Growing up in Indiana, John Wooden was more than UCLA’s great basketball coach. He was a state legend. High school champ at Martinsville. College national champ and three-time all-American at Purdue. And then coach of South Bend Central High and of Indiana State — all before leaving for Los Angeles in 1948.
Although best known for his 10 national championships in a 12-year span at UCLA, in Indiana — at least in my little world — he was better known as a gentleman, a teacher, a leader. That’s what our fathers and coaches — and my grandfather who was captain of the Indiana University basketball team in 1942-43 — told us.
Later, when I met my wife, I learned she had attended the same tiny grammar school as John Wooden — Centerton Elementary. She had also, no doubt like so many other Hoosier students, written her eighth grade term paper about him. She loved him not for his basketball savvy but for his character.
Upon Wooden’s graduation from Centerton, his father Joshua’s gift to him was a list of maxims:
Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Wooden kept the list with him for the rest of his life. Literally, and figuratively. He lived the list.
UPDATE: See this wonderful remembrance from Rich Karlgaard noting the “astonishing” parallel lives of John Wooden and Ronald Reagan.
