Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis Page A

considered to be a bible among Lambert’s peers. The book was packed with intricate jargon that was supplemented by charts and photographs. (One photograph shows a crouched Johnny Wooden demonstrating a “low bounce dribble.” The player is described as having “unusual speed.”) Every facet of the game was broken down in the book, but what really came through was the author’s unshakable faith in the gospel of up-tempo basketball. “The fast-break, with dependence upon the initiative of the players rather than upon set formations is, in my opinion, the ideal system, if the coach has the necessary material,” Lambert wrote.
    While Lambert had strict notions on the way the game should be played, his true genius lay in the broad freedom he gave his players to execute his vision. He figured it was his job as the head coach to get his guys into the best possible condition, teach them how to play—and then get out of their way. He had very few offensive plays, substituted infrequently, and rarely talked to his players about their opponent. This was another offshoot of the rules of the day, which forbade coaches from speaking to players during time-outs. (When the action stopped, the players simply huddled on the court.) Lambert often told his players that the team that commits more mistakes usually wins. “One of the dangers in teaching is overloading the players with knowledge,” he wrote in Practical Basketball . “Most young players cannot absorb all of this knowledge, and there is more danger in overcoaching than in undercoaching.”
    Lambert whittled his philosophy down to three components: condition, skill, and team spirit. “He didn’t have any complicated systems or anything of that sort,” Wooden said. “He taught me the value of a controlled offense, but one that had freelance aspects to it. You build a base from where the offense would start, trying to get movement by design but not necessarily by a precise pattern. There was always somebody moving, in and out, crossing over, and then he would add little changes within that framework.”
    In other words, he was the polar opposite of Glenn Curtis, Wooden’s coach at Martinsville High School. Whereas Curtis taught a deliberate offense and maintained an even keel, Lambert turned his horses loose and behaved frenetically on the sideline. “I’ve seen Piggy getting up, leading cheers, coaching, and officiating all at the same time,” said Clyde Lyle, a college teammate of Wooden’s. A veteran league official once complained that “it’s an uncomfortable feeling to be calling them as you see ’em, knowing the little guy over there has never been wrong on a basketball floor in his life.” When Lambert retired in 1946 after having won 71 percent of his games and eleven league championships during his twenty-nine-year tenure at Purdue, he admitted he was “anxious to be relieved of the nervous strain and mental punishment that accompanies a head coachship.”
    Lambert was tough on his players, but he generally took a positive tack. This was yet another way in which Wooden saw Lambert as an extension of Hugh. As Lambert wrote in Practical Basketball , “The coach who continually tells his players they are rotten is sure to make them so.” Added Clyde Lyle, “He was a master psychologist. He had a tremendous vocabulary and he didn’t need a lot of profanity to let the players know what he wanted.”
    With Wooden waiting in the wings as a freshman, the Boilermakers’ varsity posted an impressive 13–4 record and finished second in the Big Ten. During one game that season, they set a new conference record by scoring 64 points in a rout of the University of Chicago. Interest in the team’s exploits was so high that four of their home games were moved to Jefferson High School, whose gym was nearly twice the capacity of Purdue’s on-campus facility, Memorial Gymnasium. When the Boilermakers did play at Memorial, the place was so jammed that some fans