Happy Birthday to Poet Laureate of All Coaches

Eighty-eight has long been one of the magical numbers associated with the UCLA basketball program. It represents the consecutive games won under Coach John Wooden from the middle of the 1970-71 season through the first 13 games of 1973-74.

The number has extra significance now. As of today, 88 is also Wooden’s age.

It adds a little more perspective to the greatness of his teams when you realize that you would have to have been born in 1910 to have celebrated a birthday for every game his Bruins won during that early ‘70s streak.

Perspective might be the best benefit of aging. But perspective is nothing new to Wooden. As a coach, he used to hike to the upper reaches of Pauley Pavilion during practice, so he could get a different view of how the plays unfolded and add that to his knowledge of basketball. He always saw things completely, in ways no other coach did.

As the birthdays add up, however, it becomes hard not to look back.

“I think the older you get, the more reflective days become,” Wooden said. “Maybe because you have more to reflect about.”

For as much as his life has been associated with winning, the one thing that dominates his memories is a loss: the passing of Nell, his wife of 53 years, in 1985.

“To be quite honest with you, I think more about my late wife and our many years together,” Wooden said. “That comes to me a little more than anything.”

For so many, when they think back on those who have had an impact on their lives, they think of John Wooden.

At a reunion for members of the winning-streak era teams this summer, I asked several former players about their main recollections of their days at UCLA. All of them named Wooden. They cited his leadership and command of those star-studded teams, and the values and principles he instilled in each person.

“It gives you a very pleasant feeling,” Wooden said when that was relayed to him. “I do feel that all the players that you have, they’re like extended family. Next to your own children, they became a family.

“It’s different than when I taught English in high school and at Indiana State. You only reach them mentally. Athletes, you’ve got them physically, athletically and emotionally. You tend to get closer to them than the youngsters you have as students in an academic class.”

Bill Walton still calls every week. Eddie Sheldrake, a member of Wooden’s first UCLA team in 1948-49, calls regularly, as do others. A few former players attend church with Wooden on Sundays. And when the special events such as his birthday roll around, the calls start coming in from all over the country.

The only people closer than his “extended family” are the members of his real family. He has a son and a daughter, seven grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, all of whom live within 60 miles of Wooden’s Encino home.

His daughter worries that he doesn’t eat enough, so she or her husband often come by to take him to dinner. Or his children will join him for his regular breakfast at a local coffee shop.

And that’s pretty much what he does. He spends his spare time reading (his favorite subjects are anything that has to do with Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa) or doing crossword puzzles.

Hard to believe, but that’s about it.

The other day I was talking with a Chicago sportswriter who recalled the time he needed to talk to Wooden for a story and called the house. Nell answered the phone and told him that John was out shopping. The reporter couldn’t imagine the Wizard of Westwood out at the grocery store like anybody else.

“I think I live a very normal life,” Wooden contends.

He’s in demand for speaking engagements all over the country, but he rarely accepts if they involve much travel. A surgically replaced hip and a bad knee make long plane fights hard to endure.

His big thing now is poetry. He often writes poems for his family members for birthdays, holidays and other special occasions, and now he’s compiling a book for them with 20 poems about family, 20 poems about faith, 20 about nature, 20 about patriotism and 20 on a “hodgepodge” of subjects.

“I’m working on this just to leave for them when I’m gone,” Wooden said.

“I got the idea from Danny Ainge’s father. When Danny Ainge received the basketball player-of-the-year award under my name, he couldn’t attend, so his father accepted for him. He quoted a poem that I liked very much. He said he had written it.

“He said he had a few extra and he’d send me one. He also sent another one that he’d done, with poems from all of his family.

“My children got after me to do that.”

In his family, that’s what he’s known for.

“My oldest granddaughter, when she was in fifth grade, her class project was to write a composition about the person they admired most,” Wooden said. “She wrote on her grandfather.”

A perfectly understandable choice. But she didn’t write about Wooden’s 10 championships, or the winning streak or his .813 winning percentage.

She wrote about how he loves children and he writes poems.

“She wrote, ‘My Papa’--she calls me Papa--’My Papa is a great rhymer,’ ” Wooden said. “I’m not a poet, I’m a rhymer.”

So happy birthday to a great rhymer, who also knows a thing or two about basketball.