The greatest basketball coach

On the 21st of the month, the best man I know will do what he always does on the 21st of the month. He will sit down and pen a love letter to his best girl. He will say how much he misses her, loves her, and cannot wait to see her again. Then he will fold it once, slide it in a little envelope and walk into his bedroom. He will go to the stack of love letters sitting there on her pillow, untie the yellow ribbon, place the new one on top and tie the ribbon again.

The stack will be 180 letters high then, because the 21st will be 15 years to the day since Nellie, his beloved wife of 53 years, died. In her memory, he sleeps only on his half of the bed, only on his pillow, only on top of the sheets, never between; with just the old bedspread, they shared to keep him warm.

There has never been a finer man in American sports than John Wooden, or a finer coach. He won 10 NCAA basketball championships at UCLA, the last in 1975. Nobody has ever come within six of him. He won 88 straight games between January 30, 1971, and January 17, 1974. Nobody has come within 42 since. So, sometimes, when the Basketball Madness gets to be too much too many players trying to make Sports Center, too few players trying to make assists, too few coaches willing to be mentors, too many freshmen with out-of wedlock kids, too few freshmen who will stay in school long enough to become men -- I like to go see Coach Wooden. I visit him in his little condominium in Encino, 20 minutes northwest of Los Angeles, and hear him say things like “Gracious sakes alive!” and tell stories about teaching “Lewis” the hook shot. Lewis Alcindor, that is...who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There has never been another coach like Wooden, quiet as an April snow and square as a game of checkers; loyal to one woman, one school, and one way; walking around campus in his sensible shoes and Jimmy Stewart morals. He would spend a half hour the first day of practice teaching his men how to put on a sock. “Wrinkles can lead to blisters,” he would warn. These huge players would sneak looks at one another and roll their eyes. Eventually, they would do it right. “Good,” he would say. “And now for the other foot.” Of the 180 players who played for him, Wooden knows the whereabouts of 172. Of course, it’s not hard when most of them call, checking on his health, secretly hoping to hear some of his simple life lessons so that they can write them on the lunch bags of their kids, who will roll their eyes. “Discipline yourself, and others won’t need to,” Coach would say. “Never lie, never cheat, never steal,” and “Earn the right to be proud and confident.”

If you played for him, you played by his rules: Never score without acknowledging a teammate. One word of profanity and you are done for the day. Treat your opponent with respect. He believed in hopelessly out of date stuff that never did anything but win championships. No dribbling behind the back or through the legs. “There’s no need,” he would say.

No UCLA basketball number was retired under his watch. “What about the fellows who wore that number before? Didn’t they contribute to the team?” he would say. No long hair, no facial hair. “They take too long to dry, and you could catch cold leaving the gym,” he would say. That one drove his players bonkers. One day, All- America center Bill Walton showed up with a full beard. “It’s my right,” he insisted. Wooden asked if he believed that strongly. Walton said he did. “That’s good, Bill,” Coach said. “I admire people who have strong beliefs and stick by them, I really do. We’re going to miss you.” Walton shaved it now. Now Walton calls once a week to tell Coach he loves him. It is always too soon, when you have to leave the condominium and go back out into the real world, where the rules are so much grayer and the teams so much worse. As Wooden shows you to the door, you take one last look around. The framed report cards of his great grand kids, the boxes of jellybeans peeking out from under the favorite wooden chair, the dozens of pictures of Nellie.