being recorded by the station. (The first was the previous year’s heavyweight championship boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.) Back in Martinsville, a local telephone company manager provided a connection to the field house and set up loudspeakers at the offices of the
Daily Reporter.
Fans could also go to the Maxine Theater and follow the action on the electric scoreboard. Outside the Butler Fieldhouse, seven ticket scalpers were arrested for trying to sell tickets for as much as twenty-five dollars apiece. Inside, there was not a seat to be had.

The game was highly competitive, but it was also deflated by Curtis’s somnambulant methods. The teams traded baskets in the early going and locked into a 4–4 tie. The next day’s article in the
Indianapolis Star
generously characterized what ensued as “a spectacular defensive battle.” The piece went on: “The Bearcats, whenever an opportunity was presented, attempted to use a fast-breaking attack but had limited success with this style of play.” Martinsville led 9–8 at the half.

The Artesians scored three free throws after intermission to build a 4-point lead, but when that advantage was cut to 2 following a Muncie bucket, Curtis slammed on the brakes. During one five-minute stretch, both teams went scoreless. Heading into the final minute, Martinsville had a 12–11 lead and possession of the ball.

As the seconds ticked away, Charlie Secrist, the Muncie center, realized that Martinsville could win by stalling, so he called another time-out, knowing that his team would be assessed a technical foul because it didn’t have any time-outs remaining. It was a clever strategy, because it meant that Muncie would have a chance to get the ball back via a center jump following Martinsville’s free throw.

Wooden recognized this immediately. He told Curtis that he wanted to refuse the free throw and instead retain possession on an out-of-bounds play, an option that the rules allowed. Curtis, however, overruled Wooden and opted to shoot the technical. The strategy wasn’t bad. He did, after all, have one of the finest free throw shooters in the state right there on his team.

Wooden stepped to the line with a chance to salt away the win. He flung the ball using his patented, two-handed, underhanded motion. It bounced off the rim.

With Martinsville still clinging to a 1-point lead, the teams returned to midcourt for the center jump. Muncie’s plan was for Secrist, the tallest man on the floor, to tip the ball to himself (which was allowed under the rules) and then hurl it toward the basket while his teammates rushed to get the rebound. The play worked exactly as planned—almost. Secrist controlled the tip, waited a beat for his teammates to prepare for the rebound, and then he flung the ball underhanded toward the hoop. “It was the highest-arching shot I have ever seen,” Wooden recalled. The ball sailed through the rafters, drifted downward … and splashed through “almost without disturbing the net,” according to the
Star
. It was a total fluke, but it counted. The Muncie fans went wild as their Bearcats now owned a 13–12 lead.

The Artesians had about thirty seconds left to reverse their fortunes. This time, they won the center jump. Curtis knew the Muncie defenders would overplay Wooden, so he used his star as a decoy. Wooden dribbled around the backcourt and fired a pass to his center, George Eubank. The big man had a clear shot at the basket with no one around him, but he put too much spin on the ball and it slipped off the rim. As the official scorer fired his pistol to signal the end of the game, the Muncie fans rushed onto the court in what the Associated Press characterized as “an explosion of gaiety rivaling the Armistice signing.” The Martinsville players, meanwhile, were inconsolable. “We just sat on the floor and cried,” Sally Suddith said. “We were so close to two in a row.”

Even in defeat, the Artesians won plaudits from their hometown paper. “Both Teams Played High Class Basketball from Whistle to Crack of Pistol,” read one headline in the
Daily Reporter
. The accompanying article declared the game as “the greatest exhibition of real basketball ever staged in a state tourney.” Even the writer from the
Muncie Press
called Wooden “flashy, hard hitting and sure shooting.” Over the years, Wooden would often say that far more people told him they had attended that game than could fit inside the field house. Many of those people got their facts wrong, claiming that the final gun had gone off while Secrist’s shot was airborne. They forgot that Martinsville still had one final possession. “They’ll insist to me, ‘I was there,’” Wooden said. “Well, I was there, too.”

Wooden proffered a recollection of his own from that fateful evening in Indianapolis: he claimed to be the only one among his teammates who didn’t cry. “I have never felt badly about that missed free throw,” he said. Was that really true? Or did he just
want
it be true? It’s difficult to imagine that a teenager who had just lost in such devastating fashion left the gym with dry eyes, much less without even feeling bad about it. Regardless, his point was a good one. Yes, Wooden had missed the pivotal free throw, but it wasn’t for a lack of hard work or meticulous preparation. The ball just didn’t go in. Secrist’s did. In the end, Wooden knew he had given it his best shot, and that should have been enough.

*   *   *

As it turned out, the biggest impediment to Wooden’s pursuit of higher education wasn’t Nellie. It was baseball, his first love.

During the summer following his graduation from Martinsville High, Wooden spent several weeks in the town of Anderson working as a machine buffer. While he was there, he played shortstop for the town’s baseball team and caught the eye of Donnie Bush, the veteran major league shortstop, who at the time was managing a minor league team in Indianapolis. Bush offered Wooden a pro contract. For a young man who never had much money, it was extremely tempting. In the end, though, Johnny turned it down, trusting his father’s advice that the best way to achieve financial security was through education, not sports.

Needless to say, there were plenty of colleges interested in Wooden. The place that made the most sense was Indiana University. The Hoosiers’ basketball coach, Everett Dean, had built one of the finest programs in the nation, and Bloomington was only twenty miles south of Martinsville. Butler’s Tony Hinkle and Notre Dame’s George Keogan also wanted Wooden to come play for them, as did the coaches at Illinois, Kansas, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.

Wooden, however, was not going to let basketball dictate his decision. He aspired to be a civil engineer, and one of the few state universities that had a civil engineering program was Purdue. That school also had an excellent basketball team, and though Wooden had never visited the campus, several of his friends who were Purdue students recommended that he go there. As the summer of 1928 concluded, he decided to head for West Lafayette.

And what about the fiery little Irish girl with the turned-up nose? She would wait for him, of course. When Wooden left for college, Nellie remained behind in Martinsville, where she finished her senior year of high school and then went to work at the Home Lawn Sanitarium. Before he departed, he and Nellie had yet another awkward conversation about dating. He told her—again—that he preferred she not go out on dates but said he trusted her. Regardless, he promised he would not date any girls at Purdue. They also made a pact they would not have sex, not even with each other, until his four years at college were up. Upon his graduation, he would return to Martinsville, and together they would find a priest and get married. There was no proposal, no engagement ring, no getting down on one knee. They simply decided it would be so. Johnny Wooden possessed many virtues, but a flair for romance wasn’t one of them.

4

Piggy

The world of college athletics that Johnny Wooden entered in the fall of 1928 was a far cry from the one that exists today. Instead of being coddled, canonized, and catered to, college athletes in Wooden’s day were real-life amateurs who had to pay their own way. Purdue’s basketball coach, Ward “Piggy” Lambert, helped his players get jobs to cover their $70-per-semester tuition costs, but that was pretty much the extent of his assistance. Wooden made ends meet by waiting on tables and cleaning dishes at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house, where some of his friends from Martinsville were brothers.

Not surprisingly, Wooden’s commitment to Beta’s social life did not extend beyond his waiter duties. “I’m not a good fraternity man,” he later said. “Even though I lived there, I lived there for my meals. I wasn’t going to go through with the hazing and things of that sort. I was at odds with a lot of the people in the fraternity house because of my feelings about that.” For Wooden, a wild night on the town was eating ice cream at the Purdue creamery or shooting pool at a local joint called Deac’s. Wooden did imbibe some home brew on one occasion, but the beer made him so ill that he swore off alcohol for life.

Wooden made two significant discoveries early in his freshman year. The first was Purdue’s policy to waive tuition costs for students who made the dean’s list. Wooden would have made dean’s list anyway, but that was a nice fringe benefit. At the same time, Wooden was disheartened to learn that in order to get his degree in civil engineering, he would be required to attend a special camp during the summers. That would be impossible because his family depended on the money he made in the summertime. Had he known of the requirement, Wooden said later, “I would have gone to Indiana. It would have been closer to Nellie, and I liked their basketball.” But he was stuck at Purdue.

Around that time, Wooden developed a rapport with Dr. Herbert Creek, the head of Purdue’s English department and a respected expert on Shakespeare. Dr. Creek reignited Wooden’s love for the written word, instilled in him by his father. With civil engineering no longer a viable option, Wooden decided to major in English.

Waiting tables didn’t cover all of Wooden’s living costs, and his parents had no money to give him. So just as he had done in Martinsville, Johnny found outside work. “When you don’t have much,” he said, “you do.” He helped the football team’s trainer tape ankles for twenty-five cents an hour. He painted the stadium on weekends. He enlisted local high school players to sell programs before football games, splitting the revenue with his young salesmen and pocketing some additional money on advertising. “I’d do pretty well on the homecoming game,” Wooden said. “I’d get over to the hotel the night before where most of the people come to homecoming would stay, and they’d be happy and celebrating despite the fact that it was the days of Prohibition.”

Wooden’s drive to earn extra money nearly cost him his college basketball career. At the end of his freshman year, he was invited to play an exhibition game for a semiprofessional team from South Bend that was competing in an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) tournament. Wooden was offered a small stipend, even though accepting it would violate the rules governing amateur competition. One of the other players on the team was a Purdue football player named Joe Dellinger, who was allowed to play because he had already completed his senior season. Dellinger warned Wooden that he was taking a bad risk, but Wooden wouldn’t listen. “I was really scared to think what Piggy Lambert would do to me, an upperclassman, if Wooden got in trouble,” Dellinger said. “Lambert was just a little guy, about 125 to 130 pounds, but he was feisty and I was scared to death of him.”