John Wooden has always been a man of numbers so improbable that they make you stop and clean your glasses, even if you not wearing them.He won 10 national titles in 12 years, including seven in a row an 38 straight NCAA tournament games, 620 games in 27 years at UCLA; 88 of those were consecutive, an all but untouchable record. In 161 games in Pauley Pavilion, which opened during the height of Wooden's legacy, he lost just twice.
Earlier in the year, he was named as the greatest coach in sports' history by fellow coaches in The Sporting News.
Wednesday, Wooden will celebrate another big number, his 99th birthday, with will well-wishers in search of an even bigger one. In conjunction with the launch of his latest book, "A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring," which will hit shelves on his birthday Wednesday, the publishers are seeking 9,999 birthday wishes for the coach.
(Click here to add your message to Coach Wooden.)
The book, co-authored by Don Yaeger, whose written four New York Times bestsellers, chronicles the influences on Wooden's life and character, including Abraham Lincoln, his college basketball coach at Purdue, and his wife Nell, to whom Wooden was married for 63 years before her death in 1985, as well as those he's influenced, including former UCLA players Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton and coaches around the continent.
Wooden retired from coaching at age 64 after his 10th NCAA title in 1975, but the coach has remained a fixture in college basketball, often seen in the UCLA stands. The legacy of the coach with the owlish face, clear piercing blue eyes and square brown glasses just a size or two removed from Joe Paterno still towers over college hoops in the way no other coach dominates his sport, perhaps aside only from Vince Lombardi in the NFL. But Wooden, who has credited his long life to moderation and has avoided alcohol, remains a grandfather to the game and something of a moral center for a sport often plagued by scandal. Even as rumors about UCLA's recruiting have become commonplace, Wooden remains one chopped cherry tree from fullblown sainthood in the game.
Of course, the man that looks like he might've struggled to box out Orville Redenbacher hasn't always been just the grandfather figure to basketball. He was once one of the sport's stars, an All-American basketball player at Purdue, leading the Boilermakers to the 1932 national title, awarded retroactively by the Helms Foundation, seven years before the first of the NCAA tournaments he would later dominate as a coach.
Gameplan chronicles a life in leadership from those days in Indiana, where he also won a high school championship as a player and played for several professional teams , through the coaching legacy and tradition of leadership he's passed on.
Perhaps all it needs are a few thousand more birthday wishes to complete the drive to 9,999 by Wednesday.
This, of course, may seem like a challenge.
But improbably large numbers have never been a problem for John Wooden.
(Click here to add your message to Coach Wooden.)
