Remembering Wooden as a Hoosier daddy

JOSEPH N. BELL

In a world that sometimes seems bounded by suicide bombers abroad and

Greg Haidl at home, it is wonderfully refreshing to start the new

year with Pat McLaughlin and John Wooden. McLaughlin is a third-grade

teacher at Mariners Elementary School in Newport Beach, and John

Wooden is probably the best basketball coach in human history. As

Jeff Benson reported in the Pilot, they connected on Tuesday at

Mariners, and 700 kids and a lot of us grown-ups -- chronologically

speaking -- who were there are the better for it.

All this came about because McLaughlin -- with the strong support

of Wooden -- had created a school program built around Wooden’s new

book, “Inches and Miles: the Journey To Success,” in which he adapted

his famous 15-block Pyramid of Success to reach kids smaller than

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. McLaughlin’s program has been

taught, a block at a time, to the entire Mariners student body, and

John Wooden -- in person -- represented Block No. 15, “Competitive Greatness.”

I came to listen, not so much because I need help -- I’m far

beyond even John Wooden’s reach -- but because my Indiana citizenship

would have been revoked if I had passed up this opportunity to see a

fellow Hoosier thus honored.

Californians tend to think that John Wooden was born and raised on

the UCLA campus and moved into the athletic department when he was

deemed ready to lead the Bruins to a passel of national

championships. At least 700 California kids now know that he was

born, raised, educated and learned his trade in Indiana, where

winning the state high school basketball championship defers only to

winning World War II in importance. The only reason Coach Wooden got

to UCLA at all was because a heavy snowstorm prevented the University

of Minnesota from reaching him with an offer he would have accepted,

so he ended up at UCLA.

All of us who heard him Tuesday got a strong sense of how he must

have conducted basketball practice. He didn’t talk down to the kids

(kindergarten to sixth grade) ever, nor did he patronize them. Once,

when a boy raised his hand and was called on to answer a question,

then went blank, Coach Wooden said, not unkindly: “What happened? Did

the pressure get to you?”

Wooden, who recently turned 95, gave all of us old folks new hope

for immortality if we can only master his pyramid blocks. He arrived

without a retinue, walked with the support of just a cane, climbed

some steps to the stage, and communed from a straight-back wooden

chair for about an hour with the kids. The first half was devoted to

a run through the book -- which uses animals to illustrate the

behavior points -- and the last half for questions from the audience.

There was a sea of hands throughout, just as many at the end as

the beginning of the question session. That gave him a chance to tell

some coaching stories. Like the day Wooden told his All-American

center, Walton, that he would have to cut his trailing locks if he

wanted to continue playing for UCLA. Walton responded that his coach

had no right to tell him how to wear his hair. And Coach Wooden said:

“You’re absolutely right. But I do have the right to decide who is

going to play, and we will miss you.” So Walton cut his hair.

John Wooden was as unselfish with his time at Mariners as Pat

McLaughlin was last summer in creating the program that brought Coach

Wooden to Newport Beach. She bought Wooden’s children’s book because

she has admired him since she was a student at UCLA and because she

thought she might be able to use it with her third-grade students. So

she worked up a teaching program and e-mailed it to Wooden’s website

requesting his approval, was invited to his home to discuss it and

ended up with a new friend and permission to use the artwork from his

book.

When McLaughlin told her fellow teachers, they enthusiastically

urged that the program be expanded to the whole school -- “It’s not

often,” McLaughlin said, “when all of our teachers can agree on

something” -- so she spent her summer creating a workbook that

embodied the 15 pyramid points, with space under each point to record

examples of how that quality had been put to use. Examples from home

were also encouraged, which suggested subliminally to parents that

they had better shape up.

A week was devoted to each quality, and on the 15th week, the top

of the pyramid, John Wooden, himself, was the piece de resistance. I

asked McLaughlin if she thinks her program might spread to other

schools, and she said: “As far as I know, it will end here. Expanding

it isn’t in my mind right now. But John Wooden has told me that if

the publishers decide to take the idea further, I would be used as a

consultant.”

I hung around after the assembly was over because I wanted to tell

Coach Wooden that I must have been the only person in his audience --

and maybe the only one in Orange County -- who remembers hearing

about Johnny Wooden’s last high school game. Wooden’s Martinsville

High School team made it to the championship game of three

consecutive state tournaments, losing in 1926 and winning the state

title in 1927. In 1928, Martinsville was leading Muncie by one point

with only seconds to play when Wooden missed an easy basket. The

Muncie center retrieved the ball and threw it up from behind the

center line into a tremendous arc that dropped cleanly through the

basket . My brother was captain of the Ft. Wayne South Side team that

year, and I was 7 years old and already deeply immersed in the state

basketball tournament.

I never got a chance at Mariners to review this history with Coach

Wooden. After he finished speaking, the line of students and parents

waiting to get their books signed was so long it threatened to

conflict with the start of the USC-Oklahoma game, so I went home. The

chance to meet Pat McLaughlin and see where her hard work and

enthusiasm had led and to pay my Indiana respects to John Wooden was

enough.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.