Wooden: A Coach's Life (84 page)

In the fall of 2007, Andy Hill threw a party in honor of Wooden’s ninety-seventh birthday. Some fifty former players showed up, including Abdul-Jabbar, who looked more relaxed that night than anyone had ever seen him. Wooden was the life of the party. “It was like Coach shape-shifted that night. He was on fire,” Hill said. “I think everybody was sufficiently aware that the dude’s ninety-seven. This could be the last time.”

Mike Lynn, the power forward on those Lew Alcindor championship teams, had flown in from his home in Vermont to attend that party. Lynn had been raised in a religious household—his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister—but he lost his enthusiasm when he discovered Charles Darwin in the seventh grade. Yet when Kenny Washington asked Lynn if he wanted to join him and Wooden at church the following morning, Lynn said yes. “It just seemed like something I couldn’t pass up,” he said. “Maybe it was me trying to say to him that I was willing to meet him at least halfway.”

Going to church with Wooden was Lynn’s way of acknowledging what all the others could now see. Their coach had stood the test of time, for a long time, living out the credo that had been posted on his office wall:
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts
. After all these years, he was still a student of life, still improving a little bit each day. A man of actions, not statements. “I remember sitting in his den thinking that he always said the most important things in life were faith and family,” Sidney Wicks said. “So I’m looking around and I’m thinking, it’s all here. Not much to the place, pretty small. He lived simply. He was living what he always said.”

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When his former players weren’t around, Wooden relied on the kindness, and company, of strangers. Doug Erickson was one of them. After graduating from San Jose State University in 1992, Erickson landed an administrative job in the UCLA basketball office. He was naturally curious about Wooden, so he wrote Wooden a letter introducing himself and asking if they could get together sometime. Two days later, Wooden called and invited Erickson over. “It just didn’t seem like he was that busy,” Erickson said. “He had more time back then.”

Wooden told Erickson he could come back anytime. He did, often. When Steve Lavin succeeded Jim Harrick as UCLA’s head coach in 1996, he kept Erickson on staff and asked him to check in on Wooden several days a week. Wooden became so comfortable around Erickson that he thought nothing of opening his door to him while wearing his Mickey Mouse pajamas. Erickson estimated that over the years, he brought some five hundred people to Wooden’s condo. “He had more energy than we did,” Erickson said. “We’d keep him up until ten at night. He got stronger as the night went on.”

In all their time together, Wooden got cross with Erickson just once. They were watching
Monday Night Football
when Wooden made some predictions about what was going to happen next. “Coach,” Erickson said, “if you’re right, you really will be the Wizard of Westwood.”

“Don’t ever call me that,” Wooden snapped. “That’s a moniker I’ve never liked.”

Erickson was crushed. “I went to the bathroom so I could get myself together,” he said. “I was like, man, Coach just lit me up.”

Sometimes, the strangers who spent time with Wooden were just that—strangers. Jeff Weiss was among the countless outsiders who earned an audience with Wooden through sheer persistence. A basketball coach at Lawrence Woodmere Academy on Long Island, Weiss read several of Wooden’s books, and in 2004, he wrote a letter to the UCLA athletics office asking if someone could forward his information to Wooden. It took several more letters and phone calls, but Weiss finally received a handwritten note from Wooden that included his phone number and an invitation to visit.

Over the next few weeks, Weiss dialed the number several times. Each time, he left a message on Wooden’s answering machine. (He kept assuring Wooden that he wasn’t some psycho stalker.) Finally, as Weiss was leaving yet another message, Wooden picked up. He asked Weiss when he wanted to visit. “As soon as you tell me I can,” Weiss replied. They made an appointment for the following week.

In advance of the visit, Weiss assembled a notebook filled with information and photographs from Wooden’s early days, including some of the high school teams he coached and played for. When he showed up at Wooden’s condominium, he was surprised to find Wooden alone. It seemed risky for a ninety-six-year-old man to invite a stranger into his apartment. “I couldn’t believe he was allowing me to do this,” Weiss said. “I thought it was insane.”

Wooden invited Weiss to sit with him in his den. After about a half hour of small talk, Weiss pulled out the notebook. “He loved it,” Weiss said. “He knew everything about every guy in the pictures. For the next three or four hours, he would point to a guy and say, ‘Oh, I remember this guy. He was a great player. He couldn’t go left, couldn’t rebound.’ His memory was off the charts.” After about five hours, Weiss suggested that he should go, but Wooden invited him to stay for dinner so they could watch a Yankees–Red Sox game together. After he got home, Weiss sent Wooden a thank-you note and a picture for him to sign, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Wooden obliged the request and dropped it in the mail.

For Jeff Weiss, it was the experience of a lifetime. For John Wooden, it was another day in the life. He was so gentlemanly, so avuncular, that people whom he had never met felt as if they knew him. Once, when Wooden was sitting in his usual seat at a UCLA game, his granddaughter Cathleen got up to go to the bathroom. She returned to see a man sitting in her seat and talking to Wooden, so she shifted one seat down. Wooden chatted with the man for the rest of the game. Afterward, Cathleen asked Wooden who the man was. He said he had no idea.

Wooden prided himself on never turning down a request for an autograph. “I wouldn’t say he loved it,” Erickson said. “He just didn’t want to disappoint anyone.” That was especially problematic at UCLA games, where Wooden signed and posed for pictures during time-outs and halftimes. “I won’t say that I’m not flattered by things of that sort, but I’m not comfortable with it,” Wooden said. Nan was his primary protector, just as her mother had been. If they were eating somewhere and a stranger approached by saying, “I’m sorry to bother you,” Nan, like Nell, would interject with a sharp, “Then don’t.” When Nan learned that Erickson was bringing Wooden mail by the cartload so he could sign and return each item personally, she put a stop to it. “You can’t believe all the people who want to make money off his name,” she said. “I get so mad at all the mail he gets. He gets big boxes of basketballs people expect him to sign. I can’t believe people are that stupid.”

The network of UCLA employees that supported Wooden stretched well beyond the former players. There was Marc Dellins, the sports information director who once interviewed Wooden alone in his hotel room during the 1975 Final Four, back when Dellins was a student reporter at the
Daily Bruin
. One day in 2009, Dellins called Wooden because he had heard a rumor that Wooden had died. “Not yet, but I’m well on my way,” Wooden said. Dellins called back one more time just to make sure.

Dellins’s longtime assistant, Bill Bennett, was the primary point of contact for Wooden in the UCLA athletics office, the designated keeper of the flame. Bennett was a gentle soul who was renowned for wearing canvas high-tops with his suits. He and Wooden shared the same birthday. Wooden was smitten with Bennett’s wife, Joanne.

Then there was Tony Spino, the mercurial, emotional, opinionated, hardheaded athletics trainer who became as devoted to the old man as any of his blood kin. Spino first got to know Wooden when he was a trainer for the UCLA freshman teams in the 1970s. After Wooden retired, Spino worked briefly for the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks before returning to Westwood in 1981. For years, Spino would drive to Wooden’s condo a few mornings a week to massage him and help him exercise before taking him to breakfast. Wooden once compared Spino to Sam Gilbert because “you can’t tell him anything. He’s going to do what he wants to do.” The two of them had a wonderful rapport. “Tony’s a New York Italian. They enjoyed going back and forth at each other,” Doug Erickson said. “After being together so long, Tony was not afraid to tell him what he needed to do.”

One day in February 2008, Spino opened Wooden’s front door and found the coach facedown on the hallway floor, shivering from shock. He had fallen at around 10:00 p.m. the night before and had broken his left wrist and collarbone. Because no one was staying with him that night, and because he was too stubborn to wear a wireless device that could be activated in just such an emergency, Wooden had no choice but to lie on the floor all night long and wait for Spino to show up. Asked later how he spent those eight hours, Wooden replied, “Sometimes I’m crying. Sometimes I’m laughing.”

Spino scooped Wooden into his arms and carried him to bed. He called for an ambulance, wrapped Wooden in a blanket, and hugged him in an effort to warm him up. After Wooden finished recuperating, his family and close friends devised a schedule so that someone would be sleeping in the condominium every night. Wooden fought them at first, but for once, he had to let his stubbornness give way.

After that incident, UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero assigned Spino to be Wooden’s full-time caretaker. Spino spent more time with the coach than with his own wife and children. He put a baby monitor beside Wooden’s bed, talked to Wooden as he fell asleep, and then slept in a separate bedroom.

Ironically, with all of these men bidding for Wooden’s time, the person with whom Wooden became closest was a female gymnastics coach. Her name was Valorie Kondos Field, a 1987 UCLA graduate and former ballet dancer who took over UCLA’s gymnastics program in 1991. Valorie grew curious about Wooden after marrying Bob Field, an associate athletic director who had gotten to know Wooden while Bob was a UCLA assistant football coach. She suggested that they invite Wooden over for dinner, but Bob didn’t want to because he feared too many people were already bugging him. “The worst he can do is say no,” she said. Wooden accepted the invitation, and from that day forward, he dined at the Fields’ house several times a year.

Bob and Valorie regularly drove Wooden and Nan to UCLA football games. If they had trouble finding a parking space, Valorie would drive up to a security guard, tell Wooden to sit up straight and smile, and roll down the window so the guard could see who her passenger was. “I could have parked on the field if I wanted to,” she said. Valorie frequently brought her gymnasts to visit Wooden at his condo. “He just loved being with all those pretty young girls. They would sit around him and ask questions and he would tell stories,” Keith Erickson said. “Valorie was his favorite person on the entire campus.”

Wooden, in turn, became a regular at UCLA gymnastics meets. He rarely missed a competition, although he did come close one time when Nan and Kenny Washington showed up ten minutes late to pick him up. He was ninety-five years old, but he was tired of waiting. So he drove himself. Nan was so furious that when she and Washington arrived, she walked right by her dad in a huff and sat on the other side of the bleachers. When it was over, she huddled up with the Fields to figure out how Wooden was getting back. “Never mind,” he told them. “I got myself here, I can get myself home.”

Valorie and Wooden became so close that she was occasionally invited to take part in forums alongside the likes of Keith Erickson, Rafer Johnson, and Andy Hill. She loved hearing stories about how tough and cold he used to be. “I knew him as the sweet, kind, older man with the twinkling eyes. I didn’t know him as a feisty coach,” she said. “Mike Warren said to me, ‘You’ve experienced a side of him we rarely got to see.’”

Their more poignant interactions occurred when they were alone. On a day when the UCLA football team was playing on the road, Valorie invited herself over to watch the game with Wooden at his place. During halftime, he looked at her and said, “You know, Nellie and I made love every day.” Valorie said, “I stopped and thought, am I gonna get the sex talk from Coach Wooden?” Wooden explained that not a day went by when he and Nell didn’t kiss, or hold hands, or say they loved each other. “That was his definition of making love,” Valorie said. “I told him I understand.” Later, Wooden fixed her a sandwich and handed her a bottle of Ensure. “Drink this,” he said. “They tell me it’s good for me.”

He had stayed alive and sharp for so long, it appeared he was defying science. Eventually, alas, he started losing the battle. In July 2009, the
Sporting News
assembled an expert panel to vote on the top fifty coaches in the history of American sports. Wooden finished first, ahead of Vince Lombardi, Bear Bryant, Phil Jackson, and Don Shula. The magazine honored Wooden with a luncheon at one of his favorite restaurants in Sherman Oaks. He was ninety-eight years old, and as he addressed the room, the listeners strained to hear him, and at one point, they sat through an extended, uncomfortable silence while he tried to gather his thoughts. After Wooden followed that by stumbling through a one-on-one interview with ESPN, Nan made clear that there were to be no more public appearances. “Most of the time, he’s not who he was,” Nan said. “As a family, we want people to remember him how he has always been.”

*   *   *

Andy Hill wanted to throw Wooden a ninety-ninth birthday party at his house that October, but Nan said it would be too much for him. “Wouldn’t it be great,” Hill told her, “if he blew out the candles in front of everyone and just dropped dead right into the cake. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” Nan did not think it would be amazing. So instead, Wooden spent his birthday having dinner with his family at a local restaurant. In early 2010, Wooden went to Pauley Pavilion to help the school celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the 1970 championship team, though he was unable to leave his seat during the halftime ceremony. After the game, the school held a party where each member of the team was invited to speak—including Bill Seibert, who had single-handedly killed the postseason banquet. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to speak at this place again,” Seibert cracked when he came to the microphone. The room broke up.