Wooden--A Coach's Life

November 11, 2013
Wooden, who coached the UCLA men’s basketball team to 10 NCAA championships in the 1960s and ’70s, is a more supple and conflicted man than his oaken reputation suggested, according to this probing biography. In this hefty but well-paced account, Sports Illustrated scribe Davis (When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball) provides entertaining play-by-play and color commentary on Wooden’s dynasty-building, key games, and the grueling, authoritarian methods—players were even instructed on the correct technique for donning shoes and socks—he used to impart his innovative fast-break system. Davis also unearths the nasty competitive streak beneath Wooden’s saintly image, and shows how his old-school creed of hard work, clean living, and gentlemanly deportment warped under the pressure of high-profile competition and Vietnam-era nonconformism, forcing him to bend the rules for indispensable players and tolerate the influence of a seamy booster. Woven through the narrative is the usual psychodrama that basketball seems to incubate more than any other sport—capped by a shrieking Wooden rage at a showering player—and vivid depictions of Wooden’s complex relationships with superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. As Wooden’s rock-ribbed principles confront chaotic times and compromising circumstances, Davis paints an unusually rich and illuminating portrait of the coaching mission. Photos.

Starred review from November 1, 2013
A comprehensive and crisply written biography of a legendary coach. John Wooden (1910-2010) may well be the closest the sports world has had to a secular saint in the last half-century. Widely venerated for both his accomplishments as an athlete and coach and for his stature as a human being, Wooden remained a universally admired figure for the remainder of his life. Sports Illustrated senior writer and CBS Sports studio analyst Davis (When March Went Mad: The Game that Transformed Basketball, 2009, etc.) delivers a massive biography that manages to bolster its subject while reminding readers that for all of Wooden's greatness, he was a human being with human failings. Utilizing myriad interviews and an impressive array of published sources, the author traces Wooden from his humble childhood in Indiana through his overlooked playing career, which garnered him entry into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1960, to the coaching career that brought him his greatest glory. Wooden began coaching (and teaching English, his first love) at the high school level and spent two years coaching at Indiana State before moving on to UCLA, where he became quite likely the greatest college coach in history. Davis admires his subject, which is apt, since Wooden was unquestionably admirable. However, a true biographer strips away legend as much as burnishes it, and Davis is unflinching in doing so where necessary. Early in his coaching career, Wooden, widely respected for his views on race during his UCLA tenure, still could have done more for his sole black player at Indiana State, who faced Jim Crow on a number of occasions with Wooden's tacit acquiescence. Long lauded for his personal integrity, he nonetheless clearly turned a blind eye to boosters who flouted NCAA rules in providing benefits to UCLA's star players. Wooden has long stood as a giant in the world of college sports. In revealing the real man behind the legend, Davis has done honor to the legacy of a true gentleman.

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Starred review from November 1, 2013
Although the most successful and one of the best-known college basketball coaches ever, the late John Wooden is not an easy subject for a biographer. He was a reserved and aloof man, often dull, always a midwesterner despite his many years as coach of the UCLA Bruins. Though a coach of biracial teams during a period of intense racial feelings, Wooden remained above the fray, rarely accused of bigotry, though never a crusader. Similarly, coaching with astounding success throughout the sixties, and having among his athletes the greatly gifted but politically aware and rebellious Bill Walton, Wooden, though frequently at odds with his stars, managed an unprecedented and since unequaled series of championships. By way of interviews with former players and associates, and with the aged Wooden himself, Davis (When March Went Mad, 2009) manages to present a balanced portrait of a singular man, deflating the image of Saint John with suggestions of his anger, occasional nastiness (his bench jockeying will be a revelation to those who observed him less closely), the blind eye he turned to overzealous boosters, compulsive orientation to detail, and detachment from athletes who, in some cases, may have craved more paternal attention. Davis has avoided stultifying, game-by-game detail (but does offer genuinely exciting accounts of several key games) and has provided a multidimensional, nearly cradle-to-grave portrait of a highly successful and revered coach and teacher, in the process delivering a history of the evolution of college basketball and profiles of many of its stars.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)