LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

He will awaken today in a condominium where time has not budged for 27 years.

There is shag carpet on the floor, crushed velvet furniture in the corners, his late wife Nell’s enduring vision on walls filled with aging clocks and plates and photographs of men in basketball hot pants.

He won’t turn on his cell phone, because he doesn’t have one. He won’t jump on the Internet, because he doesn’t own a computer.

He will not watch the TV in his bedroom, because it hasn’t worked for years. He will instead look at the photo of Nell that is propped up on a pillow above where he sleeps, and another one on the side where she slept.

If he decides to drive, it will be in a 1989 Ford Taurus. If he decides to get his hair cut, he will drive to a barber he has used since he was in possession of all his hair.

John Wooden will awaken today in a world unchanged since he became a sports icon and city treasure.

Unchanged, except for him.

Today, John Wooden turns 90.

America’s oldest working coach.

“I’m hanging on,” he says with a laugh. “I used to be hanging in. Now I’m hanging on.”

It is the day before his birthday, which occurred 90 years ago in the bedroom of a farmhouse in the middle of Indiana.

Yet the grip this shuffling old man with the bad hip and aching knees holds on us is tighter than ever.

His modest San Fernando Valley condo, in the shadow of a freeway and with a view of a parking lot, is besieged by gawking florists and mailmen who toss piles of packages onto his porch from the alley below.

His name is on a little stenciled plate in the glassed-in directory by the front door like everyone else in the building.

His phone number is listed.

That phone rings. A familiar voice is heard on the answering machine singing, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday from Australia . . .”

“Oh,” the former UCLA coach says with a smile. “That’s Bill Walton.”

Wooden rises slowly from his hard-backed chair and walks halting down the hall toward the phone, while Walton makes idle conversation on the machine, as if he knows his old coach is going to eventually pick up.

Wooden finally reaches the receiver in a cluttered office. He sits carefully on another hard-backed chair. He cradles the receiver.

“Bill, Bill, I love you too,” he says to Walton. “Yep, it’s me, I’m here.”

Fifteen minutes later, Wooden shuffles out the room with a smile.

“Bill calls me twice a week, and I love talking to him,” he says, his eyes twinkling. “Although, it is safe to say, I don’t do much of the talking.”

There will be a family party at his granddaughter’s house today, with loads of children and maybe a special lemon cake and only one rule.

No presents.

“I said it, and I meant it,” Wooden says. “I told my family, their presence is my presents.”

The way Wooden views it, every day is a gift for a teacher who is continually allowed to teach.

The other day he agreed to speak to a wheelchair basketball team at the airport before it departed for the Paralympics in Australia.

“And I was ashamed of myself, just ashamed,” he says.

Turns out, because of typical LAX parking problems, he was required to walk a long distance to meet the team. During the walk, he could feel his ankles swell and his legs stiffen.

“I was thinking, why did I get myself into this?” Wooden recalls. “Then I finally get there, and see all these beautiful girls in wheelchairs, all of them so happy to see me, just thrilled at anything I would say . . .”

He shakes his head.

“And here I was, bemoaning my situation? I was ashamed, just ashamed.”

Wooden told the team what he tells many teams these days, that the journey is more important than the end result, that they are winners by just trying.

Some days, he not only says those words, he must live them.

Although he is in generally good health, a couple of times in the last few months he has become suddenly dizzy and fallen at home.

Because his bad artificial hip makes it impossible for him to stand up from a sitting position without support, each time he has crawled down the hall on his belly to a chair, and lifted himself into a sitting position.

“Felt like I was crawling for two hours,” he says, smiling. “Although I’m sure it was only minutes.”

Neither time would he call for help.

“What for?” he says. “Once I sat down, I was fine.”

He still attends nearly every UCLA home basketball game, sitting in the same place in the corner behind the UCLA bench, enduring the same autograph sessions during halftime, an autograph for which he has never been paid.

“It’s like I always told my players, if they want your autograph, in a sense they are honoring you,” he says.

He has yet to attend a sports event at Staples Center, and while he cheers for the Lakers, he still thinks college basketball beats the knee-length pants off the NBA.

“All that traveling, the post play is wrestling, so much showmanship,” he says.

In fact, he even thinks the WNBA can be, at times, better than the NBA.

“Technically, the better women in that league are better than the men,” he says.

Not that, despite his record 10 NCAA championships and 88-game winning streak and career .813 winning percentage, he can believe anyone cares what he thinks.

“I am not a famous man,” he says. “I hate being called a wizard. I am not a wizard.”

He pauses, though not for long.

“I think being famous is somebody who did something good for mankind,” he says. “Mother Teresa was famous. Nobel Prize winners are famous. Basketball coaches aren’t famous.”

He looks out the window over the parking lot, and beyond to the plain doors of a neighboring apartment complex.

He has given away all but one of his championship rings. Of all the gaudy trophies that sit haphazardly on his floor, his most prized award, he says, is stuck back on a shelf in a little black box.

It is a bronze medallion for academic-athletic achievement he earned in 1932 as a senior at Purdue.

“I was a person who was a teacher who happened to be in the public eye,” he says.

And still teaching. Just ask Lindsay Benko, an Indiana-based competitive swimmer who was the granddaughter of one of Wooden’s former pupils.

When she was struggling during the Olympic trials, Wooden phoned her with a pep talk.

When she made the Olympics, she credited her closing strength to that talk.

When she won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 800-meter freestyle relay team, Wooden felt young again.

“The greatest joy you can get is saying or doing something that helps another person,” he says. “That joy is reward in itself.”

Good thing, because Wooden’s annual income never exceeded $38,000, including basketball camps.

That is why, during his final years at UCLA, he and Nell settled in a condo that looks more like student housing than legend housing.

But that is not why he stays here.

He stays here, in a place darkened by piles of books and trophies and photos, because Nell is here.

“My children have wanted me to come live with them, but everything here reminds me of Nell,” he says of his wife of 53 years, who died in 1985. “Everything on the wall, she put there. The bookcases were her idea. The white carpet, she picked out.”

It is well known that Wooden refused to attend a Final Four for nearly a decade after Nell’s death, because they always attended together. The Bruins’ 1995 appearance, and national championship victory, finally drew him back.

He continues, however, to write letters to Nell on the 21st of each month, the day she died. The love notes have been carefully bundled together and rest on her pillow next to his.

“I haven’t been afraid of death since I lost Nell,” he says. “I tell myself, this is the only chance I’ll have to be with her again.”

As the midafternoon shadows creep across the plain windows and into a room brimming with nearly a century of wisdom, John Wooden begins reciting a poem.

“If death should beckon me with outstretched hand, and whisper softly of an unknown land, I shall not be afraid to go. . . .”

He finishes, taps his bare fingers on his nose, smiles.

“But you know, I’m still having fun,” he says. “It’s been a really good life.”

Happy birthday, Coach.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.