Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis | Teen Ink

Wooden: A Coach's Life by Seth Davis

January 13, 2015
By andrewhoag BRONZE, State College, Pennsylvania
andrewhoag BRONZE, State College, Pennsylvania
2 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"Thats the nature of the beast" - Bo Jackson


I recently read Wooden A Coaches Life by Seth Davis. Wooden A Coaches Life details the life of perhaps the greatest basketball coach of all time, John Wooden. The book starts in his childhood, and moves through his college basketball days at Purdue. After playing, the got into coaching. He coached at Indiana State for a short while before taking the head job at UCLA. At the time of Wooden’s arrival, UCLA’s basketball program was in bad shape. Nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood," as head coach at UCLA he won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period—seven in a row— an unprecedented feat. Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games. Not only was he successful on the court, but he taught his players to become men and ready for life after basketball. He taught that the most important thing you can do is get your degree, because not everyone can play in the NBA. He also taught that even if you played in the NBA, you would retire with well over 75 percent of your life ahead of you. Wooden was renowned for his short, simple inspirational messages to his players, including his "Pyramid of Success". These often were directed at how to be a success in life as well as in basketball. Some of the players that played for Wooden were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in athletics. Relentlessly researched and written with devastating detail and texture, Seth Davis has delivered the definitive biography of the most important figure in college basketball history. Seth Davis has cut through the mythology to present John Wooden and his UCLA dynasty in a fresh and compulsively readable way.


The author's comments:

This book changed the way I viewed college athletics. 


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