Wooden: A Coach's Life Read Free Page B

pants in anticipation of the punishment, but Warriner made him pull down the outer pair so he could properly feel his penance.
    When Warriner’s discipline combined one day with Johnny’s love for basketball, the result was the ultimate life lesson. It happened when Wooden was in the eighth grade. Centerton was supposed to play a game against Hazelwood, but the game had been in doubt because of rain. The schools had called each other several times during the day to figure out whether they should play. They finally agreed to play when the skies cleared, but Wooden had not brought his game uniform to school. When Warriner asked him to go home and retrieve it during recess, Johnny refused, even though his house was right up the road. “I guess John wanted me to beg him to play,” Warriner said.
    Warriner told another player, named Freddy Gooch, that he would substitute for Wooden. Johnny was shocked. As soon as school was over, he raced home, got his uniform, and ran back to the school. He was there in plenty of time to warm up with his teammates, but when the game began, Warriner left him on the sideline. He stayed there during the entire contest, which Centerton lost. After the game was over, Warriner put his arm around Wooden’s shoulder and said, “Johnny, we could have won with you in there, but winning just isn’t that important.”
    It was a day the boy would never forget. “Johnny Wooden learned early in life he was not a necessary article,” Wooden said during one of his frequent retellings of the incident. “It didn’t make any difference how good I was in sports, business, or anything else. If I don’t put out, I’m not worth a dime.” He also learned that day that the bench was all the motivation a coach ever needed.
    When Wooden graduated from the eighth grade, he faced the choice of going to Martinsville or Monrovia for high school. The Woodens were still a year away from losing the farm, and each town was the same distance from their home in Centerton. Martinsville, however, was a real hotbed for basketball. The school routinely drew huge crowds for games and had just won a state championship. The idea of making a living playing or teaching the sport wasn’t remotely in Johnny’s mind, but he did know that he loved playing and was very good at it. So he chose Martinsville. This was Indiana, after all. It was only natural that he would want to follow that bouncing ball.

 
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    The Artesians
    On March 21, 1925, Dr. James Naismith arrived at the Indianapolis Exposition Building, where he had been invited by the Indiana High School Athletic Association to speak at the annual state championship game. There was, however, a problem at the door: the arena was full, and a security guard was not allowing anyone else inside. Naismith showed the man his ticket and his official’s badge, but the guard wouldn’t relent. Finally, a police captain approached and asked what was going on. When Naismith revealed his identity, the captain said, “Good Lord, man, why didn’t you say so long ago?”
    Naismith got a chuckle out of the mix-up. But what really tickled him was the spectacle that greeted him after the police captain showed him to his seat: a crowd of close to twenty thousand full-throated fans who were on hand to watch the sport Naismith had invented just thirty-four years before. That sight, Naismith wrote in his 1941 autobiography, Basketball: Its Origin and Development , “gave me a thrill that I shall not soon forget.”
    Thus did Naismith discover what those twenty thousand spectators already knew: basketball may have been conceived in Massachusetts, but it was born in Indiana.
    “Basket ball,” as it was still known, was part of an experiment that appealed to pious farm boys like Johnny Wooden. The organization that invented and proselytized the sport, the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, advertised its mission as promoting a person’s “mind, body and spirit.” Wooden never had