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Wooden: A Coach's Life (2014)

by Seth Davis(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0805092803 (ISBN13: 9780805092806)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Times Books

review 1: Coach Wooden is a hero in our home. My husband, himself a journeyman basketball coach, loved the man. One of the high points of his life was getting to work at Coach Wooden's basketball camps in the summer. We have a packet of saved letters written by Coach in his perfect English teacher's penmanship. Our son memorized A Little Fellow Follows Me in elementary school for a project. Our daughter received a hug or two from the man. Coach and Mrs. Wooden are buried not too far from my husband's parents in Forest Lawn's Hollywood Hills Cemetery and when we go we always leave flowers at their site too. We cried when he died. This book is the story of how Coach became THE COACH WOODEN of UCLA basketball fame. It. Isn't a glossy, sweet story, but a hard look at the compet... moreitive young man from Indiana who tried each day to live up to his father's expectations and in the process became the winningest basketball coach in history. Seth Davis did a lot of research in putting this book together and in fairness to him and to Coach, I think he did a good job. The man who developed the Pyramid of Success and stressed competitive greatness wasn't a huggy, missy kind of fellow. He wasn't his players' friend, he was their Coach. He was their to mold boys into men and the men into players who could win games. The books is written around Coach's own basketball career and his coming to UCLA and those 10 national championships. The disagreements are there with the UCLA AD, the Sam Gilbert mess, and his times with Bill Walton. I was amazed that he never earned more than 35,000.00 coaching because of UCLA policy that a coach couldn't earn more than a professor. The odd jobs that Coach took to supplement his income are fascinating. I thought it interesting that he 'rode' the refs and other players so much, but then the Coach I knew wasn't the Coach who was still coaching.Coach Wooden lived 35 years after retiring and that was long enough to build the bridges with his players that should have been built earlier. He became the beloved mentor who quoted poetry and told stories and even gave hugs. Listen to Bill Walton do play by play today and you will hear a man who is who he is because of Coach. Coach never held himself up as perfect. He was a boy from Indiana, a child of the Depression who valued hard work and love of family above all else. He didn't have feet of clay and I didn't find the book unkind to him. If you love basketball and have a liking of history, this is a good read.
review 2: I won this book as part of Goodreads' First Reads programs.I recently finished a biography on another legendary coach and was left feeling bored by it. It's hard to write a compelling biography in the sports world where each chapter chronicles a season, as the seasons and chapters tend to blur together in one repetitive jumble. As a result, I kept putting off this book in lieu of something else. Well that was my mistake. This is a very engaging, easy to read book on perhaps the greatest basketball coach we will ever see. While it follows the common formula of roughly a chapter per season, it is broken into two parts. The first is the season itself and the second is a theme from that year, be it a transcendent player, a booster, or a growing rivalry. That theme might cover a few years, but it really cuts down on the repetition and helps the biography flow very gracefully.The book doesn't hold back either. It presents Wooden in a fair light, warts and all. It praises him for all he accomplished but also didn't back down from chastising him for his hypocrisy or failure to stand up for his black players in the '40s and '50s as much as he could have.I gave the book 4 stars as it was a great look at the man that dominated college basketball like no one before or probably ever will again, despite what Wooden himself would say. less

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