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Wooden: A Coach's Life
A provocative and revelatory new biography of the legendary UCLA coach John Wooden, by one of America's top college basketball writers
No college basketball coach has ever dominated the sport like John Wooden. His UCLA teams reached unprecedented heights in the 1960s and '70s capped by a run of ten NCAA championships in twelve seasons and an eighty-eight-game winning streak, records that stand to this day. Wooden also became a renowned motivational speaker and writer, revered for his "Pyramid of Success."
Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports has written the definitive biography of Wooden, an unflinching portrait that draws on archival research and more than two hundred interviews with players, opponents, coaches, and even Wooden himself. Davis shows how hard Wooden strove for success, from his All-American playing days at Purdue through his early years as a high school and college coach to the glory days at UCLA, only to discover that reaching new heights brought new burdens and frustrations. Davis also reveals how at the pinnacle of his career Wooden found himself on questionable ground with alumni, referees, assistants, and even some of his players. His was a life not only of lessons taught, but also of lessons learned.
Woven into the story as well are the players who powered Wooden's championship teams – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Walt Hazzard, and others – many of whom speak frankly about their coach. The portrait that emerges from Davis's remarkable biography is of a man in full, whose life story still resonates today.
No college basketball coach has ever dominated the sport like John Wooden. His UCLA teams reached unprecedented heights in the 1960s and '70s capped by a run of ten NCAA championships in twelve seasons and an eighty-eight-game winning streak, records that stand to this day. Wooden also became a renowned motivational speaker and writer, revered for his "Pyramid of Success."
Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports has written the definitive biography of Wooden, an unflinching portrait that draws on archival research and more than two hundred interviews with players, opponents, coaches, and even Wooden himself. Davis shows how hard Wooden strove for success, from his All-American playing days at Purdue through his early years as a high school and college coach to the glory days at UCLA, only to discover that reaching new heights brought new burdens and frustrations. Davis also reveals how at the pinnacle of his career Wooden found himself on questionable ground with alumni, referees, assistants, and even some of his players. His was a life not only of lessons taught, but also of lessons learned.
Woven into the story as well are the players who powered Wooden's championship teams – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Walt Hazzard, and others – many of whom speak frankly about their coach. The portrait that emerges from Davis's remarkable biography is of a man in full, whose life story still resonates today.
608 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 14, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 reviews
March 15, 2014
Coach Wooden is a hero in our home. My husband, himself a journeyman basketball coach, loved the man. One of the high points of his life was getting to work at Coach Wooden's basketball camps in the summer. We have a packet of saved letters written by Coach in his perfect English teacher's penmanship. Our son memorized A Little Fellow Follows Me in elementary school for a project. Our daughter received a hug or two from the man. Coach and Mrs. Wooden are buried not too far from my husband's parents in Forest Lawn's Hollywood Hills Cemetery and when we go we always leave flowers at their site too. We cried when he died.
This book is the story of how Coach became THE COACH WOODEN of UCLA basketball fame. It. Isn't a glossy, sweet story, but a hard look at the competitive young man from Indiana who tried each day to live up to his father's expectations and in the process became the winningest basketball coach in history. Seth Davis did a lot of research in putting this book together and in fairness to him and to Coach, I think he did a good job. The man who developed the Pyramid of Success and stressed competitive greatness wasn't a huggy, missy kind of fellow. He wasn't his players' friend, he was their Coach. He was their to mold boys into men and the men into players who could win games.
The books is written around Coach's own basketball career and his coming to UCLA and those 10 national championships. The disagreements are there with the UCLA AD, the Sam Gilbert mess, and his times with Bill Walton. I was amazed that he never earned more than 35,000.00 coaching because of UCLA policy that a coach couldn't earn more than a professor. The odd jobs that Coach took to supplement his income are fascinating. I thought it interesting that he 'rode' the refs and other players so much, but then the Coach I knew wasn't the Coach who was still coaching.
Coach Wooden lived 35 years after retiring and that was long enough to build the bridges with his players that should have been built earlier. He became the beloved mentor who quoted poetry and told stories and even gave hugs. Listen to Bill Walton do play by play today and you will hear a man who is who he is because of Coach. Coach never held himself up as perfect. He was a boy from Indiana, a child of the Depression who valued hard work and love of family above all else. He didn't have feet of clay and I didn't find the book unkind to him. If you love basketball and have a liking of history, this is a good read.
This book is the story of how Coach became THE COACH WOODEN of UCLA basketball fame. It. Isn't a glossy, sweet story, but a hard look at the competitive young man from Indiana who tried each day to live up to his father's expectations and in the process became the winningest basketball coach in history. Seth Davis did a lot of research in putting this book together and in fairness to him and to Coach, I think he did a good job. The man who developed the Pyramid of Success and stressed competitive greatness wasn't a huggy, missy kind of fellow. He wasn't his players' friend, he was their Coach. He was their to mold boys into men and the men into players who could win games.
The books is written around Coach's own basketball career and his coming to UCLA and those 10 national championships. The disagreements are there with the UCLA AD, the Sam Gilbert mess, and his times with Bill Walton. I was amazed that he never earned more than 35,000.00 coaching because of UCLA policy that a coach couldn't earn more than a professor. The odd jobs that Coach took to supplement his income are fascinating. I thought it interesting that he 'rode' the refs and other players so much, but then the Coach I knew wasn't the Coach who was still coaching.
Coach Wooden lived 35 years after retiring and that was long enough to build the bridges with his players that should have been built earlier. He became the beloved mentor who quoted poetry and told stories and even gave hugs. Listen to Bill Walton do play by play today and you will hear a man who is who he is because of Coach. Coach never held himself up as perfect. He was a boy from Indiana, a child of the Depression who valued hard work and love of family above all else. He didn't have feet of clay and I didn't find the book unkind to him. If you love basketball and have a liking of history, this is a good read.
May 30, 2021
A wonderful look at not just Coach John Wooden, but the man John Wooden. So many life lessons that we can all benefit from. My favorite comes from John’s father Hugh, his “Two Sets of Threes”: Never lie, never cheat, never steal. Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.
April 1, 2020
500 + pages and I was wanting more. His life from start to finish. A really a good man with a brilliant mind and excellent leadership abilities. It was so interesting to see how he put together so many great teams year after year.
November 19, 2013
Seth Davis provides a thorough look at a somewhat contradictory man. Wooden could be forceful and quiet, determined to win and happier when the team lost. I liked that Davis did not pull any punches while dealing with his revered subject, showing both a willingness to listen to others and a stubbornness that often worked to his detriment.
Free review copy.
Free review copy.
July 13, 2014
How can one not like a book about John Wooden? The man is a sports icon. Most of all, of course, he's a teacher, which is exactly what he wanted to be and prided himself on. He based his entire life on teaching basketball fundamentals and simple rules about life - almost always applied to basketball.
The book gets a little long. It covers his entire life in chronological order. Most of the book covers his seasons coaching at UCLA, but there is enough outside of the basketball season to demonstrate what the man was about as a person. It was difficult at times to get through some of the slower parts of the book when the reader knows that a section about his time coaching Kareem or Bill Walton is coming up.
One great thing about this book is that it's not all positive. The author takes a pragmatic look at Wooden, it seems. He claims that 1. Wooden actual didn't coach defense, especially early in his career. 2. Wooden didn't recruit - he felt students/players should want to come to him - when he did recruit, it was only from the LA area. 3. Wooden did very little to help or even listen to his players with their personal lives - this opened up an opportunity for Sam Gilbert, a booster to violate NCAA regulations in helping the players. 4. Wooden didn't coach very much during the game - he felt that he taught the players fundamentals in practice and it was their job to execute.
The author also discusses how Wooden was not his calm, cool self when on the bench during a game. He would yell at the refs mercilessly and opposing players as well.
The author also points out how the NCAA never went after wooden or UCLA (while Wooden was the coach) for any infractions of which it had many. The NCAA clearly like Wooden's squeaky clean image and his winning record. This infuriated Jerry Tarkanian (Long Beach then UNLV coach) who got nailed time and again for doing the same things Wooden did.
Here are some quotes from the text:
• One of the handwritten lessons that Hugh (Wooden’s father) passed to his four sons was what he called his “Two Sets of Threes”: Never lie, never cheat, never steal. Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.
• what you do is more important than what you say you’ll do."
• Reverend Theodore Hesburgh’s credo that “the best thing a man can do for his children is love their mother.”
• He also learned that day that the bench was all the motivation a coach ever needed.
• Thus did Naismith discover what those twenty thousand spectators already knew: basketball may have been conceived in Massachusetts, but it was born in Indiana.
• the Hoosier state did not have a bunch of urban manufacturing centers with schools that were big enough to field football teams. Rather, it was clustered with hundreds of small rural communities. The farming calendar was also not conducive to supporting football because autumn was harvest season. If people were going to look for entertainment, it had to be in winter—and indoors. Best of all, since basketball required only five men a side (as determined by a rule that was put in place in 1897), no school was too small to field a team.
• 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.)
• UCLA’s athletic department was under the purview of the Associated Students, which meant that the president of the student body was technically Wooden’s boss. Not only did Wooden receive no pension contribution on his paltry salary of $6,000, but he also had to suffer the ignominy of having his paycheck signed by an undergraduate. While the student body president had his own office, Wooden shared a small space with Ed Powell (whom Wooden had brought with him as an assistant coach) in Kerckhoff Hall, the building that housed the student association, the school store, the student newspaper, and the athletic department. “Had I realized the situation, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have come,” he said.
• Norman replied, “Mr. Wooden and I just had a few differences, so we had a heart-to-heart talk. I wasn’t working too hard in practice, for one thing, and Mr. Wooden didn’t like it. So he told me what he thought and I told him what I thought and we reached a compromise. We decided to do things his way.”
• “The better basketball players in the Midwest are no better than our basketball players in the far west,” Wooden said. “But there are many more of the better class players in the Midwest than we have out here. Back there you just about must have an indoor game. Basketball is it. Out here fans and boys can be outdoors all the year around. That splits basketball interest with other activities. Basketball suffers.”
• The year before Wooden arrived, UCLA’s undergraduates elected as their student body president Sherrill Luke, a black student who grew up crashing the gates at the Coliseum to watch Jackie Robinson gallop alongside the Goal Dust Twins.
• Berry was learning what many past and future Bruins would learn. John Wooden was an intelligent coach and a classy sportsman, but he was not the kind of man who went out of his way to help his young players sort through their feelings of rejection.
• industriousness (“There is no substitute for work”), intentness (“Concentrate on your objective and be determined to reach your goal”), alertness (“Be observing constantly”), poise (“Being at ease in any situation”), and confidence (“May come from faith in yourself in knowing that you are prepared”)
• is no substitute for work”),
• There was no playbook at UCLA because there were no plays.
• Wooden’s high-post offense allowed players two or three options for each exchange, but it was up to them to make those decisions.
• Wooden told his players every day that they were in better shape than their opponents. Were they really? Maybe, maybe not. But in his mind, if they believed they were, then they were.
• No wonder Ron Lawson said playing for Wooden felt like a job. He was hardly the first and wouldn’t be the last.
• He always maintained that a coach’s best motivator was the bench. “If I see a boy giving up the baseline [on defense], I take him out for the rest of the half,” he once said. “They don’t like that.”
• Wooden’s consistency amazed his players more than anything else about him. It was as if the man were a machine himself. “I played varsity for three years and observed him every day in practice. He never once disappointed me in terms of his demeanor, his speech,” said Bob Archer, who played at UCLA from 1955 to 1959. “He was no-nonsense and strict, but he never humiliated people. There was always a kindness underneath his austere exterior. You can’t fake that.”
• Wooden told his players not to use profanity, so he never used it himself. He asked them to quit smoking, so he did the same. He told them they were never to criticize a teammate—That’s my job, I’m paid to do it, pitifully poorly I might add—and he wanted them always to be on time. (Time was of the essence. If you’re on time, you don’t have to hurry.) “There are lots of things I suggest my players do, and a few things I demand they do,” he said. “They learn that I stick by my demands.”
• “He was just a master teacher,”
• if his players matched his persistence, they got better, too. There was, however, a price they had to pay. To become a part of his program, a young man had to surrender his individuality, and that’s not easy for a college student to do.
• “Usually, some time in the first half, he would choose one incident, a close call, and jump all over the referee,” Powell said. “Just chew him out in, if there is such a thing, a gentlemanly manner. But let him know that side of Wooden. Then the half comes. During the half, as they’re walking to the lockers, he’ll seek out the referee and apologize to him. ‘I know it was a close call. Regardless of whether I thought you were right, it’s a job, and you’re doing the best you can.’
• He was also unprepared for Wooden’s coldness, which Hirsch witnessed firsthand after he ripped up his ankle during the first month of practice. “I was lying there and Wooden said, ‘Can somebody get him off the court? I’m trying to hold a practice here.’ I mean the pain went to the top of my head,” Hirsch said.
• “Wooden didn’t want to have anything to do with Alcindor,” Jerry Norman said.
• Wooden’s reminder that Wilt Chamberlain did not win a title at Kansas, that Oscar Robertson did not win a title at Cincinnati, that Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek only won one title at Ohio State, and that Cazzie Russell couldn’t even bring Michigan back to the NCAA semifinals
• Wooden insisted that players acknowledge each other by pointing when someone made an assist. He believed it created unity. The players bought in. “There was no room at UCLA basketball for racial tension. It was always left in the locker room,” Heitz said. “I’m telling you, I passed Kareem a shitload of shots when he was at his angriest-young-black-man period, and I never didn’t get acknowledged for it. I never had a black guy refuse to pass me the ball. It was a meritocracy that Wooden created. It was the one thing we never questioned.”
• But Norman didn’t buy into the growing story line that Wooden had transformed into some kind of coaching savant. The way Norman saw it, Wooden won more often now because he was coaching better players—players whom Norman had recruited. “I don’t mean to sound derogatory, but if you look at Wooden’s record, he was at UCLA fifteen years and never won anything,” Norman said. “Then all of a sudden we started to win. Why did we win? Overnight he became a genius? It was pretty much the same stuff over and over, but you’re telling it to different players.”
• (After he retired, Wooden was asked who was harder to coach, black players or white players. He replied, “Seniors.”)
• It was an emphatic valedictory for the young giant. He finished with 37 points and 20 rebounds as he completed his college career with an 88–2 record, with both losses coming by a single basket.
• “I look forward to again coaching to try to win,” he said, “rather than trying to avoid being defeated.
• Wooden was adamantly opposed to out-of-state recruiting unless the player made the first contact.
• “It bothers me when I keep reading about how straight they were at UCLA when I know they weren’t, but I don’t think Wooden was behind any of that,” Tarkanian said. “On at least two or three occasions, he told me about Sam Gilbert and how he went to J. D. Morgan, and J. D. told him, ‘You coach the team and let me handle Sam.’ I just don’t know what more he could have done.”
• years went on and more of Gilbert’s transgressions came to light, Wooden’s critics tried to use Gilbert as a cudgel. They argued that it tainted Wooden’s legacy. They may have succeeded in denting the myth, but they never knocked the man off-balance. “I know what the truth of it is,” Wooden said in August 2009, ten months before he died. “I never tried to use Sam Gilbert in any way. I never sent a player to him. I tried to keep players away from him. So people can say whatever they want. My conscience is clear.”
• “I’ve always told my players to be quick but don’t hurry,” he said,
• Their situation might have been more tolerable if UCLA were paying Wooden a sum commensurate with his value, but that was not the case. As the 1972–73 season began, Wooden’s salary remained just $31,000. That was a ridiculously low amount, especially since earlier that fall, Wooden had been enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, for his coaching achievements, making him the first man to be inducted as both a player and a coach.
• “John Wooden liked to win,” Walton said many years later. “He and Larry Bird were the biggest trash-talkers I ever knew.”
• Wooden had arranged for the nets to be woven extra tight. That way, after every basket, the ball would hang an extra second or two before hitting the floor, which would give the Bruins a couple of extra ticks to set up their full-court press.
• “We should have run the table,” he said nearly forty years later. “Playing for UCLA was fun. It was really, really fun, really positive, really upbeat. And I blew it.”
• For the 1974–75 season, Wooden’s salary was $32,500, a laughable sum but still the most he had ever been paid. For the last time in a season of last times, Wooden sat down at his desk and made his game-by-game predictions. He decided his Bruins would go 23–3 but fail to win the national championship. Wooden sealed the paper in an envelope and stowed it in his desk without telling anyone.
• Phelps went on to call Wooden “sanctimonious” and took him to task for his bench jockeying: “While Wooden sits on the bench clutching that silver cross in his hand, he’s also riding officials and players worse than any other coach I have seen.
• Since most sportswriters and opposing coaches were unable to solve this riddle, it was left to a pair of psychology professors to make a clinical study. The two professors—one from the University of Hawaii, the other from UCLA—charted several dozen of Wooden’s practices during the 1974–75 season and published their findings in the January 1976 issue of Psychology Today magazine. The professors came up with ten different categories of communication (Instructions, Hustles, Praises, Scolds, etc.) and assigned everything Wooden said to one of those. The most frequently cited category by far was Instructions, which the psychologists defined as “verbal statements about what to do or how to do it.” That accounted for 50.3 percent of things Wooden said. The professors calculated that overall “at least 75 percent of Wooden’s teaching acts carry information.” The researchers were also taken by the qualitative change in Wooden’s demeanor once practice began. This was the “walking contradiction” that Marques Johnson and his teammates had come to know so well. “The whistle transforms Wooden,” they wrote. “He becomes less the friendly grandfather and more the Marine sergeant … [and he] scolds twice as much as he rewards.”
• Wooden truly lived the credo that hung on his office wall: It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
• If ever there was evidence to support Tarkanian’s theory that Wooden was the good Lord’s favorite coach, this was it.
• As soon as Wooden left the locker room, McCarter brought everyone together and delivered a stern message. “There’s no way,” he said, “that we are going to let this man lose.”
• “Coach Wooden’s basic philosophy is that the best quality a player can have is quickness. It will beat strength every time.”
• Wooden’s teams won ten NCAA titles and put together two epic streaks—seven straight national championships and eighty-eight consecutive wins.
• a well-heeled alumnus walked up to offer his good wishes. “Congratulations, Coach,” the man said. “You let us down last year, but this made up for it.”
• Whereas the NCAA had deployed a single newly hired recent law graduate to interview Gilbert, it sent a former FBI agent to Las Vegas to turn up evidence against Tarkanian. In the years since the NCAA brought the hammer down on Cal State Long Beach, Tarkanian’s criticisms had become more vocal, both in public and in private. “In those days, he would call me virtually twice a week. Almost every time, he talked about UCLA,” Berst said. “He did this when he was at Long Beach State. He’d say, we can barely afford a bus ticket to go to the apartments, and they’re driving Rolls-Royces.” From Clark’s viewpoint, it was obvious the NCAA was a lot more intent on going after Tarkanian than Wooden. “They were on Tarkanian like flies on honey,” Clark said. “They were all about getting Tarkanian.”
• Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry!
• There was one last example of this pattern that was especially hurtful to the UCLA family, and that was the way Wooden whitewashed Jerry Norman from the historical record. This really bothered the men who played in that era, for they knew that without Norman, Wooden’s championship dynasty might never have gotten rolling. “Jerry never got any credit. Most people don’t even know who Jerry Norman is,” Jack Hirsch said. “The reason nobody gives him credit was because Wooden didn’t give him enough credit.”
• His main focus in life became creating and enhancing his image.”
• “It was kind of like, take him off the cross, we need the wood. Appreciate him for what he was—a great coach, a great person, but not a god.”
• I’ve always said, when trying to pick the best, you need to say best of the era. Remember, Jesse Owens in one afternoon broke four world records. That’s rather amazing.
• “All change isn’t progress, but there is no progress without change.
The book gets a little long. It covers his entire life in chronological order. Most of the book covers his seasons coaching at UCLA, but there is enough outside of the basketball season to demonstrate what the man was about as a person. It was difficult at times to get through some of the slower parts of the book when the reader knows that a section about his time coaching Kareem or Bill Walton is coming up.
One great thing about this book is that it's not all positive. The author takes a pragmatic look at Wooden, it seems. He claims that 1. Wooden actual didn't coach defense, especially early in his career. 2. Wooden didn't recruit - he felt students/players should want to come to him - when he did recruit, it was only from the LA area. 3. Wooden did very little to help or even listen to his players with their personal lives - this opened up an opportunity for Sam Gilbert, a booster to violate NCAA regulations in helping the players. 4. Wooden didn't coach very much during the game - he felt that he taught the players fundamentals in practice and it was their job to execute.
The author also discusses how Wooden was not his calm, cool self when on the bench during a game. He would yell at the refs mercilessly and opposing players as well.
The author also points out how the NCAA never went after wooden or UCLA (while Wooden was the coach) for any infractions of which it had many. The NCAA clearly like Wooden's squeaky clean image and his winning record. This infuriated Jerry Tarkanian (Long Beach then UNLV coach) who got nailed time and again for doing the same things Wooden did.
Here are some quotes from the text:
• One of the handwritten lessons that Hugh (Wooden’s father) passed to his four sons was what he called his “Two Sets of Threes”: Never lie, never cheat, never steal. Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.
• what you do is more important than what you say you’ll do."
• Reverend Theodore Hesburgh’s credo that “the best thing a man can do for his children is love their mother.”
• He also learned that day that the bench was all the motivation a coach ever needed.
• Thus did Naismith discover what those twenty thousand spectators already knew: basketball may have been conceived in Massachusetts, but it was born in Indiana.
• the Hoosier state did not have a bunch of urban manufacturing centers with schools that were big enough to field football teams. Rather, it was clustered with hundreds of small rural communities. The farming calendar was also not conducive to supporting football because autumn was harvest season. If people were going to look for entertainment, it had to be in winter—and indoors. Best of all, since basketball required only five men a side (as determined by a rule that was put in place in 1897), no school was too small to field a team.
• 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.)
• UCLA’s athletic department was under the purview of the Associated Students, which meant that the president of the student body was technically Wooden’s boss. Not only did Wooden receive no pension contribution on his paltry salary of $6,000, but he also had to suffer the ignominy of having his paycheck signed by an undergraduate. While the student body president had his own office, Wooden shared a small space with Ed Powell (whom Wooden had brought with him as an assistant coach) in Kerckhoff Hall, the building that housed the student association, the school store, the student newspaper, and the athletic department. “Had I realized the situation, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have come,” he said.
• Norman replied, “Mr. Wooden and I just had a few differences, so we had a heart-to-heart talk. I wasn’t working too hard in practice, for one thing, and Mr. Wooden didn’t like it. So he told me what he thought and I told him what I thought and we reached a compromise. We decided to do things his way.”
• “The better basketball players in the Midwest are no better than our basketball players in the far west,” Wooden said. “But there are many more of the better class players in the Midwest than we have out here. Back there you just about must have an indoor game. Basketball is it. Out here fans and boys can be outdoors all the year around. That splits basketball interest with other activities. Basketball suffers.”
• The year before Wooden arrived, UCLA’s undergraduates elected as their student body president Sherrill Luke, a black student who grew up crashing the gates at the Coliseum to watch Jackie Robinson gallop alongside the Goal Dust Twins.
• Berry was learning what many past and future Bruins would learn. John Wooden was an intelligent coach and a classy sportsman, but he was not the kind of man who went out of his way to help his young players sort through their feelings of rejection.
• industriousness (“There is no substitute for work”), intentness (“Concentrate on your objective and be determined to reach your goal”), alertness (“Be observing constantly”), poise (“Being at ease in any situation”), and confidence (“May come from faith in yourself in knowing that you are prepared”)
• is no substitute for work”),
• There was no playbook at UCLA because there were no plays.
• Wooden’s high-post offense allowed players two or three options for each exchange, but it was up to them to make those decisions.
• Wooden told his players every day that they were in better shape than their opponents. Were they really? Maybe, maybe not. But in his mind, if they believed they were, then they were.
• No wonder Ron Lawson said playing for Wooden felt like a job. He was hardly the first and wouldn’t be the last.
• He always maintained that a coach’s best motivator was the bench. “If I see a boy giving up the baseline [on defense], I take him out for the rest of the half,” he once said. “They don’t like that.”
• Wooden’s consistency amazed his players more than anything else about him. It was as if the man were a machine himself. “I played varsity for three years and observed him every day in practice. He never once disappointed me in terms of his demeanor, his speech,” said Bob Archer, who played at UCLA from 1955 to 1959. “He was no-nonsense and strict, but he never humiliated people. There was always a kindness underneath his austere exterior. You can’t fake that.”
• Wooden told his players not to use profanity, so he never used it himself. He asked them to quit smoking, so he did the same. He told them they were never to criticize a teammate—That’s my job, I’m paid to do it, pitifully poorly I might add—and he wanted them always to be on time. (Time was of the essence. If you’re on time, you don’t have to hurry.) “There are lots of things I suggest my players do, and a few things I demand they do,” he said. “They learn that I stick by my demands.”
• “He was just a master teacher,”
• if his players matched his persistence, they got better, too. There was, however, a price they had to pay. To become a part of his program, a young man had to surrender his individuality, and that’s not easy for a college student to do.
• “Usually, some time in the first half, he would choose one incident, a close call, and jump all over the referee,” Powell said. “Just chew him out in, if there is such a thing, a gentlemanly manner. But let him know that side of Wooden. Then the half comes. During the half, as they’re walking to the lockers, he’ll seek out the referee and apologize to him. ‘I know it was a close call. Regardless of whether I thought you were right, it’s a job, and you’re doing the best you can.’
• He was also unprepared for Wooden’s coldness, which Hirsch witnessed firsthand after he ripped up his ankle during the first month of practice. “I was lying there and Wooden said, ‘Can somebody get him off the court? I’m trying to hold a practice here.’ I mean the pain went to the top of my head,” Hirsch said.
• “Wooden didn’t want to have anything to do with Alcindor,” Jerry Norman said.
• Wooden’s reminder that Wilt Chamberlain did not win a title at Kansas, that Oscar Robertson did not win a title at Cincinnati, that Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek only won one title at Ohio State, and that Cazzie Russell couldn’t even bring Michigan back to the NCAA semifinals
• Wooden insisted that players acknowledge each other by pointing when someone made an assist. He believed it created unity. The players bought in. “There was no room at UCLA basketball for racial tension. It was always left in the locker room,” Heitz said. “I’m telling you, I passed Kareem a shitload of shots when he was at his angriest-young-black-man period, and I never didn’t get acknowledged for it. I never had a black guy refuse to pass me the ball. It was a meritocracy that Wooden created. It was the one thing we never questioned.”
• But Norman didn’t buy into the growing story line that Wooden had transformed into some kind of coaching savant. The way Norman saw it, Wooden won more often now because he was coaching better players—players whom Norman had recruited. “I don’t mean to sound derogatory, but if you look at Wooden’s record, he was at UCLA fifteen years and never won anything,” Norman said. “Then all of a sudden we started to win. Why did we win? Overnight he became a genius? It was pretty much the same stuff over and over, but you’re telling it to different players.”
• (After he retired, Wooden was asked who was harder to coach, black players or white players. He replied, “Seniors.”)
• It was an emphatic valedictory for the young giant. He finished with 37 points and 20 rebounds as he completed his college career with an 88–2 record, with both losses coming by a single basket.
• “I look forward to again coaching to try to win,” he said, “rather than trying to avoid being defeated.
• Wooden was adamantly opposed to out-of-state recruiting unless the player made the first contact.
• “It bothers me when I keep reading about how straight they were at UCLA when I know they weren’t, but I don’t think Wooden was behind any of that,” Tarkanian said. “On at least two or three occasions, he told me about Sam Gilbert and how he went to J. D. Morgan, and J. D. told him, ‘You coach the team and let me handle Sam.’ I just don’t know what more he could have done.”
• years went on and more of Gilbert’s transgressions came to light, Wooden’s critics tried to use Gilbert as a cudgel. They argued that it tainted Wooden’s legacy. They may have succeeded in denting the myth, but they never knocked the man off-balance. “I know what the truth of it is,” Wooden said in August 2009, ten months before he died. “I never tried to use Sam Gilbert in any way. I never sent a player to him. I tried to keep players away from him. So people can say whatever they want. My conscience is clear.”
• “I’ve always told my players to be quick but don’t hurry,” he said,
• Their situation might have been more tolerable if UCLA were paying Wooden a sum commensurate with his value, but that was not the case. As the 1972–73 season began, Wooden’s salary remained just $31,000. That was a ridiculously low amount, especially since earlier that fall, Wooden had been enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, for his coaching achievements, making him the first man to be inducted as both a player and a coach.
• “John Wooden liked to win,” Walton said many years later. “He and Larry Bird were the biggest trash-talkers I ever knew.”
• Wooden had arranged for the nets to be woven extra tight. That way, after every basket, the ball would hang an extra second or two before hitting the floor, which would give the Bruins a couple of extra ticks to set up their full-court press.
• “We should have run the table,” he said nearly forty years later. “Playing for UCLA was fun. It was really, really fun, really positive, really upbeat. And I blew it.”
• For the 1974–75 season, Wooden’s salary was $32,500, a laughable sum but still the most he had ever been paid. For the last time in a season of last times, Wooden sat down at his desk and made his game-by-game predictions. He decided his Bruins would go 23–3 but fail to win the national championship. Wooden sealed the paper in an envelope and stowed it in his desk without telling anyone.
• Phelps went on to call Wooden “sanctimonious” and took him to task for his bench jockeying: “While Wooden sits on the bench clutching that silver cross in his hand, he’s also riding officials and players worse than any other coach I have seen.
• Since most sportswriters and opposing coaches were unable to solve this riddle, it was left to a pair of psychology professors to make a clinical study. The two professors—one from the University of Hawaii, the other from UCLA—charted several dozen of Wooden’s practices during the 1974–75 season and published their findings in the January 1976 issue of Psychology Today magazine. The professors came up with ten different categories of communication (Instructions, Hustles, Praises, Scolds, etc.) and assigned everything Wooden said to one of those. The most frequently cited category by far was Instructions, which the psychologists defined as “verbal statements about what to do or how to do it.” That accounted for 50.3 percent of things Wooden said. The professors calculated that overall “at least 75 percent of Wooden’s teaching acts carry information.” The researchers were also taken by the qualitative change in Wooden’s demeanor once practice began. This was the “walking contradiction” that Marques Johnson and his teammates had come to know so well. “The whistle transforms Wooden,” they wrote. “He becomes less the friendly grandfather and more the Marine sergeant … [and he] scolds twice as much as he rewards.”
• Wooden truly lived the credo that hung on his office wall: It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
• If ever there was evidence to support Tarkanian’s theory that Wooden was the good Lord’s favorite coach, this was it.
• As soon as Wooden left the locker room, McCarter brought everyone together and delivered a stern message. “There’s no way,” he said, “that we are going to let this man lose.”
• “Coach Wooden’s basic philosophy is that the best quality a player can have is quickness. It will beat strength every time.”
• Wooden’s teams won ten NCAA titles and put together two epic streaks—seven straight national championships and eighty-eight consecutive wins.
• a well-heeled alumnus walked up to offer his good wishes. “Congratulations, Coach,” the man said. “You let us down last year, but this made up for it.”
• Whereas the NCAA had deployed a single newly hired recent law graduate to interview Gilbert, it sent a former FBI agent to Las Vegas to turn up evidence against Tarkanian. In the years since the NCAA brought the hammer down on Cal State Long Beach, Tarkanian’s criticisms had become more vocal, both in public and in private. “In those days, he would call me virtually twice a week. Almost every time, he talked about UCLA,” Berst said. “He did this when he was at Long Beach State. He’d say, we can barely afford a bus ticket to go to the apartments, and they’re driving Rolls-Royces.” From Clark’s viewpoint, it was obvious the NCAA was a lot more intent on going after Tarkanian than Wooden. “They were on Tarkanian like flies on honey,” Clark said. “They were all about getting Tarkanian.”
• Be Quick—but Don’t Hurry!
• There was one last example of this pattern that was especially hurtful to the UCLA family, and that was the way Wooden whitewashed Jerry Norman from the historical record. This really bothered the men who played in that era, for they knew that without Norman, Wooden’s championship dynasty might never have gotten rolling. “Jerry never got any credit. Most people don’t even know who Jerry Norman is,” Jack Hirsch said. “The reason nobody gives him credit was because Wooden didn’t give him enough credit.”
• His main focus in life became creating and enhancing his image.”
• “It was kind of like, take him off the cross, we need the wood. Appreciate him for what he was—a great coach, a great person, but not a god.”
• I’ve always said, when trying to pick the best, you need to say best of the era. Remember, Jesse Owens in one afternoon broke four world records. That’s rather amazing.
• “All change isn’t progress, but there is no progress without change.
October 11, 2017
Fascinating biography of an interesting man. Wooden is one of the few people who is in the basketball hall of fame as both a player and a coach. Before reading this book, I had no idea how good Wooden was as a player, nor did I realize he was an English teacher and a pool shark. His relationships with various players over the years is interesting. What particularly struck me is how all of them, whether or not they got along with Wooden while they played for him, kept in touch with him and looked up to him. Great read!
September 15, 2025
Wooden: A Coach’s Life is one of the fairest, most balanced biographies I’ve read. Going in, I only knew John Wooden as the legendary coach with unmatched success, but Seth Davis brings out the full man—his greatness, his flaws, and his humanity. I appreciated the honesty: “He was a great coach and a great man, but he wasn’t God.” It took me some time to work through this one but it was well worth it. A thoughtful and respectful portrait of a true icon.
March 4, 2017
"Wooden" by Seth Davis is an intriguing biography by Seth Davis. A point that is obvious and mentioned throughout the book is hard work. One of the keys to success is working hard in everything you do, whether it's on or off the court. The court is the setting where the majority of things are "played" out. So much time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears are given up just so 18-22 year old men will have the chance to even be on the court.“Practice was Mr. Wooden’s domain. The game was the players’ domain,”. John Wooden made sure his players worked hard enough so they could have the court time they wanted during the game. Not everyone played though, the hardest workers still had to be really good players. This makes most of the athletes work even harder.
John Wooden is unarguably the best college basketball coach of all time and, as previously mentioned, is about working hard. He learned this from his father. "...the Wooden's life was not easy. But they never wanted for anything, so long as they were willing to work for it." John had a Father who kept their family together at all times. His dad was able to provide for the family even at hard times financially. John learned to work hard and persist, which led to his great success as a player and as a coach.
I highly recommend this book, especially to those that enjoy basketball and even if you don't there is plenty of morals to be learned. John Wooden will forever be remembered, and we will be the ones who carry on his legacy by reading and telling it to others.
John Wooden is unarguably the best college basketball coach of all time and, as previously mentioned, is about working hard. He learned this from his father. "...the Wooden's life was not easy. But they never wanted for anything, so long as they were willing to work for it." John had a Father who kept their family together at all times. His dad was able to provide for the family even at hard times financially. John learned to work hard and persist, which led to his great success as a player and as a coach.
I highly recommend this book, especially to those that enjoy basketball and even if you don't there is plenty of morals to be learned. John Wooden will forever be remembered, and we will be the ones who carry on his legacy by reading and telling it to others.
August 6, 2016
I received "Wooden: A Coach's Life" as part of a Goodreads giveaway.
As someone whose sports interest tends towards pro hockey and baseball, I didn't know a lot about John Wooden coming into this book. However, Davis' biography of the legendary UCLA basketball coach is through while remaining eminently readable. I got a sense of Wooden not only as a legendary coach, but also as a person--a devout Christian Midwesterner transplanted to the West Coast, followed by towering success and a bittersweet end to his career.
One of the aspects of the book that I most respected was Davis' balanced portrayal of Wooden. After researching and working on the book for years, including three separate interviews with Wooden himself, in addition to being an accomplished college basketball writer, it would be understandable if Davis fell prey to hero worship, but that's not the case here. He takes plenty of times to highlight Wooden's mistakes, blind spots, and faults. Wooden, while on the whole a very good man, was human, and the book reflects that.
One of the challenges of writing about sports in general, and college sports in particular, is the revolving door nature of teams. I'll admit that, over Wooden's more than two decades at UCLA, including his string of championship runs in the 1960s and early 1970s, names and personalities did tend to run together a bit, but I don't necessarily lay that at Davis' door; it's just sort of the nature of the subject.
Even as a novice of college basketball, "A Coach's Life" was a fascinating read. Recommended.
As someone whose sports interest tends towards pro hockey and baseball, I didn't know a lot about John Wooden coming into this book. However, Davis' biography of the legendary UCLA basketball coach is through while remaining eminently readable. I got a sense of Wooden not only as a legendary coach, but also as a person--a devout Christian Midwesterner transplanted to the West Coast, followed by towering success and a bittersweet end to his career.
One of the aspects of the book that I most respected was Davis' balanced portrayal of Wooden. After researching and working on the book for years, including three separate interviews with Wooden himself, in addition to being an accomplished college basketball writer, it would be understandable if Davis fell prey to hero worship, but that's not the case here. He takes plenty of times to highlight Wooden's mistakes, blind spots, and faults. Wooden, while on the whole a very good man, was human, and the book reflects that.
One of the challenges of writing about sports in general, and college sports in particular, is the revolving door nature of teams. I'll admit that, over Wooden's more than two decades at UCLA, including his string of championship runs in the 1960s and early 1970s, names and personalities did tend to run together a bit, but I don't necessarily lay that at Davis' door; it's just sort of the nature of the subject.
Even as a novice of college basketball, "A Coach's Life" was a fascinating read. Recommended.
July 11, 2016
I received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for a review.
I was too young to be much aware of Coach John Wooden during his coaching career, but he is a familiar figure to me, as he must be to even the most casual fan of college basketball. He is “The Wizard of Westwood,” revered for his coaching prowess, wisdom and numerous national championships.
This book is a respectful and remarkably balanced portrayal of his life from beginning to end, as well as a fascinating window into the interpersonal, institutional and social dynamics behind the great UCLA basketball dynasty. Though Wooden’s brilliance and success is well-documented, his career spanned decades of dramatic social change, and he often struggled to adapt. His relationships with players, assistants and the media were sometimes strained. Davis illustrates the coach’s strengths and weaknesses objectively throughout, reporting the facts without passing judgment. That this biography is the product of meticulous, exhaustive research is evident on every page. I found it compelling, well-written and a pleasure to read.
I was too young to be much aware of Coach John Wooden during his coaching career, but he is a familiar figure to me, as he must be to even the most casual fan of college basketball. He is “The Wizard of Westwood,” revered for his coaching prowess, wisdom and numerous national championships.
This book is a respectful and remarkably balanced portrayal of his life from beginning to end, as well as a fascinating window into the interpersonal, institutional and social dynamics behind the great UCLA basketball dynasty. Though Wooden’s brilliance and success is well-documented, his career spanned decades of dramatic social change, and he often struggled to adapt. His relationships with players, assistants and the media were sometimes strained. Davis illustrates the coach’s strengths and weaknesses objectively throughout, reporting the facts without passing judgment. That this biography is the product of meticulous, exhaustive research is evident on every page. I found it compelling, well-written and a pleasure to read.
April 12, 2015
Well-written and thoroughly researched, Seth Davis' biography of John Wooden - "Wooden", A Coach's Story- is an honest appraisal of the great coach's life. Davis works with dozens of players, coaches, and others who were closest to the man to paint a fully-fleshed out portrait of a complex man. Wooden, the owner of the most men's NCAA basketball titles in history was a genius on the job, a doting husband, and a polished PR man. He also built one of the greatest dynasties in sport's history, let alone college basketball history.
Davis interviews former Bruin stars like Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, Marques Johnson, Lucius Allen, Walt Hazzard, Gail Goodrich, Sidney Wicks, and Curtis Rowe, just to name a few to give readers a close look at every UCLA season under Wooden. Also interviewed extensively for this book are the Bruin benchwarmers who provide some of the most interesting details and honest appraisals of the Wizard of Westwood.
College basketball fans and historians will find this book an absolute treat. Author Davis has done a wonderfully fair job creating a complete story of John Wooden's life. This book is a slam dunk!
Davis interviews former Bruin stars like Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, Marques Johnson, Lucius Allen, Walt Hazzard, Gail Goodrich, Sidney Wicks, and Curtis Rowe, just to name a few to give readers a close look at every UCLA season under Wooden. Also interviewed extensively for this book are the Bruin benchwarmers who provide some of the most interesting details and honest appraisals of the Wizard of Westwood.
College basketball fans and historians will find this book an absolute treat. Author Davis has done a wonderfully fair job creating a complete story of John Wooden's life. This book is a slam dunk!
January 2, 2014
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this biography of Coach Wooden. Seth Davis did a superb job from the early years to the late years in coaches life. Indiana, Kentucky and California and a term in the US Navy -- All four of those defined what success is, it is not a straight line from A to B; it is a bunch of little things that make up ones life--and coach did that. A devoted husband, Christian, leader, teacher, coach, mentor and most of all a person who grew everyday to make others and himself better. The author knows his sports, basketball too say the least -- but I think in creating this book the author shares with us the reader all good things are developed over time - instant gratification is short lived, coach is the corner stone of the waiting game--never give up. this book proves to all that family is not just internal but external as well. I learned a ton of new things in this book about coach I never knew and I recommend you add this to your library.
February 2, 2014
This is a great book for a pretty narrow audience. Even though the book is full of tips for living a successful life there is way too much basketball for a typical reader to wade through. However, if you are a coach, player or UCLA fan this book is very, very good. It is not a whitewash job that tells about only the great things about Coach Wooden and the UCLA basketball program over the years. There were improprieties over the years and Seth Davis is pretty fair giving a balanced view. He even writes a little about how UCLA always had an easier route through the NCAA tournament because they generally avoided the more powerful eastern conferences in those early years. This book virtually retells the story of every season during Wooden's career.
January 13, 2014
I was a Goodreads.com advance reader winner.
Nearly everyone has heard of Coach Wooden but wondered what his life was all about. How could someone win that many National Championships in a row? Who really was Coach Wooden? How did he become a coach much different than the rest of his peers?
Seth Davis, the author, does a credible job in writting about this legend. Coach Wooden style and coaching ability comes from his childhood days where his parents instilled in him the value of life.
Any sports enthusiast would and should love this book.
I grew up during his coaching time and always wondered who really is this guy? This book is not a tell all but it does say ALOT about the inside workings of the UCLA basketball program during his time.
Nearly everyone has heard of Coach Wooden but wondered what his life was all about. How could someone win that many National Championships in a row? Who really was Coach Wooden? How did he become a coach much different than the rest of his peers?
Seth Davis, the author, does a credible job in writting about this legend. Coach Wooden style and coaching ability comes from his childhood days where his parents instilled in him the value of life.
Any sports enthusiast would and should love this book.
I grew up during his coaching time and always wondered who really is this guy? This book is not a tell all but it does say ALOT about the inside workings of the UCLA basketball program during his time.
January 2, 2019
In brief, an exceptional biography.
March 27, 2023
I gave the book a 3 but the I gave the man a 1. I held off on writing this review until I read Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's lovefest about the guy. And it was honest enough to confirm my opinion. I'll start with the book. Kudos to Davis for not sugar coating the book like almost every other biographer. Davis painted Wooden with all of his warts, especially the hidden ones. The book lost two stars because there was absolutely no detail about what made Wooden great -- his teaching ability. We heard oodles about his preparation for practices and his detailed note cards, but we learned absolutely nothing about what actually happened in those practices and how the coach conveyed his legendary life lessons. He obviously did convey life lessons--although maybe many more after he retired--as most of his players say so. And he obviously was a great coach given his record although--and I am going to fall into the Geno Auriemma-trap here--he really didn't start winning until he had by far the best players. Heck, he had among the best two college platers ever in Kareem and Walton. And I doubt he'd get that kind of success out those rosters with today's sensibilities. Many players wouldn't play for the guy and many others would transfer. That said, Coach K who is the closest analog to Wooden got great players to play for him. But to return to my point, we learned nothing about how Wooden conveyed his life lessons and actually what happened in practices. And that was a huge, unforgivable miss.
As for Wooden, I couldn't help but dislike the man -- intensely. He was, at bottom, a petty, self-centered, master self-promoter, who gave no one any credit. It was all about Wooden to Wooden. And he'd go the amazing lengths to manage the myth, not the reality. He repeatedly said that he never had a losing season. Not true. He had at least 2, perhaps 3 (I can't recall). UCLA became successful only after the team used a zone press which was developed by Jerry Norman (a Wooden assistant coach) and put into use only after Norman relentlessly pressed Wooden to do so. Wooden took complete credit for using the zone press at UCLA and gave zero credit to Norman for it. Zero. Heck, when interviewed at 98, Wooden still gave Norman no credit for it, saying that he had something to do with it, but that it was something Wooden used at Indiana St. And Wooden did virtually no recruiting. That was done by his assistants in large part for which he, of course, gave them no credit.
He famously spread the myth that he never uttered a bad word about anyone. OMG. Saint Wooden was the most vicious trash talker on the bench, riding refs the entire game, and worse, mocking and deriding opposing players in game. He did that his entire career. So much for never saying a bad word to anyone. He was also quite petulant. He let a player, Lacey, quit because Wooden treated him poorly, when he could have simply apologized.
Despite his pyramid of success, which was real, he never taught that pyramid to his players. It was hanging in his office, but he never taught his players using it. As for teaching and mentoring his players, he did no such thing outside of practices. He had virtually no one-on-one interaction with his players.
He also did quite a bit to hurt the team's success after he left. He was a constant annoying presence at UCLA in the background after he retired, but made snide comments like that he did not leave a bare cupboard when he retired. Instead of helping UCLA continue to win, I think he was pleased that it only won with him at the helm.
And like Joe Paterno he turned a blind eye to all of the NCAA violations taking place in his program by boosters giving his players cars, clothes, money, and other goodies. I think that those were victimless crimes and am a fan of NIL, but I was amused by Wooden claiming he had no idea that it had gone on.
So while I thought the book was good--although too much time was spent on game by game results over many years of action (boring) and too little time spent explaining Wooden's actual teaching and practice methods (read: none)--I came away disliking Wooden, the man.
Two postscripts. I didn't know that Wooden the player was so good. He was the best player in the country for a couple of years. Also, winning the NCAA tournament was way easier in his time. The field was way smaller - at most 32 teams. And for 8 of his 10 wins, it wasn't seeded. Each team had to win two games in its region, and the west region had the least talented teams in those years--other than UCLA. And then UCLA only had to win two more games.
As for Wooden, I couldn't help but dislike the man -- intensely. He was, at bottom, a petty, self-centered, master self-promoter, who gave no one any credit. It was all about Wooden to Wooden. And he'd go the amazing lengths to manage the myth, not the reality. He repeatedly said that he never had a losing season. Not true. He had at least 2, perhaps 3 (I can't recall). UCLA became successful only after the team used a zone press which was developed by Jerry Norman (a Wooden assistant coach) and put into use only after Norman relentlessly pressed Wooden to do so. Wooden took complete credit for using the zone press at UCLA and gave zero credit to Norman for it. Zero. Heck, when interviewed at 98, Wooden still gave Norman no credit for it, saying that he had something to do with it, but that it was something Wooden used at Indiana St. And Wooden did virtually no recruiting. That was done by his assistants in large part for which he, of course, gave them no credit.
He famously spread the myth that he never uttered a bad word about anyone. OMG. Saint Wooden was the most vicious trash talker on the bench, riding refs the entire game, and worse, mocking and deriding opposing players in game. He did that his entire career. So much for never saying a bad word to anyone. He was also quite petulant. He let a player, Lacey, quit because Wooden treated him poorly, when he could have simply apologized.
Despite his pyramid of success, which was real, he never taught that pyramid to his players. It was hanging in his office, but he never taught his players using it. As for teaching and mentoring his players, he did no such thing outside of practices. He had virtually no one-on-one interaction with his players.
He also did quite a bit to hurt the team's success after he left. He was a constant annoying presence at UCLA in the background after he retired, but made snide comments like that he did not leave a bare cupboard when he retired. Instead of helping UCLA continue to win, I think he was pleased that it only won with him at the helm.
And like Joe Paterno he turned a blind eye to all of the NCAA violations taking place in his program by boosters giving his players cars, clothes, money, and other goodies. I think that those were victimless crimes and am a fan of NIL, but I was amused by Wooden claiming he had no idea that it had gone on.
So while I thought the book was good--although too much time was spent on game by game results over many years of action (boring) and too little time spent explaining Wooden's actual teaching and practice methods (read: none)--I came away disliking Wooden, the man.
Two postscripts. I didn't know that Wooden the player was so good. He was the best player in the country for a couple of years. Also, winning the NCAA tournament was way easier in his time. The field was way smaller - at most 32 teams. And for 8 of his 10 wins, it wasn't seeded. Each team had to win two games in its region, and the west region had the least talented teams in those years--other than UCLA. And then UCLA only had to win two more games.
June 26, 2024
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
This was a favorite quote of Coach Wooden’s and I found my mind circling back to it repeatedly as I listened to this book. Davis pierces the veil of hero worship surrounding the iconic coach and allows the reader to get to know a real person with real convictions and real shortcomings. As a teacher, he always had an element of knowledge to dispense (be it a new play or a classic poem, etc.), however, Wooden's real genius ended up being his willingness to become a real listener and to be open to real feedback.
It wasn’t until his 15th year at UCLA (1961-62) that Coach Wooden had a team that got to the Final Four of the National Championship. After that season, he exhibited the humility to rethink some basic procedures in terms of player rotation and revamp an innovative use of the full-court press (which was suggested to him by his assistant coach). He was by no means perfect but he was real in his attempt. None of us know it all - few of us even know a little - and all too few of us get to be mentored by someone of the quality of Coach Wooden - but we can all choose to keep learning all of our lives. To me, that represents the best play and the Coach ran that one to perfection.
This was a favorite quote of Coach Wooden’s and I found my mind circling back to it repeatedly as I listened to this book. Davis pierces the veil of hero worship surrounding the iconic coach and allows the reader to get to know a real person with real convictions and real shortcomings. As a teacher, he always had an element of knowledge to dispense (be it a new play or a classic poem, etc.), however, Wooden's real genius ended up being his willingness to become a real listener and to be open to real feedback.
It wasn’t until his 15th year at UCLA (1961-62) that Coach Wooden had a team that got to the Final Four of the National Championship. After that season, he exhibited the humility to rethink some basic procedures in terms of player rotation and revamp an innovative use of the full-court press (which was suggested to him by his assistant coach). He was by no means perfect but he was real in his attempt. None of us know it all - few of us even know a little - and all too few of us get to be mentored by someone of the quality of Coach Wooden - but we can all choose to keep learning all of our lives. To me, that represents the best play and the Coach ran that one to perfection.
October 26, 2025
I enjoyed this book. It was written in an unbiased manner. John Wooden is often presented by the mainstream media as a perfect man who had no faults. The author dispassionately told Wooden's story, highlighting both his victories and his faults. This made John Wooden far more relatable to me than he'd been previously.
The key takeaway I took from this book is that relationships matter. How one is generally regarded at the end of one's life, years after they're removed from their vocation, is the mark of whether they achieved interpersonal relational success and had a positive meaning on others. Coaching and leading people is a difficult proposition. What I've learned from reading this book and observing coaches and leaders throughout my career is the mark of most successful coaches and leaders is that they are generally disliked or viewed indifferenly in the moment by their subordinates, but are well-regarded decades later once the subordinates obtain more life experience and understand what the coach/leader was attempting to facilitate.
The key takeaway I took from this book is that relationships matter. How one is generally regarded at the end of one's life, years after they're removed from their vocation, is the mark of whether they achieved interpersonal relational success and had a positive meaning on others. Coaching and leading people is a difficult proposition. What I've learned from reading this book and observing coaches and leaders throughout my career is the mark of most successful coaches and leaders is that they are generally disliked or viewed indifferenly in the moment by their subordinates, but are well-regarded decades later once the subordinates obtain more life experience and understand what the coach/leader was attempting to facilitate.
March 27, 2019
Fascinating book about one of the most famous teachers to ever. I learned a great deal here about teaching, especially how he planned practices and broke each skill into small parts.
I appreciated how even-handed the book was. On the one hand, it showed all of his persistence and skill. On the other hand, it showed how he could be cold, distant, and would bend the rules for great players.
The part about Sam Gilbert, the booster, was especially interesting. So ... UCLA was playing the players, and Wooden knew. No one cares? Why is this not a bigger deal? Yes, he didn't like it, and yes, he told the athletic director, but UCLA was paying Kareem and many other players and giving them free stuff.
A few questions:
1. Why did they take so long to put in the shot clock?
2. What is a zone-press and how is it different than the usual full-court press?
3. Why didn't Norman coach again?
4. How much of Wooden's success was due to him, and how much was due to him having better players?
I appreciated how even-handed the book was. On the one hand, it showed all of his persistence and skill. On the other hand, it showed how he could be cold, distant, and would bend the rules for great players.
The part about Sam Gilbert, the booster, was especially interesting. So ... UCLA was playing the players, and Wooden knew. No one cares? Why is this not a bigger deal? Yes, he didn't like it, and yes, he told the athletic director, but UCLA was paying Kareem and many other players and giving them free stuff.
A few questions:
1. Why did they take so long to put in the shot clock?
2. What is a zone-press and how is it different than the usual full-court press?
3. Why didn't Norman coach again?
4. How much of Wooden's success was due to him, and how much was due to him having better players?
December 2, 2020
Author Seth Davis captures the life, personality, and the teaching methods of the most winningest Coach of all time. John Wooden was about balance and consistency. He was a religious man who never drank. He was devoted to his wife and family. His pupils revered him. His life’s journey showed how his methods remained consistent throughout changing times. He never wavered, in yet he recognized the unique personalities, and how he adapted to each. He appeared very mild mannered but was a vicious competitor. He believed that fundamental preparation and conditioning was the primary basic for success. Starting with how to wear socks, and bathing to the intricate details. He was known for trashing talking opponent players and coaches, but never cursed. In his old age, he said he would have been an English teacher if he could do it all over.
Davis painted the whole picture of a great man. A must read!
Davis painted the whole picture of a great man. A must read!
August 24, 2025
A comprehensive account of the life of John Wooden, focusing (as the subtitle indicates) on his coaching as the animating force of his life. Davis does a good job of recognizing and naming some of Wooden's flaws (his inflexibility, his willingness to accommodate racism in the early years of his coaching, his aloofness and mythmaking in the interest of self-promotion) without this being any sort of hatchet job. Davis clearly has a lot of respect for what Wooden did and how he did it. I learned a lot about the man but also how he approached his craft, which I really appreciated. This is a fun read for a college basketball fan.
February 28, 2023
I really enjoyed reading this. There is so much about Coach Wooden that is mythologized. This book painted a realistic picture of Coach Wooden, the good and the bad, and he still comes across as a remarkable person worthy of emulation. It was nice to see the flaws and to be able to see growth as he responds to the changing world and players within it. I still aspire to be like him as I coach my teams, but also to take the places where he fell short and try to improve on what he did. I recommend this to anyone coaching sports, and to anyone who leads others for that matter.
February 27, 2018
Very well written and thorough account of Wooden's life. The narrative worked well to develop the themes of Wooden's character and traits from his early childhood to his passing. It was a fair biography. It was not overly critical, but wasn't overly gushing either. Most things written about Wooden only focus on his coaching, life philosophies or winning. This book provides a better overall picture.
February 24, 2021
A very insightful deep read about a good coach and a decent man with his flaws. It's really good to get a behind the scenes view of how it was to play for a legend coach and what those titles gave him and took out of him. Despite being aloof and somewhat distance, he stuck to his principles and was the same man on and off the court.
January 20, 2019
A look into Coach Wooden’s life that reveals a side not widely know! Seth Davis doesn’t let the coach’s public stature get in the way of pointing out some inconsistencies that make you think that the Wizard of Westwood might really just be a normal man behind the curtain!
January 10, 2020
What a fantastic read for any sports or teaching fan. I was very moved at the end and thought the author did a wonderful job with a larger-the-life figure. He makes him a man. Takes him off the pedestal and into the chair across from you. It was so good.
August 6, 2020
John Wooden was a life long teacher. His curriculum; basketball. This book highlights the career of the greatest coach of all time. It also illustrates the evolution of college basketball. Great look inside a legendary career.
January 16, 2021
Coach
In growing up, I only tended to root for UCLA. In learning more about Mr. Wooden, the more I appreciated the man. Giving Mr. David a lot of credit for not leaving out the somewhat unseemly side of Coach's career, great book!!
In growing up, I only tended to root for UCLA. In learning more about Mr. Wooden, the more I appreciated the man. Giving Mr. David a lot of credit for not leaving out the somewhat unseemly side of Coach's career, great book!!
December 29, 2017
John Wooden will always be one of my heroes and this book explains why--clear, compelling writing.
April 9, 2018
A good book but way too long for the casual reader.
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