Gene Keady, the former great Purdue coach, can’t understand why more of John Wooden’s assistants didn’t see the genius of the UCLA coach’s way.
Wooden’s first practice session each season was devoted to teaching players the proper way of putting on their socks and sneakers. Honest.
He rarely spent more than 10 minutes on any drill.
“I would tell people that he had a simple system and for some reason people didn’t think that was good enough,” Keady told The Post by telephone from Puerto Rico. “Ten national titles and his system wasn’t good enough?”
John Robert Wooden, the most successful college basketball the game will ever know, died of natural causes late Friday night at the age of 99. Much will be made of his remarkable run at UCLA, but the 10 titles in 12 seasons from 1964-75 are footnotes to Wooden’s legacy.
* He coached 27 seasons and reportedly was called for one technical foul.
* He loved Dickens and everything Shakespeare. He studied Gandhi and idolized Mother Teresa.
* He met his wife, the late Nellie Riley, at a small town Indiana carnival, married her, and for 53 years they only had eyes for each other. After her death on March 21, 1985, Wooden visited her grave on the 21st of every month and wrote a love letter he placed under her pillow.
* He never kissed another woman.
* He would walk up to young coaches and praise them.
“I was at a 1990 Sports Illustrated party and he comes up to me and says now much he admires our pressure,” Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun told The Post. “I was amazed he even knew who I was.”
Wooden knew.
Some of his favorite phrases he learned from his father, Joshua, who gave his son a Seven Point Creed upon high school graduation. No. 1 on the list? Be true to yourself.
No wonder former UCLA and current St. John’s coach Steve Lavin wanted to have Wooden as the best man at his wedding. Who wouldn’t?
During the Great Depression, Joshua would read poetry to his son by the light of a coal lamp. Wooden was never paid more than $35,000 a year at UCLA, less than a video coordinator now makes.
He was called the Wizard of Westwood and wrote the Pyramid of Success, but at Purdue, where he led the Boilermakers to the 1932 national title, he was known as the Indiana Rubber Man because of his reckless dives for loose balls.
“He was in Gainesville about seven or eight years ago and all he kept talking about was how fortunate he had been to have coached the players he coached and worked with the people he worked with,” Florida coach Billy Donovan, who was awarded the 2010 Wooden Legends of Coaching Award, told The Post.
“He never once said anything about himself,” Donovan said. “The greatest coach alive and not once did he say anything about his accomplishments. It was always about everyone else.”
