Coach Wooden

I met John Wooden a couple of times. The first meeting, when I was eight, came in his office at UCLA. He had retired the year before but kept an office at school. My father, 84 years now and counting, was doing some promotional work at the time that incorporated the Pyramid of Success. I'm not sure how he did it, but he managed to get us a few minutes with Coach. Wooden was very warm and engaging. He offered me jelly beans from a jar on his desk, talked to us for about 20 minutes and signed my Pyramid of Success which I still have somewhere.

The second time I met up with Coach was at one of his basketball camps in Thousand Oaks. All the campers had one-on-one time with Wooden and when I reminded him we had met before he claimed to remember me. I didn't doubt him.

One would be hard pressed to find a player more identified with Wooden than Bill Walton. The one time I visited Bill's home in San Diego for a story on Luke, Big Bill gave me a book. Not one of his own, but one of Wooden's. He signed it: "To John, Learn from the master teachers. Go Bruins. Bill Walton UCLA '74."

In my interview, Bill managed to compare Jerry Garcia to Wooden and I can't read the quote without hearing the Big Redhead's voice. "It's the creativity and the imagination, the electricity, the rhythm, the explosiveness, delivering peak performance on command, making other people's lives fun, creating joy and happiness for others, the leadership, the willingness to make the hard decisions, keeping everybody together. They are definitely the same person."

Walton and Wooden are linked forever, but the one relationship Coach had with a player that to this day has fascinated me was with Kareem. I don't think Wooden ever referred to Kareem by his Muslim name. It was always Lew or Lewis. That bugged me and I'm not sure if Kareem has ever addressed it. Regardless, Kareem had great affection for Coach. And I'll always remember the last time I saw the two of them together. It was at the Stanford game in 2007 in which UCLA celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1967 team. At halftime, the team gathered at halfcourt and when the ceremony was over Kareem escorted Wooden back to his seat. There was a purity in that moment that overwhelmed me. The middle-aged Abdul-Jabbar towered over the cane-assisted nonagenarian as the two walked off the floor not arm-in-arm, but with hands clasped.

Goodnight, Coach.