The Coach And His Champion

He takes the morning walk in part because she insisted he take it. He has continued to participate in the camps because his share of the profits goes into the trusts, and family was so important to her. He gives the speeches, usually on his Pyramid of Success—a homespun collection of life principles—because, if you riffle back through the Norman Rockwell scenes of their life together, back to high school in Martinsville, Ind., you'll see it was Nell who persuaded taciturn Johnny Wooden to take a speech class to help him out of his shell. He struggled until the teacher. Mabel Hinds, who knew of his fondness for poetry, gave him a copy of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which made the speaking easier.

He still knows Gray's Elegy cold, and in Martinsville in January, at a banquet on the eve of ceremonies to dedicate the 12-year-old high school gym in his name, he recited it. With all manner of acclaim being slung at him, he intoned this stanza as if raising a shield to protect himself:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e're gave;
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

"And they do," he added from the dais. ' "We're all going to go someday."

"As a coach, did you ever lose your temper?"

The postprandial question comes from the audience in Martinsville. Wooden's answer provides a lesson about self-control: "I always told my players to control their tempers, and I couldn't very well expect them to if I wasn't setting a good example myself. I lost my temper once in a while. But I never lost control. I never threw anything. I never threw a chair."

Not 20 miles from Bloomington, within the pale of Bob Knight, the banquet hall erupts with approval.

The sphinx of the Pyramid of Success rests his left forearm against his stomach, parallel to the ground. His left hand is a socket for his right elbow. His right forearm forms a hypotenuse leading to his chin, where the index finger sticks upright, hovering just over his mouth. When speaking. Wooden strikes this pose frequently and unconsciously. A photograph of him in the same pose—Nell's favorite—hangs in their bedroom.

It is an enigma, that finger to the mouth. Is it the stern Midwestern schoolteacher, meting out discipline, admonishing the class? Or is it the kindly grandfather, guiding the wayward and confused young, giving them assurances that everything will be all right?

Or is it both? Wooden's greatest achievement isn't the 10 in 12, or seven in a row, although such a feat will surely never be accomplished again. It is rather that he did all this during the roily years from 1964 to '75—an era in which 18-to 22-year-old males were at their most contrary—at UCLA, a big-city campus awash in the prevailing freedoms.