Anecdotes from They Call Me Coach

In typical sports autobiographies anecdotes are used to shock or make the reader laugh.  John Wooden is not a typical sports figure.  Throughout his autobiography They Call Me Coach, written with Jack Tobin, Wooden emphasizes his belief that character is more important than basketball and that basketball’s best tool is the ability to develop players off the court.  For this reason, the three anecdotes that resonate the most with me from They Call Me Coach deal with the character of John Wooden’s two most famous players and Wooden himself.

            In earlier chapters Wooden describes his playing career and at one point discusses the time he quit basketball after an altercation with a player and his coach, Martin Curtis.  Eventually Curtis convinced Wooden to return to the basketball team and Wooden details how this event shaped his coaching career, “I’m sure this incident accounts for the fact that throughout my coaching career I tried to understand the young men who stood up to me… I almost always took back a boy who had walked off the team.”

            I found it very interesting that there was a specific event that defined how Wooden decided to manage relationships with his players.  The story also reveals that Wooden once quit on his team.  Without any knowledge one might assume based on Wooden’s insistence on morals and work ethic that he would never quit a team, but is fascinating to know Wooden values sticking up for what you believe in just as much as a commitment to your team.

            The next anecdote that stuck with me was about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (referred to as Lew Alcindor).  This anecdote deals with a racist comment aimed at Abdul-Jabbar and Wooden’s response.  While the UCLA team was walking to the team bus, a passerby called Abdul-Jabbar a ‘big black freak.’  Wooden responded by turning to Abdul-Jabbar and saying, among other things, that the comment had nothing to do with his race.  After this altercation Wooden and Abdul-Jabbar discussed racial issues at length and Wooden felt that he had begun to understand what Abdul-Jabbar was going through.  The most interesting aspect of this anecdote to me is the fact that Wooden chose to include it in his autobiography.  Many people today would consider this incident a blemish on Wooden’s record, but he chose to include it.

            The final anecdote that resonated with me includes one of my favorite athletes, Bill Walton.  This anecdote might resonate with me more because it romanticizes my idea of Walton than reveals anything about Wooden.  After returning home from a short hospital stay, Wooden answered the doorbell to see Bill Walton, who had biked over ten miles to visit Wooden.  The image of a six-foot-eleven, gangly, Bill Walton biking through the streets of Los Angeles is resonant enough, but it also demonstrates how John Wooden’s players cared for him.  And that is one of the resounding messages of They Called Me Coach; Wooden put so much into UCLA basketball and the relationships with his players, but they gave just as much back to him.