Warriner told another player, named Freddy Gooch, that he would substitute for Wooden. Johnny was shocked. As soon as school was over, he raced home, got his uniform, and ran back to the school. He was there in plenty of time to warm up with his teammates, but when the game began, Warriner left him on the sideline. He stayed there during the entire contest, which Centerton lost. After the game was over, Warriner put his arm around Wooden’s shoulder and said, “Johnny, we could have won with you in there, but winning just isn’t that important.”
It was a day the boy would never forget. “Johnny Wooden learned early in life he was not a necessary article,” Wooden said during one of his frequent retellings of the incident. “It didn’t make any difference how good I was in sports, business, or anything else. If I don’t put out, I’m not worth a dime.” He also learned that day that the bench was all the motivation a coach ever needed.
When Wooden graduated from the eighth grade, he faced the choice of going to Martinsville or Monrovia for high school. The Woodens were still a year away from losing the farm, and each town was the same distance from their home in Centerton. Martinsville, however, was a real hotbed for basketball. The school routinely drew huge crowds for games and had just won a state championship. The idea of making a living playing or teaching the sport wasn’t remotely in Johnny’s mind, but he did know that he loved playing and was very good at it. So he chose Martinsville. This was Indiana, after all. It was only natural that he would want to follow that bouncing ball.
2
The Artesians
On March 21, 1925, Dr. James Naismith arrived at the Indianapolis Exposition Building, where he had been invited by the Indiana High School Athletic Association to speak at the annual state championship game. There was, however, a problem at the door: the arena was full, and a security guard was not allowing anyone else inside. Naismith showed the man his ticket and his official’s badge, but the guard wouldn’t relent. Finally, a police captain approached and asked what was going on. When Naismith revealed his identity, the captain said, “Good Lord, man, why didn’t you say so long ago?”
Naismith got a chuckle out of the mix-up. But what really tickled him was the spectacle that greeted him after the police captain showed him to his seat: a crowd of close to twenty thousand full-throated fans who were on hand to watch the sport Naismith had invented just thirty-four years before. That sight, Naismith wrote in his 1941 autobiography,
Basketball: Its Origin and Development
, “gave me a thrill that I shall not soon forget.”
Thus did Naismith discover what those twenty thousand spectators already knew: basketball may have been conceived in Massachusetts, but it was born in Indiana.
“Basket ball,” as it was still known, was part of an experiment that appealed to pious farm boys like Johnny Wooden. The organization that invented and proselytized the sport, the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, advertised its mission as promoting a person’s “mind, body and spirit.” Wooden never had Naismith as a mentor per se, but the two were kindred spirits all the same. Like Wooden, Naismith grew up on a farm (in Ontario, Canada) where he learned the value of a hard day’s work. He originally intended to become a minister, but upon graduating from the theological college at Montreal’s McGill University, Naismith decided he could have just as much impact through athletics as he could through the ministry. In 1890, he began formally studying at the YMCA’s training school in Springfield, Massachusetts.
In those days, many religious scholars viewed athletics as a tool of the devil. A group of liberal Protestant ministers rebutted that way of thinking by launching a movement called “muscular Christianity.” In the summer of 1891, the head of the Springfield YMCA’s training school’s physical education department, Dr. Luther Gulick, assigned Naismith the task of creating a new game that students could play indoors during the winter. Naismith used a phys ed class as his laboratory, but his first few attempts proved futile. Gymnastics was too boring, football and rugby were too rough, and there wasn’t enough space in the gymnasium to play soccer or lacrosse.
Sitting in his office, Naismith tinkered with adapting a game he used to play as a boy in Canada called “Duck on a Rock,” where points were scored by lofting small rocks so they would land on a bigger rock. But he was still concerned things would get too rough. That’s when he experienced his eureka moment:
there should be a rule against running with the ball!
If the players couldn’t run, they wouldn’t be tackled. And if they weren’t tackled, they wouldn’t get hurt.
Excited by his breakthrough, Naismith sketched out thirteen rules using just 474 words. The rules did not include dribbling, so the players were stationary, and therefore safe. He then asked the building’s superintendent to fetch him a pair of eighteen-inch boxes to use as goals. The superintendent didn’t have any boxes, but he offered a couple of peach baskets instead. Naismith decided these would have to do.
The class consisted of eighteen students, and the first game featured nine men on each side. It was an instant hit. In the months that followed, Naismith continued to develop and modify his invention in the hope that other YMCAs and athletic clubs would adopt it in coming winters. He had two means of spreading the word. The first was the YMCA’s official publication,
The Triangle
, which was delivered to clubs across the country. The second was the army of clergymen who came to study under Naismith at the training school in Springfield.
One such missionary was a Presbyterian minister named Nicolas McKay, who was the secretary of the YMCA in Crawfordsville, Indiana, sixty miles north of Martinsville. During the winter of 1892, Reverend McKay spent several months observing the new game and engaging in long talks with its inventor. He took his notes and a copy of Naismith’s thirteen rules with him back to Crawfordsville, where he taught the game to his own students, including a pint-sized boy named Ward Lambert, who would later coach Johnny Wooden at Purdue University. Thus was a direct lineage established: Naismith to McKay to Lambert to Wooden.
The state of Indiana’s first organized basketball game was played at the Crawfordsville YMCA on March 16, 1894. The next day’s
Crawfordsville Journal
reported, “Basket ball is a new game, but if the interest taken in the contest last night between the teams of Crawfordsville and Lafayette is any criterion, it is bound to be popular.” That was an understatement. As it turned out, the state provided the ideal platform for Naismith’s game to lift off. Unlike neighboring Ohio, 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. With high school teams popping up all over Indiana, the natural next step was a statewide tournament. The inaugural edition was held in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Crawfordsville, fittingly, was crowned the first champion.
Martinsville was not going to be outdone by its neighbor. So in May 1923, the town set out on an ambitious project: to build the world’s largest high school gymnasium. Thanks to the money spent by all those outsiders who came to visit Martinsville’s gleaming spas, the town was able to complete its mission in swift fashion. On February 7, 1924, Martinsville unveiled its grandiose landmark in time for its first game against Shelbyville. On the morning of the game, the Martinsville
Daily Reporter
revealed that more than four thousand tickets had already been sold, and that 1,500 people from Shelbyville were planning to attend as well. Officially, the gym held 5,382 people, which was more than the entire population of the town. (That fact earned a mention in a popular, nationally syndicated column by Robert Ripley entitled “Believe It or Not.”) Train lines that had been specially set up for the occasion brought spectators from neighboring burgs. Writers from Indianapolis, Vincennes, Frankfort, and Lafayette were on hand, as were a dozen or so local basketball coaches.
The occasion was so intoxicating that even the hometown Artesians’ 47–41 loss couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm. Under the headline “Gymnasium Dedication Was a Great Event,” the next day’s
Reporter
declared, “The fact that this city now has a gymnasium that will take care of any crowd that wishes to witness a basket ball game overshadowed the feelings of regret because of the defeat. The big gym was packed to capacity, and the cheering throng, the music by the bands and the brilliant display of school colors presented a scene never to be forgotten by those who were present.” Within a few years, dozens of communities across Indiana would build large high school gymnasiums of their own. From that point on, the sound of leather pounding wood would serve as the state’s steady heartbeat.
* * *
By today’s standards, a town of fewer than five thousand people is considered small, but back then the citizens of Martinsville justifiably thought of themselves as cosmopolitan and urbane, living as they did among the hustle and bustle of all those out-of-town visitors. Wooden was a small-town kid who seemed out of place when he arrived at Martinsville High School in the fall of 1924. “We Martinsville fellows were city slickers and he was a country boy,” said Floyd Burns, a high school classmate. “John had on a drugstore outfit, snow white and clean, and we looked on him as a greenhorn. He was inexperienced, and he’d run faster than he could dribble and he’d lose the ball. But we all liked him and were amazed that he learned so quickly.”
Since baseball was Johnny’s favorite sport, he might have focused on that if Martinsville fielded a high school team, but it didn’t. Nor did it have a football squad. Wooden lettered for two years in track—he finished sixth in the state in the 100-yard dash as a senior—but he devoted most of his energy to basketball. When that season came around, Wooden found himself under the tutelage of Glenn Curtis, known as the “Old Fox,” who was emerging as one of the finest high school coaches in the state.
Curtis had already won two state championships, with Lebanon in 1918 and Martinsville in 1924. Like many coaches in those days, he deployed a plodding, ball-control offense that made it virtually impossible for opponents to recapture a lead once Curtis’s teams seized it. This was aided by the rules that were in place at the time. After each made basket, the teams returned to center court for a jump ball. There was also no half-court line—that would not be added until 1932—and thus no ten-second counts or backcourt violations. And of course, the sport was decades away from implementing a shot clock. Thus, if a coach had guards who were reliable, quick dribblers, they could use the entire floor to avoid the defense and run out the clock.
Johnny did not hold the Old Fox in high esteem at first. His older brother, Cat, had been a member of Curtis’s 1924 championship team, but Cat barely got into the games. Curtis appeared to confirm Johnny’s fears early on while breaking up a fight between Wooden and one of his teammates. In Wooden’s eyes, Curtis had unfairly backed up the other fellow. “You’re not going to do to me what you did to my brother!” Johnny shouted. He flung off his jersey, his shorts, his shoes, and his socks, and he stormed off the floor in half-naked protest. He decided then and there to quit the team.
Curtis could have regarded Wooden as an intemperate fool and bade him good riddance. But he didn’t. Instead, he spent the next two weeks trying to coax Wooden back on to the squad. Wooden resisted at first, but eventually he relented. He also never forgot his coach’s graciousness in letting him back on the team, a lesson that Wooden would apply to his own players after he started coaching.
Wooden was fortunate to encounter early in his life a man who took his craft so seriously. Curtis systematically broke down the game into its smallest, simplest elements. His players worked for long stretches without using a basketball, and on his command they efficiently shuttled from drill to drill. A decade later, in 1936, Curtis started using a friend’s movie camera to film games and instruct his teams. He was so impressed that he convinced the high school to purchase a camera so he could use it whenever he wanted. An official from the Eastman Kodak Company told the
Daily Reporter
that “no one has yet attempted to teach basketball through this medium.”
Curtis was also renowned for delivering spine-tingling locker room speeches minutes before tip-off. That was one tactic that did not impress Wooden. Hugh had so emphatically pounded the importance of keeping an even keel that Johnny did not want his emotions to overtake him. However, once the games began, Wooden was struck by how Curtis regained his composure. On one occasion, when an opposing player took a cheap shot at Wooden, Curtis prevailed upon young Johnny not to retaliate. “They’re trying to get you out of the game. Don’t lose your temper,” he told Wooden. Then he joked, “After the game is over, I’ll take on the coach and you can take on the players.”
Unlike his brother, Johnny was a starter on Curtis’s team, and he led the Artesians to a sectional title in the 1926 Indiana state tournament. The final rounds were to be played in Indianapolis at the Exposition Center, which was called the “cow barn” because twice a year it hosted livestock shows. Martinsville made it to the championship game—its third contest of the day—where it faced Marion High School. Marion’s nickname was the “Giants,” which was appropriate because the lineup featured the tallest player Wooden had ever seen: Charles “Stretch” Murphy, a six-foot-eight-inch center. The center-jump rule made having that kind of player an enormous asset. Wooden failed to score as Martinsville lost, 30–23.
Despite the disappointing finish, it was a terrific first season of varsity basketball for young Johnny. In the parlance of the day, he played the position of floor guard, which made him responsible for directing the offense much as a point guard does today. (A team’s other guard at that time was typically called a back guard because he served as a de facto goalie, hanging back on defense to protect his team’s basket.) As it turned out, Wooden’s innate physical gifts were uniquely suited to this young sport. “I didn’t have as much size as many, but I was quicker than most all, and that was my strength,” he later recalled.