Wooden: A Coach's Life (8 page)

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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.”

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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 Foundation 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.”

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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.

Later that summer, Wooden received an even more lucrative offer from a barnstorming team called the New York Celtics, which had played in the American Basketball League before the ABL folded in 1931. The Celtics were willing to pay Wooden $5,000 for just one year. That was a lot of money for anybody during the Great Depression, much less someone who grew up as poor as Wooden did. However, when Wooden approached Lambert for his blessing, he was subjected to another Socratic grilling. “What did you come to college for?” Lambert asked.

To get an education, Wooden replied.

“Do you think you got it?”

Yes.

“Would you like to use it?”

Yes.

“So how would this be using it?”

Wooden turned the Celtics down. “He told me without telling me,” he said of Lambert. “That was his way with so many things.”

It’s not that Wooden couldn’t have used the money. Lord knows, he didn’t have much. But he was bred to believe that there was something inherently unclean about using Naismith’s game as a tool of avarice. That’s not why the game was conceived, and it’s not how Wooden was raised. Both his father and his coach believed the best path to a well-lived life was to get an education and use it. Wooden may have been itching to play ball and earn some dough, but the last thing he wanted to do was let either man down.

The best way for Johnny to honor both Hugh and Piggy was to become an English teacher and basketball coach. That, however, put Wooden in conflict with another cherished male role model, Dr. Creek, who suggested to Wooden that he remain at Purdue to study as a fellow in the English department. Lambert told Wooden that he could coach Purdue’s freshman basketball team as well, but Creek was against that idea. “He wasn’t much for athletics at all. He thought my thinking about going into teaching to become a coach was kind of foolish,” Wooden said. Stuck between two mentors whom he greatly admired, Wooden preferred not to make the choice. He told Dr. Creek no thanks.