33
The Hardest Loss
While UCLA basketball spiraled, Wooden floated above the fray, enjoying a contented life. He no longer went into the office, but he stayed plenty busy—traveling, speaking, writing, receiving visitors. He expressed surprise that people still cared so much about what he had to say. “Perhaps one of the reasons people still want to hear me is that I was always known as a teacher as much as a coach,” he said. “Of course, winning championships didn’t hurt.”
Immediately after his retirement, Wooden found work as a television commentator, primarily for NBC. He stopped after a few years. “This is not my cup of tea,” he said. “I don’t think I provided what the networks or stations wanted because I refused to be extremely critical of coaches or players.” Another reason Wooden stepped away is that he could see the destructive influence television was having on the game. “I see coaches who have stopped coaching so they can become actors and get the TV cameras turned on them,” he said. “Most of them have forgotten what the game and their responsibilities are all about.”
Indeed, Wooden’s opinions on the state of the game were widely sought. He became the sport’s resident scold. After watching North Carolina win the 1982 ACC tournament championship over Virginia, Wooden chastised Dean Smith for having his team hold the ball for thirteen minutes. “I deplore a game of non-action. I can’t see talented teams not playing each other,” he said. Wooden believed play was too rough. (“If I want to see something like that, I’ll go to a wrestling match.”) The refs were too lenient. (“They let them travel, palm the ball, the amount of moving screens are ridiculous.”) He opposed expanding the NCAA tournament, but if it was going to be expanded, he wanted every team in the country to be invited—just as Indiana did with its high school tournament. Wooden was pleased when a shot clock was finally added in 1986, but he remained a lone, futile crusader against the offensive rebound basket. Dating back to his days coaching UCLA, Wooden argued that if an offensive player got a rebound, he should have to pass before another shot is taken. He thought it would elevate teamwork. Wooden did acknowledge that bringing back the dunk was good for basketball, but he deplored the way it encouraged showmanship.
Such opinions should have made Wooden seem outdated, but if anything, his voice was resonating even more than when he was coaching. As his grandson, Greg Wooden, put it, “He became much more famous after he retired.” In an era of ever-faster changes, Wooden provided a link to a simpler time. “Today’s kids are crying out for discipline, and most of the time they’re not getting it,” he told the
Christian Science Monitor
in 1986. “Until we give them the proper standards to live by, we will continue to be a nation whose young people will be in and out of trouble.”
Stepping away from coaching also enabled Wooden to devote more time to his basketball camps. He loved the chance to engage in pure teaching, without alumni and scoreboards determining whether he had “succeeded.” He adored children—his schoolmarm’s mien softened whenever one of them asked for an autograph or to take a picture—and he enjoyed sitting around for hours talking ball with the staff. “I used to tell the coaches, get your questions ready. That’s all he likes to do is hold court,” Jim Harrick said. “It was like getting your doctorate degree in basketball.”
Many of Wooden’s former players worked at the camps or visited him there. They couldn’t believe how relaxed, personable, and, yes, funny the man could be. “I saw a totally different side of him,” said Jim Nielsen, the former UCLA center, who spent several years as a codirector for Wooden’s camps. “He loved to tease me. He’d have me out there demonstrating what foot to pivot on, where your head would be, where your balance would be. He’d always find something that wasn’t right and say, ‘You didn’t listen to me when you were playing for me, and you won’t listen to me now.’”
The activity that occupied most of Wooden’s time, however, was public speaking. Much of it was unpaid, but Wooden also signed contracts with businesses that committed him to make dozens of appearances per year. He and Nell traveled all over the country as he astounded audiences with his lecture on the Pyramid of Success, which was more relevant to his audiences than it had ever been to his players. Wooden was well into his seventies, but he could deliver the speech without glancing at a single note. He quoted poetry at length (including some poems he had written) and showed off his wit. When he took the stage, he often joked, “I hope the good Lord will forgive my introducer for overpraising, and me for enjoying it so much.” Wooden was a spellbinding raconteur. (“So I said to Bill, ‘You’re right. You don’t have to get a haircut. We’re gonna miss you.’”) When his talk was over, he would stand around signing autographs, posing for pictures, and exchanging words with strangers who would speak of the encounter for the rest of their lives.
Wooden was flooded with countless letters as well as requests for a signed copy of the pyramid. He did his best to answer each one personally, often paying for the postage himself. Each time he dropped something in the mail, he touched another life. “He had a great coaching record, but what he created after coaching was much more than that,” said Eddie Sheldrake, the point guard on Wooden’s first UCLA team, who remained one of his closest friends. “He developed a following and a mystique. He became like a god.”
Wooden bristled at that kind of talk, which only made him seem more impressive. It was as if all of those NCAA championships were a prologue to what Wooden was really meant to be. Or rather, what he had been all along. “I considered myself at UCLA, and prior to being there, just as a teacher. That’s all a coach is. You’re a teacher,” he said during one talk to a group of UCLA alumni. The only difference was that his classroom had gotten a little bigger. “He stopped coaching UCLA a long time ago,” Bill Walton said. “Now he just coaches the world.”
* * *
As he moved into his seventies, Wooden remained in good physical shape for a man his age. He still took his daily five-mile walk around his neighborhood, reciting poetry and Biblical verses to allay his boredom. His active lifestyle and jam-packed calendar kept his body strong and his mind sharp. However, he soon had to dial back his pace for the saddest of reasons. His Nellie was falling ill, and she wasn’t getting better.
The cigarettes she had smoked all her life were finally exacting their lethal toll. Among other ailments, Nell’s bones were breaking down. In 1982, she went into the hospital for hip surgery, but because of her chronic emphysema, she went into cardiac arrest during the surgery. Her doctors saved her life by massaging her heart for forty-five minutes. Shortly afterward, she suffered a second heart attack and lapsed into a coma. Wooden was told that it was very likely she would never come out of it.
John sat at her bedside every day. His children and grandchildren took turns sitting with him. Bill Walton, who was now a member of the Los Angeles Clippers, came by every day that he was in town. Jim Harrick drove down frequently from Malibu. “My wife and I would just go up there and be with him,” he said. “Might sit forty-five minutes without a word being said, but we’d sit there. Trust me, he never forgot stuff like that.” Many other former players would drop in as well. “They never called him, never told him they were coming,” one of the hospital nurses said. “They just showed up, day after day, to be with him.”
Days, weeks, and eventually months went by, and still Nell slept. At one point, a minister was called in to administer last rites. John was convinced she would wake up. “Dad just never gave up hope, even when we were told that if she did come out of the coma, she wouldn’t know any of us,” Wooden’s son, Jim, said. “It was total devotion.”
He wasn’t nearly as strong as he tried to appear. “I never broke down in front of my family,” Wooden said. “I can remember going home some nights and—well, maybe I did there. But I was always up again for the next morning.” He followed her doctors’ suggestion that he talk to her. “They said that I might not see any signs, but in her subconscious she might be hearing me.”
Otherwise, there wasn’t much to do except sit next to her bed and squeeze her hand. Finally, ninety-three days after Nell had gone into her coma, she squeezed back.
It was a miraculous comeback, but Nell never regained her full strength. From then on, she was mostly homebound. She and John would watch her favorite soap operas for hours. He had no use for those shows, and the television was extremely loud because she was hard of hearing, but he sat with her and watched nonetheless. He still conducted a few speaking engagements, but he crafted his schedule around her needs. Once, when he was asked to make two appearances on behalf of the Wooden Award on the East Coast a few days apart, he flew back and forth to Los Angeles so he could be with her in the interim. When Nell wasn’t in the hospital or at the doctor’s office, she was resting at home, greeting his many visitors with her customary smile and peck on the cheek. “I remember a time when eight or nine of us went to have lunch with Coach. We went to the condo,” Johnny Green said. “Nell was in a walker, but she came out to greet us all. She just wanted to see her husband’s boys.”
Nell eventually needed to have her gallbladder removed, and her doctors feared her body could not withstand the trauma. It did, and she recovered well enough to go with John to the 1984 Final Four in Seattle. John’s recall for names and faces was legendary, but Nell would always help him identify people whom he did not know. She was too weak to go to the games, so John pushed her wheelchair around town, allowing her to see people and go out to dinner. At one point, as he wheeled her through a hotel lobby and into an elevator, the dozens of basketball fans milling about the lobby gave them a standing ovation. “It was,” John later said, “the last enjoyable thing she did.”
On Christmas morning in 1984, Nell fell ill and had to be rushed to the hospital. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This time, there would be no miracle. The doctors gave Nell only a few months to live. John resumed his sad, lonely vigil. He kept a running ledger of every dose of medication, every meal, all her sleeping and eating patterns. It was as if he were charting rebounds at practice. “He kept copious notes on every single thing that was said and done,” said Bill Hicks, who played for Wooden from 1959 to 1962. “I found them in his car one day, and he’d literally written down every word the doctor had said, what TV program she was watching at one o’clock, everything that happened to her. That’s the way he kept his mind occupied.”
On a few occasions, the doctors performed a Code Blue to bring Nell back from the brink. “I remember we’d try to look hard at the doctor’s face as he came out [of her room],” the Woodens’ daughter, Nan, said. “You’d try to guess at the expression he had. Your heart would pound.” Nell spent most of her time sleeping. She knew her time was short. Once, when she awoke to see her husband leaning over her and weeping, she reached up and brushed his tears away.
In those final days, John was surrounded by family and friends in the daytime. When evening came, however, he preferred to be alone with her. “We respect his wishes,” Nan said. “I’ve known a lot of married people, and I’ve always said what they had was rare. It’s like they were one person.” At one point, John was so exhausted that he fainted. He was advised to check himself into the hospital as a patient, but he refused to leave her. “She’s slowly slipping, and there’s nothing that can be done,” he said in February 1985. “What we’re trying to do is to relieve as much of her pain as possible. It’s impossible to take care of all the things that are bothering her.”
“When she’s awake, she’s very aware, and always thinking of John,” Nan said. “The last few weeks, knowing she isn’t getting any better, her main concern has been for Dad, my brother and myself. She hasn’t thought of herself.”
For most of his adult life, Wooden had done everything he could to control the events around him. He was obsessive-compulsive, hyperorganized, forever fixating on the smallest details. Here, finally, was a machine that could not be repaired. Yet he tinkered to the very end. He talked to his wife, told her how much he loved her, tried to coax her through another day. He did his best, but in the end it wasn’t good enough. Nell died on the first day of spring.
* * *
It was well known that while he was coaching at UCLA, John clutched a silver cross in the palm of his hand during games. It comforted him to know that Nell was sitting in her seat, holding an identical cross in one hand and smelling salts in the other. Before he buried Nell, John took her cross and put it in his pocket. If he couldn’t hold her, at least he could hold their talismans.
It was one of the countless ways in which John tried to keep Nell’s memory alive. He visited her gravesite every Sunday after church. He wrote her a letter on the twenty-first of every month, because that was the date she died. He listened to the Mills Brothers. He wrote poems for her. When he endorsed checks, he signed her name along with his because “that pleases Nell.” He spoke to her in his prayers. He even spread her nightgown on the bed next to him and refused to go under the covers. Her lipstick sat on the dresser. Her license plate reading “MAMA 7” stayed by the foot of the bed. The room looked as if she had just been there the day before. “It was spooky,” Jack Hirsch said, “but it was part of the man and his aura.”
But he was lost. Badly, badly lost. Nell was the one area of his life where Wooden violated his cardinal rule about avoiding peaks. Their love had brought him to godly heights, given him a glorious view. Without her there to prop him up, he plunged. It sent him on a long, dark walk through the valley.
His children hoped that as painful as Nell’s death was at least John would benefit from not having to attend to her manifold illnesses. There would be no more trips to the doctor’s office, no more long nights in hospital rooms. “We thought it would make it easier now because of all that he had gone through and all of us had gone through. It affects everybody,” Jim said. Instead, Wooden sealed himself in his condo and rarely came out. He received a few visitors and still went to breakfast at Vip’s, his favorite local restaurant, but for the most part, he did not want to speak to anyone. When his phone rang, he let his answering machine pick it up so he could listen for who was calling. If it wasn’t someone he wanted to speak to—which was most of the time—he wouldn’t pick up the phone. It got so bad that his children feared he might take his own life. “He just didn’t care whether he lived or not,” Jim said.