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Q: How about when you were growing up? People that influenced you, got you involved in basketball? And also, academically, who influenced you? W: Well, I think the people probably who had most influence on me throughout, were my mother and father, and particularly my father. He had certain things. He said, there's always time for play. That's after the chores and the studies are done, of course. He read to us every night. We didn't have electricity or running water or anything on the farm. He would read poetry and read scriptures to us every night. A number of years later, after I had graduated from Purdue and entered the teaching profession, I wanted to come up with a different definition of success from Mr. Webster's. I wanted it to be more than just the material possessions or prestige, and I wanted to come up with my own definition. And my dad, I remembered, tried to teach us, never try to be better than somebody else, because you don't have any control of others. Learn from others, because you'll never know a thing you don't learn from someone else in another way. And the thing over which you have control is, never cease trying to do the best you can do at whatever it is. And I had more or less forgotten that. Probably it went in one ear and out the other at the time. And then, I guess, somehow, in the hidden recesses of my mind, it held on a little bit, because later, I thought about it, and when I was trying to coin my own definition. And then I read a short verse that said, “At God's footstool to confess, a poor soul knelt and bowed his head. ‘I failed,’ he cried. The master said, ‘Thou didst thy best. That is success.’” I recalled that and then I recalled a discussion of success that we'd had in high school under, under Mr. Scheidler, who taught algebra, and later went from there to Muncie and his, he had two sons, twins, that played basketball. Very fine basketball players there. And from those, I coined my own definition of success in 1934. I choose to define it as, peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable. And you're the only one that knows that, you know. Nobody else knows. You can fool others, but you can't fool yourself. It's like character and reputation. Your character, you're the only one who knows your character. Your reputation is what you're perceived to be by others, but your character is what you really are. I think that helped me later in my teaching, developing my own philosophy in teaching, of always just trying to do your best. And I think it enabled me, and I think I was able to get this across reasonably well to the youngsters under my supervision, that you never lose a game, or anything else, if you know you made the effort to prepare yourself and do the best you can. And you're the only one that will know that. I didn't believe in highs and lows. I wanted to stay away from the mountains and the valleys. There are gonna be ups and downs in one's life, and learn to accept them. And I believe maybe from Dad, I learned that. And then I had a principal in grade school. I learned a lot from him, too. And he was also the basketball coach, and gave me and the other basketball players a good whippin’ one time because we wouldn't sing in the morning sessions that we had, and we pretended we were singing. We weren't getting by with it. He gave us a good whipping before the whole school and that was very embarrassing. But he was a dear friend to me throughout his life. Then, of course, having Glenn Curtis as my high school basketball coach. I think he was a very outstanding coach, and I look back at the things he taught. I’ve been fortunate in so many ways. I’ve really been blessed in so many ways. And then going to Purdue, and having the privilege of playing under Ward “Piggy” Lambert. He's the best. There's just no better. A man of extremely high principles. And I think my basic coaching philosophy came more from him. At the heart of my pyramid I have three things: condition, skill, and team spirit. And I think that came from Mr. Lambert, as much as anybody else. He wanted us to be in the best possible condition. He wanted us to be able not only properly but quickly to execute the fundamentals. And if you didn't play together as a team, you were going to go to the bench in a hurry. And I tried to use those in my teaching philosophy throughout. So there are many people that I learned from. I'd say most of them at the time, I didn't realize at the time what I’m learning from them. But it comes, it comes later. It's like some of my basketball players at UCLA, uh, Lewis Alcindor, now known as Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Just recently someone asked him, What do you think of Coach Wooden’s pyramid for success? He said, ‘When I first heard of it, I thought it was the corniest thing I’d ever heard. Before I got out of school, I thought it was kind of meaningful, but I never realized how much until a number of years after I was out and on my own.’ And that pleases me. It pleases me that others feel -- well, I don’t think there’s greater joy than to find out that something you’ve said or done has been meaningful to another when you didn’t do it thinking of anything in return. If we’re just always thinking of what we’re going to get out of it, that’s not so good. |
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