John Wooden

In his final years, as he sat in a recliner inside his condominium penning monthly love letters to his late wife and autographing fan mail that he sometimes paid the postage to return, John Wooden answered a telethon's worth of phone calls from his former UCLA players.

Sometimes they would call just to check in on the coach. On other occasions they wanted to hear his reassuring words of wisdom. There was a telepathic tone when Wooden said "Hello."

"Whenever you called Coach Wooden, it was like he was just expecting your call," said Jamaal Wilkes, who went by Keith Wilkes when he starred at small forward for the Bruins. "I mean, to a man, that's what all the guys say about him. It was like he knew you were going to call."

It must have been a skill that Wooden developed late in life, because he never anticipated the call that would have drastically changed the course of UCLA history, not to mention the power structure in college basketball for parts of four decades.

In 1948, Wooden was a fast-rising coach at Indiana State Teachers College mulling tentative job offers from Minnesota and UCLA, when the Golden Gophers, his preferred choice, called to tell him they would meet his condition that he hire his own assistant. Wooden wanted to accept. Problem was, the call came later than expected after a snowstorm had prevented Frank McCormick, Minnesota's athletic director, from reaching Wooden at the scheduled time.

Only minutes earlier, Wooden had fielded a call from UCLA and, figuring that Minnesota was not interested in his services, agreed to coach the Bruins. A man of conviction, Wooden kept his word even after the offer he truly wanted came from Minnesota.

Wooden would go on to guide UCLA to an unprecedented 10 national championships, including seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. He was equally iconic as a life coach whose Pyramid of Success transcended basketball and inspired a nation.

"He saw himself as a teacher first, which he was," Wilkes said. "He was an English teacher and he had a way with words. He could say so much in so few words and it applied to so many different situations."

The man who liked to be called "Coach" had developed a taste for simplicity growing up on a farm in rural Indiana. The family home had no running water or electricity and the first basketball Wooden used consisted of old rags stuffed into black cotton stockings. He would shoot at a tomato basket with the bottom knocked out inside the hayloft of a barn.

Wooden showed an early aptitude for baseball as well as basketball but had to give up the former sport because of injuries. He starred in basketball at Martinsville High before going on to Purdue, where he learned many of his detail-oriented ways from coach Ward Lewis "Piggy" Lambert. A wiry 5'101/2" and 178 pounds, Wooden earned a reputation for tenacious play and became the first three-time consensus All-American.

He graduated in 1932 and married his high school sweetheart, Nell Riley, while accepting his first coaching job at Dayton High in Kentucky, where he also taught English. A coaching stop at South Bend Central followed before Wooden provided fitness training to combat fighters as a Navy lieutenant in World War II. Wooden's first college coaching job came after the war at Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State University), where he led the Sycamores to a 44–15 record in two seasons.

The call to coach UCLA in 1948, at age 37, was hardly akin to assuming control of a basketball power. The Bruins had posted a winning record in only three of the 21 seasons immediately preceding Wooden's arrival, so their capturing the Pacific Coast Conference's Southern Division in his first season was widely viewed as a breakthrough. The Bruins posted a winning record in each of the next 12 seasons but never made it past the first round in any of their three NCAA tournament appearances.

Wooden was laying the groundwork for something much bigger. It came in the way he taught his players to pull their socks tight to avoid blisters and repeated sayings such as "Be quick but don't hurry" and "Failing to prepare is preparing to...