Wooden

1) He was born in Hall, Ind., on Oct. 14, 1910. 2) Wooden led Martinsville High to the Indiana state title in 1927. 3) One of his role models was Fuzzy Vandivier of the Franklin Wonder Five, a basketball team that dominated Indiana high school basketball from 1919 to 1922. 4) He was a three-time high school all-state selection. 5) Wooden met his future wife, Nell Riley, at a carnival in July 1926. 6) They married in August 1932. Afterward, they attended a Mills Brothers concert to celebrate.

Steve Alford might not seem to have many ties to UCLA basketball. He played at Indiana for Coach Bob Knight, who seemed to go out of his way to praise Pete Newell at the expense of John Wooden, who like Alford was an all-state high school player in Indiana who became an All-American in college and led his team to an NCAA title. But here's a nugget I found from an extensive 1997 story I did on Alford when he was coaching at Southwest Missouri State. After Alford was released by the Sacramento Kings in 1992, he was offered a job to coach Division III Manchester College in Indiana. The school was looking for a home-state hero to rescue a struggling basketball program.

I am the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Encino, the church which Coach John Wooden regularly attends. I speak here on my own behalf, and not on behalf of Coach Wooden, Nan Muehlhausen, or any other member of the Wooden family. Thank you for attempting to lay out the facts of what transpired the day that Coach Wooden suffered his injury and was hospitalized. I hope that your article has defused any misunderstanding. At the same time, I am deeply troubled that this matter has been aired publicly at all. As a pastor, I deal every day with families who are facing the very difficult questions surrounding the care of elderly persons.

Ben Howland, who led UCLA to three Final Fours, was fired Sunday, the school announced, ending the longest tenure for a Bruins coach since John Wooden retired in 1975. Howland spent 10 seasons in Westwood, finishing with a 233-107 record. He is coming off one of his best coaching performances, with the Bruins winning the Pac-12 Conference regular-season championship. Yet his star had fallen considerably since he took UCLA to consecutive Final Fours in 2006, '07 and '08. He was informed Sunday that he was fired.

1910: Born the third of six children to Joshua and Roxie Wooden on Oct. 14, in Hall, Ind. His father, a rural mail carrier, takes care of the family farm, which has no running water or electricity. Like many farm families, the Woodens go bankrupt and lose their farm, shortly after moving to Martinsville, Ind. 1924-28: Wooden is a star athlete at Martinsville High. A four-year letterwinner, he leads his team to the state championship in 1927 and is runner-up twice (1926 and 1928)

If all who were touched by John Wooden could attend his memorial, the Rose Bowl wouldn't be big enough. … The principled, Indiana-bred Wooden was "so square," Jim Murray once wrote, "he was divisible by four." … Wooden was a smoker — he picked up the habit while serving in the Navy during World War II — but never smoked during the season and had quit altogether by the time he retired in 1975. … He did not drink. … His musical tastes ran to Lawrence Welk and the Mills Brothers, the latter of whom he saw perform on his wedding night.

Every generation needs its Socrates, and now ours is gone. John Wooden coached us through life, and we learned a few things about basketball along the way too. As he got older of body, he got younger of mind. He never yelled, but when he spoke, the room fell silent. He told us things that didn't slap us in the face, but crept slowly into our hearts and minds until, fully absorbed, we understood. In life, he was both an inspiration and a crutch. As rotten as things could get, as much as evil and cheating and laziness prevailed, there was always Wooden to look to for hope and guidance.

I have so many memories of Coach Wooden, but the one that's most vivid for me came in 1964 when we were playing Duke for the national championship — the first UCLA championship. We're 29-0 at the time and the No. 1 team in the country, but Duke is still favored. In the locker room before the game, Coach gets up for his pregame talk. He says, "We got here playing a certain way — making this a 94-foot game. How many of you remember who finished second last year?" No one raised their hand.

The caption under the photograph of Luke Walton on the front page of the March 21 sports section seems to have accidentally switched a key capital letter. In reference to Bill Walton, instead of reading "My dad is like a Wooden freak," it should have read "My dad is like a wooden freak." Josh Clark San Marino

Even though most people call him Coach, John Wooden prefers to think of himself as a teacher, and not just one who taught hundreds of UCLA basketball players during his 27 seasons coaching the Bruins. His "Pyramid of Success," a diagram of core values, has helped shape the lives of thousands. Wooden, 95, who won a record 10 national championships at UCLA and is widely considered the greatest coach in the history of college basketball, is largely unaffected by his success. He still lives in the modest Encino condominium he has called home since 1972.

There is unfinished family business brewing, though Minnesota guard Austin Hollins was unaware of it. Hollins, a 6-foot-4 guard, is eagerly anticipating his chance to play against UCLA in the second round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, which he will get in Austin, Texas, on Friday. After spending Selection Sunday unsure whether the Golden Gophers would be chosen to advance, Hollins had a revelation: "We have a new opportunity. " The game fell right out of the family tree.

On networks with historical bents, there is always a fair amount of Lincoln-mania this time of year - PBS' "American Experience" just repeated its excellent miniseries "Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided," - and what with Steven Spielberg's big screen "Lincoln" steadily amassing statuary, it's safe to say, things have reached a fever pitch, putting us well into the counterintuitive stage, i.e., let's have a look at the other guy. "Killing Lincoln,"...

The players Cori Close inherited when she took over as coach of the UCLA women's basketball program were not a cheerful bunch. It was the spring of 2011 and the Bruins had just lost their previous coach, the charismatic Nikki Caldwell, who bolted to Louisiana State for more money and a job closer to family. Fans grumbled, wondering if Athletic Director Dan Guerrero had tried hard enough to keep Caldwell. The players felt betrayed. "We had a lot of trust issues," forward Jasmine Dixon recalls.

GOMA, Congo - It's an ungainly beast of a machine: a wooden bicycle with handlebars like great bull's horns, two runtish wooden wheels, a chunky frame like a squashed triangle and no pedals. There's no seat either, just a kneepad fixed to the frame, made from a spongy Chinese flip-flop. The Congolese chikudu looks like it rolled right off the pages of a child's drawing book and onto the rutted roads of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Uzima Bahati, 18, was a child himself when he became a chikudu operator.

In a week when you thought you might have heard it all, I present to you Bill Walton speaking to USC students and bashing UCLA basketball. "I never knew they had pretty girls here at USC," began Walton, one of UCLA's all-time greats, after being introduced to a packed auditorium of sports business students. And for the next two hours he wouldn't shut up, entertaining, inspiring, opinionated, off the wall and dedicated to preserving the memory of John Wooden. It was all part of a bus tour to promote the Pac-12 Networks, Walton trumpeting an upcoming game in his own way. "What should be an absolute unbelievable game will be ruined by the style of the UCLA basketball team who loves to do nothing but call timeouts and run plays.

The people who lived in eastern Germany around 7,000 years ago are thought to have been some of the first farmers. Now, new archaeological evidence suggests they were also surprisingly skilled woodworkers, crafting intricate water wells some two thousand years before metal tools were forged in Europe. Sophisticated in construction, four wells discovered near Leipzig were built using stone carving implements and wooden mauls and wedges, said Willy Tegel, a researcher at the Institute for Forest Growth at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

We all die, but I was really hoping in Coach Wooden's case an exception could be made. Tom Scarpelli Northridge :: While Coach Wooden would no doubt have been embarrassed by such a public tribute, he would have appreciated the eloquent power of the written word. Hat's off to your writers. They were at their best when their best was needed. Robert Campbell Palos Verdes Estates :: Several years ago, I had an opportunity to have lunch with John Wooden by virtue of an auction at a charity event.

Former UCLA coach John Wooden, 97, has returned home for the first time since suffering a broken left wrist and left collarbone Feb. 29. Wooden was released from a local hospital March 11 and spent the past 12 days in a rehabilitation facility. Wooden fell at his Encino condominium sometime during the night of Feb. 28 after watching a UCLA game on television. This is the third consecutive year he has been hospitalized during a similar period of NCAA tournament play. Two years ago, it was because of a stomach condition that caused internal bleeding.

President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev negotiated the SALT II Treaty in Vladivostok, a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton later named "Lucy" was discovered by anthropologists in Ethiopia and the top song on the charts was "I Can Help," by crossover artist Billy Swan. And … the Buffalo Braves' franchise record 11-game winning streak ended with a two-point loss in Chicago, despite Bob McAdoo's 31-point performance. The date of all these seismic events? Nov. 24, 1974.

Saturday night, the glass got thinner in the fishbowl where Ben Howland lives. What he does for a living is about as private as a tweet by Donald Trump. He coaches UCLA's basketball team. One of his predecessors was John Wooden and his 10 NCAA titles. That's all you need to know. Howland's life is as quiet and predictable as the 405 Freeway on a Friday afternoon. Expectations for him were set in stone in March 1975, when Wooden won the last of those titles. Howland was two months away from turning 18. You don't fill Wooden's shoes.