Wooden: A Coach's Life (6 page)

Wooden played the first half, but during halftime a spectator who recognized him from his high school days came into the locker room and threatened to notify Purdue if Wooden kept playing. Wooden told the other players to ignore him, but they eventually convinced the team’s owner to leave him out of the second half. When Dellinger reminded Wooden of the incident many years later, Wooden chuckled and said, “That could easily have been my Alamo.”

Since he was basically broke, Wooden did not get to see Nellie as often as they would have liked. She had a brother-in-law who owned a car, and once in a while he would drive her to West Lafayette. On other occasions, Johnny would hitchhike back to Martinsville. “There was no problem hitchhiking in those days. If there was room, anybody would pick you up no problem,” Wooden said. “Times were hard. The bus might have been ten or fifteen cents. I didn’t have it, and she didn’t either.”

Wooden was an intelligent, good-looking athlete, so naturally he turned some heads. He would have none of it. “He never brought a girl to any dance, but mostly stood off to the side and occasionally would dance with another fellow’s girl,” said Mary Dohn, a fellow student. “Everybody knew he was going with his high school girlfriend.” Nellie, alas, was a different story. Not only did she continue to date other boys back home, but she would sometimes write Johnny letters detailing her active social life, which rankled him something awful. When he confronted her yet again during one of his visits, she told him that he was just going to have to trust that she was his girl and they would end up together.

Like all freshmen, Wooden was not eligible to compete with the Purdue varsity, so he looked to other sports. He spent two days during the fall of his freshman year practicing with Purdue’s football team as a halfback until Lambert found out and ordered Wooden to stop. The following summer, Wooden played baseball for a team in Indianapolis, where he was working for the state’s highway annex. During one at bat, he turned into a pitch that struck him hard in his right shoulder and damaged his rotator cuff. This was a major problem since Wooden’s greatest asset was his arm. He explored the possibility of having corrective surgery, but once again, Lambert stepped in and said no. Thus did Wooden enter his sophomore year totally committed to playing basketball for Piggy Lambert, whether he liked it or not. He was only beginning to comprehend the myriad ways in which this fiery, exacting, brilliant little coach was starting to shape his life.

*   *   *

In John Wooden, Piggy Lambert saw a taller, younger version of himself. In Lambert, Wooden saw a male authority figure who could use basketball to nourish his mind, body, and spirit. At five foot ten, Wooden always thought of himself as small, but he fairly towered over his coach, who stood just five foot six and was sometimes referred to in the local newspaper as Purdue’s “midget mentor.”

Lambert was living proof that an indomitable spirit could overcome an elfin frame. Born in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1888, he was two years old when his family moved to Crawfordsville. That’s where Ward caught the basketball bug. As he bounced around the YMCA popping basketballs out of the coffee sacks that Reverend McKay hung from the rims, the older boys used to tease young Ward about the pigtails that flapped under his stocking cap. That’s how he got the nickname “Piggy.”

By the time he reached Crawfordsville High School, this little Piggy weighed all of 115 pounds. The school’s coach, Reverend Ralph Jones, who would later coach for two seasons at Purdue, deemed him too small to play for the varsity. Still, Lambert was fast and determined, and he finally broke through at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, where Jones also coached basketball. Jones finally rewarded Lambert with a spot in Wabash’s starting lineup as a sophomore. Lambert spent his last three years at Wabash as an accomplished three-sport star in basketball, baseball, and football.

Lambert was even more serious about his studies. After college, he earned a graduate degree in physics and chemistry at the University of Minnesota. But he could not resist that bouncing ball. He took over as coach at Indiana’s Lebanon High School in 1911, and he was hired at Purdue six years later at the age of twenty-nine.

In West Lafayette, Lambert fashioned his teams in his own image. Basketball was very much a big man’s game in those days. Not only could a taller player plant himself under the basket and score easily (this was long before the three-second violation), but he was also a great weapon for the center jump that was held after every made basket. Yet Lambert preferred players who were smaller and quicker, and he was determined to speed the game up. Sportswriters branded this strange style “fire-wagon basketball,” but Lambert had another name for it. He called it the fast break.

It was not enough for Lambert’s players to be quicker than their opponents. For his system to work, they also had to be in superior condition. The way he figured it, if his team was able to impose its fire-wagon style for an entire game, it would eventually wear out the opponent and seize control down the stretch. So he ran his guys ragged. “Our practices were hellish,” said Charlie Caress, who played at Purdue from 1939 to 1942. Lambert placed so much emphasis on making his players run that he preferred not to stop practice to talk to his team as a group. When he wanted to correct something, he would pull individual players aside for brief chats. While other coaches let their boys go home during the Christmas holiday, Lambert insisted that they remain on campus so they could keep on running.

During his second season at Purdue, Lambert’s Boilermakers set a new Big Ten record by scoring 35.6 points per game. According to
The Big Ten
, a voluminous history of the conference, one sportswriter who covered the league at the time “noted that offense was getting too much ahead of defense and predicted gloomily that basketball would soon be spoiled by 40-point games.” Two years later, Purdue won its first undisputed Big Ten title, and over the next twenty-seven years, Lambert would claim ten more conference crowns and eventually earn enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

His ethos dovetailed perfectly with Wooden’s skill set, not to mention his farm-bred work ethic. “He was way ahead of his time in fast break basketball,” Wooden said. “I tried to feel … that no one would be in better condition than I was. They may beat me on ability, but they’ll never beat me on condition.” When Lambert later referred to Wooden as the best-conditioned athlete he had coached, Wooden recognized it as the ultimate compliment.

No detail was too small to escape Piggy’s discerning eye. For example, he was fixated on the condition of his players’ feet. He ordered them to rub their feet twice a week with a solution of benzoin and tannic acid, which Lambert said would toughen up the skin. Instead of having his players wear one pair of thick wool socks as was customary, he told them to wear two—a cotton pair next to the feet to absorb sweat plus a medium-weight wool pair to reduce friction against their shoes. After they showered, he wanted his players to fan their feet, not towel them, and he reminded them to make sure they were dry between the toes.

Lambert was a stickler for routine. For an 8:00 p.m. tipoff, the players ate precisely at 1:15. The menu was always the same—fruit cocktail, medium-sized steak cooked medium well, peas, carrots, celery, green tea, and ice cream or custard cup for dessert. Then he wanted his players to take a short walk and lie down for a nap between 3:00 and 4:30. Outside of basketball, he said they should abide by what he called the “right rules of living.” That meant no smoking, alcohol, overeating, or “irregular hours,” even though Lambert himself was a smoker and inveterate poker player (and not a very good one at that).

When it came to teaching the game, everything Lambert did was predicated on speed. He preferred passing to dribbling because the ball moved faster. Whereas most teams tended to slowly walk the ball up the floor following an opponent’s missed shot, Lambert drilled into his players the habit of immediately firing a long pass. “When you rebounded, your first look was down the floor,” Caress said. “I don’t know how many afternoons we practiced getting our hand behind the ball so that when we threw the ball the length of the floor, it wouldn’t curve.”

Lambert laid out all of these precepts in a textbook he wrote called
Practical Basketball
. Published in 1932, it was one of the first technical volumes to be authored by a college coach, and for years it was considered to be a bible among Lambert’s peers. The book was packed with intricate jargon that was supplemented by charts and photographs. (One photograph shows a crouched Johnny Wooden demonstrating a “low bounce dribble.” The player is described as having “unusual speed.”) Every facet of the game was broken down in the book, but what really came through was the author’s unshakable faith in the gospel of up-tempo basketball. “The fast-break, with dependence upon the initiative of the players rather than upon set formations is, in my opinion, the ideal system, if the coach has the necessary material,” Lambert wrote.

While Lambert had strict notions on the way the game should be played, his true genius lay in the broad freedom he gave his players to execute his vision. He figured it was his job as the head coach to get his guys into the best possible condition, teach them how to play—and then get out of their way. He had very few offensive plays, substituted infrequently, and rarely talked to his players about their opponent. This was another offshoot of the rules of the day, which forbade coaches from speaking to players during time-outs. (When the action stopped, the players simply huddled on the court.) Lambert often told his players that the team that commits more mistakes usually wins. “One of the dangers in teaching is overloading the players with knowledge,” he wrote in
Practical Basketball
. “Most young players cannot absorb all of this knowledge, and there is more danger in overcoaching than in undercoaching.”

Lambert whittled his philosophy down to three components: condition, skill, and team spirit. “He didn’t have any complicated systems or anything of that sort,” Wooden said. “He taught me the value of a controlled offense, but one that had freelance aspects to it. You build a base from where the offense would start, trying to get movement by design but not necessarily by a precise pattern. There was always somebody moving, in and out, crossing over, and then he would add little changes within that framework.”

In other words, he was the polar opposite of Glenn Curtis, Wooden’s coach at Martinsville High School. Whereas Curtis taught a deliberate offense and maintained an even keel, Lambert turned his horses loose and behaved frenetically on the sideline. “I’ve seen Piggy getting up, leading cheers, coaching, and officiating all at the same time,” said Clyde Lyle, a college teammate of Wooden’s. A veteran league official once complained that “it’s an uncomfortable feeling to be calling them as you see ’em, knowing the little guy over there has never been wrong on a basketball floor in his life.” When Lambert retired in 1946 after having won 71 percent of his games and eleven league championships during his twenty-nine-year tenure at Purdue, he admitted he was “anxious to be relieved of the nervous strain and mental punishment that accompanies a head coachship.”

Lambert was tough on his players, but he generally took a positive tack. This was yet another way in which Wooden saw Lambert as an extension of Hugh. As Lambert wrote in
Practical Basketball
, “The coach who continually tells his players they are rotten is sure to make them so.” Added Clyde Lyle, “He was a master psychologist. He had a tremendous vocabulary and he didn’t need a lot of profanity to let the players know what he wanted.”

With Wooden waiting in the wings as a freshman, the Boilermakers’ varsity posted an impressive 13–4 record and finished second in the Big Ten. During one game that season, they set a new conference record by scoring 64 points in a rout of the University of Chicago. Interest in the team’s exploits was so high that four of their home games were moved to Jefferson High School, whose gym was nearly twice the capacity of Purdue’s on-campus facility, Memorial Gymnasium. When the Boilermakers did play at Memorial, the place was so jammed that some fans sat on steel trusses above the floor. Lambert understood that basketball was a form of entertainment, and the customers wanted running and scoring. They would soon get their wish, thanks to the dynamic little player who was ready to hop aboard Piggy’s fire wagon and rip it into higher gear.

*   *   *

Lambert may have favored speed over size, but he was not ignorant to the value of a big man. In the fall of 1926, two years before Wooden arrived on campus as a freshman, a tall, skinny gift landed in Lambert’s lap: Charles “Stretch” Murphy, the six-foot-eight center from Marion whose team had beaten Martinsville in the state final at the end of Wooden’s sophomore season. Most coaches who had big men on their roster planted them in the middle and told them to stay there, but not Lambert. He resolved to burnish Murphy’s strength, quickness, and skill, just as he did with his guards. The result was one of the first truly great big men the college game had seen.

Murphy was quite the unfinished product at first. His weighed just 173 pounds, and his habit of flinging his elbows when cradling the ball could be a menace to his teammates during practice. “He was a beanpole,” Clyde Lyle said. “He was not clever at all, and most teams were knocking him down by hitting him low because he didn’t have much strength and didn’t know how to keep his feet out for balance.”

Still, Murphy was unusually coordinated for a player his size. Lambert installed him as a full-time starter his sophomore year, and the following season, Murphy set Big Ten records for scoring in a single game (26 points) as well as a season (143). When Wooden joined the varsity for Murphy’s senior year in 1929, the two of them became a must-see tandem, although Wooden was not mentioned in the early stories that previewed the upcoming season. (The main local paper in West Lafayette, the
Journal and Courier
, referred to him that fall as “Jimmy Wooden.”) After the Boilermakers opened the season with a 19-point drubbing of Washington University, the paper’s beat writer, Gordon Graham, reported that Wooden “had proven himself capable” of handling college competition. The word was out.