In Honor of Coach John Wooden, Jim Murray’s 1975 Column

With the passing of legendary UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, I’m going to step outside our usual collection of music and environmental stories to give you Jim Murray’s April 4, 1975 column on the Coach.  A fitting eulogy to a legendary man.  RIP Coach, you will always be the best.  May the four winds blow you safely home!

APRIL 4, 1975, SPORTS
Copyright 1975/THE TIMES MIRROR COMPANY

JIM MURRAY

He Dared Stand Alone

Don’t bang the drums slowly. Don’t muffle the caissons, or lead a riderless horse. Strike up the band. Let the trumpets roll. Never mind the 21-gun salute, just bring a plate of fudge. Raise your glasses in a toast if you must – but fill them with malted milk.

John Wooden is not going out as a great general or field leader. This is not Old Blood and Guts or Old Hickory, this is Mr. Chips saying goodbye.

John Wooden never wanted to be thought of as a fiery leader. Life to him was a one-room schoolhouse with pictures of George Washington, Christ and a pair of crossed flags. Outside, the pumpkins ripening under a harvest moon. A pedagogue is all he ever wanted to be or remembered as. A simple country teacher.

His precepts were right off a wall motto. His idols were gentle Hoosier poets, not the purple-prose artists of the sports pages. A reserve guard stumbled out of a pregame meeting once to mumble in some shock to a frat brother, “Our game plan is by Edgar A. Guest, and our front line seems to be made up of Faith, Hope and Charity.”
John Wooden, someone once said, was “the only basketball coach from the Old Testament – “St. John,” who walked to work across Santa Monica Bay.

His lifestyle was embodied in a cornerstone of philosophy which he called the “Pyramid of Success,” which looked like a collection of Horatio Alger titles. They were real easy to follow – if you lived in a convent.
His basketball was 20th century, but his life lessons were B.C. “Dare to be Daniel! Dare to stand alone!” He spouted more poems than Lord Byron. Most of his thoughts for the day had a strong odor of new-mown hay about them or sycamores in the candlelight, and sometimes the ghetto kids from New York, more used to subway graffiti than “The Old Oaken Bucket” or “Moonlight Along The Wabash,” wished he’d stick to setting picks.
Critics contend that it was easy to put your faith in the Bible when your center was between 7 and 8 feet tall and as agile as an acrobat, but that you would have to turn to more recent works when your whole team could come to the games in a single Volkswagen. Wooden went out and won NCAA championships with nothing more than 6’5” centers and the Book of Leviticus.

In the world of modern sport, piety in a coach is as suspect as piety in a faro dealer. The fabric of recruitment is as corrupt as a military junta, and it was hard to believe anyone in it could not sooner or later be found in possession of 30 pieces of silver he couldn’t account for.

Every time John Wooden hinted at retirement in recent years, the scribes – to say nothing of the Pharisees – nodded sagely and said, “Aha! Now comes the NCAA investigation!” So, Wooden would get tight-lipped – and stay on for another two years.

An act like this might have been hard to maintain at a little church school in the middle of the Dakotas. At UCLA, a campus surrounded by Gomorrah by the Sea, it was believed impossible. No one believed the mysteries of zone defense could be equated with Deuteronomy, but Wooden quietly went his winning way with the Bible in one hand and a basketball in the other.

When he came to UCLA, basketball was such a poor relation in intercollegiate sports that the team barely had matching uniforms. It was considered a refuge for guys too little or too timid for football and too slow or too tall for track.
By the time he left, football was becoming the poor relation. One coach fled all the way to Georgia Tech when an alum called him up on the eve of the USC football game and asked him if there was any way he could use his influence to get the old grad basketball tickets.

Mentors are in the shortest supply in college athletics. Baseball is a soloist sport, as is most of track, wrestling, or even net sports. But football and basketball belong to the coach. A Rockne, Howard Jones, an Amos Alonzo Stagg, Adolph Rupp, a Vince Lombardi comes along only once a generation. And so does a John Wooden.

Wooden’s monument may not be a gym, an arena, a plaque, or a fading picture on a wall. It may not even be this assortment of champions or his legacies to the pros. It may be a standard of play which made Saturday’s Louisville-UCLA and Monday’s Kentucky-UCLA games possibly the best pure basketball games ever played at the college level. Wooden went out a winner for the 10th time but the real winner was the game he left behind.
But the campus need not be given over to ribbons of black, or the mournful tread of a dirge. As long as Wooden basketball is played, Wooden will be a UCLA.

Notre Dame didn’t sink to intramural football when Rockne left and, while the UCLA teams may not be co-coached by James Whitcomb Riley, or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with an assist from George Ade anymore, the true believers are like the undergrad who found a coed weeping because coach Wooden had gone off to join the ages. “So what?” he shrugged. “After all, it’s only the three days!”

Reprinted with permission by the Los Angeles Times.

Courtesy of:
Jim Murray Memorial Foundation
www.jimmurrayfoundation.org
E: Murrayscholars@aol.com