That's right: John Wooden.
When he died last week at the age of 99, the legendary coach had just finished an essay for Poetry (the nation's oldest and most prestigious journal dedicated to the form) which will appear in the July/August issue.
excerpt:
At UCLA, where I was head coach of men’s varsity basketball for twenty-seven years, poetry was one of my favorite teaching tools. I have loved poems since I was a child, perhaps because my father, Joshua Hugh Wooden, introduced me to literature at an early age—reading to his four sons at night under a coal oil lamp in our Indiana farmhouse: Tennyson, Whitman, Longfellow, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, Shakespeare, and more...
...In 1962, UCLA came within a whisker of winning a national championship. A phantom foul called on Walt Hazzard perhaps kept us from the championship game against Ohio State in which we would have been the favorite. Our team had given it everything they had. And been outscored. I reminded them of George Moriarty’s poem:
Who can ask more of a man
than giving all within his span?
Giving all, it seems to me,
is not so far from victory.
A teacher never knows what stays with those he or she is teaching. You do your best using the tools at your disposal. Poetry was one of my many tools. Thus, even though I understood that Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and many others on our teams may have raised their eyebrows at some of my maxims and poetry at the time, things changed as they matured. In fact, when Bill had children of his own, he began writing down some of my maxims on their brown paper lunch bags before they left for school....
To read the rest, click here - or better yet, go out and buy a copy.
John Wooden! In Poetry! Yeah.
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1 comment:
Aw. What do you know. Thanks for this.
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