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would have been revoked if I had passed up this opportunity to see a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