Wooden: A Coach's Life Read Online Free Page A

supporting football because autumn was harvest season. If people were going to look for entertainment, it had to be in winter—and indoors. Best of all, since basketball required only five men a side (as determined by a rule that was put in place in 1897), no school was too small to field a team. With high school teams popping up all over Indiana, the natural next step was a statewide tournament. The inaugural edition was held in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, where Crawfordsville, fittingly, was crowned the first champion.
    Martinsville was not going to be outdone by its neighbor. So in May 1923, the town set out on an ambitious project: to build the world’s largest high school gymnasium. Thanks to the money spent by all those outsiders who came to visit Martinsville’s gleaming spas, the town was able to complete its mission in swift fashion. On February 7, 1924, Martinsville unveiled its grandiose landmark in time for its first game against Shelbyville. On the morning of the game, the Martinsville Daily Reporter revealed that more than four thousand tickets had already been sold, and that 1,500 people from Shelbyville were planning to attend as well. Officially, the gym held 5,382 people, which was more than the entire population of the town. (That fact earned a mention in a popular, nationally syndicated column by Robert Ripley entitled “Believe It or Not.”) Train lines that had been specially set up for the occasion brought spectators from neighboring burgs. Writers from Indianapolis, Vincennes, Frankfort, and Lafayette were on hand, as were a dozen or so local basketball coaches.
    The occasion was so intoxicating that even the hometown Artesians’ 47–41 loss couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm. Under the headline “Gymnasium Dedication Was a Great Event,” the next day’s Reporter declared, “The fact that this city now has a gymnasium that will take care of any crowd that wishes to witness a basket ball game overshadowed the feelings of regret because of the defeat. The big gym was packed to capacity, and the cheering throng, the music by the bands and the brilliant display of school colors presented a scene never to be forgotten by those who were present.” Within a few years, dozens of communities across Indiana would build large high school gymnasiums of their own. From that point on, the sound of leather pounding wood would serve as the state’s steady heartbeat.
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    By today’s standards, a town of fewer than five thousand people is considered small, but back then the citizens of Martinsville justifiably thought of themselves as cosmopolitan and urbane, living as they did among the hustle and bustle of all those out-of-town visitors. Wooden was a small-town kid who seemed out of place when he arrived at Martinsville High School in the fall of 1924. “We Martinsville fellows were city slickers and he was a country boy,” said Floyd Burns, a high school classmate. “John had on a drugstore outfit, snow white and clean, and we looked on him as a greenhorn. He was inexperienced, and he’d run faster than he could dribble and he’d lose the ball. But we all liked him and were amazed that he learned so quickly.”
    Since baseball was Johnny’s favorite sport, he might have focused on that if Martinsville fielded a high school team, but it didn’t. Nor did it have a football squad. Wooden lettered for two years in track—he finished sixth in the state in the 100-yard dash as a senior—but he devoted most of his energy to basketball. When that season came around, Wooden found himself under the tutelage of Glenn Curtis, known as the “Old Fox,” who was emerging as one of the finest high school coaches in the state.
    Curtis had already won two state championships, with Lebanon in 1918 and Martinsville in 1924. Like many coaches in those days, he deployed a plodding, ball-control offense that made it virtually impossible for opponents to recapture a lead once Curtis’s