basketball,” but Lambert had another name for it. He called it the fast break.
It was not enough for Lambert’s players to be quicker than their opponents. For his system to work, they also had to be in superior condition. The way he figured it, if his team was able to impose its fire-wagon style for an entire game, it would eventually wear out the opponent and seize control down the stretch. So he ran his guys ragged. “Our practices were hellish,” said Charlie Caress, who played at Purdue from 1939 to 1942. Lambert placed so much emphasis on making his players run that he preferred not to stop practice to talk to his team as a group. When he wanted to correct something, he would pull individual players aside for brief chats. While other coaches let their boys go home during the Christmas holiday, Lambert insisted that they remain on campus so they could keep on running.
During his second season at Purdue, Lambert’s Boilermakers set a new Big Ten record by scoring 35.6 points per game. According to The Big Ten , a voluminous history of the conference, one sportswriter who covered the league at the time “noted that offense was getting too much ahead of defense and predicted gloomily that basketball would soon be spoiled by 40-point games.” Two years later, Purdue won its first undisputed Big Ten title, and over the next twenty-seven years, Lambert would claim ten more conference crowns and eventually earn enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
His ethos dovetailed perfectly with Wooden’s skill set, not to mention his farm-bred work ethic. “He was way ahead of his time in fast break basketball,” Wooden said. “I tried to feel … that no one would be in better condition than I was. They may beat me on ability, but they’ll never beat me on condition.” When Lambert later referred to Wooden as the best-conditioned athlete he had coached, Wooden recognized it as the ultimate compliment.
No detail was too small to escape Piggy’s discerning eye. For example, he was fixated on the condition of his players’ feet. He ordered them to rub their feet twice a week with a solution of benzoin and tannic acid, which Lambert said would toughen up the skin. Instead of having his players wear one pair of thick wool socks as was customary, he told them to wear two—a cotton pair next to the feet to absorb sweat plus a medium-weight wool pair to reduce friction against their shoes. After they showered, he wanted his players to fan their feet, not towel them, and he reminded them to make sure they were dry between the toes.
Lambert was a stickler for routine. For an 8:00 p.m. tipoff, the players ate precisely at 1:15. The menu was always the same—fruit cocktail, medium-sized steak cooked medium well, peas, carrots, celery, green tea, and ice cream or custard cup for dessert. Then he wanted his players to take a short walk and lie down for a nap between 3:00 and 4:30. Outside of basketball, he said they should abide by what he called the “right rules of living.” That meant no smoking, alcohol, overeating, or “irregular hours,” even though Lambert himself was a smoker and inveterate poker player (and not a very good one at that).
When it came to teaching the game, everything Lambert did was predicated on speed. He preferred passing to dribbling because the ball moved faster. Whereas most teams tended to slowly walk the ball up the floor following an opponent’s missed shot, Lambert drilled into his players the habit of immediately firing a long pass. “When you rebounded, your first look was down the floor,” Caress said. “I don’t know how many afternoons we practiced getting our hand behind the ball so that when we threw the ball the length of the floor, it wouldn’t curve.”
Lambert laid out all of these precepts in a textbook he wrote called Practical Basketball . Published in 1932, it was one of the first technical volumes to be authored by a college coach, and for years it was
It was not enough for Lambert’s players to be quicker than their opponents. For his system to work, they also had to be in superior condition. The way he figured it, if his team was able to impose its fire-wagon style for an entire game, it would eventually wear out the opponent and seize control down the stretch. So he ran his guys ragged. “Our practices were hellish,” said Charlie Caress, who played at Purdue from 1939 to 1942. Lambert placed so much emphasis on making his players run that he preferred not to stop practice to talk to his team as a group. When he wanted to correct something, he would pull individual players aside for brief chats. While other coaches let their boys go home during the Christmas holiday, Lambert insisted that they remain on campus so they could keep on running.
During his second season at Purdue, Lambert’s Boilermakers set a new Big Ten record by scoring 35.6 points per game. According to The Big Ten , a voluminous history of the conference, one sportswriter who covered the league at the time “noted that offense was getting too much ahead of defense and predicted gloomily that basketball would soon be spoiled by 40-point games.” Two years later, Purdue won its first undisputed Big Ten title, and over the next twenty-seven years, Lambert would claim ten more conference crowns and eventually earn enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
His ethos dovetailed perfectly with Wooden’s skill set, not to mention his farm-bred work ethic. “He was way ahead of his time in fast break basketball,” Wooden said. “I tried to feel … that no one would be in better condition than I was. They may beat me on ability, but they’ll never beat me on condition.” When Lambert later referred to Wooden as the best-conditioned athlete he had coached, Wooden recognized it as the ultimate compliment.
No detail was too small to escape Piggy’s discerning eye. For example, he was fixated on the condition of his players’ feet. He ordered them to rub their feet twice a week with a solution of benzoin and tannic acid, which Lambert said would toughen up the skin. Instead of having his players wear one pair of thick wool socks as was customary, he told them to wear two—a cotton pair next to the feet to absorb sweat plus a medium-weight wool pair to reduce friction against their shoes. After they showered, he wanted his players to fan their feet, not towel them, and he reminded them to make sure they were dry between the toes.
Lambert was a stickler for routine. For an 8:00 p.m. tipoff, the players ate precisely at 1:15. The menu was always the same—fruit cocktail, medium-sized steak cooked medium well, peas, carrots, celery, green tea, and ice cream or custard cup for dessert. Then he wanted his players to take a short walk and lie down for a nap between 3:00 and 4:30. Outside of basketball, he said they should abide by what he called the “right rules of living.” That meant no smoking, alcohol, overeating, or “irregular hours,” even though Lambert himself was a smoker and inveterate poker player (and not a very good one at that).
When it came to teaching the game, everything Lambert did was predicated on speed. He preferred passing to dribbling because the ball moved faster. Whereas most teams tended to slowly walk the ball up the floor following an opponent’s missed shot, Lambert drilled into his players the habit of immediately firing a long pass. “When you rebounded, your first look was down the floor,” Caress said. “I don’t know how many afternoons we practiced getting our hand behind the ball so that when we threw the ball the length of the floor, it wouldn’t curve.”
Lambert laid out all of these precepts in a textbook he wrote called Practical Basketball . Published in 1932, it was one of the first technical volumes to be authored by a college coach, and for years it was
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