Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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“You can’t live a perfect day,” John Wooden believed, “without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”
He taught this lesson by deed. One such occasion remains as vivid to me as if it happened last week, not three decades ago. Actually, it is a quilt of numerous remembrances stitched together from each time I visited Coach in his Encino home.
In my mind’s eye I can still see the plastic postal bins, approximately the size of a laundry basket, filled with outgoing fan mail: photographs, trading cards, magazine covers, even basketballs and UCLA jerseys that people sent Coach to autograph. Requests for a signed Pyramid of Success were also common.
A surprisingly sizeable number of these fans failed to enclose return postage. No matter. Coach trekked to the Post Office weekly and footed the bill himself.
Once again, we all have a chance to emulate Coach Wooden’s benevolent example and live a perfect day by helping others who can never repay us through “Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive” which kicks off today.
To the kindhearted souls, and there are legions of you, who have made this effort part of your family’s holiday traditions, this year’s early start instead of right after Thanksgiving Day will come as a surprise but is necessary because the deadline to give has also leapfrogged sooner to December 8.
The inspiration for this annual endeavor occurred about 30 years ago at a youth basketball clinic when former Ventura College and NBA star Cedric Ceballos awarded autographed basketballs to handful of lucky attendees. Leaving the gym afterward, I happened upon a 10-year-old boy who had won one of the prized keepsakes…
…which he was now dribbling on a blacktop outdoor court, and shooting baskets with, all while perhaps imagining he was Ceballos with the game clock ticking down to the final buzzer.
Meanwhile, the real Ceballos’ Sharpie signature was quickly wearing off.
Curious as to why the boy had not protectively taken the trophy basketball home to keep safely on a bookshelf, I interrupted his playing to ask.
“I’ve never had my own basketball,” he answered matter-of-factly between shots.
With visions of that boy – and other boys and girls who do not have their own basketball to shoot, soccer ball to kick, football to throw – dancing through my head, I asked you dear readers to help brighten the holidays by donating new sports balls for disadvantaged kids. You responded like champions then and have continued to ever since.
Are you up to the challenge once more? If so, drop off new balls (no batteries required!) at a local Boys & Girls Club, YMCA, Toys For Tots, or similar organization.
Or bring them (weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Dec. 8) to Sanbell (formerly Jensen Design & Survey) at 1672 Donlon St., near Target, on Telephone Road in Ventura – online orders can be shipped to this same address – and I will see that your gifts wind up in deserving young hands.
While the early deadline cannot be helped, I fear it may result in fewer balls – and, thus, fewer kids’ smiles – than in years past, and that would be heartbreaking. I beseech you all to please prove my worries unfounded.
Please, also, email me at woodywriter@gmail.com about your donations so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally and thank you by name (unless you request anonymity) in a future column.
Individually we can each take a step towards living a perfect day by collectively making the holidays happier for a whole lot of kids.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.