The town of South Bend was mad for basketball, but it was still a long way from Martinsville. The gymnasium was so small the basketball team could not even practice there. Instead the players trekked a couple of miles down the street to the YMCA, and the squad played its “home” games at various schools around town. While Wooden considered coaching to be secondary to his duties in the classroom, he understood that his superiors did not share that view. “I don’t think South Bend knew whether I’d be a good English teacher or not. They hoped from my background that maybe I could be a pretty good basketball and baseball coach,” he said. “I wanted to be a good English teacher. I wanted to be the best English teacher I could be, but they’re not always looking for that.” Wooden was so deft with language that when he took a job on the side as an editor for the Harper Grace publishing company, the executives there tried to hire him full-time.
It didn’t take long for the folks in South Bend to realize just how stubborn their new head basketball coach could be. One of Wooden’s primary team rules was that every player had to be on time. On the night of one of his first road games, several of Wooden’s players, including the two cocaptains, were a few minutes late for the bus. Wooden climbed aboard and told the driver to leave without them. The players found their own way to the game, but Wooden left them on the bench.
Things did not get much better for the team as Wooden finished his first season as Central’s coach with a record of 8 wins and 14 losses. This was apparently an unpleasant experience for him, because for most of his life he pretended it never happened. In the many interviews he gave and books he wrote over the decades, as well as in all of his officially distributed bios, Wooden always claimed that that first year in Dayton was the only losing record of his coaching career. It was a classic case of selective amnesia.
The benching of the tardy cocaptains was but a minor kerfuffle compared to the storm Wooden ignited during his second season as Central’s head coach, in 1937–38. The Bears were scheduled to play their main rival in the Northern Indiana Conference, Mishawaka High School, on the same night that a big dance was being held at the high school by a club called The Smiters. Four of Wooden’s players failed to show up for the game. The next day, Nell was looking through a newspaper and came upon a picture of the players at the dance. Wooden immediately booted them off the team.
One of those players, Bobby Osborne, happened to be the son of the assistant principal. The father insisted that Wooden reinstate Bobby and his three friends. The principal, P. D. Pointer, tried to intervene on the players’ behalf, but Wooden told him that if he was forced to accept the boys back on the team, he would quit. Pointer backed off. “That made Wooden in South Bend,” said Ed Powell, who arrived at Central in Wooden’s second season and soon became one of his favorite players.
“It really shook up the town,” said Eddie Ehlers, who at the time was an eighth grader and one of the better players in town. “One of the boys’ mothers called my mother and told her Coach Wooden was a bad man and she shouldn’t let me play for him. Thank goodness my mother said, ‘I believe in my son, and he wants to play for Mr. Wooden.’”
Ehlers followed through on that desire once he reached high school. He also played baseball for Wooden, although the coach did not approach that task with the same degree of sobriety as he did basketball. “It was fun for him,” Ehlers said. “It wasn’t like basketball, where from the minute you walked out on the floor it was serious.” When the players rode their bikes to baseball practice, they often stopped at a bakery along the way to buy five-cent pies. Wooden, who had a serious sweet tooth, would sit with them at the start of practice and devour the desserts. Still, the competitor in him came out during games, such as the day in 1939 when he sat his whole team down for fifteen minutes to express his displeasure at an umpire’s missed call, and then resumed the game under protest. (The
South Band Tribune
reported that Wooden “registered vigorous disapproval” of the umpire’s ruling. His protest was later denied.)
Wooden was just as stern while conducting his English classes. “It was always very orderly,” Ehlers said. “Some of the coaches have class and it’s an opportunity to goof off, but not with Coach Wooden.” Ed Powell recalled that Wooden was a “stickler for good penmanship.” Occasionally, Wooden would pass along a favorite poem to his players and ask them to commit it to memory. One he particularly liked was titled “Mr. Meant To”:
Mr. Meant To has a comrade
And his name is Didn’t Do
Have you ever chance to meet them?
Did they ever call on you?
These two fellows lived together
In the house of Never Win
And I am told that it is haunted
By the ghost of Might Have Been
Since Wooden learned most of what he knew about basketball from Piggy Lambert, it was only natural that he would implement many of Lambert’s ideas. That included enforcing the coach’s “right rules of living” away from the court. “Three or four times a year, he would sit us down on the floor and talk to us about things other than basketball,” said John Gassensmith, one of his former players. “How to behave, being good to the teachers. I remember he told us, after you eat dinner, congratulate your mother. Tell her what a good meal it was.”
From the very beginning, Wooden put in place a strict smoking ban, making clear that a violation would result in dismissal. In one instance where he had caught a player smoking, the player repeatedly asked to return to the team, but Wooden refused. At the time, the player appeared to be headed for college, but after being kicked off the team, he never pursued his higher education. Though Wooden couldn’t be sure things would have turned out differently if he had let the player return, he came to regret his inflexibility. “He quit school. Never went to college. I think he ended up a common laborer,” Wooden said. “I’m not putting them down, but here’s a player who was going to get a college education, to have a better chance, and it was because of my being perhaps too stubborn [that he didn’t go]. But I saw no middle. It was either black or white. There was no gray area, and there is a gray area on many things. So that bothered me.”
Wooden kept the no-smoking rule in place, but he subsequently dropped the specification of what the penalty would be. “Instead of saying if you smoke you’re off the team, he said, ‘There is to be no smoking. It will not be tolerated,’” said Jim Powers, who attended Central from 1939 to 1943. During Powers’s senior year, Wooden briefly suspended one of his best players, Parson Howell, for smoking, but he allowed the other players to vote him back onto the team.
Ironically, Wooden was a smoker himself. He admitted as much to his players, but he also told them that he quit when practice began and didn’t resume until the season was over. “He used this as an example to show that he could quit when he wanted to if he really put his mind to it,” Powell said. Nell was also a heavy smoker, but unlike John, who eventually quit for good, she was never able to kick the habit.
Through it all, Johnny Wooden had no better friend, supporter, and defender than his Nellie. On every game night, she and John carried on the same pregame ritual they had begun back in Martinsville, with Wooden turning to the stands to make eye contact with his bride and then flashing her the “okay” sign right before tip-off. Nell had several more fainting incidents, but she never missed a game. There were no laundry facilities at the school, so John asked Nell if she would wash his players’ sweaty uniforms, socks, and jock straps after each practice. She obliged, just as she did when he asked to invite his players to their house on Woodward Avenue. “She was almost my mother,” Powers said. “She’d have those parties after the season was over. They knew I loved ice cream, so they’d get me a gallon of it beforehand.”
Wooden was not a man of many hobbies, although he did spend time during the off-seasons playing some golf. During one memorable afternoon, he accomplished the rare feat of scoring a hole in one and a double eagle in the same round. (He kept that scorecard for the rest of his life.) That aside, Johnny, who was now in his late twenties and a married father of two, was still an introverted wallflower. As usual, it was up to Nell to provide balance. “He was very shy,” Powell said. “His wife saw it, too. She knew it when he was speaking to people and would have his finger on his mouth.” Wooden was combative during games, but away from the court it was Nell who was the loud one. One time Ehlers was riding in the backseat of the Woodens’ car on the way home from a difficult loss against James Whitcomb Riley High School. The car was quiet until Nell spied a Riley player, in his purple letterman’s sweater, walking down the street. The young man had an unfortunate pug nose. Nell rolled down the window, stuck her head out, and shouted, “You no-good little bulldog!” John grabbed her and pulled her back inside the car.
If there’s one thing Wooden understood innately, it’s that a teacher must set a righteous example if he wants his students to follow him. “You have to walk it,” Wooden said. “You can’t fool these kids. They know whether or not you really care about them.” If he insisted that his players never smoked, then he wasn’t going to smoke. If he said that they could never be late, then he could never be late. (He was there to greet them at the YMCA every morning at 6:00 a.m. so he could tape their ankles before practice.) And if he told them that they could not use profanity, he wasn’t going to use any himself. Instead of cursing when he got mad, he adopted the habit of shouting “Gracious sakes alive!” If he was really ticked off, he would say “
Goodness
gracious sakes alive!” It was odd that a man with such affection for the English language would construct a phrase that made no sense, but there it was. When I asked Wooden where he came up with it, he replied, “I have no idea.”
Wooden was a popular, respected basketball coach and English teacher, but there was little to augur that South Bend was witnessing some kind of legend in the making. To wit, when Wooden accepted an invitation to speak at a local banquet, here’s how a local newspaper described the event: “Johnny Wooden, South Bend Central’s basketball coach, will be the featured speaker at Elkhart High’s sports banquet, although they had hoped to line up some prominent college coach.”
* * *
Day by day, step by step, year by year, he perfected his craft. This wasn’t just some English teacher chasing state championships in his spare time. This was a man who was laying the groundwork for a career that would dominate the sport of basketball.
Many of the tactics Wooden developed during his eight seasons as South Bend’s head basketball coach were born of necessity. The facilities were so bad, and the gym time so limited, that he had no choice but to map out his practices in rigid detail. “We only had two hours, so he knew he had to get everything done,” Powers said. “The practice had to be highly organized. You didn’t have a moment to think about what you wanted to do.”
The fixed schedule meant there was no time for frivolity. “He didn’t take no foolishness,” said Tom Taylor, who played at Central High from 1939 to 1943. “I found that out the first time he threw me out of practice. I was fooling around with another guy. He said, ‘Go get your shower.’ Then he’d coach you up later on. He didn’t cuss, but he got it across to you.”
Taylor was lucky that was all Wooden got across that day. The coach was far more incensed when he found out that his best player, Parson Howell, had been smoking. On the morning that Wooden learned of Howell’s transgression, he marched upstairs to the auxiliary gym where Howell was shooting baskets and repeatedly kicked him in the rear end as the two of them walked down two flights of stairs. “He literally helped Parson down the stairs by booting him all the way,” Powers said. Gassensmith recalled that when Wooden kicked someone, he could actually lift him off the ground. “I tell you, for a little guy he was powerful,” Gassensmith said.
“Not everybody came out of their exposure to John Wooden and made the grade. He was very strict, and some people had a problem with that,” said Stan Jacobs, another of his former South Bend players. “There were some failures, too, who were disappointments to him, who drank, who didn’t stick to training rules, and who didn’t get their academic work done and keep it up to par.”
Like Piggy Lambert, Wooden immersed himself in the smallest details. He refused to move on to the next fundamental until the players had mastered the one they were working on. It was all part of a grand design that extended well beyond a single practice. Once again, Wooden viewed a basketball season through the eyes of the engineer he nearly became. First, he had to set the foundation—a row of pipes here, a couple of gears there—and then he laid everything in place piece by piece. If a gear got stuck, he had to go back and apply a little more oil. Every drill, every practice built toward something, and Wooden was the only one who could see the full blueprint.
The season began with a focus on conditioning, footwork, and movement. “Everybody was in motion all the time. Everything was done at full pace,” Powers said. When Wooden taught the players how to shoot, they had to learn the proper form first. The ball came later. Same thing with learning how to run an offense. “You just never had the ball in your hands,” said Ed Powers, Jim’s older brother. “You were always playing three on two, two on one, one on one, but you never shot the ball. It was just ballhandling. After you did that for two weeks, then you finally got to play basketball.”
Wooden’s education as a coach was bolstered in 1941, when Notre Dame, just across town in South Bend, hired Frank Leahy to be its football coach. Leahy jealously guarded his own practices—no writers or coaches were allowed—but he took a liking to Wooden and invited him to watch. Wooden considered himself organized, but he was floored by how efficient Leahy’s workouts were. He ran a beautiful, well-designed engine. The players shuttled from drill to drill without missing a beat. The coaches also did very little talking, since each word that was spoken meant time standing idle. As a result of those visits, Wooden developed the habit of writing his practice plans on index cards so he could pull them out of his pocket without slowing down the action.