A lasting legacy of family and love
By Matt Stevens
June 6, 2010 9:17 p.m.
Thursday night, just after 8 p.m., UCLA students who never knew John Wooden were crying, embracing and wiping their tears.
But across the street, the two people who knew him best stood patiently outside the hospital, composed and tearless.
“He wanted to be with my mom,” Jim Wooden, 71, said. “Twenty-five years ago, she passed away, and today is his day.”
That was Jim Wooden’s first sentence, and it summed up a point he and several others who knew Wooden would return to over the course of the next 72 hours: John Wooden wanted, more than anything, to be reunited with Nell, the love of his life.
“This is the culmination of something absolutely beautiful,” John Vallely said of his coach’s passing.
This perspective explains why few, if any, of those who have spoken to the media about John Wooden have shed a tear or choked up during an interview. It seems that any sadness John Wooden’s friends and family feel at their great loss is far surpassed by the joy they feel for John and his Nell.
“Life is a united effort of many,” Wooden wrote as the opening line of his 2003 biography “They Call Me Coach.” “My life has been inspired from my youthful days in high school, through university, and into my coaching career by one person ““ my late wife, Nellie.”
It’s been well-documented that John Wooden loved his wife of 53 years dearly. She is the only girl he ever kissed, and the first girl he ever set his eyes on when he met her at a town fair in Martinsville, Ind., the summer before his freshman year of high school.
It was at Martinsville High School that John Wooden would begin his “one little intimacy” with Nell Wooden ““ a ritual that wouldn’t end until his retirement from basketball nearly 50 years later.
“Wanting to get Nellie’s attention before the center jump that first game, I looked over at the band where she was playing the cornet, and winked at her. She took her thumb and index finger to form an “O” ““ meaning good luck, everything is OK.”
When Nell Wooden passed away from illness at the age of 73 in 1985, a deeply sad and increasingly reclusive John Wooden began another ritual of sorts. He began writing love letters to his wife every month, placing them on her pillow.
“My love is still there,” he told ESPN’s Rick Reilly in November 2009. “And I’m keeping my promise. There will never be another.”
Coach Wooden’s first love may have been Nell, but a close second was the rest of his family. He learned to put family first from his father Joshua, a simple, but honest and hard-working farmer whom Wooden credits in “My Personal Best” as being the perfect role model.
“I never heard him speak an unkind word about another person,” John Wooden wrote in the opening chapter of his 2004 book. “Dad came as close to living the Golden Rule as anyone I’ve ever known. … He loved his family deeply.”
So, too, did John Wooden. He cherished birthday celebrations and even going to the mall with one of his 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Most of his family remained close to John Wooden in Southern California, allowing him to continue the tradition of spending Sundays with the family, going to church and then sharing dinner together.
So it is not surprising, then, that Jim Wooden said his father was not afraid of death. Nor is it surprising that when UCLA coach Ben Howland was asked to describe John Wooden in one word, Howland chose the word “love.”
“That’s really what he stood for,” Howland said. “More than anything else.”
John Wooden himself would most probably agree. When Reilly asked John Wooden, at the age of 99, to explain how we can make love last, he was clear about his answer.
“There’s only one way,” he said. “Truly, truly, truly love. That’s the most powerful thing there is. It’s true. It’s true. It must be true.
“The most important word in our language is ‘love.'”
