The Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden

Now that college basketball’s final four is upon us again, let us pause and think about the greatest dynasty in sports history. Let’s remember someone who not only built the first great dynasty but who defined what a dynasty is.

Who is this person? He’s the Wizard of Westwood, the Establishment coach in a time of anti-Establishment dominance.

John Wooden.

Are you still with me? I’m writing about John Wooden, universally regarded as the most successful coach not just in college basketball, but in sports history. He turned the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) from an obscure four-letter acronym into a household name.

As the 2019 Final Four races headlong into history this year, the Sun Day asks all fans to remember that the bespectacled Indiana “professor” is the chief author of this annual athletic festival. He turned college basketball from a largely ignored sport into an exciting national phenomenon. Since the NCAA tournament began in 1939, no coach has come close to touching his incredible post-season record.

His UCLA teams won 10 NCAA titles in 12 years in the 1960s and 70s. Adolph Rupp, his greatest contemporary, won only four. The Bruins racked up seven straight NCAA tourney titles from l967-1973, without losing a single post-season game. They recorded four perfect 30-0 seasons, an 88-game winning streak, a 47-game streak, and a 41-game streak, in a sport where player turnover occurred every 2-3 years. He created a national interest in college basketball, and sowed the seeds for what we now call March Madness. Sports historian-author Brad Herzog ranks Wooden 92nd in his 1995 book, The 100 Most Important People in American Sports History.

Wooden was a small-town midwestern farm boy. He was born on October 14, 1910, and made his basketball debut in college at Purdue University in his home state. He was a three-time All-American guard for the Boilermakers in the early 30s. He was elected to the College Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1960, and was later honored the same way as a coach in 1972. He remains the only person elected twice.

He coached high school basketball in Indiana and Kentucky for several years, winning 200 games. He took over the coaching reins at Indiana State in 1947 and then went to UCLA in 1949, where he remained for 26 years. He retired in 1975 at the age of 65, and died on June 4, 2010, a few months short of his 100th birthday.

Mike Warren, one of his star guards at UCLA, once described Wooden as having “the discipline of a monk but the will of a hurricane.”

His long-time assistant, Denny Crum used racehorse imagery, calling him “the Man o’ War of coaches, the Secretariat of men.” He was a professor and friendly mentor off the court, but a dictator on it. While activists all around him loudly called for rebellion and change, Wooden spoke in cliché philosophies.

Wooden was ahead of his time in dealing with race relations. He integrated black and white players into dominant units. By the 1960s, UCLA has become famous for a tradition of African-American sports excellence with Ralph Metcalfe, Rafer Johnson, Jackie Robinson, and Arthur Ashe. Wooden built his teams around black stars such as Warren and Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff says Wooden’s legacy is in the standards of consistency and excellence he set. In Herzog’s book, Wolff said, “In a way, he’s probably helped create all the pressure that gets coaches fired. God forbid you don’t make it to the NCAA tournament a couple years in a row. He won it seven years in a row.”

Whoever wins the NCAA’s big dance this year, none of them will come close to equaling Wooden’s records.

That, in a nutshell, is what a dynasty is all about.

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