by Tim Dahlberg
AP Sports Columnist
LOS ANGELES (AP)—He was a coach when coaching meant something else, long before the job became a pathway to riches and fame. A coach when student-athletes were really students, and the thought of making millions of dollars rolling out basketballs in the gym seemed preposterous. A coach when it meant more to mold the lives of young men than to proclaim his own greatness.
“Learn as if you were going to live forever,” he would tell his players. “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”
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| WIZARD OF WESTWOOD—In this March 24, 1969 photo, legendary UCLA coach John Wooden is flanked by Sidney Wicks, right, and Lew Alcindor, draped with basket ropes, after UCLA beat Purdue 92-72 to win the NCAA basketball title for the third consecutive year, in Louisville, Ky. Wooden, who built one of the greatest dynasties in all of sports at UCLA and became one of the most revered coaches ever, died June 4. He was 99.
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John Wooden didn’t live forever. His tomorrow finally came June 4, when he quietly passed away just months before his 100th birthday.
The end came, fittingly enough, on the same UCLA campus where he tutored a player then known as Lew Alcindor. The same place he seemingly couldn’t lose with Bill Walton.
The place where he dispensed wisdom that his players remembered long after they had forgotten the X’s and O’s.
“What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player,” he would say.
His players listened. How could they not when the man giving advice lived by the same code? He was born on a farm in Indiana without running water or electricity, and his values were as solid as the land his parents worked.
The championships seemed to come as an annual rite of spring. There were 10 of them in all, an accomplishment so staggering that no other college coach will ever come close.
The other statistics blurred together over time. Still, it wasn’t the 88-game winning streak, four 30-0 seasons or even the 38 straight NCAA tournament wins that defined the humble Midwesterner who ended up at UCLA almost by accident.
He had the best players. They came because of him, and they came in spite of him.
Playing for Wooden, you see, was never easy. He was the boss, practices were brutal, and things were always done in his meticulous way. The players who bought in would one day become his lifetime friends. Those who didn’t would never understand.
The first practice of every season began not with a midnight slam dunk contest, but a demonstration by Wooden on the proper way to put on shoes and socks. Wrinkles in the socks could lead to blisters, he explained, and blisters could lead to losing.
The fundamentals never went out of style, and Wooden never changed his approach.
His players learned, and they grew. He taught them how to win, but he also taught them bigger things, like his belief that a life not lived for others is a life not lived well. He wouldn’t accept less than their best effort both on and off the court.
“Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but what you should have accomplished with your ability,” Wooden would warn them.
It’s been 35 years since Wooden watched his Bruins cut down the nets down one last time, then walked away while still at his peak. Yes, he was the “Wizard of Westwood”—a nickname he didn’t like—but he never made more than $32,500 and for years he mopped the floor himself before practice.
He never begrudged the coaches of today the millions they make, but making money wasn’t why he got into coaching in the first place. He became a legend because of what his players did on the court, but to Wooden the victories were merely a byproduct of the life lessons that always came first.
Indeed, Wooden did what he preached, living his life for others. His style was authoritarian, but his players graduated and the messages sank in a lot more than they missed the mark.
He encouraged them to take chances, urged them to be all they could be.
“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything,” he would tell them. “I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.”
Wooden didn’t make many. He lived an impeccable life, devoid of scandal, still so in love with his wife, Nell, in the years after she died that he would write her a letter each month just as he had done while she was alive.
As word got out about his final hospitalization, students who hadn’t even been born the last time he worked a game rallied on the UCLA campus in tribute. Words of tribute, meanwhile, began flowing the moment his death was announced.
But the words that matter most are the ones his players still remember. The same words they’ve passed on to their children and their children’s children.
“Don’t give up on your dreams, or your dreams will give up on you,” he told them.
As hard as it is to imagine, John Wooden is gone. His dreams, however, live on.
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