John Wooden, You Beast

When I was in seventh grade, I can remember watching the NCAA finals in our living room. This large space was centered on our humble television that sat near the northwest corner of the living room. It was in this living room, before we got the big screen, that my father would organize my entire family to watch college basketball. Duke was always the team and had been the team since the beginnings of my memories. My fuzzy remembrances would piece together images of an old house in Los Gatos, California, watching Duke play Michigan, my father cheering for the Blue Devils.

By seventh grade, in our house near Reed College, we had similar rituals. I was more versed in the rules, more perceptive of the game's ways (all thanks to my dad) and we would argue strategy and possible outcomes until the buzzer rang out through the room. For all that I learned from my old man about basketball, the most important lessons came when earlier in that seventh grade year he handed me an old copy of John Wooden's They Call Me Coach. The jacket was worn down and the pages were rough. "If you want to play basketball, you gotta read this book," he said. I knew all about John Wooden's success, how he was certainly the greatest basketball coach that ever lived, that he took a program like UCLA into the history books and every coach and player that is involved in the game since has looked to that man as the leading exemplar of basketball.

But what I didn't know was Wooden's key to success. Growing up as a third generation basketball player and basketball fan, I was under the impression that success in basketball was preceded by the fact that basketball was the most important thing in your life. You had to be obsessed with the game, it had to be the primary thought in your mind and heart.

To my total surprise, Wooden did not think that way. "What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player," he said. Wooden's key to success was that he understood the game to be just that. His secret lied in the fact that basketball was not all of his life. In his book, he talks more about character, faith, and family above strategies of the game. His role as coach was a mentorship role and his idea of teamwork was an exercise in character building. The game of basketball was a vehicle for producing better men.

As a society, sports began for us to build character and to discover the wonder of corporate play. It was a way for us to teach our children the value of teamwork and the importance of sportsmanship.

The idea of sports has dramatically changed into a way in which we use our children to brag about our genetics. We push them to extremes so that, as parents, we can brag about the fact that our fourth grader pitched a no-hitter. And say goodbye to seasons; the junior high kids that I mentor right now are more busy than I was last year. They go from school to baseball practice to a year-round basketball game and then to bed. Baseball is not just a spring sport. There are training camps for all sports, weightlifting classes at junior high schools, and "conditioning" that starts at the 3rd grade level. Important question: how do you "condition" an 8 year-old other than to condition him to unload the dishwasher and clean up after himself?

Our kids are not learning the wonder of corporate play or the value of teamwork, they're learning the great American dream of being constantly busy and winning.

I hate to be a curmudgeon, but I get one free pass right? I see a lot that I dislike and, more often than not, I don't mind the changes. Downloadable music, eBooks, remaking movies that our already perfect (e.g. "The Karate Kid"), and the list goes on. I don't mind that, I don't expect the world to stay the same, nor do I desire it to be. But more than anything, I despise what has happened to youth sports. The pressure we put on these kids is tremendous and absolutely unhealthy.

Look, I'm 22 and without kids, but what I see in some of the parents I come in contact with is an extremely unhealthy and juvenile expectation of what their kid should be. These parents act like children.

One of John Wooden's proverbs goes like this: "Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts." Thank you, Coach, for always emphasizing the most important part of the game: that it's a game and not a life.