Wooden: A Coach's Life Read Free Page A

hundred people, yet every Saturday and Sunday, the basketball court next to the grade school was teeming with kids. The court was not even paved; rather, it was made of sand and clay, a mixture chosen so it would dry quickly after it rained. The locals often referred to it as a “basketball diamond.” In the wintertime, the kids often had to shovel snow off the court if they wanted to play. The school was just a few hundred yards up the road from the Woodens’ house, and Hugh delighted in watching his boys play those weekend games. Hugh liked basketball, but his best sport was baseball, where he excelled as a pitcher. He even carved a diamond, Field of Dreams –like, amid the wheat and alfalfa on the family farm.
    Centerton’s school had three rooms for eight grades. The principal, who taught in the room for seventh- and eighth-graders, was a strapping young man named Earl Warriner. When Johnny was eleven years old, his dad allowed him to play basketball under Warriner’s supervision. “Johnny says what helped him the most was the desire to play,” Warriner said. “He wasn’t a bully and neither was he a sissy. He had the grit to stay in there and fight.” Wooden needed that grit to make up for his lack of size, but what really made him effective was his speed. “My trouble was trying to keep others up with him,” Warriner said. “John was so much faster than everybody else, and he had his heart and soul in what he did.”
    Centerton’s basketball team played a haphazard schedule of five or six games a year (weather permitting) against other schools in the area, including the junior high school team from Martinsville. The boys didn’t have much by way of uniforms, just a bib to be worn on top of their overalls. “They were lucky if they had shoes,” Warriner said. They played with a lopsided leather ball that often had to be unlaced and reinflated. Wooden later credited that ball, along with the lumpy court, with forcing him to develop into an expert dribbler.
    However, it was baseball, not basketball, that was fast becoming Johnny’s favorite sport. Though his diminutive stature prevented him from having much pop as a hitter, his quickness and agility made him an effective shortstop. “That little rat John,” as Warriner called him, was still a teenager when he played for the town team alongside men who were in their twenties. “All he could do was get the ball over the infield, but he got more hits than anybody,” Warriner said.
    Young Johnny also fancied himself a bit of a practical joker. One day in winter, Warriner was feeling chilly while sitting in his office, so he went to the school’s basement and asked a janitor named Hiram to turn up the heat. Hiram did as he was told, but the room was still freezing. They went back and forth several more times until Warriner checked the basement, where he discovered that the flue to his office had been shut.
    Several months later, Warriner was walking around the school grounds and noticed that someone had written on the wall of an outdoor bathroom, “I turned off the furnace. Guess who?” Soon after, he was invited to dinner at the Woodens’ house, where he revealed to the rascal that he knew his little secret. When Johnny asked Warriner how he found out, the principal replied, “John Bob, if you graded as many papers as I do, you’d know everybody’s writing, too.”
    On the few occasions when Wooden was foolish enough to test Warriner, he paid a heavy price. Johnny was around nine years old when he and three of his classmates decided that they did not want to sing the national anthem at the morning assembly. So they pretended to sing it. The next day, Warriner called them out of the assembly, brought them into his office, and told them that if they didn’t sing, they would get the business end of a paddle. They refused again, so Warriner brought them out and stung their behinds while all the other kids watched. One of the boys had worn two pairs of