Does anybody care that UConn’s women’s team is about to complete a second-consecutive perfect season by winning another NCAA championship tonight? Now just imagine the hoopla if North Carolina [or any men’s team] had won its championship in such convincing fashion.
(Duke tops Butler to win NCAA title, The iPINIONS Journal, April 6, 2010)
I posed the rhetorical question above in a commentary earlier this year over the fact that the NCAA Women’s Basketball tournament gets virtually no media coverage compared to the hoopla that always attends the men’s tournament.
But it’s the second part of this lamentation that compels me to reprise it here. Because the death of John Wooden constrains me to note that a men’s team has in fact posted a record that even this phenomenal UConn women’s team has yet to emulate.
That team, of course, was the UCLA Bruins, which Wooden coached to 88 consecutive victories over three seasons from 1971 to 1974. What’s more, his 1974 season capped an unprecedented, and as yet unparalleled, 12-year reign during which he coached UCLA to 10 national championships.
Despite all of this, though, Wooden will probably be remembered most for coaching two NBA legends, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, to five NCAA championships between them.
Here’s how Abdul-Jabbar recalled being coached by him in a New York Times article in 2000:
To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents. In essence he was preparing us for life.
Ironically, the primary reason no men’s coach will ever approach Wooden’s record of achievement is that players of Abdul-Jabbar and Walton’s caliber never spend their full four years in college anymore. Instead, as soon as they win a national championship, even if it’s in their first year, they leave for multimillion-dollar contracts in the NBA.
Some, likeKobe Bryant and LeBron James, the league’s two top players, do not even bother wasting any money-earning years playing college basketball. No doubt this is why the NBA is comprised these days of so many uneducated thugs, who seem more suited for criminal court than a basketball court.
At any rate, Wooden became such a living legend that the college basketball player-of-the-year award is named for him; the leading college teams participate in a midseason tournament called the John R. Wooden Classic; and he was the first person elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach.
Wooden died on June 4 at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was 99.
Farewell, Wizard of Westwood.
Related commentaries:
Duke tops Butler to win NCAA title
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