Wooden leaves a legacy nearly unmatched in hoops history

John Wooden was not particularly good at being John Wooden.

He built UCLA basketball into a machine but hated the expectations that stole the joy of playing and eventually pushed him into retirement in 1975. He became a beloved elder statesman, but was embarrassed by the adulation. He was so generous with his time and name that family and friends closed ranks and said no for him more often before anyone else could take advantage of the kind soul. He was an Indiana country boy in a Los Angeles world.

There was the ultimate contradiction: Wooden was far more popular in the decades after leaving the bench than when the Bruins were a goliath. Part was that the communications explosion made him more accessible, as he released several books. Videos of grandfatherly Wooden speaking to groups became YouTube regulars, and part was people coming to view him as a symbol of integrity in a world that increasingly lost its moral base. And that, more than anything, strangely will be his lasting legacy -- it was the human side, not the victories, that defined him as the legend of a sport and the treasure of a city.

In Los Angeles until his passing on Friday, June 4, there was Wooden and Vin Scully, and then there was everyone else. (Chick Hearn was among the immortals until he passed in 2002. The Lakers still show clips of Chick on the video board and people cheer wildly for the friend they never met.) Vin and Coach stirred a reverence no player could match, not only because of brilliance on the job but because they carried themselves with a dignity. At rival USC, Wooden was the one Bruin who may not have been the embodiment of evil.

"They always throw the word 'icon' around. I don't know if we've seen an icon like him," said Jerry West, the former Lakers player and executive. "He's one of the most remarkable men that I've ever been around in my life. The most uplifting person. I don't know if there's anyone wiser or smarter. I loved that guy. I absolutely loved him. He left a mark on this city that's never going to be forgotten. An incredible person.

"One word that I've always felt that's important, maybe the most important word in my vocabulary, is humility," West said. "I've been humbled a lot. That man was the most humble man that I've ever seen, accomplishing things they're not going to accomplish again, but doing it with a class and an integrity he did it with was just amazing. Amazing, amazing man."

The professional greatness of Wooden was that he was a teacher whose subject just happened to be basketball. He probably would have been as happy had he stayed in Indianapolis or South Bend or West Lafayette and taught high school. Maybe English, because he never lost the love of poetry. Or History if only to be closer to his hero Abraham Lincoln.

Wooden wound up with great players at UCLA, of course, but he drilled them with preparation into precision units that won games on practice days, always focusing on the Bruins approach and never spending time on the opponent.

Wooden was such a preparation freak that he would annually give arriving freshman a lesson on the proper way to put on socks to reduce the risk of blisters. He hated leaving anything to chance. Practice plans were written in neat cursive on index cards and stored forever more, available for future reference, in case the coach wanted to review the lesson plan of the previous four February 15s.

Uniforms were brought home so his wife Nell, the only girl he ever went with, could do the wash, because the detergent the school used was too harsh. Even uniform numbers. Wooden didn't like players to wear 51. It was too out of balance. But 55 was fine. Even 54 -- two fat numbers.

Most anyone else would be mocked as anal, doddering and a micro-manager. Not Wooden after rolling up titles. He was the guy who would join a group of coaches each summer in the Poconos, Bible in tow, for a youth basketball camp staged by Temple legend Harry Litwack and stay behind to do dishes and tidy up while the others went drinking. The late Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote that Wooden was so square he was divisible by four.

While other coaches would use the Final Four as a party weekend, Wooden preferred to bring his beloved Nell, even the years the Bruins weren't involved, and he didn't care about being in the fraternity. He made friends and usually kept them. Press Maravich was one of his closest connections in the business -- when New York teenager Lew Alcindor announced he would attend UCLA, Wooden called Maravich to discuss ways to best use the recruit -- and Pistol Pete's father was nobody's altar boy in those days. The ultimate coaching rebel, Jerry Tarkanian, deeply admired Wooden. Dale Brown got to know Wooden well in later years and spoke of him with love.

That was hardly universal, though. Worse than the accusation of being distant, many coaches called Wooden hypocritical and sanctimonious. St. John, some mockingly called him behind his back. Carry a Bible and work the grandfather act, and meanwhile so many players got money and gifts under the table that it became an open joke. (Opposing player, facetiously, to his coach as the team walked past three sports cars on the ramp leading down to the Pauley Pavilion court before a practice: "Hey, coach. When are we going to get ours?" Coach, not so facetiously: "When I get mine.") The image of the genial, delicate man was offset by the truth of Wooden as a hellacious bench jockey who would ride referees and opposing players hard from behind a rolled-up program.

The response from the pro-Wooden camp was predictable: jealousy.

"I always thought that not only was he the best coach there ever was, but a real gentleman," said Marv Harshman, a long-time counterpart at Washington State and then Washington.

Red Auerbach didn't have warm feelings for Wooden, considering him standoffish and blaming UCLA, though not the coach directly, for Alcindor and Bill Walton refusing to represent their country in the Olympics. The patriarch of the Celtics dynasty recalled in his 2004 book, "Let Me Tell You a Story," how he congratulated Wooden for landing Alcindor in a heated recruiting battle and Wooden responded, "Oh, you mean the chap from New York? Yes, we're quite pleased to have him."

Besides, Auerbach was a Bobby Knight guy and Wooden was most definitely not. "I didn't want to be a dictator to my players or assistant coaches or managers," Wooden wrote in a 1997 book, "Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court." Years later, Knight and Wooden thawed.

Along the way -- all along the way -- Wooden impacted the NBA without being in the pro game. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walton would have been stars no matter what; they were supreme talents, very smart and exemplary team players who hid from the spotlight. But so many Bruins had lengthy careers that it's impossible not to draw a straight line to the fundamentals and discipline they learned in college. Even as late as 2000 and 2001, Earl Watson developed a relationship with Wooden that stayed with Watson well into his NBA career, conversations about life and rarely about basketball the young guard kept with him.

The Lakers tried to hire Wooden in 1971, but he smartly turned it down. It would have been a bad fit. The league was already changing into players-first, the money didn't interest him, and Wooden would have been in a contract he would have refused to break, just as he stayed at UCLA before the titles started to roll in when he really wanted to return to Indiana because the promise of a new on-campus arena had not been kept. Preaching to players to pick up their own towels rather than leave it to managers or trainers to clean up after them probably would not have gone over well.

So the players became his NBA legacy. Abdul-Jabbar. Walton. Walt Hazzard. Gail Goodrich. Lucius Allen. Keith Erickson. Henry Bibby. Willie Naulls. Dave Meyers. Swen Nater. Sidney Wicks. Curtis Rowe. Even Ann Meyers, Dave's sister and a star on the UCLA women's team who in 1979 had a tryout with the Pacers. Ann, now an executive with the Suns and WNBA Phoenix Mercury, calls Wooden "Papa," just as countless other former Bruins would bring their kids to meet Coach to have the same lessons that shaped them so many years ago delivered anew. That was Wooden at his best, generation after generation. Forever.

Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter. The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.