Wooden: A Coach’s Life

Wooden, who coached the UCLA men’s basketball team to 10 NCAA championships in the 1960s and ’70s, is a more supple and conflicted man than his oaken reputation suggested, according to this probing biography. In this hefty but well-paced account, Sports Illustrated scribe Davis (When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball) provides entertaining play-by-play and color commentary on Wooden’s dynasty-building, key games, and the grueling, authoritarian methods—players were even instructed on the correct technique for donning shoes and socks—he used to impart his innovative fast-break system. Davis also unearths the nasty competitive streak beneath Wooden’s saintly image, and shows how his old-school creed of hard work, clean living, and gentlemanly deportment warped under the pressure of high-profile competition and Vietnam-era nonconformism, forcing him to bend the rules for indispensable players and tolerate the influence of a seamy booster. Woven through the narrative is the usual psychodrama that basketball seems to incubate more than any other sport—capped by a shrieking Wooden rage at a showering player—and vivid depictions of Wooden’s complex relationships with superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. As Wooden’s rock-ribbed principles confront chaotic times and compromising circumstances, Davis paints an unusually rich and illuminating portrait of the coaching mission. Photos. (Jan.)