A very personal anniversary arrives next week, not of my wedding, but rather a milestone marking 35 years to the morning when I walked with John Wooden for the first time.
March 31, 1987 – Tuesday then, this year Thursday – was a day so special I marked it in my datebook of birthdays and anniversaries to remember. It proved to be an occasion that changed my life for Coach became my friend and mentor, and later a great-grandfather figure to my two children. I pinch myself still for such grand luck.
Coach and me during one of many magical visits.
In the long span since, I have written more columns on Wooden than on anyone else, as well as a book; when I give guest talks he is the person most often asked about, even now 12 years after his death at age 99; so here is a stroll down memory lane.
After interviewing Coach following a lecture he gave, he invited me to join him on his daily four-mile walk. Aware of his maxim, “Be on time whenever time is involved,” I left Santa Maria when the stars were still out and arrived in Encino with nearly an hour to spare.
At the appointed time, seven o’clock sharp, I nervously pressed the buzzer outside the condominium’s entrance. Coach, true to his code, was ready and waiting and immediately came out. After warm pleasantries on a cool and dewy Southern California spring morning, we set forth around Mister Wooden’s Neighborhood.
For the first mile or two, I peppered Coach with basketball questions but he then turned the tables and asked about my life. He was delighted to learn I was going to become a father in August and asked when was the due date.
“The eighth,” I replied and Coach stopped cold, his eyes visibly misting up. That was his and Nell’s wedding anniversary, he shared. High school sweethearts, they had been married 53 years before her death to cancer two years before our walk.
On that magical morning, I was 26 and Coach was 76 – the exact age at which my paternal grandfather died two decades earlier. Indeed, sitting in Coach’s living room after breakfast I felt like I was not with a living legend so much as visiting with what I fondly remembered my beloved grandfather to be like.
Like Wooden, my Grandpa Ansel was raised on a Midwestern farm – in Ohio rather than Indiana. Like Wooden, Grandpa enjoyed Shakespeare greatly and also similarly favored “Hamlet.” Like Wooden, Grandpa loved poetry and wrote verse. And like Wooden, Grandpa had once been a schoolteacher, albeit for only a few years in order to earn tuition for medical school.
Moreover, Grandpa’s familiar reminder to me, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” surely echoed Coach’s oft-repeated aphorism, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” Similarly, Grandpa’s “If you don’t learn anything today it will be a wasted day” dovetailed perfectly with Coach’s “Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
John Muir, reflecting on meeting – and walking with – Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Yosemite Valley, wrote: “Emerson was the most serene, majestic, sequoia-like soul I ever met. His smile was as sweet and calm as morning light on mountains. There was a wonderful charm in his presence; his smile, serene eye, his voice, his manner, were all sensed at once by everybody. A tremendous sincerity was his.”
Such is how I felt about John Wooden during our first walk and visit – and feel so still.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
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. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com