Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

Piggy Lambert was born in 1888 and passed away in 1958. He was the head basketball coach at Purdue University from 1918-46, compiling an overall record of 371-152 and earning induction in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1960. Lambert’s greatest player at Purdue was John Wooden.

In a Part 1 passage titled “Mentors,” Wooden refers to Lambert as one of the most important mentors in his life and states that Lambert “demonstrated extraordinary devotion to his principles” (22). As an example, Wooden cites an anecdote in which Lambert withdrew his powerful 1940 Purdue squad from the national tournament, which they had a great chance of winning, because he believed collegiate games should only be played on college campuses and not in commercial venues.

Born Lewis Alcindor in 1947 in Harlem, New York, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the sport. Jabbar was already seven feet tall by the time he was a senior in high school, and he became one of the most highly recruited athletes in college sports history. He attended UCLA and played for coach John Wooden, enrolling in the fall of 1965. During all three of his varsity seasons for the Bruins, 1967-69, Jabbar was named the National Player of the Year and the Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament. The Bruins won the national title all three years and compiled an overall record of 88-2 during his varsity seasons. Jabbar was the top overall pick in the 1969 NBA Draft, after which he won six NBA titles, won six NBA Most Valuable Player Awards, and became the league’s all-time scoring leader.

As perhaps Wooden’s greatest overall player and one with whom Wooden has maintained a lifelong bond with, Jabbar is referenced a number of times throughout the book. In Part 2, in a passage titled “Kareem’s Selflessness,” the author argues that Kareem could have played like a superstar and focused on his own scoring, but instead he was a selfless player and sublimated his scoring for the good of the team (78). In a passage from Part 3, Wooden argues that he “learned more from Kareem about man’s inhumanity to man than [he] ever learned anywhere else” (156). This was because Wooden witnessed how Kareem was frequently unfairly criticized and often the target of verbal abuse from fans, all while “he conducted himself like a gentleman” (157).