Former Bruin head coach Cunningham still carries Wooden’s principles
Gary Cunningham spoke at Pauley Pavilion Saturday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the passing of John Wooden.
By Matt Stevens
June 6, 2010 8:53 p.m.
Coach John Wooden is known for the way he embraced everyone he met, for never swearing and for helping each individual find his competitive greatness.
But moments after coaching his first-ever college game, Gary Cunningham went to go hide from the coach in a corner of Ackerman Union.
In a freshman versus varsity exhibition game meant to celebrate the opening of Pauley Pavilion, Cunningham coached his freshman team led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to a 15-point win over the top-ranked varsity squad.
And he was pretty darn sure the gracious Wooden was planning on firing him for it.
“I didn’t know how to behave,” Cunningham said. “Afterward I was embarrassed and I stayed in the locker room and I didn’t come out and talk to the press or anything. … On Monday, we came to work, and (Wooden) called me in the office, and I thought that was it. I coached one game and I’m done.”
As it would turn out, Wooden just wanted to discuss recruiting, and Cunningham was far from done. He would help Wooden win eight of his 10 national championships, then return two years after Wooden retired to take his mentor’s place on the bench as head coach.
Perhaps because he learned so much from the man he says “was like a father to me,” Cunningham holds the best winning percentage in UCLA history ““ his teams went 50-8 over two seasons ““ and he eventually became UC Santa Barbara’s athletic director, a position he held for 13 years.
Cunningham said that Wooden would let his assistants really participate in coaching, and that that trust meant a lot to him as a former player. But if you did feel strongly enough about something to make a suggestion at one of the daily morning meetings, Cunningham said you’d have to be ready to face the inquisition.
“He didn’t want people that were yes people,” Cunningham said. “If you disagreed with him, you told him, and he’d challenge you. It was almost like you were defending your doctoral proposal. (But) if you convinced him, he’d put it in.”
Cunningham and Wooden’s other assistant, Denny Crum, did manage to convince the head coach to make one major change back in February 1970. Wooden had always believed in stout man-to-man defense, deeply distrustful of the zone. But Cunningham and Crum were convinced the Bruins needed a 2-3 zone as a secondary defensive set. The two proposed it, Cunningham installed it and off the team went to Oregon to try it out.
“The first night we play Oregon State, and we win by 15 points, and we play zone the whole second half,” Cunningham recalled. “(Then) we go down to Oregon, in Eugene, we get beat. … And that was the end of the zone. Those are the only two games I know in (Wooden’s) whole coaching career that I know he played zone.”
Aside from working with the defense, Cunningham also was responsible for working with the big guys ““ big guys that included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. With Wooden’s help, the coaching staff developed a way to give Abdul-Jabbar a meaningful practice squad defender.
“We didn’t have a big guy with Kareem to play defense, and so one time we got a long broom, and we’d have someone stand in the key, and as he’d make these moves, we’d have someone put the broom up and try to block his shot,” Cunningham said.
But the former assistant bristled at the suggestion that Wooden had to “handle” his stars.
“He wouldn’t like the word handled,” Cunningham said. “He’d say he worked with you.”
“(Wooden) wasn’t going to showcase one player,” he added. “If somebody got too many points, he’d put him on the bench.”
But like so many others, Cunningham said that Wooden taught him some of his most important lessons off the court.
Talking to him Saturday, Cunningham was insistent that Wooden touched more people’s lives after coaching than he did as a coach.
Cunningham was one of the lucky ones who got to learn from Wooden both during and after.
“When we all played for him, he never showed us the pyramid, or talked to us about it,” Cunningham said. “He talked about parts and he represented parts, but we weren’t interested in that. We really weren’t. “˜Let’s play basketball, Coach. We don’t care about being industrious, and enthusiasm, and definition of success ““ we don’t care about that.’ And yet later on, 15 or 20 years later in our life, we realized that we’re employing all those principles that he talked about.
“That’s all part of me now. He gave me those things.”
