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

sat on steel trusses above the floor. Lambert understood that basketball was a form of entertainment, and the customers wanted running and scoring. They would soon get their wish, thanks to the dynamic little player who was ready to hop aboard Piggy’s fire wagon and rip it into higher gear.
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    Lambert may have favored speed over size, but he was not ignorant to the value of a big man. In the fall of 1926, two years before Wooden arrived on campus as a freshman, a tall, skinny gift landed in Lambert’s lap: Charles “Stretch” Murphy, the six-foot-eight center from Marion whose team had beaten Martinsville in the state final at the end of Wooden’s sophomore season. Most coaches who had big men on their roster planted them in the middle and told them to stay there, but not Lambert. He resolved to burnish Murphy’s strength, quickness, and skill, just as he did with his guards. The result was one of the first truly great big men the college game had seen.
    Murphy was quite the unfinished product at first. His weighed just 173 pounds, and his habit of flinging his elbows when cradling the ball could be a menace to his teammates during practice. “He was a beanpole,” Clyde Lyle said. “He was not clever at all, and most teams were knocking him down by hitting him low because he didn’t have much strength and didn’t know how to keep his feet out for balance.”
    Still, Murphy was unusually coordinated for a player his size. Lambert installed him as a full-time starter his sophomore year, and the following season, Murphy set Big Ten records for scoring in a single game (26 points) as well as a season (143). When Wooden joined the varsity for Murphy’s senior year in 1929, the two of them became a must-see tandem, although Wooden was not mentioned in the early stories that previewed the upcoming season. (The main local paper in West Lafayette, the Journal and Courier , referred to him that fall as “Jimmy Wooden.”) After the Boilermakers opened the season with a 19-point drubbing of Washington University, the paper’s beat writer, Gordon Graham, reported that Wooden “had proven himself capable” of handling college competition. The word was out.
    The first big game Purdue played that season was a late December clash at Butler. It was such an important contest that Nellie decided to drive up from Martinsville to watch her Johnny play. Wooden bought her a comb, brush, and mirror set as a Christmas present, but he never made it to the game. As he was on his way to catch the train from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, Wooden flagged down a cleaner truck, and the driver invited him to hop on the rear bumper. It had just snowed in West Lafayette, and the roads were icy. As the truck carrying Wooden was stopped on a hill, another truck skidded from behind. Wooden saw the truck coming and grabbed the top of his own vehicle to swing his body, but he couldn’t quite get his right leg out of the way, and it was pinned between the two trucks. His first concern was his gift to Nellie, which had been in his back pocket and was busted in the collision. Wooden was lucky his leg was not broken, but it was lacerated badly enough that he was laid up for days. It was the second straight year he spent Christmas in the hospital. (The year before he had come down with scarlet fever.) “Nellie and her sister and brother-in-law drove through bad weather,” he lamented many years later. “I saw them at the hospital instead of at the game.”
    Without Wooden, Murphy was held to zero field goals against Butler, and Purdue lost, 36–29. The Journal and Courier noted that Wooden’s absence was “keenly felt.” Wooden also missed Purdue’s next game, a win over Vanderbilt, but he rejoined the squad for its January 2 home game against Montana State. He wore a football pad on his injured thigh, but he was hurting so badly that he had to ask Lambert to take him out early in the second half. As a result, Purdue suffered its